**The following correspondence is shared with permission of the authors.
June 19, 2018
Dear Friends,
Inviting General Petraeus as an honored and paid guest seems bad enough. But pre-screening all questions and not allowing questions from the floor strikes me as frightful.
It is one thing for SHAFR to say we must be open to all points of view; it is another to set yourself up as deciding which questions can or cannot be asked of the point of view. I find this arrangement appalling.
Yours,
Arnie Offner
Cornelia Hugel Professor of History (Emeritus), Lafayette College.
SHAFR Past President
John Prados sent this letter to Amy Sayward, Executive Director of SHAFR. It is reprinted here with permission.
June 15, 2018
Dr. Sayward--
I am John Prados sending this. I have been a SHAFR member for many decades. I have just seen the latest development in the sorry saga of the David Petraeus address. I find it necessary to object very strongly to the Society's practices in regard to selecting, engaging, and presenting conference speakers. This episode has risen to the level of abhorent.
SHAFR should have learned the lesson in the early oughts when we brought in Paul Wolfowitz to speak at our conference. That amounted to a supposedly objective organization giving an administration flak a megaphone to peddle the official line. But we went on to invite Michael Hayden, who took the occasion to inform historians he was going to deny us access to a whole category of primary source material. Then there was John Yoo to tell us torture is legal.
When do we learn ?
This time around the invitation to David Petraeus, highly dubious to begin with, was actively protested by a significant segment of the membership. The grounds were substantive, but the Petraeus invitation, in the @metoo era, can only appear as offensive. I don't care to know the details of why the supposed alternative event (the counterinsurgency panel) fell apart.
SHAFR leadership was doubly at fault in the Petraeus invitation--triply for repeating past poor judgment. And now the society tells members the speaker can get away with written questions. That's quadruple. No historian can be satisfied with a process in which the speaker/interviewee/source person gets to choose the subjects they will or will not deal with. I am forced to conclude that this event has lost all integrity.
I do hope that at the Society's business meeting, a resolution is adopted declaring an official, explicit SHAFR policy for the selection of invitees to address us and for ground rules that will apply in all cases to the speakers we commission. I believe the business meeting will occur before I arrive at the convention site, but in all fairness you should bring it up autonomously.
For me, I shall not participate in or attend future SHAFR conferences that repeat these atrocious practices.
Thank you,
John Prados
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