Adler and Alger
Sir: It has always amazed me that a
• journal that can provide its readers with the brilliant political commentary of Patrick Cosgrave can be reduced — When it comes to articles about America to the kind of arrant nonsense that regularly seems to issue from the pen of Your contributor Larry Adler. It is not that I object to harmonica players rising -kahcrve their station. I feel about "armonica players acting as political ej,ildrnentators much the same as Doctor
felt about lady preachers. I am surprised that it is done badly, but at it is done at all. Normally I avoid Mr Adler's articles in • m
'He Spectator for the same reason that I Would avoid anything that isn't very rod; but I could not ignore or avoid his At.tie Panegyric to the wretched Alger issThe idea of presenting your readers with an interpretation of American politics (which Mr Adler, based on his vast knowledge, dubs as being crooked) and Richard Nixon (who, we are told, is a "genuine schizoid") through the eyes of Alger Hiss, may atrike some as being an example of good Journalism; but I for one find it to be a rather cheap way of making an ideological Point.
The glint of Alger Hiss is now almost „•'wersally accepted by most thinking ?Mericans, including American liberals. Icriored t one am appalled that this discre
s:I man, this convicted perjurer, joould be granted a platform in your urnal to mouth his insipid ideas.
Whatever your readers may now think of Richard Nixon and the squalid scandals engendered by his term in the White House, I trust that they will agree that the entire business warranted more serious consideration than it received at the hands of Alger Hiss and your Mr Adler.
Peter P. Witonski American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research 1150 Seventeenth Street, NW, Washington, DC.
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