That Man in California

Sir: Ronald Reagan's candidacy for Governor [Oct. 7] and the present trend in California politics convince me that future Governors will be elected by an applause meter at the Hollywood Bowl, with Art Linkletter and Ted Mack as election judges. Campaign managers would be replaced by directors, makeup men and choreographers. What about a 15-minute routine for each candidate? A soft-shoe would surely please the moderates. A flag-waving minuet would thrill the Birchers. The liberal candidate could easily upstage his opponent by launching into a topless watusi while juggling navel oranges from the south and mashing grapes from the north. Curtains up! Sacramento, here we come!

CHARLES G. WEBB San Francisco

Sir: I am a supporter of Reagan--principally because Brown promises everything to everybody but delivers only to a few and sends the bill to me. However, when you say that Reagan and Goldwater are against farm subsidies, I submit that no serious politician in the Southwest is against farm subsidies. They are select in the form they believe subsidies should take. Southwest agriculture, with the exception of grazing, is dependent on federally subsidized water to raise, in many cases, subsidized crops using imported contract labor.

GERALD C. HARMON Glendale, Calif.

Sir: After I watched Ronald Reagan in a television interview, it became obvious that the people of California should realize that Mr. Reagan is indeed maturing --he is beginning to look more and more like Edward Everett Horton.

JAMES WALLACE Toledo

Sir: Your cover story on Ronald Reagan states: "The hottest issue among California farmers is the U.S. Labor Department's cancellation of a longtime arrangement whereby Mexican braceros entered the country without visas to pick crops." Congress itself, not the Labor Department, ended the bracero program--with Northern and Eastern Republicans in on the kill. Check the House roll calls of May 29 and Oct. 31, 1963. The braceros will not be back, no matter who wins.

LIONEL VAN DEERLIN Congressman, 37th District California Washington, D.C.

Sir: Your article on former Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan gives the impression that Guild officials were Communists and the union under Communists' influence. At no time was the Guild controlled, dominated or influencec by Communist policy. The record clearly shows that on June 16, 1946, long before Reagan became president, this organization adopted a statement of policy condemning Communist influence in the film industry. It is also a matter of public record that our membership later passed by a 96% majority a by-law permanently barring from the Guild any member of the Communist Party.

CHARLTON HESTON President

Screen Actors Guild Hollywood

> TIME got the movie industry, which Communists had infiltrated, mixed up with the Screen Actors Guild, which they had not.

Popping the Psyche

Sir: Your Essay on Pop-Psych [Oct. 7] bristles with thinly veiled snobbery. "Pop-psych" is one of the few esoteric studies that have ever reached "the mass" intact; the popularity of pop-psych indicates a widespread concern among human beings. The very fact that psychology has some relevance outside of academia seems to make it untouchable in the eyes of your essayist; but at least he kept it at exactly two pages.

CHRISTOPHER C. BREWSTER, '69 Yale New Haven, Conn.

Sir: This seems to be the age when a man might consult a psychiatrist not because his life is a mess, but because he can find only himself to blame.

BONNIE RYAN Alton, 111.

Sir: Why do adults think they are accomplishing so much by telling us how crazy we are when they are the ones who are always at the psychiatrist's office having their own schizophrenic personalities analyzed?

JEAN MARKOVITZ, AGED 15 Chicago

Sir: After 20 years of reading paperbacks on psychology, I feel qualified to offer my analysis of cigar smokers. Smokers are immature people who have never been completely weaned.

DOROTHY B. NEWELL Glendale, Calif.

Sir: Your Essay reveals the subconscious, repressed, latent-homosexual, anxiety-ridden amateur psychologist's traumatic dependency on the compulsive, depressing gullibility of the confused, simple, inferiority-complex-suffering American public. So what else is new?

(MRS.) HELGA MARSHALL San Diego

The Other Poll

Sir: I applaud your efforts to keep your readers well informed by giving wide coverage to the cultural revolution (purge) and atrocities of Red Guards on the Chinese mainland [Sept. 23].

Now I would like to draw the attention of your readers to a poll that has not been reported so far as I know. Rev. Daniel A. Poling, of the Chapel of the Four Chaplains and chairman of the board of Christian Herald magazine, announced on Aug. 31 that a nationwide poll, responded to by 30,000 American Protestant clergymen, showed that 71.4% were opposed to the admission of Red China to the United Nations or granting it American diplomatic recognition. The same poll showed that 93.7% of American Protestant clergymen were opposed to the expulsion of Nationalist China from the United Nations in order to satisfy Communist conditions for joining.

As you may recall, the General Board of the National Council of Churches, at its meeting in St. Louis on Feb. 22, 1966, adopted a resolution calling for the admission of Red China to the United Nations and the granting of U.S. diplomatic recognition to the Peking regime.

While the N.C.C. resolution has been widely publicized throughout the world, the poll conducted by Poling has so far received very little attention from the general public. This leads people to think that all, not some, clergymen in the U.S. are in favor of accommodation with the atheistic regime that tortured and drove Roman Catholic nuns from the Chinese mainland. Particularly tragic is the effect on the morale of young American soldiers who are fighting in Viet Nam. If their own church leaders favor accommodation with Communists, why should they give up their lives to resist them?

IRVING GEE Houston

Into Battle

Sir: Are we a democracy or an idiocracy? We have in President Johnson [Sept. 23] a statesman who is gallantly trying to fight, almost without international support, the battle of the West against Chinese Communism. He is also a politician who knows he must carry a majority of the American "people with him in November if the "Battle of the West" is not to be lost in the ballot boxes of the U.S.A. This is an agonizing situation in which the President needs the support of as many influential persons and media as possible. At this juncture, every man, regardless of party, who agrees with the President on the international scene, should give him unequivocal support. I am a Republican, but the failure of leading Republicans to rally to the support of our President so plainly derives from the hope of political advantage in the elections that I, for one, shall certainly cast my vote for the Democratic candidate.

S. S. TYLER Las Palmas, Spain

How We Got There

Sir: TIME'S treatment of the House Republican White Paper on Viet Nam [Sept. 30] concedes our point that the Johnson Administration has been guilty of obfuscation, miscalculation and deception. It suggests, however, that U.S. troops are fighting in Viet Nam in part because of Eisenhower commitments.

Please note General Taylor's reply when Senator Hickenlooper asked whether the U.S. had any commitment to put in fighting forces in Viet Nam before 1965. General Taylor said: "No sir, very clearly we made no such commitment. We didn't want such a commitment. This was the last thing we had in mind."

TIME also says the White Paper offers no solution. It is a strange criticism of a document that deals with the past to complain that it does not provide policy for the future. If we have presented an accurate account of how we got where we are today in Viet Nam, we have done as much as should be expected of 37 pages.

CHARLES E. GOODELL Congressman 38th District, New York Washington, D.C.

Work from Within

Sir: All of us should grieve that there are men and women who feel it necessary to be estranged from the official Church [Sept. 16]. Some may find themselves in this condition in good faith. Their consciences may tell them that they cannot believe this or that teaching. If they are in good faith, they are indeed still within the Church in the sense that they are of good conscience and subjectively inculpable before God, even in the eyes of the Church.

Some of the "Uncatholics" may be intellectuals who feel frustrated by the institutional Church. For these we pray that Christ will give them his own virtues of patience and meekness and remind them of his words, "Unless you become as little children you shall not enter the kingdom." If they see human flaws in the institutional Church, they can do more to correct the flaws by staying in the Church than outside it. The Church is unique. Its validity is supernatural. It comes from Christ, from God. Its validity does not come from the intellectual capacity of the Pope or the bishops. If we knowingly and deliberately cut ourselves off from the Vicar of Christ, we cut ourselves off from Christ.

We may call ourselves "Uncatholics," or--as in other eras--"Old Catholics," "Enlightened Catholics," "Modern Catholics." But whatever the current name, we are still disconnected from Christ's truth.

(THE VERY REV.) FRANCIS A. QUINN

Editor

The Monitor San Francisco

Jazz in Class

Sir: My wife attended San Francisco State College with John Handy before he became as well known as he is today [Sept. 30]. John is truly one of today's fine jazz musicians. While at school, the word would spread that John Handy was playing in a classroom or a practice room, and suddenly there would be a crowd listening to him, often until late into the evening. John had been as instrumental in bringing good jazz to San Francisco State College as the school has been in John's maturity as a jazz musician.

PAUL WALKER Eugene, Ore.

Amen

Sir: Re the Dirksen "Amen Amendment" [Sept. 30]: Haven't Everett Dirksen, Billy Graham and Dan Poling read far enough in Matthew to see this: "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in their educational institutions and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

ART SANDALE Brooklyn

Pot Roast

Sir: Congratulations on your excellent article about "Mysticism in the Lab" [Sept. 23]. One significant fact about Dr. Pahnke's research on chemically induced religious experience is that this project was carried out at Harvard under the guidance of Dr. Timothy Leary who recently founded a psychedelic religion under the name tag League for Spiritual Discovery. Dr. Leary and other members of the Harvard Psilocybin Project spent many hours planning this research with Dr. Pahnke. This study, completed four years ago but only published now, represents a major scientific demonstration of the link between psychedelic drugs and religion.

RALPH METZNER, PH.D. Editor

Psychedelic Review New York City

Sir: I was horrified to read where Psychiatrists Pahnke and Richards experimented with drug-induced "mystical" reactions with the cooperation of divinity students. True mysticism and clairvoyance are natural phenomena--entirely independent of any medication.

W. I. ELDRITH Hartford, Conn.

Sir: I'm waiting for Timothy Leary [Sept. 30] to open next to the Stage Delicatessen his version: the Psyche-Deli, among whose delights will be sacred mushroom and barley soup, acid head of lettuce, and the piece de resistance--pot roast. If a single LSD dose constitutes a "trip," Leary must have a commutation ticket.

SOL WEINSTEIN Levittown, Pa.

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