Notes & Asides

Dear Mr. Buckley:

Your editorial, “The Logic of Defection” [“The Week,” March 23], and your subsequent “clarification” [“Notes & Asides,” April 20] have just been brought to my attention. As the later item notes, your statement— which was the basic premise of your editorial and of its title—that I had served for a number of months “rather high up on the White House staff of Henry Kissinger” is thoroughly mistaken. The error is puzzling, since the very issue of the New York Review of Books, March 11, from which your editorial draws its three quotations— each one of which, incidentally, is transcribed slightly inaccurately—describes my limited association with the Administration explicitly: “In the first several months of the Nixon Administration, he worked as a consultant on Vietnam options to Henry Kissinger.” (It was Kissinger’s wish that the fact of this consulting be held private, and therefore I made no allusion to it in public or in print throughout 1969-70 until after, early this year, Kissinger himself revealed it on-the-record to Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post.)

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Dear Mr. Buckley:

Your editorial, “The Logic of Defection” [“The Week,” March 23], and your subsequent “clarification” [“Notes & Asides,” April 20] have just been brought to my attention. As the later item notes, your statement— which was the basic premise of your editorial and of its title—that I had served for a number of months “rather high up on the White House staff of Henry Kissinger” is thoroughly mistaken. The error is puzzling, since the very issue of the New York Review of Books, March 11, from which your editorial draws its three quotations— each one of which, incidentally, is transcribed slightly inaccurately—describes my limited association with the Administration explicitly: “In the first several months of the Nixon Administration, he worked as a consultant on Vietnam options to Henry Kissinger.” (It was Kissinger’s wish that the fact of this consulting be held private, and therefore I made no allusion to it in public or in print throughout 1969-70 until after, early this year, Kissinger himself revealed it on-the-record to Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post.)