To the Editors of the CRIMSON:
In your story about the opinion of some faculty members on the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Cubs (CRIMSON, Jan. 5th) you reported me as being a member of the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." This is not true. I am not and have not been a member of that organization. Your reporter probably confused the "Fair Play Committee" with the "Committee on Cubs of the Harvard and Radcliffe Liberal Union" with which I was connected untill recently. I would appreciate it if you set the record right.
Allow me on this occasion to make a friendly criticism of your reporting. I believe that your reporters tend to think too much in terms of headlines and quotable words and too little in terms of getting accurately the views of their interlocutors. I have more than once been not so misquoted as misrepresented or misinterpreted by your reporters. In the particular story at issue, for instance, I was reported as saying that the rupturing of diplomatic relations was "unforgivable," which is true, but the context of the reasoning which led me to that admittedly harsh judgement was left out or distorted. What I said was something to this effect: Given the background of provocation and retaliation that has characterised Cuban-American relations, the best one could expect from the new administration, prior to the breaking off of relations, was an unsensational, quiet policy of stopping further deterioration of relations as a preliminary to making a new attempt to discover some ground for accommodation. What the Eisenhower decision did was to put Kennedy in the embarrassing position in which if he wanted to do anything at all about Cuba, he had to start by taking the sensational step of restoring diplomatic relations, a step which can easily be interpreted as going much further than Kennedy would like to and perhaps even should go at this point. You would agree that using the term "unforgivable" in this context sounds much less pretentious than in the context in which your reporter placed it? N. Safran, Instructor in Government.
(Neither Dr. Safran nor Luigi R. Einaudi '87, teaching fellow in Government, has ever been associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The CRIMSON regrets the error contained in yesterday's story.)
