188
PARTISAN REVIEW
"democratic revolutions," as we did in Haiti and the Philippines,
and urged that the same be done in Nicaragua. And he suggested
that in such a context a certain amount of secrecy might be called for
in order to protect the participants .
At the time, no one knew that Ledeen had served to initiate
contact with "moderate" groups in Iran, or indeed that any arms
sales to Iran had taken place. The whole scandal was yet to come.
Daniel Bell objected to Ledeen's essay and quietly withdrew from
our board-though he expects to continue to write for us and to re–
main our friend . Some of our editors thought William Phillips
should have consulted them before the symposium was initiated,
either because of their feelings about Ledeen, their disagreements
with his views, or their assessment of the quality of the article. Some
of those who did not like Ledeen or his views wrote extremely critical
replies. This was precisely the sort of symposium Phillips had hoped
for, since the issues were addressed from a wide variety of political
perspectives .
The Iran scandal broke sometime in November, and Ledeen's
name was mentioned as an initial go-between. Since our January
issue had to go to press, and we did not know what else would sur–
face, we decided to postpone the symposium. As often happens
when a quarterly deals with rapidly shifting issues and topical con–
cerns, Ledeen's essay as well as the answers to it became somewhat
dated and, in the changing context of events, took on different
meanings than it had before; therefore, the majority of the editors,
though not all of them, thought we should put the matter behind us
and start afresh at a later date.
This is precisely what polemical and one-sided press reports
have made difficult for us to do. Most of them quoted from an un–
published manuscript-without the permission of the author. The
most sensational of them gave the impression that the magazine is
tottering or riven with internal conflict, or even that it served as
some sort of unwitting adjunct to the "Irangate" activities . They
have suggested that the magazine has betrayed its glorious past, now
the subject of so many studies and memoirs-a past, by the way,
during which it was regularly reviled. These journalists, many of
whom seem unfamiliar with
Partisan Review,
do not know that we
follow neither a "right" nor "left" line, and that William Phillips
continues to prefer a politically heterogeneous editorial board .
The editors of
Partisan Review
maintain healthy differences on
