L'AFFAIRE KRAVCHENKO
SIR,—Let me assure your correspondent Monsieur Jean Bailhache that though in my article L'Affaire Kravchenko I tried to be objective, I laid no claim to be impartial. It was as impossible to be impartial about the Kravchenko case as it must have been to be so about the Dreyfus case. To have been impartial about either would have been to follow in the footsteps of the mayor-elect who, in his inaugural speech, promised in his term of office to " follow the narrow path that leads between right and wrong."
None of the non-Communist correspondents attending the trial appeared to regard Albert Kahn's testimony as in the least important— except in so far as it aided the plaintiff ; indeed, Maitre Izard thanked him in court for the " great service " he had rendered Kravchenko. Mr. Kahn admitted that he had never been to Russia, and never read the article by the legendary Sim Thomas, which formed one of the grounds for the action, and whereas the defendants attacked Kravchenko as a tool of the American Secret Service, Mr. Kahn claimed that he was a Nazi agent. It is true that Mr. Kahn introduced some gaiety into the proceedings by comparing I Chose Freedom to the Kinsey Report, but was that really " important testimony " ?
As to the French witnesses, Monsieur Farge and Monsieur d'Astier de la Vigerie (to take two examples) may have been very eminent members of the resistance movement. But all the first said was that he regarded the defendants as men of good will ; while the declaration of the second that Kravchenko would have been arrested in Algiers in 1944, with the unanimous approval of the Provisional Government, if he had given his New York Times interview there, was promptly repudiated by two of Monsieur d'Astier's Cabinet colleagues, Socialists Andre Philip and Andre le Trocquer.
I see that Monsieur Bailhache holds the view that to challenge the Communist Party is only to strengthen it. I have noticed no particular satisfaction in the French-Communist Press at the success before Judge Kurkheim of Kravchenlaa's challenge.—Yours faithfully,
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