Man of the Year?
Sir:
... I presume that your choice will be Dwight D. Eisenhower . . . Nevertheless . . . I nominate Governor Adlai Stevenson . . .
JOHN F. O'SCANLAN
Paris, France
Sir:
TIME, Dec. 8 carried the answer. Certainly the man . . . who is doing the most to get us away from the earth--Wernher von Braun.
RICHARD SCOTT New York City
Sir:
In view of recent developments, let us again consider General Douglas MacArthur . . .
ROGER BERTRAND West Warwick, R.I.
Sir:
. . . May I suggest General Sir Gerald Templer who, in such a short time, has achieved so much in working to clear Communism in the Malayan Peninsula? Without his ability the Communists will certainly . . . overrun all of Southeast Asia . . .
T. L. THEE Djakarta, Indonesia
Sir:
. . . The American draftee in Korea. Like the American taxpayer--he serves.
J. O. JAMETON
Pharr, Texas
Sir:
. . . For chief of the vanishing Americans, F.D.R.
AUGUST R. KREHBIEL Kansas City, Mo.
Sir:
Bess Truman! She was not always posing for her picture . . . She had no sons who made the headlines with their shameful escapades. She never wrote a book or a column. Neither did she travel all over the world . . . And I'll bet she doesn't know what a demagogue is ...
All she seems to want is to get back to the bridge club in Independence . . .
M. GRIFFITHS Binghamton, N.Y.
Sir:
. . . Who else but Vice President-elect Richard Nixon?
(CPL.) DON MCQUILLAN % Postmaster San Francisco
Sir:
Mao Tse-tung . . .
Denver
SAMUEL ROSEN
Out of This World
Sir:
The human race will never have a more satisfactory trip to the moon, Venus and Mars than the one you gave us on Dec. 8, with your excellent exposition of the space travel arguments and your gentle and convincing confutation of the same.
Getting to the moon should not be difficult, as we know that once, when we were all young, a cow did it. Of course . . . the cow made it without stopping, so a man ought to be able to make it easily in two jumps . . .
THOMAS NUNAN San Mateo, Calif.
Sir:
I don't wish to be an alarmist, but these space travelers are going to bring an end to the world for the simple reason that they are overlooking a principle of physics familiar to any high-school boy, i.e., "action equals reaction." . . . The same principle would be involved in a space ship leaving earth. Smalt as it would be in relation to the earth's mass, the rocket blasts would be sufficient to knock the earth slightly out of kilter in the delicate balance between centrifugal force and gravitation which now keeps our planet from either whirling loose from the solar system or falling into the sun . .
JOHN J. McDoNOUGH Los Angeles
Sir:
May I suggest a simple laboratory experiment for the "Noah's Ark method" of colonizing distant stars? Why not lock up ant interested group on some inaccessible spot on earth? The pseudo space ship might be pelted with manufactured cosmic rays and other realistic hazards from time to time. Then a reliable committee and its descendants could: investigate every 500 years or so to see how the crew is getting along . . . The final report on this jolly group of totalitarian cannibals would be most enlightening.
MADI MACFARQUHAR
West Newbury, Mass.
Sir:
That illustration of a space man made a damn striking cover. Best I've seen in a long time.
ROBERT D. CARLEN
New York City
Sir:
Artzybasheff's "Space Pioneer" seems to be walking across a terrain with a good deal of ease. How he does, though, remains a mystery because whichever of his three legs he lifts first would throw him into a state of unbalance and he would topple over on that side. Besides, lacking counterweights at his knee joints, he could never straighten his knees once he had bent them. Furthermore, if the poor man ever got tired and sat down, he probably never would stand up again ... In other words, even the man of the future is going to have to pay some attention to his basic anatomy. .
HARRY SHERSHOW Revere, Mass.
Sir:
Do I hear echoes of Valhalla pouring forth from Wernher von Braun's mouth? . . . [His] concept of an "American star" rising over Asia . . . would . . . cause fear on the part of many nations . . . They will always believe that we will abuse power . . . Von Braun would do well to concentrate on his rockets and guided missiles and leave politics alone . . .
WILLIAM PUCKETT JR.
Bethlehem, Pa.
Sir:
. . . You say: ". . . If a space ship moves at nearly the speed of light, its time slows down. It can sail like a cosmic ray for thousands of earth-years from star to star, but for its crew only weeks will pass. When they return to earth, however, they will all be Rip van Winkles: their friends and families will long since have passed into ancient history."
Suppose it were possible to establish radio contact between this ship and earth. On one end (in space) time is almost at a standstill, whereas at the other it is going at the regular clip . . . How would the earthling sound to the space operator?
L. H. WEINHEIMER Minneapolis
P: When Reader Weinheimer's radio message reached the space ship, it would be a voice from the past, and he would be rather in the position of the famous young lady named Bright:
. . . Whose speed was jar greater
than light
She set out one day In a relative way
And returned on the previous night. --En.
Responsibility in Government
Sir:
In your issue of Nov. 3, you carried a story concerning the origins of the United States policy toward Korea prior to the outbreak of hostilities there. In this story you said that in 1949 the State Department's "Far Eastern experts and policy planners (among them John Davies . . .) worked up a new policy paper . . . for the National
Security Council," misrepresenting General MacArthur's advice about the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Korea.
The impression left by this statement is, insofar as it applies to Mr. Davies, erroneous and unjust. Davies had no responsibility for the preparation of the paper you mention or any other papers on this subject. Insofar as he might have made any contribution toward their preparation (and there is actually no evidence either in the files or in people's memories that he had anything to do with this at all), such contribution could certainly not have been of an order different from that of dozens of other subordinate officials in the Department of State . . .
It was I, after all, not Davies. who was at that time head of the Policy Planning Staff. I was responsible for its work and its recommendations . . . Do you not mislead your readers when you encourage them to disregard the clear hierarchy of governmental responsibility and to seek in the alleged "influence" of junior officials the explanation for whatever is found displeasing in the workings of public policy? Must all reverses be attributable to sinister intrigue? Is it not possible that most of them might be the result of normal factors in the operation of a governmental system?--of faultiness in even the most scrupulous human judgment, of blurred spots in even the clearest human vision, perhaps even in the fact that not all the problems of national policy are readily soluble?
GEORGE F. KENNAN
East Berlin, Pa.
Japan's Christian Martyrs
Sir:
1 appreciated your interesting Nov. 10 review of Father James Brodrick's St. Francis Xavier. One sentence, though, might be a bit misleading and a bit uncomplimentary to the Japanese people. After mentioning the permanent successes of Xavier's whirlwind apostolate, your reviewer states: "Other [missionary conquests,] like his great Japanese mission, were later nullified by persecutions and royal decrees."
Actually, over 200 years of vigorous persecution could not root out the Christian faith from the shepherdless flock of Japan. A few years after Commodore Perry's reopening of Japan to the West in 1853, Catholic missionaries discovered around 50,000 Christians isolated in little pockets throughout the country . . . These Japanese descendants of the martyrs of Nagasaki and Miyako discovered the missionaries. These latter were cautiously approached and by their answers to three questions were recognized as the successors of the i;th century Japanese pastors. The questions were: Did they come from the Pope in Rome? Were they celibates? Did they honor the Mother of Jesus? . . . (THE REV.) N. G. MCCLUSKEY, SJ. Paray-le-Monial, France
Praise of Tariffs
Sir:
Commentators in your Dec. 8 Letters column on Detroit's Board of Commerce proposal to abolish all U.S. tariffs overlook the most fundamental principle underlying foreign trade. Foreign imports are of no benefit to a country unless they consist of products which that country cannot profitably produce.
To be specific: when butter or cheese from Holland enters this country, it takes the place of our own dairy products . . .
If we want to subsidize foreign countries in order to use them as wartime allies, that is. a different matter. It can be done in either one of two ways: by direct gifts of money extracted from American taxpayers, or by free trade at the expense of American business.
E. G. LEE
Saint Paul, Minn.
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