Jena, Versailles, and Cuomo

First, in her effort to prove that my stories “hewed closely” to the Jena narrative prepared by civil rights activist Alan Bean, Allen states that I passed along Bean’s assertion that LaSalle Parish district attorney Reed Walters had attended an assembly at Jena High School and directed threats at black students. In fact, I could never confirm this incident during my frequent reporting trips to Jena, and, while it may appear in other journalists’ stories about Jena, you will not find it in any of my coverage.

Second, Allen asserts that my stories contained no interviews with any African-American residents of Jena beyond the Jena Six and their families. This is demonstrably false. In my very first story about Jena, published on May 20, 2007, I quoted one mother of a Jena Six defendant; two white town officials (the mayor and the school superintendent); a white preacher; a white civil rights activist; and two black Jena residents who were unconnected to the Jena Six defendants or their families. One of those African Americans was the lone black member of the Jena school board, who verified that “whites and blacks are treated differently here.” Subsequent stories I wrote about Jena quoted other African Americans as well.

Third, contrary to Allen’s assertion, the Denver Post is not owned by the Tribune Company.

HOWARD WITT

Houston, Tex.

CHARLOTTE ALLEN RESPONDS: I owe Howard Witt a clarification for my “hewed closely” sentence. I lumped Witt’s reporting with that of the BBC’s Tom Mangold, giving the misleading impression that Witt had reported LaSalle Parish district attorney Reed Walters’s supposed threat to black students at a Jena High School assembly in September 2006. Witt never reported that.

As for Witt’s allegation that I said his stories “contained no interviews with African-American residents of Jena beyond the Jena Six and their families,” I did not write that. What I wrote was this: “A noticeable feature of all the news stories about the Jena Six was the almost-complete absence of interviews with any black residents of Jena beyond the Jena Six and their family members.” Note the “almost.” A few interviews with other black residents of Jena do pop up here and there in Witt’s stories and those of other reporters but not many.

I stand corrected as to the Denver Post‘s ownership.

VERSAILLES REVISITED

I AM GRATIFIED that such an eminent historian as Professor John Milton Cooper Jr. has read my book, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today, so carefully (“Peace in Their Time,” December 17). Alas, he seems to have chosen to review a different book entirely from the one I wrote.

I did not indeed set out to provide the world with yet another comprehensive scholarly work on the Treaty of Versailles–certainly well-ploughed ground. Instead, I undertook something that is done all too infrequently by journalists and historians alike–examine a key turning point in history through the prism of a journalist. Or, conversely, to bring the critical skills of a historian to bear on key events in today’s world.

What I was seeking to establish was context, which ironically perhaps seems to be what Professor Cooper considers the real strength of A Shattered Peace. Rather than historical debate on sources and footnotes, which this reviewer seeks to engage, my sincere hope was that A Shattered Peace would help to set a broader national agenda–on the need for a return to a more stable form of ethnically and religiously homogeneous microstates that in so many areas have proven to be successes, but whose prospects were destroyed by the myopia, self-interest, and outright hubris of those who gathered in Paris in 1919.

There was, I confess, one oversight which will be remedied in future editions. I omitted Professor Cooper’s fine work, Breaking the Heart of the World, from my detailed bibliography, the road map by which I hoped scholars would be able to trace my research which ran to more than 2,000 pages of notes, and sources–more than 300 volumes including work in several archives–that were cited. I intentionally omitted the detailed footnotes that often prove a hurdle to a broader reading audience.

As Harvard’s distinguished diplomatic historian Ernest R. May put it, A Shattered Peace “explains more clearly than any other work how the failure of peacemaking in 1919 shaped later history and, indeed, shapes our own era.” That best describes the book I wrote.

DAVID ANDELMAN

New York, N.Y.

CUOMO ON OBAMA

YOU RAN A STORY entitled “The Wages of Sensitivity,” (January 28) by Noemie Emery that had a factual inaccuracy in misquoting Andrew Cuomo. He never, in fact, negatively characterized Senator Obama. In the interview you reference, he praised both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton and the importance of small-state primaries such as New Hampshire and Iowa. A simple review of the transcript would have made this clear to any editor or writer actually interested in reporting the facts.

JEFFREY LERNER

Director of Communications
New York Attorney General’s Office
New York, N.Y.