I was stunned by your recent article; "Saving Social Security..." Why such an evil portrait of Ed? This is the second article that I've read in which you depict Ed in terms (that frankly are) a little out of his league: Ed is pretty much W.C. Fields, he isn't rich and he never made any decisions at CATO, he is a 'figure head,' his female counterpart started CATO, ran it, and ran Ed, really you are talking about a man who was never sober enough to know where he parked his car: when he founded CATO it was an old used Mercedes. In college it was a low end 280Z. He is the cheapest guy alive, he was probably born with testicles but by the time he was 20 they were socked into her purse. Even before the couple were public about their relationship, it was clear that she ran the show; once at his house, on a date, I became aware that she was in the bedroom while we were 'together' in the living room. They are a match made in heaven, she is bossy, perfect for a man who needs to be told what to do, as I recall, she spent all day at CATO, posted outside of his office, making phone sex calls to her then husband: Ed spent all day enthralled. She looked like the icon on the Playboy Jokes page, (the little pen and ink drawing of a bunny who is all butt and boobs) they were both stereotypical products of the 50s, she was ten pounds of sugar in a five pound sack. My mother met her and referred to her as 'the cocktail waitress type hanging out at his office door,' my mother also said that Ed was a stuffed shirt, and that it figures he went to USC, University of Spoiled Children. I remember Ed's doppleganger, vaguely, as being loud and mean, I remember Ed as being really kind, and easily manipulated by everyone; but relentlessly by her. He is just a marionette, you give him too much credit. By the time he headed the very precarious Cato, of the 70's, he did not have enough brain cells left for any sort of 'vision,' or anything else, she was at the helm, and clearly still is, assuming that his current 'wife' is the same woman who was in the role at Cato's inception. She had a way of making proclamations that really annoyed me, she was a kind of gate-keeper / empress, it was irritating, because it gave her a reclusive vantage point from which she could feign non-accountability for the fiasco that she perpetrated, Ed being the instrument of that, but in a way it is a match made in heaven, or in hell, but a perfect match. Back then if a woman could type or had a business degree, she had the expectation of being the brains behind 'the boss.' It was an expectation, a right of passage, she stepped into that role with Ed at Cato. It was a man's world, they came from a time when feminism was unheard of. So, all things considered, they are exactly a product of their times, nothing more and nothing less. It is a great accomplishment that they lasted long enough to become so established. I seriously doubt that he has any assets: he is a stockholder, but that means that the money probably all goes back into Cato. I don't think he actually attended any classes at Berkeley; it was customary to hire a professional student to do all of that for you, back then, so that you could free up your time for the more important things in life: sex and drugs. He knew enough about the stock market to fill a thimble, back then, and his great crusade was to get everyone, at the office, to donate their frequent flier air miles to him, so that he could save on travel costs. Money was not his forte. People like that do not get rich, much less become wealthy, even if their wife is their handler / manager. Her idea of money was somehow connected to the display of tacky gold jewelry from various boyfriends. My sister, who was in charge of the DeBeers Paris Show, every year, met her, when my sister had come to CATO to pick me up for my father's funeral, and commented that the woman in Ed's doorway was probably worth a lot more than she got paid, (in trinkets) but that she didn't likely know the difference. She was beautiful in a sort of high school way, a sort of tacky overt demanding style, she had frosted brown hair, and the rest was curvy. Every day, of Cato's early days, without exception revolved around her whip cracking edicts, she was kind of petty, a control freak, and she totally dominated Ed. He is not the villain, and she isn't a villain: they are just products of their times. I never saw either of them again after they moved to DC, but I still remember that she would be on the phone talking dirty with 'whomever' when I got there in the morning, when I left for lunch, when I returned, and when I left at the end of the day. Her main complaint in life was that she didn't get enough 'attention' from her then husband (who scandal reported shared his attention with another wife). And clearly her main purpose in life was to keep Ed's attention on herself. And I supposed, (by the fact that his bedroom ashtrays were always full of her menthol butts, and her remnants in view -undergarments) she viewed other women as her sacrificial victims: But, back then that was normalcy. She insisted that I was working for the CIA, because I used an answering service titled Central, and so, I always called in 'Central this is Nancy 536, checking in (for my messages).' She fired me for numerous dings that didn't make any sense, one day she burst out, "Nancy You Can See Right Through That Dress!" I don't think that she owned a dress that did not reveal everything. I retorted, "At least I'm wearing a slip." (I was a dainty little flat chested girl, there was nothing to see.) I didn't exactly work for Ed or his female, I worked free lance in the art department, for Andy Saunders, who constantly cried to Ed that I was persecuting him because he was Jewish (meanwhile my father, a Nobel prize nominee in microbiology, and my heart surgeon mother, had brought the Roboz family Einstein's sister and her husband, out of Germany rescuing them from concentration camps, in the 40's); both Saunder and Crane saw all of the worlds problems as blamable on women, and would spend all day in a persecution-pity-party which justified ending the day by boozing away their cares and woes. When my boss could not be discouraged from raping me, I complained to Ed about it, which amounted to another ding toward dismissal. The boss in question knocked on my door every night until the police showed up, at which point he explained, "Oh she needs me to drop off some work, I'm her boss." He would then insinuate himself into my apartment, the last time it happened, I walked up the street to Ed's apartment and knocked on the door, all night, at three separate intervals, just to give him a dose of how it feels. He was very polite about it, and asked me to stop waking up his neighbors (or her). Eventually I married a Three Star Admiral, and followed with a Marine Special Forces chaser. He did actually work for the CIA, and found that there were many people at CATO, on that payroll, and on NSA's data base, as informants at various government agencies, calling the kettle black. He graduated from Michigan State Law, got a PhD from I don't know or care where, and went on to live the life of anyone of so many who never got over Vietnam. I went into art and law: I write and illustrate civil rights kid's books. Ed was a pussycat, a really sweet person. But it is true that he could be easily stoked into a rage over nothing, by anyone who figured out how to manipulate him. The most perplexing thing about your articles is your characterization of Ed as a villain in the sack. He was not only drop dead gorgeous, sex with him was magic. -Nancy