A friend sends this along:

You may know this already, but there was a nice little exchange about
the Neshoba thing in the Times Lit. Supplement recently. Ted Rabb, a
renaissance lit professor at Princeton (actually an excellent scholar
in his field), quoted Krugman as if he, Krugman, were an objective
news source on Reagan — delicious. Anyway, Philip Terzian at the
Standard wrote in to correct the error, and Rabb’s feathers got a
little ruffled.
Here’s the exchange so far . . .
Sir, –
A number of correspondents have written to correct the one-sidedness
of your reviews of recent books on Ronald Reagan (most recently,
September 14), but none has challenged the characterization of the
President as “anti-racist”, as documented by his diary entry: “There
is no place in this land for the hate-mongers and bigots”. Against
that view stands the following, from a recent New York Times column by
Paul Krugman, who reports that Reagan, at Trent Lott’s urging, began
his 1980 presidential campaign “with a speech supporting states’
rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil
rights workers were murdered in 1964″.
THEODORE K. RABB
Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544.
Sir, –
While our expectations of professors of history at Princeton should
never be too high – especially those, such as Theodore K. Rabb
(Letters, September 28), who rely on the writings of Paul Krugman as
their authority – it should be pointed out that Ronald Reagan began
his post-convention presidential campaign in 1980 near Philadelphia,
Mississippi, because that is the site of the Neshoba County Fair, a
huge, historic, annual out-door gathering of politicians and
connoisseurs of political oratory from the South. Krugman and
Professor Rabb notwithstanding, the proximity of the (1980) Neshoba
County Fair to the (1964) murder site of three civil rights workers is
of no more significance than the location of Labour Party conventions
in the same city where five people, including Sir Anthony Berry MP,
were murdered by the IRA in 1984.
PHILIP TERZIAN
The Weekly Standard, 1150 17th Street NW, Suite 505, Washington, DC 20036.
Sir, –
Philip Terzian’s ad hominem comments (Letters, October 5) deserve no
reply, but his failure to understand a false analogy is worth
correcting. To trumpet states’ rights in Mississippi in 1980 was to
give at least indirect endorsement to local racism; to hold a
wide-ranging political conference in Brighton in 2000 was to imply
nothing about that city. The significance that Mr Terzian appears to
miss is that the murder of civil rights workers reflected Mississippi
politics, whereas the murders by the IRA were irrelevant to the
politics of Brightonians.
THEODORE RABB
Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544.