Source: codoh.com
by Richard A. Widmann

Bradley R. Smith was born to a working-class family in South Central Los Angeles on February 18, 1930, where the family remained until 1970. He was a good student on occasion, but was more interested in horses than education. At 18 he joined the army and in 1951 served in the 7^th Cavalry in Korea where he was twice wounded. It was in the army hospital at Camp Cooke California where he began to write.

In the 1950s he searched for something in addition to the writing that could hold his attention. He became a deputy sheriff for Los Angeles County, but that wasn’t it. He left the department to travel to Mexico where he became involved with the bullfights, becoming a novillero – an apprentice bullfighter – in the central mountain states of Jalisco, Guerrero and Hidalgo. The bulls very much had his attention, but his liver gave out with hepatitis and he had to return to the States for hospitalization.

In 1958 Smith went to New York City where he worked for The Bodley Gallery on East 60^th Street. He discovered the intellectual and cultural life of Greenwich Village, a new world for him. In the Village he read a bootleg copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and was, literally, rocked by it. He returned to Los Angeles where he opened a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard specializing in paperback books, which at that time was new and all the rage. When Tropic was published he dedicated himself to promoting the book in his store windows. He was arrested, jailed, and prosecuted for refusing to stop selling the book.

The ensuing trial lasted six weeks, the longest civil trial ever to have taken place in Los Angeles at that time. There was considerable press coverage. Smith was intrigued by the proceedings. For six weeks he watched and listened to academics and writers and community leaders argue under oath that Tropic should be censored and those selling it be punished because the book expressed sensibilities that did not meet, legally, “community standards.” Leon Uris, author of The Exodus particularly caught Smith’s attention by arguing that Miller, a writer obviously more important to American culture, should be censored. In 1962 Smith was convicted for selling a book that “endangered” the community standards of Greater Los Angeles.

In the 1960s Smith patrolled the streets of Hollywood and worked as a seaman on merchant ships. He shipped to Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. In 1968 he jumped ship in Thailand and made his way to Saigon where he traveled the country as a correspondent with accreditation by the Vietnamese. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, he had met a Jewish lady, they had exchanged hearts, each with the other, in a relationship that lasted into the mid-1970s.

Then it happened.

In 1979, when Smith was 49 years old, his life changed forever when he read a leaflet by Robert Faurisson, “The Problem of the Gas Chambers.” The story of this life-changing moment is recounted in his autobiographical work, Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist.  Smith writes, “I felt stunned, as if Buck Rogers had somehow come down from the 21st century and zapped me with a beam from his ray gun.” It took him three months to digest the core of the revisionist argument. And then he jumped into the struggle. He knew from the beginning that he was going to address the taboo against publishing revisionist arguments, not the arguments themselves. He would be the “Henry Miller” of the revisionists. Not so good as Miller, not so original, but he would do his best

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