Friday, Mar. 19, 1965
Peru, Si!
Sir: As a Peruvian studying in New York City and having a hard time deciding whether to work here or at home, I'd like to thank you for your cover story about Peru [March 12]. Now I think I would be a fool not to try to include myself in our great future.
LUISA PORRAS New York City
Sir: Amid the current "genuine excitement in Peru," my wife and I worked for three years as Papal Volunteers for Latin America. We were pleased with TIME'S tremendous coverage of Peru's new conquest. Would that more of President Belaunde's aristocratic countrymen were awakened to the adelante spirit his administration has created.
DAN B. MCCARTHY Tampa, Kans.
Senor: Muy agradecido por su importante articulo y por su destacada* presentation en TIME. Cordiales saludos.
PRESIDENTE BELAUNDE Lima
The Battle of Selma
Sir: Had a foreign power treated a group of Americans as the Alabama state police treated those Negroes in Selma, a state of war would no doubt exist.
W. A. ROWLAND Hollywood
Sir: We condemn attacks on our embassies in other countries, but attacks on humans here are entirely permissible--if "they're only a bunch of black folks."
WINSTON R. CHEAL Eaton Rapids Journal Eaton Rapids, Mich.
Sir: Are we going to make the same mistake with Martin Luther King that we did with Castro? Are we going to give King our blessing until he makes his final march into the White House? King today is more powerful politically than Lyndon Johnson, and will not need either the Democrats or the Republicans when he has his army registered. Then the white man will have to paint his face black to get recognition.
PRIMROSE HOLLAND Miami
Sins of the Fathers
Sir: The principle of retributive justice--the infliction of present pain in return for past wrongdoing--is bad enough, but in the case of German war crimes [March 5], it may appear more absurd, since the victims are likely to be quiet, older men whose 20-or-more-year-old crimes were not only legal but officially approved when they were committed.
A. PATTERSON HAZEN New York City
Sir: I was born in Germany in 1937 and I lived there till 1956, before moving to the U.S. However, a good many people I meet just won't let me forget my "past." Somehow they blame me for Auschwitz and World War II. To those who can't bury their old hate, my reply is not "Sieg Heil" but an expression I heard Mr. Truman use--"Go to hell!"
FRED L. BOGER De Kalb, Ill.
Beauty & The Beholder
Sir: TIME'S cover picture of Jeanne Moreau [March 5] exemplifies the gulf between some art and people. My wife and I are qualified to judge a portrait by 40-odd years of sympathetic observance of the Western world, and to us the haunted ghost on the cover bears no relation to the womanly artist glimpsed in the photos and the warm person who certainly comes through in the text. Knowledgeable as some of your readers may be in the language of modern art, they are simply too few to justify TIME'S addressing them on 3,800,000-plus covers. Furthermore, the validity of the interpretation of these cognoscenti will be in doubt for at least another ten years, by which time Jeanne Moreau will be playing Empress de Gaulle and will deserve a different analysis.
JOHN FITCH Lime Rock, Conn.
Sir: Portraits like this should make us all thankful that our women are still made by God and the Revson brothers, and not by painters like Rufino Tamayo.
BILL LENZ Augusta, Ga.
Sir: The cover portrait of Jeanne Moreau was magnificent.
MARGARET KOYE Somerset, N.J.
Sir: How could you compare that no-talent Miss Moreau with the greatest star of movies: Greta Garbo?
PHILIP HICKEY The Bronx, N.Y.
Winsor's Wealth
Sir: It was New American Library, not Pocket Books, that paid $500,000 for the paperback reprint rights to Kathleen Winsor's new novel, Wanderers Eastward, Wanderers West [March 12]. N.A.L. also published Miss Winsor's Forever Amber, Star Money, The Lovers and America with Love in paperback.
EDWARD T. CHASE The New American Library New York City
One A for Effort
Sir: Your article "Spinning for Space" [March 12] again proves the accuracy of TIME textstyle in presenting the facts of the Navy's Man in Space research. The Naval Air Training Command is very proud of our contribution to the nation's space programs, but to label NAS (Naval Air Station) Pensacola as NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Pensacola constitutes a TIMEslip. TIME is always welcome at NAS Pensacola.
VICE ADMIRAL A. S. HEYWARD JR. Chief of Naval Air Training Bullville, N.Y.
The Handsome Hands
Sir: Mr. and Mrs. Protocol [March 5] might be physically an American dream, but to say that their limited knowledge in languages is a minor matter is just as superficial as was their appointment.
ROBERT O. FISCH Minneapolis
Sir: Re your article on Lloyd and Ann Hand: thank you for showing that not all Texans are like Lyndon and Lady Bird.
CHARLES R. HAWORTH Austin, Texas
Rock Fight
Sir: In the dispute between England and Spain over Gibraltar [March 5], I sympathize with the Spanish government. After all, how would we feel if England claimed Manhattan as one of her colonies?
FERMIN E. BAUER Fort Carson, Colo.
Sir: As usual with TIME, the report on Gibraltar is completely accurate and unbiased. But as a Gibraltarian and admirer of the U.S., I must express my annoyance at the fact that since the dispute started, the U.S. Government has not once raised its voice in support of a people who only ask to choose their own way of life.
E. SERRUYA Irish Town, Gibraltar
Morality, Old & New
Sir: At the Harvard conference on "The Church and the New Morality" [March 5], I never said that sexual intercourse ceases to be "premarital" once the couple have made a "commitment" to each other. What I said was that where there is marriage-consent, expressible in words of the present tense, it is then an existing marriage that is being consummated. Most Christians in past ages believed that persons consenting together (whether before church or state, or not) have a performatory power that is so extraordinary that it creates an indissoluble bond that did not exist before between them.
PAUL RAMSEY Princeton University Princeton, N.J.
Sir: New morality, my Aunt Fanny Hill! If the group at Harvard had its way, the last vestige of our crumbling morality would disappear. Poor St. Paul. He has been taken out of context so often, he must wish he had never written a word.
SONJA F. NABIESZKO North Bay, Ontario
Sir: Your reporting on the new morality shows more sensitivity to what is at stake than some professional moralists. Many, if not most of us who study religious ethics would rather see efforts directed toward the development of new norms than expended in tilting at old legalisms. Perhaps the most loving course of action would be for the churches to sponsor frank discussion among parents and teenagers, with the goal of reaching agreement on appropriate standards for sexual behavior.
A self-imposed discipline, backed by peers, holds more promise for bringing order and perspective to those passionate moments in the back seat than either the old authoritarianism or the new morality.
RICHARD E. FRENCH Auburndale, Mass.
Sir: The proper function of religion is to lead. Coffin and his crew are followers of fads.
(THE REV.) JOHN D. GALL Norwalk, Conn.
Sir: I wonder if Screwtape is smacking his lips in anticipation of Ramsey's, Coffin's and Fletcher's souls.
(MRS.) MARTHA DAUM Media, Pa.
Long Live the King
Sir: Re the death of Nat King Cole [Feb. 26], it is just possible that the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the wrong King.
FLORENCE WESOLOWSKI Warren, Mich.
Dustless Obits
Sir: In your Jan. 29 issue, you said that "the Post-Dispatch obituary on former Mayor Bernard Dickmann, now 76, has gathered dust for 30 years." With due respect to Mayor Dickmann, who is good for another 76 years, we have to update his obituary every few years. (Some colleges call them "vitas" instead of "obits," because the subjects are still very much alive.) Our file copy was rewritten at some length in 1952, revised in 1957, revised again in September 1962, and put on tape in December 1964. So a rolling vita at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gathers no dust.
ROY T. KING
Head, Reference Department St. Louis Post-Dispatch St. Louis
Casement's Zola
Sir: Shame on TIME. To omit Conan Doyle from the Casement case [March 5] is to omit Zola from the Dreyfus affair. The contribution of Pacifist G. B. Shaw was a rat's squeak compared to a lion's roar. The Irish nation has always paid tribute to my father as the one public man who sacrificed his own interests attempting to save Casement's life.
ADRIAN CONAN DOYLE Geneva
Winsome Is as Winsome Does
Sir: When an oldfashioned, square picture like Lord Jim [March 5] comes along, there is inevitably flippant mention of winsome, blue-eyed, boyish sailors and clean-cut profiles, with jazzy little phrases like "accident-prone." Conrad's story wasn't easy to film, but I'm sure that the picture will recall to many accident-prone sailors, of varying winsomeness and profiles but tangled up in honor and all that, that we were briefly "a tiny white speck that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world" and then went out.
W. J. WHITESIDE Rear Admiral, U.S.N. (ret.) New York City
Two-Year Colleges
Sir: The importance of the two-year college in American culture has finally been brought to the attention of the public through your article [March 5]. It would be well to have your story made compulsory reading in senior high schools and colleges across the land.
JAMES R. KASENOW Western Michigan University Kalamazoo
Sir: You mention those "educators" who deplore moves by some junior colleges to become "second-rate four-year colleges." Our system of higher education today has created a situation that demands more second-rate four-year colleges to meet the needs of all those college-bound second-rate high school graduates.
DAVID W. FLUKE Sussex, N.J.
Tiny Paradise
Sir: "In this game of dominoes, the key piece was a tiny hamlet named Bongson [March 12], which in Vietnamese means 'paradise.' " How did your editors let that tautology get by? Did they ever hear of a large hamlet?
FREDERIC BABCOCK Winter Park, Fla.
Indeed. By strict definition, and still-accepted English usage, a hamlet is a village without a church, just as a town cannot be a city unless it has a cathedral--regardless of size.
Huedunit
Sir: There are other ways to explain the names of the different systems for the transmission of color television [March 5]: the American NTSC: Never Twice the Same Color; the German PAL: Pray and Learn; the French SECAM: Systeme Evolue Contre les Americains.
EELKE JAGER Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Potpourri
Sir: Your March 12 issue was just the right mix of pot, moonshine and geology.
GEORGE D. KETTEL Rochester
*Outstanding.
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