New York Letter
sift,--f would like to be able to write that M. L. Rosenthal is accurate in saying, as he does in your October I issue, that I am a 'military journalist.' Already I indulge myself in the fantasy that I graduated young from West Point, rose rapidly to the rank of colonel in the intelligence, and was then planted as a secret agent in the Fourth Estate to spy on its doings for the military-scientific establish- ment. I can even tell myself that my repeated in- sistence on the. over-emphasis of military factors in American policy-making is only a trick for worming my way deeper into the confidence of the civilians.
But even as I write, the harsh truth intrudes upon these daydreams. I am about as much a 'military journalist' as Kaldor and Balogh are baton-bearing Sandhurst products risen to the rank of field- marshal in the British army. What has escaped Mr. Rosenthal. whom I suppose to be an American, seems to have been blown right in the eye of your countryman and former contributor, Henry Fairlie. As he writes in the October Commentary, I am a 'Washington commentator.'
JOSEPH KRAFT
3021 N Street, NW, Washington 7, DC
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