Birchite McDonald
Sir: Mr Christopher Hitchens (1 October) depicts Lawrence Patton McDonald, recently killed by Soviet airmen, as a 'pathetic' crank. On the contrary, this articulate, handsome and popular
key-
figure of the US House Armed Services Committee was well-known for his faultless grasp of military intelligence and for publications whose research-range, wit and vigour far exceed those of your contributor. He was neither a 'religious quack' nor an 'anti-Jewish dolt'.
Dr McDonald graduated from the Emory School of Medicine and worked as a surgeon-in-residence at Michigan University Hospital. The suggestion that he 'made a living' out of 'terminal cancer patients' disgracefully misrepresents his successful palliation of the symptoms of a large proportion of some eighty people who sought help from his legitimate nutritional therapies in Atlanta, where he practised as a distinguished urologist.
Maybe his 'sex life' lacked the colour of that of (say) the 'Reverend' Martin Luther King, whose media-elevation to the status of George Washington was justifiably — if unfashionably — opposed by the Congressman. So what?
Of course, Larry McDonald believed all .along that Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss, among too many others, were `guilty men', and he was therefore concerned, as others should be concerned, that the liberal establishment persisted in concealing, minimising or whitewashing the activities of what can be accurately described as nothing other than an 'international communist conspiracy'.
Mr Hitchens banks on the certainty that not one English reader in ten thousand has ever read anything actually published by the John Birch Society, another of whose Council members (Dr Medford Evans) has often dissented, incidentally, from the consensus about the Rosenberg espionage involvement. Just remember: 13irchite' McDonald is dead because of the `paranoid style' of Soviet politics, and he is yet one more victim in the death-toll which now runs into many millions, Please put the record straight.
S. Hirsch
395 Concord Avenue, Belmont, Massachusetts, USA
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