To the Editor:

In “Who Needs the Liberals?” [October], Penn Kemble reports an alleged conversation between me and Bella Abzug in which she is reputed to have said that she did not favor sanctuary in the U.S. for non-Communist Vietnamese, in the event of a Communist victory, and felt that “such people deserve the ‘punishment’ that awaits them.”

The writer did not check the story with me. No such incident ever took place. I have never had any such argument with Bella at any time. Furthermore, as one who has known Bella for many years, and has had many political disagreements with her, I do not believe that she can be guilty of such callousness.

Such stories do a great injustice and appear with altogether too much frequency toward the end of an election campaign, at a time when a refutation is lost in the maze of last-minute political rhetoric.

Paul O’Dwyer
New York City

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Penn Kemble writes:

So far as I am able to confirm, there is no documentary evidence to which one can turn to prove or disprove my statement about Bella Abzug’s stand against political sanctuary for non-Communist South Vietnamese. Since reading Mr. O’Dwyer’s letter, I have checked again with my sources—people who personally attended the meeting at which the incident occurred. While they concede the possibility that Mr. O’Dwyer himself may not have been involved in the debate, they still insist that Mrs. Abzug argued for the position I attributed to her.

In any case, Mrs. Abzug had over a month between the appearance of my article and election day in which she certainly could have set the record straight regarding her stand on political sanctuary, if in fact I did misrepresent her. She has not, so far as I know, made any serious effort to do this—and I have been a close observer of her campaign. She has instead repeatedly threatened libel suits against me, though without making clear what, precisely, the grounds for such suit would be.

I do not believe that this report did “great injustice” to Mrs. Abzug—it was actually one of the milder points one might have made against her. As a sample, let me offer a vignette from Mrs. Abzug’s campaign to Mr. O’Dwyer, who protests that she is incapable of callousness. It is taken from a recent article by Jimmy Breslin, one of Mrs. Abzug’s most ardent admirers, which appeared in the October 5 issue of New York magazine. (That this should appear in an article which is intended as praise for Mrs. Abzug reveals as much about the writer as about the candidate he is boosting.)

“There she is in the purple dress, that’s Bella Abzug, she’s against Israel,” a little guy from the Jewish Defense League began yelling at a rally on the East Side the other night. Bella grabbed a young guy who had driven her to the meeting. “Hit that bastard in the mouth for me,” she said. “I can’t do it where people see me.”

Should people like this replace Mayor Daley?

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