UNFINISHED BUSINESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000200820025-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 10, 2010
• Sequence Number: 25
• Publication Date: September 1, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/11: CIA-RDP90-00845R000200820025-9
ARTICLE APPEAR
9H PAGE 2L
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM Rr Tlnel
SEF'.['"eFER/0CT03E 1980
Harrison Salisbury reflects
TO THE REVIEW:
As I read the review of Without Fear or
Favor (cJR, July/August) by my former
Times colleague Mary Breasted, I was
bothered by a sense of deja vu, but it was not
until I had reflected a bit that I realized which
particular ghost she had stirred. It was the
ghost of Pravda.
Over the'long years I have often read of
myself in Pravda: "Even the savagely anti-
Soviet scribbler Harrison Salisbury is com-
pelled to admit [my italics] that the Soviet
Union has achieved a steel production of X
million tons," or "Even the chauvinist
capitalist apologist Salisbury was forced to
report from Hanoi that the U.S. is bombing
the Vietnamese capital."
There are many such formulations in Mary
Breasted's review, but perhaps the most
striking is her assertion that "as Salisbury
himself points out" The Washington Post
was consistently ahead of the Times on
Watergate. Indeed, Salisbury did point that
out. Moreover, he emphasized it and he went
to considerable lengths to analyze the "def-
erential attitude toward power," which she
cites, and other factors, some of them simply
accidental, which caused The New York
Times to run No. 2.
Breasted suggests that I believe "that the
Times deserves credit for bringing Nixon
down." I have made no such assertion nor
do I believe either The New York Times or
The Washington Post brought the president
down. Nixon brought himself down. The
point I tried to make was that Pentagon ac-
celerated the creation of an apparatus and a
psychology within the White House which
led to Watergate and the "White House hor-
rors." And the Supreme Court in Pentagon
reinforced the press legally and psychologi-
cally to pursue Watergate with vigor. In this
setting, as I wrote, the magnificent team of
Woodward and Bernstein worked their
magic.
Finally, I devote 196 pages of a 591-page
text to relentless pursuit of the interconnec-
tions between the CIA and The New York
Times. This took eighteen months of uninter-
rupted digging and it unearthed major reve-
lations in the area of perversion of the press
by the agency. There are still some fuzzy
edges and probably always will be, although
I have not myself given up on the inquiry; it
will go on so long as I have the breath to ask
questions. To dismiss this with a contemptu-
ous shrug tells me something I do not like to
know concerning the parameters of Mary
Breasted's critical standards. I have not been
able to uncover any leftovers of CIA linkage
in "the new" New York Times. But if she or
anyone possesses such evidence, it would be
very much in the public interest to step for-
ward and present it.
HARRISON E. SALISBURY
Taconic, Conn.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/11: CIA-RDP90-00845R000200820025-9