Investigate The Attack

To the Editors of The Crimson:

As one who witnessed the attempted fire-bombing near the Science Center after the East Asian Legal Studies Forum on Vietnam the evening of Thursday, April 23, I certainly agree with Prof. John Womack (see his letter in the April 30 Crimson) that the attack on East Asian Research Center associate Dr. Ngo Vinh Long '68 calls for scrupulous investigation by the appropriate authorities. Harvard Police officer Thomas Simas has made a complaint to the District Court against one Ngo Nghia "for the crime of Assault with Intent to Commit Murder." Prosecution proceedings, originally scheduled for May 1, are being delayed, and the accused has been released from custody on $1000 bail.

While it is probably only to be expected that in most newspapers a lamentably high percentage of quotations are in fact misquoted. I should have thought that Prof. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, a participant in the April 23 panel and a member of the Harvard faculty (asst. professor of Sino-Vietnamese History) would not have repeated, in her letter published together with that of Dr. Womack on April 30, an April 24 misquotation from the Crimson. Dr. Long never expressed the opinion that the "reeducation camps" in Vietnam are "necessary," as can be attested by a complete recording of the panel discussion, which I have on tape. He said rather that there is currently much debate in Vietnamese society and within Vietnam's government as to whether or to what extent they should be continued.

Why, instead, did not Prof. Ho Tai express some indignation about the seriousness of the attempted violence (which could have brought death to several people) directed against a fellow panelist and scholar?

In closing, I want to mention that Ngo Vinh Long and his wife Chan (who will graduate from Harvard Law School this June) have been my very close personal friends for more than 15 years. Dr. Long is widely recognized as a first-rate Vietnamese scholar and historian and his book "Before the Revolution" and other works are highly regarded in his field. William R. Carter   Ph. D. candidate in History and East Asian Languages