To the Editor:

Nicholas von Hoffman is one of those members of the ‘60s generation who promoted the Black Panther party as a radical vanguard then and who, for 20 years, has kept his mouth shut or studiously ignored the murders and other crimes they committed, leaving the task to a handful of people like myself who are exposed to Panther threats of retaliation because we are so few. Now he has the temerity to insinuate in his review of my book, “Radical Son” (Book Review, Feb. 9) that I know more than I am telling and that I may be implicated in the crimes I expose. Von Hoffman can do this because he has either not read my book carefully or is simply gratuitously malicious in misrepresenting it. “Horowitz depicts himself as a naif, a bumbling Marxist theoretician who lived among drug dealers and killers for years without a clue.” This is pure fiction.

If Von Hoffman had read carefully what I wrote, he would know that I never “lived among drug dealers and killers.” All the time I was associated with the Panthers, I lived in a middle-class section of Berkeley with four children and a wife who did not drive. I was holding down a full-time job with Ramparts and then researching and writing a biography, “The Rockefellers.” My association with the Panthers lasted barely one year, and my actual physical encounters with them were no more frequent than once or twice a month.

I have told everything I know about the Panthers and the crimes they committed. I have told what I knew and when I knew it. I invite Nicholas von Hoffman and other leftists to do the same.

David Horowitz, Los Angeles

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Nicholas von Hoffman replies:

It’s been so long since I’ve been called a leftie that I had begun to think they had pulled my card, but Horowitz has come to my rescue and gotten my ticket punched for me. In my defense, let me say that when I am malicious, it’s never gratuitous.

For the rest, though I have not had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman, in his book Horowitz shows himself to be a prickly sort of fellow, so I shall let his indignant harrumphs pass and retract whatever I said which was displeasing to him. I had not realized that all the time he was not consorting with drug dealers and killers, Horowitz was really either McGriff, the crime dog, or a soccer dad. Anyway, let us hope that the former Mrs. Horowitz has learned to drive.