TIGER FOR RIGHTS

Back in the early 1950s when the ACLU had qualms about defending the rights of Communists or former Communists, Carey McWilliams, the editor of this magazine, joined two others in an open letter calling attention to the need to provide adequate legal defense to the political pariahs of the cold war. This initiative led to the formation of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (then called the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee), which from 1968 to 1998 was under the tender loving care and supercompetent direction of Edith Tiger, who died on October 22 at 83. There was not a year that Edith wasn't on the phone proposing yet another project on which The Nation and ECLC could collaborate. Under Edith's direction, the ECLC championed cases that other groups wouldn't handle and had a win-loss record that George Steinbrenner would envy. She also made her office a haimish oasis, where visitors high and low, old left and new, received the same dose of warmth and humor, the occasional well-deserved scolding and all the benefits of a crackerjack mind when it came to the issue closest to her heart--civil liberties. The Bill of Rights never had a better champion.

WILLIAMS TAKES WELLS AWARD

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