Bishop & the Dictator

Everybody is entitled to his opinion--but in the eyes of many editors, Columnist and Author (The Day Christ Died) Jim Bishop was voicing some very peculiar opinions last week. Bishop took a two-week vacation in sunny Haiti, where an especially brutal dictatorship dishes out voodoo, terror and death. In five columns distributed to 159 newspapers by Hearst's King Features, Bishop wrote as if he were in a delightful if somewhat seedy country of racial harmony, fiscal integrity, health and peace.

To Bishop, Dictator Franc,ois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier was "honest" and "intelligent." Commenting on last year's carefully supervised election, in which Papa Doc stood alone on the ballot, Bishop wrote: "The Haitians liked him so well that they elected him President for life. This was not a spurious, rigged election. He could call one tomorrow and win easily." Bishop was equally impressed by the dictator's secret police, the tonton macoute: They "comprise a personal force whose function is to keep President Duvalier acquainted with the true temper of the people."

This was a bit much for many newspapers. The Miami Herald dropped one column, in which the editors counted what they considered to be several errors of fact or judgment, and heavily edited two others. Other papers--the Milwaukee Sentinel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Cleveland Press and Philadelphia Bulletin--decided against running at least three of the columns.

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