Notebook

Visalia, California
November 1990

Friend;

I have to find a way to keep in regular touch with those of you who are interested in the work I'm doing. I've written three newsletters this year prior to this one and have published only one. That was a 14-page edition of SMITH'S LETTER. I mailed it in March, nine months ago. It was too long, cost too much to mail and was too much work. sometimes it's hard for me to keep in mind that a newsletter is a place to put a little news, not a place to develop a series of literary anecdotes.

In June I trashed what was supposed to be the second issue of SMITH'S LETTER when I saw that once again I was developing another literary tract. In September I at last took a rewritten version of SMITH'S LETTER to the printers, and when I went back to pick up the finished job, he hadn't done it but rather had produced a layout for a newsletter that was so professional looking compared to what I had given him that I decided to use his ideas and work with him.

After working out a simple, beautifully designed format of 20 pages, including a catalog, I was ready to go to print again a couple weeks ago. But now my designer/printer had his own problems, and one delay followed another until I saw the light. I was at the point of getting into a publishing project that in all likelihood would make problems for me rather than solve them. One more example of adversity producing insight, which appears to be the one way I learn.

I was in trouble again. I have to maintain contact with those of you who believe I am doing worthwhile work and who want to support me. I have to do a newsletter that I can actually do, one that I can publish regularly and that I can afford to distribute free. I don't want the problem associated with subscription lists, renewals and so on. The newsletter should have a format that discourages my compulsion to write literary stories rather than news information. I'm working on a 600-700 page book manuscript, and if I feel compelled to do literary stuff, I should have enough sense to put it in the book, not try to force it into a newsletter.

Preferably the newsletter should be very simple, very inexpensive, and just large enough to give you the basic information you need to understand what I've done the preceding month to try to straighten out this bloody Holocaust story. It should tell you bow to get additional information on those projects I'm working on that interest you.

The day before yesterday I was getting Mother out of bed when I heard her call my name, as if from a distance. I realized that I had stopped ministering to her and that I had been standing in the middle of the room gazing out her window toward the park across the street. I don't know how long I'd been standing there like that. From her bed Mother said: “Bradley, what the hell are you doing? Bradley?” When I heard her call, I sort of came 'round, and I realized that the image of this little newsletter had come to me from—somewhere—and that what I had been gazing at wasn't the park across the street but, in my own mind's eye, the format to the pages you have in your hand.

Wish me luck. At doing newsletters, I'm no genius.

The Horton Downey Interview

In October I was in Washington D.C. to help with PR for the l0th International Revisionist Conference, held over the weekend of the 13th through the 15th. John Toland, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian, was the keynote speaker. Quite a feather in the bonnet of the IHR. But then any successful historian who is willing to say publicly, as John Toland did at the banquet on the 14th, that the majority of his professional peers are “ass kissers” is my kind of guy.

If you want a full rundown on the conference, you can write to the IHR, 1822 1/2 Newport Blvd. #191, Costa Mesa, CA 92627, and ask for their November '90 Newsletter.

On the 17th I took the train up to Fort Lee where I stayed with Fritz Berg. The evening of the 18th Fritz went with me to CNBC studios where I did the taping and Fritz monitored it from the audience. The Downey program is on Cable now, lasts one-half hour, and is divided into three segments. I was told at the last minute I would have only two of the three segments. Downey wasted a lot of time at the beginning of the interview, but the first segment went well enough. During the commercial the audience began to get a little rowdy, I wasn't told when I came back on camera, Downey began to get intense, and after a few moments he blew up, called me an "A-hole" and threw me off the show. I was taken a little aback. His Coordinator had assured me that "nobody is going to throw sand in your face."

Fritz didn't like the way Downey behaved with me, so he caused a scene from the audience, and when Downey couldn't yell him down, he had Fritz thrown out of the audience. So Norton Downey made a clean sweep of the Revisionists on 19 October 1990. Afterwards Fritz was very happy. It looked to me like he enjoyed the action.

I have a video of the interview. The rowdiness is edited out, but the interview itself is largely intact. I also have an audio cassette of a warm-up session with Fritz, and how we talked it over when we were back at his house. There were half a dozen of us. It was like a little party, and that's the way it sounds.

Death of a Friend

While I was in Washington D.C. for the Revisocon I received a telephone message from a mutual friend informing me that David McCalden had died of Aids. David was in on the founding of the Institute for Historical Review and afterwards published the important and relentless and oftentimes vicious David McCalden Newsletter, which he used for years to monitor the Revisionist movement. He was a skilled journalist, he was very smart, had a highly-trained memory, and he was an outsider in almost every way and a compulsive radical. The (willfully) ignorant obituaries that identified him with the political right couldn't have been more off the truth. If he was anything at all politically or intellectually, he was an anarchist.

David had been sick a long time, I thought I knew what was wrong and what was going to happen, but because I wasn't sure about it was still shocking. I hadn't expected that the news of his death would move me to tears.

I had serious arguments with David over many years about many things, but largely about his compulsion to make ad hominem attacks against individuals that to me were inexcusable. His writing, and his influence among Revisionists and among Jews particularly suffered severely because of it. There was something to his character that prohibited him from understanding why the victims of his attacks, and he could make very crazy charges sometimes, were unable not to be personally offended by them.

In person he was unfailingly good company. He was very smart and very well informed, he was always in good humor and ready for a laugh, and he was a stalwart beer drinker. His preferred glass was the Irish-brewed Harp. No one in the movement has been more generous with his knowledge and information. Even when he was dying, as it turns out, he kept me informed of matters he knew were of interest to me, sent me clippings, called to say that he liked something I had written for the media.

Over the last couple months David began to thank me for the occasional phone call I would make to him. I didn't know his death was so near but now I suppose that he did. In all the time he suffered through his dying I never heard him complain about his fate and I never detected a note of self-pity in anything he ever said to me.

I can recall all David's failings and all the reasons I have had to be angry with him, but what I recall most clearly is that from the beginning to the end, he was my friend.

Today in the mail I got an envelope with no return address, post-marked Los Angeles. Inside was a photocopy of the 25 October L.A. Times obituary headlined: “David McCalden: Failed to Disprove the Holocaust.” To one side of the obituary, which contained the usual misinformation, written in pencil, are the words:

“Well, that's one down!
Love and kisses.
No pun intended.”

Another Holocaust Conference

The state of Nevada is preparing to host an "International Conference On the Holocaust" in 1991. The state has created an "advisory council on education relating to the Holocaust," and has set aside $50,000 as initial funding.

Judith Schuchmann, a resident of the Lake Tahoe/Reno area, is monitoring preparations for the event. We've talked about my going up there to speak. If you can help with information, ideas, or in any other way, please contact: Judith Schuchmann, PO Box 1042, Carnelian Bay, CA 95711.

National Coalition Against Censorship

Children's author Judy Bloom has lent her name to NCAC's most recent fund and membership drive. NCAC is up in arms over the institutional censorship of such books as Catcher in the Rye. Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary, and a dramatic production of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. NCAC is also involved in the dispute over public tax funding for The National Endowment for the Arts. Authors Kurt Vonnequt and Betty Friedan, actress Colleen Dewhurst and others are featured in HCAC's literature. There is a good deal of Christian Fundamentalist-bashing.

Because we are concerned about these things too, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust has sent in the membership fee to join NCAC. Once we are accepted, we have two very interesting dOcuments involving open and shut censorship cases at Penn State University and Stanford. These documents demonstrate that access to Revisionist literature on the Holocaust is denied to students on those two campuses. The Penn State file goes to 40 pages. The Stanford file is half a dozen pages.

I have also joined the Free Press Association, whose membership is largely libertarian.

The Media Project

On 13 November I sent off the latest of my mass-mailings to radio and TV talk shows around the country. The package included a 2-page flyer on "Re-writing the Holocaust story," my pamphlet "The Case for Teaching Holocaust Revisionism in our Colleges and High Schools," and Mark Weber's pamphlet "The Holocaust: Let's Hear Both sides.” I'm a little behind with this one. My last 1nterview was the 18 November Morton Downy Show.

A Missed Opportunity

I had made preparations to attend the Illinois regional conference of the National Association for College Activities (NACA) during November 15-18. NACA conferences are attended by college buyers searching for entertainers and lecturers, and by those like myself who want to line up paid engagements before campus audiences. But on the morning of October 10, while I was driving up Highway 99 toward the Fresno airport, the motor on my little 1981 Mazda 626 blew a head gasket and left me stranded in the pre-dawn darkness in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley.

The upshot was that, while I continued on my way to the 10th International Revisionist Conference in Washington, my wife had to have the car towed 40 miles back to Visalia, and I have got a $2,000 bill to pay for a "new" used motor for the Mazda. When the head gasket blew, the block heated up almost instantly. Motor blocks are made mostly of aluminum these days, so it melted and fused, or so I'm told at my trusty garage.

In any event, I could either give up the Illinois NACA conference or I could give up having a car for six months or so. When you have a four-year-old and an 89-year-old in the house, along with the rest of you, you don't think it is very wise to give up having the car. So I gave up the NACA conference.

This is only one of many opportunities I regularly miss to do Revisionist work because there isn't enough money to take care of business. I don't know if I would have been successful in contracting for speaking dates at the Illinois regional, but I do know, by not going, that I certainly won't.

Meanwhile, I have begun running an advertisement in NACA's expensively produced magazine "Programming." Programming goes to the 1,200 colleges that are members of NACA, where it is directed to the directors of Student Activities Committees, which are responsible for contracting for speakers. The ad is headed: "THE HOLOCAUST: Let's Hear Both Sides." My mug shot follows, and beneath it: "The Historical Issue * the Intellectual Freedom Issue * The Moral Issue." That's followed by my name, and the address and telephone number of Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.

The Situation in Illinois

THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE now requires that all public school children be taught at least one unit of history on the Holocaust. In its amendment to the school code it defines what the Holocaust was, probably making it illegal for Illinois public school teachers to say otherwise. Perhaps a constitutional issue.

INGEBORG AND SAFFET SARICH refused to permit their daughter to attend a Holocaust study class in her Chicago suburb Junior High. The Sariches wrote a position paper, and several open letters detailing their positions. They mailed thousands of copies of the papers to their neighbors, the media, PTA and local public school teachers. Sarich has been interviewed by radio, TV and the print press. One of his position papers has been printed completely the Northwestern University bi-monthly "n magazine." The Northwestern Daily printed an article on the Sariches, while the Northwestern Review has published a savage article on Dr. Arthur Butz, whose The Hoax of the Twentieth Century has been high-lighted by Saffet Sarich.

DR. ARTHUR BUTZ still instructs students at Northwestern in electrical engineering and computer sciences. Periodically since 1978, when his Hoax was first published in the U.S., Butz is savaged by one or another group of students and/or professors. No academic paper has been published at Northwestern or any place else to demonstrate that Butz is off the mark in what he has written.

FRED LEUCHTER, author of The Leuchter Report, which is the first scientific report ever published on the alleged gas chaBbers of Auschwitz, has been black-listed in the State of Illinois. Leuchter, who is considered to be the leading expert on gas chamber technology in the U.S., had a contract to supervise an execution in Illinois. When it was revealed that he had published a professional document claiming that the so-called gas chambers at Auschwitz were never used and never could have been used for the mass-gassings of human beings the State Department of Corrections refused to honor its contract. Illinois legislators, congressmen and spokesmen for the Holocaust Lobby involved themselves in the dispute.

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR COLLEGE ACTIVITIES (NACA) is holding its regional conference in Peoria. This is the event I had to cancel out of. I had found a stall lecture hall at Northwestern where I wanted to speak, but I was told that I would have to provide the university with a $3-million liability insurance policy. Of course the cost was prohibitive.

I HAVE GOOD NEWS FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE TRIED TO ORDER CASSETTE TAPES AND OTHER MATERIALS from me and have found it to be an almoSt impossible task. My stepdaughter, Irene Magali Pacheco Altamirano y Smith, has graduated from high school now and is helping me, at long last, get my records, orders and other paper work under control. Mailing lists, order records, manuscripts and so on are all being put into the computer, and the mailing of this first issue of Smith's Report will be the first observable result of her work. I suspect that this is the first time, or the first time in a long while, that most of you have heard from me. I expect that to change from here on out.