The Economy: Piecemeal Suicide?
To the Editors:
It is incredible to watch my Republican Party continue to commit piecemeal suicide, the latest shocker being the proposed 5% surtax on the middle and working classes.
The same mistake that was made in Viet Nam and Korea, that of asking only a portion of the citizens to sacrifice, is being made in our own domestic Viet Nam. The longtime generosity and patience of the middle and working classes are fast coming to an end. Nothing turns an American off so much as a lack of fairness. And it is not fair for a group that has worked so hard and so long to be unable now to furnish their families with the basic necessities of life.
Mary Moree Krewson Stewartstown, Pa.
President Ford's modest proposals are not likely to do much harm, but neither are they likely to do much good. Instead we should recognize and address ourselves to the structural changes in our economy.
The devaluation of the dollar and the rising strength of the producers of food, energy and raw materials have resulted in a reduction in the standard of living of the average American. Inflation is politically the most convenient and economically the slowest mechanism to deal with this painful process. Having chosen this route through political inaction, we will have to live with inflation until the adjustment has run its course.
The inevitable lowering of our living standard can be offset only in a growing economy. Growth can be achieved through a massive capital-investment program to expand industrial capacity and productivity. This requires a major improvement in corporate cash flow through higher prices and profits, as well as vastly more liberal depreciation measures. Growth can also result from major changes in consumption patterns to reduce our intake of imported raw materials and energy. This necessitates drastic action--for example, a $1-per-gal. gasoline tax.
Neither of these strategies for growth appears politically feasible, so inflation is likely to remain with us.
Hugo Uyterhoeven Timken Professor of Business Administration Harvard Business School Cambridge, Mass.
-Political Courage
The TIME article on new faces in the 1974 political tide points to more than a mere changing of the guard between generations or an attempt to recapture our national innocence. It is clear that voters are tired of the traditional practitioners of "politics as usual." What is not yet fully perceived, however, is the need for new solutions to the problems of dwindling resources and deteriorating environment that will become more acute in the 1970s.
Traditional "liberal" and "conservative" slogans are simply not adequate to cope with the shortage crises now dominating the economy. The bankruptcy of traditional solutions to our economic malaise is apparent; the persistent stagflation seems immune to both traditional monetary policy and proposals for creation of new agencies to generate recovery.
The best of our new political thinkers will respond to the problems of concentrated wealth. As opportunities for unlimited wealth decrease, tax and economic policies must be used to leaven society lest it become two-class -- the rich and all the rest of us.
Gary Hart Denver
The writer, campaign manager for George McGovern, is a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
sb We are in a cleansing period in American politics, a period of overreaction. The voter is looking for the fresh, the young, the untried, in the urgent hope that what is new is what is better.
Many new candidates riding this wave in 1974 are hiding their ideologies for fear of losing. This will ultimately destroy them, because hiding your ideology is as much a corruption of the process as the shenanigans of Watergate.
If you sell your soul in your campaign, what is your price in government?
Walter J. Hickel Anchorage, Alaska
The writer, former Governor of Alaska, served as President Nixon 's first Secretary of Interior. He was dismissed for criticizing Administration policies.
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This year's campaign is different. Some would cite Watergate, but that is not he whole story. To make this election an up-or-down vote on the scandal does no service to the voters.
The voters are apprehensive and more demanding. I've found them far less inclined to choose a candidate simply on the basis of the images his advertisers build up. To campaign in Kansas in 1974 is to be willing, hour by hour, to speak out on issues forthrightly. Fence sitting won't go any more, nor will flip-flopping. Voters in 1974, as usual, will vote the issues and their own best interests, and so I have a growing confidence in Republican chances this November.
Robert Dole
U.S. Senator, Kansas
Washington, D.C.
The writer, a former national chairman of the G.O.P., is running for reelection.
Martyred Wives (Contd.)
This political wife is dismayed to see that TIME seems to be promoting the stereotyped view of the lot of the politician's wife as squelched, angry and unfulfilled. I have surveyed the self-perceptions of wives of the members of the 92nd Congress. While acknowledging the stresses and difficulties of life in the fishbowl of public life, they are on the whole well pleased with what they see as a life of opportunity and growth.
In fact, my study shows that the majority of congressional wives like and admire the men they married, and that they are in a position to have a positive impact on the destiny of our country.
Mary Jane Dellenback
Washington, D.C.
The writer is the wife of Oregon Congressman John Dellenback.
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Ministers' wives, too, live in a fishbowl. We constantly share our husbands, have to deal with croup, measles, hysterectomies and heartaches, but perhaps our lives are even more exacting.
We must endeavor, with God's help, not to give in. If faith cannot "work" even for us, how could the sermons our husbands preach from the Holy Scriptures be of any hope to our flock?
Unlike political families, we usually have small salaries, seldom own our homes and maintain a minimum of health benefits. But the great comfort we enjoy is the precious "retirement plan" from our "Employer," with its eternal wages. That is something politics can never offer.
(Mrs.) Constance De Falco
Hartland, Maine
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The hazards of being a neglected wife are not peculiar to the political spouse. The loss of privacy and the constant demand of being everything to everyone is a common tribulation for the psychiatrist's wife.
We must do our share of "coping" too. But, alas, unlike the political wife, I can never reserve time for our family life. I can only be tempted by Mary Lindsay's approach to privacy--remove the phone from the hook for1 1/2 hours each night. Do I dare?
Sandra Schrift
La Mesa, Calif.
I am expected to take part in the usual number of receptions and handshaking bouts. I must be well dressed and reasonably intelligent. We have moved 13 times in eleven years, and seven times I've done it alone. One of our two children was born while my husband was away. I selected and arranged the financing of our first home. I can install a washing machine in 15 minutes and hook up an elaborate stereo system in 30. I have built additions onto our houses and rewired all our appliances.
I don't consider myself noteworthy. I'm the wife of a U.S. Navy officer and, like thousands of other military wives, I am still learning to live with the life I chose.
Margaret B. Holtz
Cherry Point, N.C.
Was Gierek Lying?
Poland's Communist Party chief, Edward Gierek, told your correspondents at least three flagrant lies.
It is not true that the Soviet Union was the only country that came to the assistance of war-ravaged Poland. First of all, Poland received aid from UNRRA amounting to a half-billion dollars. Besides, at the order of the Kremlin, the Polish Communist government rejected aid offered under the Marshall Plan. It is equally untrue that the Communist regime never tried to endanger the church. On the contrary, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski and scores of other Catholic priests spent years in prison. It is also not true that the Communist regime is for free movement of peoples, ideas and information. Travel to the West is denied to certain intellectuals, and Polish-language periodicals and books published in the West are confiscated at the Polish borders by customs officials.
Stefan Korbonski Chairman
Polish Council of Unity in the U.S.
Washington, D.C.
Plaid-Jacket Firing
My sympathy goes out to Photographer Kent Henderson of the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, who was sworn at by Richard Nixon. Being assigned to photograph a President can be hazardous to your health and wealth. I know. I was fired by Nixon and his cronies for wearing a plaid jacket [during the swearing-in at Nixon's second Inauguration]. At least Henderson still has his job. I would rather have been "cussed out" than put out.
Cecil W. Stoughton
White House Photographer to
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson
Merritt Island, Fla.
A Single Exception
As a matter of accuracy, I have not said that characters in my book are drawn from people I worked with at the companies named in the TIME review of my novel Something Happened [Oct. 14]. If anything, the opposite is true, and I so stated to your correspondent. The single exception was a gentleman, now deceased, for whom I did work when I was at TIME and with whom I enjoyed a friendly and enriching association, as I do with everyone.
Joseph Heller New York City
L.BJ. at Peace
TIME'S issue of Oct. 14 says: "As Johnson neared death, [Doris] Kearns reports, bitterness and psychic pain led him deep into fantasy and to the edge of paranoia." Lyndon Johnson suffered a heart attack in April 1972, and although I am not a "psychohistorian," I believe that for the nine months remaining to him he sensed that his time was running out. But bitterness, fantasy and paranoia have no relation to the activities I witnessed in that period, and I saw a great deal of him then; those activities were of a man at peace with himself. He devoted much effort to putting his personal business affairs in order. He spoke out on issues that were of concern to him: in September, with poignant eloquence, he asked America to embrace the change being ushered in by a new generation "with their fine young minds"; in his final month, to an audience intent on applauding his accomplishments in civil rights, he forced attention instead on the next step in the quest for justice as he perceived it--a deliberate pattern of favored consideration for minorities to enable them to stand "on equal ground" with advantaged whites. Eleven days before his death, to a group of us with him at his ranch, his thoughts triggered by a funeral he had just attended, he said, "When I die, I want all of my friends to come--those who want to and can. Not just the ones who can afford to fly down here, but the men who bring their families in pickup trucks." Two weeks later, when he was buried beside the Pedernales, they were there.
Harry Middleton Director
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library
Austin, Texas
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