On Friday, I reviewed the book Renegade For Peace & Justice: Congresswoman Barbara Lee Speaks for Me. Author Peter Richardson flags this error in the piece, where I got the name of Betty Van Patter wrong, a woman allegedly murdered by the Black Panthers:

I won’t rehearse the details here–that’s what the book is for–but I don’t think Lee’s cursory discussion enhances her honor.
But let’s not get too carried with Hemingway’s argument, either. For one thing, he gets Betty’s name wrong. He calls her Betty Van Tanner, thereby repeating Lee’s mistake in the book. This despite the fact that Hemingway mentions David Horowitz’s account of this brutal episode in Radical Son, which at least gets the names right.
I don’t think I can credit anyone, left or right, whose control of the facts is that loose.

Obviously, I strive for accuracy so it’s unfortunate I got the name wrong, and I’m glad Richardson noticed this. However, I got the name wrong because Lee got the name wrong; I wish I’d spotted the error but I think it’s kind of ridiculous that this somehow proves my command of the facts is all that loose. In fact, I’m sure if Lee’s book hadn’t put the wrong name in my head I would have come up with the correct name on my own. Also, Lee was actually involved with the Black Panthers at the time of Van Patter’s murder, so it would seem more damning she got the name wrong. I think I handled the episode pretty fairly — here’s what I wrote:

Take the case of Betty Van Tanner, a secretary at a Panther-run school. Van Tanner and a large sum of cash disappeared; her body was found six weeks later with the head bashed in. It’s widely suspected the Panthers killed her, and the incident was instrumental in David Horowitz’s break with the Left. Then the editor of the left-wing Ramparts magazine, Horowitz was deeply involved with the Panthers and helped get Van Tanner her job at the school. While the incident remains unresolved, Horowitz lays out in his book Radical Son a painstakingly detailed case that the Panthers killed her.
Lee, however, dismisses the idea out of hand: “This kind of tactic had been seen before and was known to have been used by the government’s anti-Panther COINTELPRO group,” she writes, referring to the infamous FBI counterintelligence program that serves as a perennial left-wing bogeyman. According to Lee, it’s an established fact that the FBI ran around killing people and blaming it on the Black Panthers.

I didn’t make an argument that the Black Panthers are guilty — I made the point that Lee isn’t particularly credible when she dissmisses the arguments of Horowitz and others that the Panthers murdered Van Patter and absurdly blames the FBI for her death. Richardson is making a mountain out of molehill here, considering that he states up front that “I don’t think Lee’s cursory discussion [of Van Patter] enhances her honor.” It seems to me that Richardson largely agrees with me on this point but then goes out of his way to find fault with my review just so he won’t be seen as agreeing with “grist for the right-wing mill,” as he so delicately puts it.

Anyway, all that aside, I don’t know all that much about Richardson but his blog says he’s got a book coming out called A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America about the venerable lefty publication that Horowitz used to edit. If done well, that could be a very interesting book.