Happy Heretic Hails JRB

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I would have written sooner to thank you for Jake Brackman's sketch of me but I have had my hands full trying to persuade by tailor not to sue the CRIMSON for libel. I have never owned, or even been tempted to rent, a suit "with wide stripes and wider lapels." I must also, in justice to past employers for whom I retain a deep and grateful affection, correct his story that I started my own news-letter because I was "tired of researching news that city editors wouldn't print." On the contrary I started my Weekly as a last resort after the New York Daily Compass closed because for years under Ted O. Thackrey, the late John P. Lewis, Ralph Ingersoll, Freda Kirchwey, J. David Stern and Harry T. Saylor I enjoyed a quarter century of such freedom and old-fashioned crusading journalism that I was spoiled for anything else. Brackman's account may be excused as the triumph of novelistic libido over reportorial virtue. Otherwise it was a most endearing tribute. To be called a Happy Heretic was a psychic bull's-eye that shows Brackman has a genius for portraiture. I wouldn't swop that citation for two Pulitzer Prizes.

Mr. Brackman replies:

I am CRIMSON-cheeked at having misrepresented Mr. Stone's journalistic lineage. But I'm sure that if his editors hadn't printed news he'd researched he would have tired of it pretty fast. Probably he'd have taken an ax to a couple of presses on his way out.

As for his tailor (who, I understand, also does alterations for General De Gaulle), well, Mr. Stone Just Isn't bulit for Ivy League haberdashery. But for my money he is a portrait of reportorial, if not sartorial, elegance. I wouldn't trade his commendation for a solid gold Phi Beta Kappa key. I. F. Stone