Historical Precedent

Sir: Your article, "NATO: In the Wake of Illusion" [Nov. 22], was interesting. Americans are aghast when the Soviet Union issues the Brezhnev Doctrine. Why? The U.S., in 1823, announced to the world the Monroe Doctrine to support our own intervention, imperialism, and hands-off policy in this hemisphere. The Russians are simply learning from their equally ambitious counterpart how to deal with troublesome neighbors. Tit for tat, no?

RICHARD E. LANNING Berea, Ohio

Sir: The alarming buildup of U.S.S.R. military force in the Mideast reflects U.S. ineptitude as much as Russian strength. Given our NATO treaty arrangements with Turkey and that nation's stranglehold on Soviet entry to the Mediterranean, it is hard to believe that imaginative U.S. policymakers could not take counteractions (e.g., an American "presence" in the Black Sea) that would give the Russian Bear a severe case of twisted tail.

DALE TAPP Seguin, Texas

Now Hear This

Sir: You mistakenly gave Il Bandito of MAIRAIRMED [Nov. 22] the name of Richard instead of Edward, which may disturb all the junior officers who have called him "Eddy Shoutlaw" for years behind his back.

Admiral and Mrs. Outlaw very kindly invited me to be their house guest on my way from Athens to Malta to join my husband, Captain Baldwin, skipper of U.S.S. Forrestal. Our reunions in both port cities were slightly marred during the wee hours of the morning as the captain awoke, shouting and pounding me under the assumption Russian Badgers were engaging in an overflight.

In the event no one has yet answered your question as to what the Russians are doing in the Mediterranean, they are making it hard for Navy captains and their wives to enjoy an occasional quiet week ashore.

JUNE WILSON BALDWIN Virginia Beach, Va.

Doing What's Done Best

Sir: Helping backward nations grow food [Nov. 22] is not necessarily the wisest course for them or for us.

An area that is not isolated and can trade with other areas need not raise its own food, and in some cases should not. For example, it would be worse for us and for the Arabs for them to devote all their resources to growing pitifully little food rather than to producing a great deal of oil, trading a little of it for an abundance of food and the rest for whatever else they choose.

Similarly, it is in our own interest to assist backward areas to do what they can do best (however badly that may be) in terms of what we need most--even if that involves our going back into food production on a grander scale.

A. ROYALL WHITAKER Associate Professor of Economics U.S. Naval Academy Annapolis, Md.

Sir: I think TIME somewhat mistook the emphasis of C. P. Snow's Westminster College speech. Snow's prediction of disaster was not premised upon a future failure of resources, nor upon blunders yet unmade --but on the continuation of present trends that show no sign of changing.

It's not for lack of food, for instance, that we now permit starvation in Biafra. Nor is it for lack of available technology, in the main, that India fails to curb its birth rate. The problem in each case is that people who could do something don't --and won't--and can't realistically be expected to.

JOHN F. HELLEGERS Cambridge, Mass.

One Side, My Side

Sir: I rather enjoyed your one-sided story on freedom in the Roman Catholic church [Nov. 22]. Fortunately, it was my side.

BROTHER PHILIP G. RYAN St. Bernard Boys' High School Uncasville, Conn.

Sir: It seems to me that the farther out in space we go, the more we need to have something to hold onto--stars just don't make good straphangers! Catholics et al. should not forget 2,000 years of practical psychology that worked--not to mention that "out" word "faith."

JOSEPH J. SCIARRILLO, M.D. Bridgeport, Conn.

Sir: My philosophy and religion class is teaching me that the principal differences between Jesus and the Jewish Pharisees was a humanism, rather than a preoccupation with "the law."

I am a Methodist with little personal knowledge of Catholicism. However, it would appear that papal pronouncements are as confining and deadly as the Pharisees'. Is the Catholic Church that says it is the direct line from Jesus going to renounce his humanism for the system of legalism that prevented his acceptance by the Jews?

JAMES E. DEMLOW Marion, Ohio

Sir: TIME'S capacity to stand objectively and view Roman Catholicism as a historic structure or as a teaching church with more than its quota of revolutionary behavior was admirable. Unfortunately, you missed the whole point of what is taking place. This is not another Lutheran rage of 95 theses, nor is it merely another thrust against a latter-day Pius IX. It is not even an introduction to the halfway house of Callahan, Curran and Company. It is the death of the church. The young people with whom I communicate do not want a reformed church, a free church or an open church. They don't want any church, because they have grown free enough, mature enough not to need it. They have the best of its values without its fears, its hang-ups, its commitments to bastard structures. They can live honestly in or out of community, deal with present poverty, suffering, injustice--without the church. The liberals who suggest a church without compelling dogmas, stifling rituals and unreal moral codes will find that such a church already exists. It's called the world, and its adherents are called men.

JAMES J. KAVANAUGH San Diego

Rhyme and Reason

Sir: William Butler Yeats had more pertinent things to say about this year's election than his lines on defeat [Nov. 15]. He also wrote:

A statesman is an easy man,

He tells his lies by rote;

A journalist makes up his lies

And takes you by the throat;

So stay at home and drink your beer

And let the neighbors vote.

JOSEPH B. SEDEY St. Louis

In Different Voices

Sir: Your book reviewer seems puzzled both as to where T. S. Eliot found the original title of The Waste Land [Nov. 22] and what that title He Do the Police in Different Voices means. I cannot speak with authority as to why Eliot chose to call his poem by that name, but there is no doubt that it comes from a book called Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens.

In this story--which some Dickens readers consider his greatest--an impoverished old woman, Betty Higden, talks to some callers about having given a home to a poor, gangling, half-witted boy who is known only as "Sloppy." She says that Sloppy is "a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the police in different voices"--meaning, he changed his voice while reading police news aloud, to impersonate different characters.

As to what Eliot meant--perhaps he was saying that the contents of his poem were stylistically varied and with plenty of change of pace. In other words, he could "do the police in different voices."

JIM WALSH Vinton, Va.

Nominations for Man of the Year

Sir: For your '68 Man of the Year I suggest Alexander Dubeek. The Czech revolution was the year's most dramatic show of man's attempt to change his institutions from arbiters of the absolute to servants of societies' needs. This attempt underlies the world's major stories of the decade.

ANN SMITH Salt Lake City

Sir: Nixon. Who else?

SHERRY REEDY

Lisle, Ill.

Sir: Humphrey, the brave and honest fighter who, almost singlehanded, made it from the worst-ever underdog to one-quarter percent from the presidency.

HANS L. HEIMANN Providence

Sir: L.B.J., who has done more than any other in the past 20 years to keep the world free for democracy.

MILES HEDGE Hunters Hill, Australia

Sir: A friend of the white, but especially the black. A friend of the rich, but especially the poor. A friend of the old, but especially the young. Those who loved him most were those who needed him most: Robert Kennedy.

RICHARD BEAN South Yarmouth, Mass.

Sir: Senator Eugene McCarthy. No one else has done so much to change the course of history: the withdrawal of President Johnson from politics; Bobby Kennedy's plunge into the presidential race and ensuing events; a bombing halt in Viet Nam and peace talks; a President-elect named Richard M. Nixon.

BERT SIROTE Far Rockaway, N.Y.

Sir: My nominee is the little soldier my Government has made my enemy, the Viet Cong. He is that special kind of enemy that makes many of us wonder if we aren't fighting on the wrong side.

(SP/4) WILLIAM WHITMEYER U.S.A. A.P.O., San Francisco

Sir: In the U.S., he battled the administrations at Berkeley and Columbia, participated in the campaigns of every presidential candidate, and fought with the police in Chicago. In Prague, he took to the streets shouting, "Russians Go Home!" His activities nearly canceled the Olympics in Mexico, paralyzed all of France, and created a stir throughout Germany, Japan, Spain, England and Italy. He is an international striver for liberalization of the outmoded principles of society and government: the university student.

REBECCA KUZINS Los Angeles

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