Re: David Frum’s column today: In the latest nineties, my then publisher, The Free Press, sponsored a symposium of their writers at Tavern on the Green, which they asked me to moderate. My four discussants were David Gelernter, David Horowitz, Deborah Lipstadt and Andrew Dworkin. I dreaded an evening of commotion. When I was introduced to Andrea Dworkin the first thing she said was how much she had enjoyed Founding Father, and how much she admired George Washington.

I was pleased (as a vain author) and also stunned. Washington was the ur-Patriarch, so much so that he was Father of his Country. Later, in a book of Dworkin’s essays, I found her citing Howard Zinn as a guide to American history–hardly a source of Washington bouquets. What was the source of her high opinion? Maybe the fact that there is no credible tale of Washington’s sleeping with a slave (there is an incredible one), and the second fact that the last act of his life was to free his own slaves. As I point out whenever I talk about GW, Founding Father is 63,000 words long; if I had to re-write it in 4, they would be, “He really meant it.”

Later on, when NR twitted feminists for supporting a later president, Bill Clinton, I got a note from Dworkin pointing out that she didn’t. I wrote a paragraph for “The Week,” beginning with the old New Yorker lead-in, “A friend writes…”

Dworkin’s prose was unrelenting, hard, clean and compelling. Florence King praised it (while disagreeing with many of her conclusions). She really meant it. R.I.P.