NAT HENTOFF
ISSUES RETRACTION ON THAT 318,000 FIGURE
[Last week World Outlook reprinted a report by Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice concerning the size of the October 21 antiwar demonstration in Washington. In his column of November 23, Hentoff retracted what he had written and made the following explanation, which in our opinion does him credit as a responsible columnist. ]
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Well, folks, I was had. The Novenber 9 column led off with a long excerpt from a story by Bob Grove in the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society] weekly, New Left Notes. The story told of an alleged briefing of some reporters by the Washington, D.C., police chief on the Saturday evening of the October 22 demonstration. The chief said, according to the fable, that his officers had counted 318,000 marchers but the official figure was to be 55,000 so as not to embarrass the President. He asked a pledge from the reporters present to adhere to the latter figure. One of these reporters, a Keith Wisely of the Los Angeles Times, was the source of Mr. Grove's story -- according to Mr. Grove.
Now I could try to ease my way out of this by saying I did ask questions at the end of the excerpt I ran from New Left Notes, but obviously I wouldn't have used the piece as a lead if I hadn't thought it had credibility by virtue of its having been given a front page position in New Left Notes. And there was certainly reason to question the 55,000 figure. In the period since, I have learned that the editor of the Los Angeles Times has no knowledge of Mr. Wisely. Bob Grove, according to the New Left Notes office in Chicago, cannot presently be found. And now at the bottom of page three, rather inconspicuously, of the November 6 issue of New Left Notes, there appears this paragraph under the head, NUMBERS GAME REVISITED: “According to reliable sources, the 'Numbers Game' story last week was a figment of someone's imagination. NLN is in the process of checking out that information."
Why did I believe that if New left Notes gave that much prominence to the original story, it was worth pursuing? Because I believe SDS is committed to truthfulness and that its resistance to the institutions of this society are based on its revulsion against the lack of honesty with which, in varying degrees, many "adults" live and work. But obviously SDS has a concomitant responsibility to be as careful about its own credibility as possible, and this was a bad goof. And it just won't do to bury a retraction the way those old bourgeois papers do. That's letting oneself off too easily. I hope any further reports on that "figment of someone's imagination" will appear on the front page where the original story was. As for me, sure I should have been a great deal more skeptical. My goof is no more excusable than theirs. Well, I learned something, and so I hope did the editors of New Left Notes.
CHILEAN