Your September 9 issue managed to keep your batting average at .1000 -- better even than Ted Williams -- for printing stories that try to change history for the worse.
I refer to Marc Fisher '80's relentless but unsuccessful effort to paint former TV news producer April Oliver '83 as the Joan of Arc of CNN. As in Joan's case, she was betrayed by the royalty for whom she tried to secure more fame, success, and hard cash -- in this case, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. But the similarity ends there.
The article's first paragraph shows where Oliver's judgment lay. Anyone who, after visiting victims of the Soviets and their puppet regime in Afghan refugee camps, could question U.S. actions in Afghanistan rather than the Soviets' is naive enough to bite on the bogus nerve-gas story about Laos.
Even if you ignore the statements of participants in Operation Tailwind -- that tear gas was used to suppress a rebel camp whose existence was unknown until they spotted it from the air -- there are facts that should have warned Oliver to examine the case more carefully.
For example, no one checks out nerve gas for any kind of operation on a whim; generals all the way up through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and most likely the President himself, would have to approve its release from top-secret storage facilities. That would require a real emergency, not a rumor that there might be a few American deserters hanging around some huts in the Laotian jungle.
Why, after all these years, have no relatives of the deserters come forward to claim that their kin had disappeared in Laos? Also, such an attack would not have remained a secret to Communist leaders in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, or China. And what kind of incident could have been more inflammatory in the hands of antiwar protesters at home, or of leaders in other countries and the United Nations? Why wasn't there even a murmur from them?
John A. Pfeifer '54
Bay Village, Ohio
I was glad to see your article on April Oliver but am disappointed that you assigned it to a reporter for The Washington Post, a paper with a well-documented record of smearing journalists on behalf of military and intelligence agencies offended at seeing their misdeeds exposed to public scrutiny.
As for Ted Turner's hysterical apology for Oliver's CNN report on Operation Tailwind -- the use of poison gas to kill suspected defectors during the Vietnam War -- readers should keep in mind that the Gulf War yielded the highest ratings, and revenues, in CNN's history. Obviously, Turner knew the Pentagon would limit his network's access to the next war if he failed to cooperate with it on this matter.
Perhaps PAW and Mr. Fisher are unaware that Ms. Oliver and her partner Jack Smith have published a detailed rebuttal to the unfounded claims that their story is inaccurate or was carelessly verified. It's available online from the Freedom Forum (www.freedomforum.org/fpfp/specialprograms/tailwind.contents.asp). I hope alumni will read this rebuttal before they accept Mr. Fisher's glib assertion that Oliver's Tailwind report constitutes "one more scandal in a season of media misdeeds."
The real story is not to be found in the details of a military mission that took place 28 years ago, but in the Pentagon's ability to snap its fingers and compel institutions like Time, CNN, and The Washington Post to abdicate their responsibility to keep Americans informed about the conduct of their government.
Kenneth McCarthy '81
San Francisco, Calif.
As a former military analyst for CNN who quit in protest over its account of Operation Tailwind, I suggest the September issues of American Journalism Review and Commentary for further reading on this case of failed leadership and integrity. Other, upcoming articles include a 20,000-word piece in a November issue of TV Guide (the longest article it has ever published) and my article in the December issue of American Journalism Review.
Perry Smith '57
Major General, USAF (ret.)
London, England
Nothing I have seen or heard epitomizes the decline of Western civilization so much as the hiring of Peter Singer to teach in the university's Center for Human Values (Notebook, October 7). Singer's book Practical Ethics includes such statements as, "It is speciesist to judge that the life of a normal adult member of our species is more valuable than the life of a normal adult mouse." Singer also writes, "Even an abortion late in pregnancy for the most trivial of reasons is hard to condemn unless we also condemn the slaughter of far more developed forms of life for the taste of their flesh."
Perhaps when a mouse paints the Mona Lisa, or a steer writes the Declaration of Independence, Singer will be vindicated. Until then, why do we pay him to teach our students?
William T. Galey '38
Chebeague Island, Me.
I attended the September 19 dedication of the new Princeton Stadium, and it is indeed beautiful (PAW, October 7). Because the new playing field is essentially in the same place as the one that had existed in Palmer, I suggest naming it Palmer Field as another way to memorialize the old stadium, which meant so much to so many alumni.
Joel B. Johnson '32
Middletown, Conn.
Your April 22 feature, "Echoes of the Big Bang," made me recall an encounter I had in 1964 with the late Professor of Physics Robert Dicke '39. I saw him as he was getting out of his car after returning from Bell Laboratories. He had been called there by two scientists who had built a radio telescope that had "noise" on it, and they hoped Dicke would advise them how to get rid of it. Dicke found it was radiation, left over from the Big Bang, whose existence he had recently postulated.
What an injustice that the Nobel Prize was given to two men who could not identify the noise and not to the man who told them what it was. It was Dicke who discovered the radiation from the Big Bang, but on someone else's equipment.
Robert A. Winters '35
Hightstown, N.J.