The New War

Sir: Little Israel's heroic performance against the might of five Arab nations (aided by a coat-holding U.S.S.R.) has done more than save its own life. It may have given a vegetating U.N. a new opportunity to act bravely instead of to browbeat. If the U.N. wants to be a peace-insuring body, it must have the means to commandeer a police force that could on short notice be stationed in any unstable region. This force would have to have the power to act forcibly to quell aggression and provocative actions early.

NATHAN SHOR Hartford, Conn.

Sir: I was amused by Reader el-Manssour's letter [June 9] questioning the superiority of the Israeli army. I hope you will send me his address so I may clip his letter and mail it to him--between two slices of matzoth for greater palatability.

ARNOLD D. NAIDICH Plainview, N.Y.

Sir: I read with amusement Mr. el-Manssour's letter in which he accused Israel of cowardice, ending, "O David, where is thy sling?" All I can say in response to his letter is "O Goliath, where is thine army?"

LEONARD PRIMACK Brooklyn

Sir: I assume lethiferous Letter-Writer el-Manssour is enjoying his feast of:

Venom Troglodytica `a la patrie El-Manssourkraut maison Red-Lining Crow `a volonte

I assume this because his prodigious display of bravery-of-the-month was made 2,000 miles behind the lines.

JEROME B. WESTIN, M.D. Columbus, Ohio

Sir: May we say that Nasser has been defeated by a "blintzkrieg?"

JERRY SANDVICK Minneapolis

Sir: TIME's lavish contribution, in the form of a cover story, to the Israeli cause is exceeded only by the distorted, sketchy coverage afforded the plight of the Arabs. Neither eloquent oratory nor military victories can decide the rights of people. Win or lose, the underlying principle for the Arab struggle is no less justified. Where was indignant world opinion in 1947 when "third parties" paid off political debts with land that they did not own? Where were those who now call for justice when these parties permitted the Arab to be ejected from land he has owned for generations? Perhaps only history will vindicate the Arab cause, but what of today?

O. J. AKEL Waltham, Mass.

Sir: Your May 26 Middle East coverage makes me mad as hell. The Israelis have been harassed for years by Arab marauders; if they have occasionally hit back in desperation, that hardly equates them with those who sneak in at night to plant bombs and kill whomever they can. Our own country has reacted the same many times--against Indians, Mexicans and Tripoli pirates--and we react in similar ways today when our interests are threatened. And tell me, please, how would you react if somebody kept hitting you every time your back was turned?

HENRY C. COWEN Huntington, N.Y.

Sir: If you were to offer a Nation of the Year award, my vote would go to Israel. For the past 19 years, this bastion of democracy has survived in spite of the Arab commandment "harass thy neighbor." This tiny nation may yet fulfill the Biblical prophecy of being a "light unto all nations." Let's hope the U.A.R. is one of the first to see the light.

JOEL S. GOPEN Sharon, Mass.

Laurels & Thorns

Sir: TIME made an excellent choice in Artist Sidney Nolan to place laurels upon our best poet, Robert Lowell [June 2].

ALEX GILDZEN Co-Editor Toucan Kent, Ohio

Sir: Paintings by Nolan, poetry by Lowell, are a perfect match: both rotten.

G. L. ASHCRAFT

Boston

Sir: TIME's cover picture once again outdoes itself. Two years ago it was a weeping Nureyev; now it is a sorrowing Lowe. I. You treat us too infrequently to these haunting depictions. More, more!

ALAN T. BOLESTA Philadelphia

Sir: As a former student of the poet's, I feel that TIME has captured much of the agony and little of the ecstasy of Robert Lowell.

MARILYN PFOHL DONNELLY Pittsburgh

Sir: All hail to TIME for attempting to re-establish the line between the poet and the square. But--is this a dagger which I see before me? Your artist's rendering of the poet looks very like a camel. Or like a whale. Or like Prufrock peering from a nimbostratus. Lowell is an excellent poet within the confines of his own self-lacerations. But the poet who deserves (in sunlight) to grace your cover is James Dickey, who, far from measuring out his life with coffee spoons, writes with joy and imagination and vitality about the sanguine world in which most of us live.

As a teacher, I find that Dickey's "profound sense of conjunction with the world" strikes the gut and mind of students, who take to Lowell's poetry as to a rainy day.

As a publishing poet, I find that Dickey's real responses illuminate the courageous inner life as Lowell's deep conflicts can not.

Poetry is in a positive sense now up and doing. Your encomium to torment and haunting inadequacy does not help.

JACK BOBBITT

Associate Professor of English University of Missouri Rolla

Playing the Game

Sir: Your Essay on "The Golden Age of Sport" [June 2] is an excellent analysis of sport in the 1960s. The magic eye of the TV camera has had its impact in no uncertain fashion, and I hope it will be there to foot the bill and thrill the world for many years to come.

FINBARR SLATTERY Killarney, Ireland

Sir: Praising the role of TV in sport, you ignore what televised golf has done to play on the average course.

Countless players emulate and even outdo their heroes in studying shots (mostly putts), pacing terrain, measuring windage, barometric pressure and countless other factors. And all this has not resulted in their scoring better; instead, it has resulted in prolonging the usual four-hour, 18-hole round to something like six hours, to the utter frustration of following players. If something is not done about it, golf, as we oldtimers knew it, will never be the same again.

Who was the old pro who once said, "Miss 'em quick"?

D. I. DEAN, M.D. Rushville, Ind.

Sir: Your Essay is a lot of baloney. Today's sport stars have not, as you claim, eclipsed the great stars of the 1920s. For example, Jim Thorpe could outkick any kicker today. No batter today in the big leagues can even make a good sacrifice bunt. Very few pitchers today can go nine innings, and no pitcher today makes a patch on Dizzy Dean's or Satchel Paige's pants.

WALT CHARLESWORTH

Indianapolis

Sir: I take exception to the statement that the "death of the minors means that the pool of trained talent for the majors has all but dried up."

What makes college baseball any less of a training ground for future major leaguers than college football or basketball for their major leagues? University of Nevada Baseball Coach Bill Ireland displayed confidence in the quality of his 1967 squad by stating that he would like to field his team in the California league this summer. College baseball has come of age, as the instant success of Rick Reichardt, Rick Monday, etc., will attest.

PFC. JERRY L. WHITE U.S. Army Tan Son-Nhut, Viet Nam

Spare That Train

Sir: I was pleased to see TIME report [June 2] that European railroads are not surrendering passenger service to airline competition. Rail passengers in Europe get low-cost, high-comfort travel on luxury trains at fast schedules. The same combination would quickly whittle down the inflated $400 million passenger-train losses claimed by U.S. railroads, and save the U.S. passenger train from extinction.

H. E. GILBERT President

Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Engineers Cleveland

Name for the List

Sir: Thank you for helping me justify the addition of a name to my dormant-since-Lincoln list of "Politicians Worthy of Hero Worship." It is a delight to find that not everyone in politics suffers from acute atrophy of the intellect. My only regret is being unable to vote for the remarkable Senator Scott of Pennsylvania [June 2].

KELLEY ANDREWS Washington, D.C.

Brewer's Yeast

Sir: I was delighted to read about Eastern Airlines' gift to the Metropolitan Opera [May 26]. Since the story also mentioned other contributions by industry to the arts, it seems unfair to exclude the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company. In 1965 and 1966, Schlitz co-sponsored twelve free park concerts by the New York Philharmonic, concerts that, in the words of one reporter, "attracted more listeners than the Beatles." The series will be repeated this summer.

CARLOS MOSELEY Managing Director New York Philharmonic Manhattan

Petit Point

Sir: About "Le Brushoff" [May 26]: Indeed, Napoleon will be forever remembered as le petit grand for his vision and as the great champion of a United Europe. De Gaulle will be remembered as le grand petit for his narrow views on Europe. It is amazing that the new Europe tolerates this narrow-minded man.

HERMAN F. MEYER Palm Springs, Calif.

Soft Sell or No Sale?

Sir: Before you are inundated with letters from critics of the U.S. pavilion at Expo 67 [June 2], I must tell of my own delight. The country with the best and biggest of everything does not bore visitors with a salesroom or the insides of factories. How refreshing! Besides dollars and engineering brains, Americans have heart, foolishness, creative hands. The apple corer dreamed up by some ingenious Yankee, the hand sewing machine, the wooden-paddle washing machine were all forerunners of today's American technology. Should anyone doubt it, the space capsules swinging aloft will remind him. Yes, there are many movie stars, perhaps too many, but when I was a European teenager, I knew more about Clark Gable than about Massachusetts, now my home.

MADELEINE SAVAGE Sterling, Mass.

Sir: It is appalling to think that seven sophisticated designers have been given the marvelous setting of the geodesic dome (best viewed from outside) in which to say that the craftsmanship, inventiveness and creativity of Americans are appropriately symbolized by Hollywood camp versions of quilts, hats, wooden ducks, dolls, overblown faces and guitars. Opting for whimsy, indeed!

BEN R. CARROLL Fort Worth

Come On, Fellows

Sir: In "The Affluent Miniversity" [May 26], you write that while I was a fellow at Wesleyan, I "used the time to write a novel (Night and Silence Who Is Here?) chiding the collegiate practice of collecting big-name scholars in centers for advanced studies."

There is no "chiding" in my novel regarding the practice to which you refer.

I did not "use the time" writing Night and Silence. During my six weeks in residence, I completed my novel An Error of Judgment, begun at Berkeley a year earlier, collected preliminary notes for a critical study of Balzac, gave two lectures on Proust, spent a week as Visiting Fellow for Arts and Sciences at Timothy Dwight College, New Haven, and only in the last few days--perhaps three or four--made a start on Night and Silence.

This book, though it draws something from Wesleyan (there is not, however, one single character `a clef), draws also from various of my experiences, comic and otherwise, on half a dozen other campuses. I do move around, you know.

PAMELA HANSFORD JOHNSON Fremantle, England

Fair Sex

Sir: Thank you for the great Essay on sex education [June 9]. I am a high school sophomore in an all-girl public school. Sex education at school consists of one obscure "talk" in a gym class in the seventh grade, one film about bean plants in the eighth grade. The sophomore health class, in which the course of study ranges from first aid to the evils of alcohol, is expected to take care of any loose ends. It merely provides more. In the first days of class the teacher carefully explained, amid a chorus of giggles, that the model of the human torso was sexless. In our discussions of communicable diseases, V.D. was never mentioned. I hope the situation can be alleviated before our student population laughs itself silly at the embarrassment of its teachers.

SALLY CAREY Boston

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