The Now & Future Kings

Sir: My husband, who teaches at Brown University, and I, who teach at the Rhode Island School of Design, are filled with enthusiasm and optimism for your young men and women of the year [Jan. 6].

Long hair and short skirts really are only variations on the crew cuts and dirty saddle shoes of our own generation, but the compassion, honesty, earnestness and lack of hypocrisy of today's student are far beyond anything that seemed possible to us.

MEG LIGHT Providence

Sir: Thank you for honoring us with a distinction usually reserved for the great. The outcry of a generation is finally being taken seriously. All of us are for action: we see things that are wrong and demand change. We are thinkers, cool guys, picketers, students, workers, fighters, but most of all we are the future of America--and that doesn't scare us.

STEVE FORRER '69 Gettysburg College Gettysburg, Pa.

Sir: With few magazines having guts enough to picture American youth as anything but an infectious disease, it is refreshing to find a well-rounded feature on us.

JOSEPH A. SMITH '70 Urbana College Urbana, Ohio

Sir: You've managed to tell an entire generation what they are, who they are, and where they are. Isn't it wonderful to know someone cares!

KENNETH ROGOFF Sewickley, Pa.

Sir: What you say about the "generational gap" puzzles me. It seems to me that just because today's kids have less embarrassment and more articulateness they communicate with their elders rather more effectively than less. Most of today's youngsters seem to me smart enough to realize that if the Old Man survived the crossing of the Rhine or did his time in the Fast Carrier Task Force, he's not apt to be unduly shocked by existentialism, illegitimacy or the sound of a four-letter word.

The "under 25s" are indeed mostly great people, quite prepared to meet the challenges that lie ahead. Making reasonable allowance for the changing context of the times, this is neither more nor less than could have been said in 1957, 1947, 1937, and probably much earlier. (PROFESSOR) JOHN ROGER FREDLAND U.S. Naval Academy Annapolis, Md.

Sir: Perhaps the Man of the Year award should have been given to the preceding and older generation. It is their progress that has enabled us "under 25s" to read more, see more, and understand more. By observing the failures, successes and trials of our predecessors, we have come to a conclusion: Whatever we're going to do, we have to do it NOW. We can't wait, and neither can the rest of the world.

LAURIE CARLSON, AGED 15 Long Beach, Calif.

Sir:

Sir: I concur with your selection of Man of the Year, but as the mother of two of them I can't help being frightened. I fail to see much real altruism or idealism in my children or their friends. I see, rather, a perverted, sentimental self-centeredness. They may castigate us for money-and success-grubbing, but their attitude is, "Just go right on grubbing and keep that money flowing, old drudges, because we are too fine and sensitive to drudge or do without."

Since everybody is being labeled now, may I suggest a name for my generation, who grew up in the Depression, worked like the devil to finance our own college education, graduated just in time to give five years to the war, then came back and, while caring for elderly parents, raised our kids with all the orthodontics, encyclopedias, etc., that have made them this strong, bright generation that one college professor has described as "the brightest, most arrogant, most ungrateful group" he has ever taught. Let us call my generation, which is supposed to keep on financing the headlong, headstrong self-indulgence of the Now Generation, the Put-Upon Generation.

J. COLBY Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Sir: I want to comment on an extraordinary aspect of "The Inheritor." I have lived through the floods here, and for weeks The Inheritor of all nationalities has been here in overalls, taking turns with bucket and shovel to clean out the mud from the basements, houses and shops of Florence. Silently, happily and with no recompense except a camp bed and food, the anonymous youth of the world has been aiding the tired Florentine to return to a decent home and workshop. Never before has anyone experienced such a gift to a city.

MANFREDO CAMPERIO Florence

In the Cabbage Patch

Sir: Orchids to you, skunk cabbages to Harrison Salisbury [Jan. 6]. His reports provide fuel for the "moralists" who cry about the inevitable accidents of war in Hanoi. These people are free to moralize because our men and our fathers and their fathers bought that freedom. We want our children to be free, too. If we do not stop the Communists, they won't be. Viet Nam is but one battle in our worldwide war for survival. We must win it. Bombing the enemy is one way to do that. Washington has no cause to pussyfoot. We are defending the freedom of a small nation that has asked our help; we are defending the entire non-Communist world. We have no cause for shame; we have cause for pride.

SERA BAXTER Bethel, Alaska

Sir: When are the American people going to wake up? How many more truces have to be broken? How many more lives will it take? How many more decades of Communism's history of lies, subversion and outright aggression must we endure?

Didn't the spokesman of the Communist world, years ago, make it quite clear when he declared, "We will bury you"? Or must we cling to the hopes of our appeasers and surrender advocates for a peace at any cost? Now we are at war, as "hot" as it will ever be. Let's not get on our knees with the moral cowards who would allow America's fighting men to have died in vain, who would negotiate away our liberties, freedoms and principles every time a Commie says "nuclear." Let's not leave the job half done as we did in Korea. Let's make sure our children and grandchildren won't have to fight in the Viet Nams and Koreas of the future. Let's settle for nothing less than total victory this time.

And if we can't do that, then let's teach our children guerrilla warfare. They'll need to know it.

CORPORAL DALE T. TAYLOR Danang, Viet Nam

Sir: How can TIME fall prey, as it seems to do, to the Administration doctrine that if we act no more ruthlessly than the enemy we are justified in acting ruthlessly? Surely the love of God and our Western values compel us to choose a better standard of personal and national conduct.

ROBERT A. FISH Washington, D.C.

Sir: First it was Herb Matthews, then that other Times reporter in South Viet Nam at the time of the assassination of Diem, followed by Tom Wicker and now Harrison Salisbury. How much more slanted reporting do we need before the New York Times begins to lose its reputation as a great newspaper? Why, it's not a newspaper at all, but an artfully contrived propaganda device.

WILLIAM MITCHELL Denville, N.J.

Sir: We in Asia owe a great debt of gratitude to the American nation and a greater debt to the gallant young men who are dying every day in South Viet Nam. No other nation in the history of the world has made such supreme sacrifices for a principle. The Viet Nam war is a war against China and her designs, not an attempt to force a system of government on South Viet Nam. We in this part of the world thank the U.S. Government and the young men who are risking their lives to make life safe for us.

M. C. NAIR Selangor, Malaysia

Rights & Responsibilities

Sir: The view that the attack on Congressman Adam Clayton Powell [Jan. 13] is an attack on Negro political power is patently absurd. There are several Negroes exercising greater power than Powell (if only because they are not absent from their posts so much). In spite of their greater power, they are not under attack, because they are exercising their power as effective and responsible spokesmen both of their race and of their constituents.

The color of a man's skin should not deprive him of his rights as a citizen, nor should it deprive him of his responsibility as a citizen to uphold our country's laws.

CHARLES EDGAR TOMPKINS III Oklahoma City

Sir: I admire Adam Powell's deliberate ignoring of the investigations of his affairs. What Representative Wayne Hays is trying to say but doesn't have the guts to say is, "Adam, don't do as we white Congressmen do, do as we say."

A. C. BAILEY Pittsburgh

Sir: The fundamental tragedy in Negro leaders' supporting Powell is that they are displaying an appalling sense of the importance of race rather than a concern for the rule of law. Let us hope that Negro leaders will demonstrate the readiness of the Negro to stand beside the white man by their stand for the defense of law and equity, and for the defeat and destruction of misuse of authority and power by persons of whatever color.

(THE REV.) JOHN B. NICELEY Holly Springs Baptist Church Holly Springs, N.C.

Blue Chip Investment

Sir: Writing about James G. Johnston and his $1,500,000 gift to the University of Redlands [Jan. 13], you are correct in saying that "he had never so much as seen Redlands," but he thought carefully about it before giving. I know because I made the proposal to Mr. Johnston and played catalyst between him and Redlands. He acted on the basis of much reading and of several discussions with me and with his lawyers over a period of eight months.

DWAYNE ORTON

Chairman, THINK Editorial Board IBM Manhattan

Grandfather Goose

Sir: TIME'S usually thorough researchers did not go far enough into the ancestry of the Ford "Tin Goose" [Jan. 6].

William B. Stout was not its "original designer" but rather the visionary promoter who persuaded Henry Ford to make three-engined passenger aircraft.

The first version was created in the Stout Metal Airplane Co. (which Ford partly owned) by mongrelizing a single-engined plane, the "Stout Air Pullman." Only one of these bulbous-nosed trimotors was made flyable, and it was flown only once. Immediately after its hair-raising test flight, the pilot, Shorty Schroder, went to Ford and for several hours heatedly described its ungainliness and capricious lift characteristics. The next day Ford bought Stout's company.

My father was hired by Ford's chief engineer and given a free hand to design the Ford Tri-Motor. It is to Torn Towle, a relatively unknown aviation pioneer, that credit should go for designing the Tin Goose, with its legendary lifting power, durability and structural integrity. He is the real grandfather of the Bushmaster 2000, son of Tin Goose.

AUSTIN C. TOWLE Cincinnati

His Mug Runneth Over

Sir: The leftist camp sometimes produces a man of such honesty that he cannot help attacking folly everywhere.

Such an old warrior is Malcolm Muggeridge [Jan. 6]. "Compulsive readability" he has indeed, but deeper yet, the reader senses a whole man, responding to the falseness, betrayal and insatiety (to use Philip Wylie's expression) of much of modern life. It will be sad if Muggeridge ever rebounds all the way over to the tight little camp of religious orthodoxy. Understandable, but sad. For then free men might lose a vigorous spokesman, standing in the unaffrightable position of Emerson's thinking man, sending out his shafts wherever merited.

"It is greatly to be hoped" that Muggeridge will remain, as Orwell characterized Dickens, "a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

GORDON WILSON Detroit

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