Letter to the Editor

To the Editor,

You are and have been doing a wonderful job with The Public Eye; it always informs/horrifies me. I really appreciate the time and effort it takes to publish. I’ve been there...

However, in the spring issue, the editorial says, “The magazine was founded in the 1970’s by the National Lawyers Guild to publish the latest news...” Actually, the magazine was cofounded by me and Harvey Kahn; we published for a few years (1975-80?) and then, after floundering, asked Chip Berlet to take it on via the National Lawyers Guild Civil Liberties Committee. It then migrated to Political Research Associates.

Founded bymid-1970’s sounds right; I believe it went to NLG by the end of the 1979, surely by 1980. My copies are in storage at the moment but I do have a 1991 edition that was sponsored by the NLG Civil Liberties Committee and published by Investigative News Features.

We actually founded it to raise the spectre of the rise of the Right (surprise!) and the public/private collaboration of the intelligence agencies during the heady days of the Watergate break-ins, the CIA hearings, COINTELPRO, etc.We were watching Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, LaRouche, Rees, etc. It seems the FBI was watching us—our first stranger/volunteer was an old FBI informant who created our back page advertisement. Precocious as we were, we were told that we were “hysterical, the Right was no threat.”

Sorry to raise this, but one hates to see history lost.

Sheila O’Donnell
Stinson Beach, CA