SMITH'S REPORT
 
 
 
 
 
America's Only Monthly
Revisionist Newsletter
 
 
 

 
- Number 2 -
November 1990

Contents

• The Morton Downey Interview
• Death of a Friend
• National Coalition Against Censorship
• A Missed Opportunity
• The Situation in Illinois
• The Campus Project
• and more!

and now... a feature story!

Death of a Friend

   While I was in Washington D.C. for the Revisocon I received a telephone message from a mutual friend informing me that David McCalden had died of Aids. David was in on the founding of the Institute for Historical Review and afterwards published the important and relentless and oftentimes vicious David McCalden Newsletter, which he used for years to monitor the Revisionist movement. He was a skilled journalist, he was very smart, had a highly-trained memory, and he was an outsider in almost every way and a compulsive radical. The (willfully) ignorant obituaries that identified him with the political right couldn't have been more off the truth. If he was anything at all politically or intellectually, he was an anarchist.

  David had been sick a long time, I thought I knew what was wrong and what was going to happen, but because I wasn't sure about it was still shocking. I hadn't expected that the news of his death would move me to tears.

  I had serious arguments with David over many years about many things, but largely about his compulsion to make ad hominem attacks against individuals that to me were inexcusable. His writing, and his influence among Revisionists and among Jews particularly suffered severely because of it. There was something to his character that prohibited him from understanding why the victims of his attacks, and he could make very crazy charges sometimes, were unable not to be personally offended by them.

   In person he was unfailingly good company. He was very smart and very well informed, he was always in good humor and ready for a laugh, and he was a stalwart beer drinker. His preferred glass was the Irish-brewed Harp. No one in the movement has been more generous with his knowledge and information. Even when he was dying, as it turns out, he kept me informed of matters he knew were of interest to me, sent me clippings, called to say that he liked something I had written for the media.

   Over the last couple months David began to thank me for the occasional phone call I would make to him. I didn't know his death was so near but now I suppose that he did. In all the time he suffered through his dying I never heard him complain about his fate and I never detected a note of self-pity in anything he ever said to me.

   I can recall all David's failings and all the reasons I have had to be angry with him, but what I recall most clearly is that from the beginning to the end, he was my friend.

nbsp;   Today in the mail I got an envelope with no return address, post-marked Los Angeles. Inside was a photocopy of the 25 October L.A. Times obituary headlined: "David McCalden: Failed to Disprove the Holocaust." To one side of the obituary, which contained the usual misinformation, written in pencil, are the words:

"Well, that's one down!
Love and kisses.
No pun intended."