An amiable response from Beth Whelan

I've lost track of precisely when I left ACSH, but it was in March or April of 1989. I felt liberated from the cult of personality (which the subsequent regimes have labored to preserve), and the atmosphere that was anything but convivial, and from observing a very badly run organization. But I am not a grudge holder, so even though I didn't hold Elizabeth Whelan in high esteem and recognized her as occasionally venomous, I still didn't dislike her. Of course she was the boss, but I was always frank and never obsequious with her as others have been. 

Within months of exiting I created the Consumer Health Education Council (CHEC) and got to work doing what I could have done at ACSH had the circumstances been propitious. By February 1990, I had an op-ed featured in a Sunday edition of the New York Daily News titled, "Don't be a health paranoid." On May 1, 1990 a speech I had delivered at Houston's B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation in January was published in Vital Speeches of the Day. CHEC was off to a decent start, and I knew I could easily generate publishable material, but I also knew that funding would be a problem since I would never be beholden to any funder. Unlike Beth Whelan, I couldn't sell out.

I sent a copy of the speech to Beth along with what I remember to have been a simple and formal letter, and I asked for ACSH to help with some modest funding for my nascent organization. She responded with a "Dear Nicolas" letter in June which began, "Congratulations on the VITAL SPEECHES publication. I am impressed." [Her underline.] She asked if I "would be interested in specific projects...," and ended by saying, "We would be pleased to sit down and talk about options with you if you are in New York. Please let us know." She declined the funding request, as I expected. That was the last communication between us, and it puts the lie to the idea that I was fired from ACSH. I don't know if Beth Whelan liked me, but I know that she respected the quality of my work and my contributions to ACSH and thereafter. For one thing, I significantly reduced overall expenses. She trusted me, as she did others, to ghostwrite for her (an article for Reason magazine). She trusted me to edit materials by other writers, such as Stephen Barrett, for publication. She never said anything negative to me about my work. If she said anything to anyone else, I never heard about it. After I jumped ship she would naturally have been perturbed.