Glenn Garvin The Miami Herald

April 26, 2011

Glenn Garvin
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: It didn’t start with Sam Tanenhaus – Some comments on your column in today’s Miami Herald on the New York Times.

Mr. Garvin,

Prior to typing this I reached out and touched Tanenhaus’s astonishing biography of Whitaker Chambers. It sits next to a book titled Alger Hiss, Whitaker Chambers and the Schism in the American Left.

In your Bill of Indictment against the New York Times Book Review section you mention The Surrender [a ballerina’s encomium to the liberating qualities of Sodom]. No endorsement of the “liberating qualities of sodomy” can pass without inserting Churchill as the codicil. “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” were listed among the great traditions of the British Navy by the then First Sea Lord. Later, when asked about the qualifications of an opponent, he said that “he gives sodomy a bad name”. Will we ever see his likes again?

It must be noted that the 20th century moral decline of the New York Times started at the beginning of the 1930s, a “low, dishonest decade”.

Walter Duranty was a foreign correspondent stationed in Moscow in 1932. He had 2 paymasters. One was the New York Times. The other was the KGB. His reportage earned him a Pulitzer Prize. A case can be made to show that the imprimatur of the Times led to the recognition of the USSR by Roosevelt in 1933.

A Kaddish for the Kulaks is always in order.

Anywhere from 6,000,000 to 10,000,000 Ukrainian Kulaks – mostly Jews – were starved to death in the early 1930s. Stalin lied about it. Duranty swore to it. The carnage continued. Hitler saw that the West did nothing. The road to Auschwitz, to Treblinka, began in the Moscow office of the New York Times. The Germans, being better record keepers than the Russians, put 12,000,000 into the ovens.

It must be noted that there is an evil imprint in the DNA of the New York Times from the 19th century. Forged into the corporate double helix of the Times is what they did and what they didn’t do in the Presidential campaign of 1864. They acquiesced in the Democratic Party calling Lincoln a “baboon” while they editorially advocated a negotiated settlement with the South.




One of the great traits of modern American Liberalism, a belief system for whjch the Times serves as the paradigmatic template, is “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. It blesses them with an eclectic memory. In this instance a negotiated settlement with the South would have kept slavery in place. As men were dying to undo this “peculiar institution” the New York Times said it kept the unemployment rate down.

[I wonder if Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, AKA Democratic National Chairgal cum local Hecate gone big time, who warned us in January that “bile and vitriol were tearing us apart at the seams” would characterize the ad hominem argument – imagine the outcry if someone were to comment on the simian qualities of Lord Barack the Beneficent – and the support of slavery as “bile and vitriol”?]

For 20 years I asked the New York Times why it did not repudiate Walter Duranty. Linda Greenhouse, a 1997 winner, in responding to my note of congratulations to her and admonition of her employer, told me she had no idea of the consequences of his perfidy. The paper assigned a Mr. William Borders, listed as a National Editor, to be the designated catcher on my javelin team.

Some things are owed to the ledger.

The stain from the scroyle Duranty and the stain from the Times’ steadfast refusal to acknowledge same can never be offset. It can only be acknowledged with shame. The “eclectic indignation” that enables the January, February, March 2003 Page 1 of the Times to have more ink spent on the gender brouhaha of a golf tournament than this country’s Congressionally approved invasion of Iraq suggests a warped mind set.

The various Sulzberger family trusts are the best advertisement for why the estate tax should begin at 105%. The Kennedy trusts taxes should start at 205%.

The Washington Post made Janice Cook a non-person when it was shown that she lied to get her Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times has done nothing to cleanse its soul of this foul crime.

It is only fair to ask what it would have done if the 1934 Pulitzer Prize winner, Frederick Birchall, a New York times employee, had been so compromised by the security forces of the country where he served. It is almost the stuff of afternoon TV that the 1934 winner was stationed in Berlin. I can imagine the entire Sulzberger family submitting itself to “a dozen, well laid on” on the anniversary of the award, every year, if it had been shown that the Gestapo had owned their man in Berlin.







My father, the legendary Judge Smith, used to read the Two Arthurs, Krock and Daley, to me every Sunday. The first time I finished a Sunday puzzle was a time of joy.

There is a tangential Miami Herald connection to ending my New York Times connections.

On October 3, 1999, at the departure gate at DFW airport, I encountered a certain Mr. T. Fiedler. We exchanged pleasantries and then boarded the flight to Ft. Lauderdale. If memory serves he, as a big time media mogul, rode in the front. He came into the back section to see if there were any government programs available to help the coach passengers. Again we exchanged pleasantries. He observed that I was doing the New York Times crossword in ink. I allowed that there was no other way to do it. He walked to the back of the plane and on his return leg noticed that I had finished.

That was my last puzzle and the last time I bought the paper.

12 years later and both of us have survived.

At least I don’t owe any money to the Frito Bandido.







Kevin Smith