Canadian journalist David Frum has called you the "great American crackpot." I think that ranks up there with the New Republic's Martin Peretz placing you "outside the pale of intellectual responsibility." Frum also says, "There was a time when the New York Times op-ed page was your stomping ground." Have I missed something here?

I guess I have too. I did have an op-ed once -- it was in 1971, I think. This was the period when the corporate sector, and later the New York Times, had decided we'd better get out of Vietnam because it was costing us too much.

I had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Fulbright had in effect turned the Committee into a seminar. He was very turned off by the war and American foreign policy at that time. He invited me to testify. That was respectable enough. So they ran a segment of....

Excerpts of your comments. It wasn't an original piece you had written for the Times.

Maybe it was slightly edited, but it was essentially a piece of my testimony at the Committee. So it's true, the Times did publish a piece of testimony at the Foreign Relations Committee.

And that was your "stomping grounds." What about letters? How many letters of yours have they printed?

Occasionally, when an outlandish slander and lie about me has appeared there, I've written back to them. Sometimes they don't publish the letters. Once, maybe more, I was angry enough that I contacted a friend inside, who was able to put enough pressure on so they ran the letter.

But sometimes they just refused. In the Times book review section, there were a bunch of vicious lies about me and the Khmer Rouge. I wrote back a short letter responding, and they refused to publish it. I got annoyed and wrote back again -- and actually got a response. They said they'd published a different letter -- one they thought was better.