In a letter to the organizer of the event, Campbell wrote, "No doubt you will wonder at my reason for disturbing your session the other night. There was no other option left me by the speaker's own announcement that he was going to denounce me from every public platform as, 'a fascist, a coward, and a liar,' - merely because I had called attention to his war record. As I volunteered when over-age and while my own country (S. Africa) was still neutral, to fight fascism which is merely another form of communism... I could not allow myself to be called a coward by one who during the struggle against fascism had employed no other weapon to the adversary than his own knife and fork and his highly lucrative but innocuous pen - while I was on ranker's pay suffering malaria in the jungle."