REVILO PENDLETON OLIVER
701 OHIO STREET
URBANA, ILLINOIS
29 November 1968
The following is a 3 page letter from Revilo P. Oliver addressed to Willis Carto.
I deeply appreciate the confidence that you show by inviting me to speak at the first meetings of your new and auspiciously founded organization, and I sincerely regret that I must decline, for several reasons.
The first of these is the consideration that the keynote speech should be given by someone who participated in the formulation of your strategy. The public inauguration of a new organization, especially one for “hard line “action, is, as I need not tell you, a delicate and exacting task, and I while I agree that you and I agree on what needs to be done, and while I emphatically approve of the draft of the Manifesto that you sent me, I as your speaker would in effect be setting your policy on a very wide range of subjects – setting the policy in the sense that your organization would have either to endorse hat I said or to explain why it disagreed with its own advocates keynotes. I could, no doubt, give an address on matters about which I am fairly certain that our thinking coincides, but there would be innumerable specific questions from prospective members and, no doubt, from the hostile press, and the range of such questions could not be fully anticipated. It is highly improbable that my answers on all such questions would conform to your strategic plan—improbable even assuming that we completely agree on the basic premises….
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