To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

The gentle reader of your reported interview with me relative to my talk on the political and legal phases of the oil investigations before the Harvard Liberal Club, would certainly be stimulated to wonder whether facts had any importance in the scheme of life. He would be, as I am, at a loss to unscramble the report. Certainly its writer had a feeling that something "smelled rotten", but his olfactory nerves turned towards procedure, government counsel, in fact, towards anything save what commonly smells rotten Oil. To refute its many statements would not be worth time or space. But the product raises any important issue: it calls attention to the seriousness of a want of technical equipment in collegiate and other types of journalism. Why, for example, state that the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals tried a case when its very nature as an appellate court prevents it from being a trial court? How could Sinclair a private citizen, sell public lands and he arrested therefor." Why state that the courts refused to cancel the Teapot Dome leases when a reference to the reported decisions would show the contrary to be true? Why bring the Elk Hills Reservation and Pearl Harbor contracts before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals when the subject-matter is within the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit? Why involve the late Attorney General in contempt of court when newspapers a few months old show that the charge was one of conspiracy to defraud the United States? Who is M. A. Dangherty? What did he have to do with King? Of course, such examples portray the absence of that minimum of labor and keenness that should typity a reporter. But more, they could not have been made by one with some conception of judicial procedure and current events. To such a person, with only the elements of a technical training, the account would have smacked more of adventures in a Lewis Carroll wonderland than of something real and vital in this little world of ours. --J. M. Landis.