CAN FIDELITY STILL MAKE YOUR MONEY GROW?

Your article on the mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments [BUSINESS, Sept. 30] included the terms arrogance, aggressiveness, young, cocky competitiveness, volatility, obnoxiousness and the phrase "wandering far from their ostensible mandates." Is this type of behavior consistent with the fiduciary duty owed to the client by a fund? The advent of the investment supermarket appears to have transformed investors into mere customers. Caveat emptor. MARK JASAYKO West Vancouver, British Columbia

Does Fidelity's new strategy for expansion--leveraging its massive technology infrastructure to obtain new revenues via benefit plans, human-resources-administration duties and payrolls--raise concerns about the company's focus and privacy issues? Fidelity's access to personal information in these areas would no doubt give the firm a leading edge on target marketing and family life-style offerings. The strategy is brilliant in keeping Fidelity revenues smooth, but it scares me to death. George Orwell's only flaws in prediction were in the timing and the number of Big Brothers we will have in this brave new world of electronic commerce. RICHARD CARREAU Vernon, Connecticut Via E-mail

Perhaps the most extraordinary point made by your story was inadvertent: there was no mention of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is MIA when it comes to protecting fund investors concerning the issues raised by your report. All investors should care when funds stray from promised objectives and allow a 31-year-old to manage a 71-year-old's nest egg. Will it take a cataclysm of major proportions to suggest the need for more SEC enforcement and oversight of the fund industry? WILLIAM H. MOHR New York City

Despite all the money that is being spent by Fidelity for new technology so the client will receive service faster, there is one area in which Fidelity still operates in the turtle mode. That is in getting your money to you. It took four days for me to get a disbursement check. Fidelity sent it the slowest way possible so the company could make more money on the float. Over a year's time, we are talking about real money. Fidelity could get the money into the clients' hands faster, but that doesn't add to its bottom line. Amazing, isn't it, that the company does not seem to be working to speed up that process? THOMAS B. MADSON Madbury, New Hampshire

SOME THINGS PAY OFF

I can't answer the question on your cover, "Can Fidelity still make your money grow?" But everyone now knows that infidelity, at least for someone like former presidential adviser Dick Morris, can get you a $2.5 million book contract. ISADORE M. RICHLIN Culver City, California

PROTECTING THE RIGHT TO SUE

Your item on Pennsylvania representative Bud Shuster, chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure [NOTEBOOK, Sept. 30], contained numerous errors, the most egregious of which was the allegation that an amendment to the House Coast Guard reauthorization bill would "shield cruise-line companies from lawsuits by women who are raped aboard their ships." This is absolutely false. The House bill does no such thing. In fact, it expressly protects the right to sue if there is substantial physical injury, the threat of such injury or an intentional act. Moreover, Congressman Shuster's position on this issue has been clear and unwavering. In November 1995, in a letter to members of the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, he wrote, "I would never support a provision which would immunize cruise lines from liability for rapes." Your item seems to be the result of a campaign of distortion waged by the trial lawyers who are seeking to block other much needed reform provisions in the bill. That's the real story. JACK SCHENENDORF, Chief of Staff House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Washington

THE GRUNTS OF MIDDLE AGE

Although I enjoyed Jeffrey Kluger's piece "Call of the Mild" [ESSAY, Sept. 30], I must take issue with his theory that as we enter middle age we make noises that signify our physical decline. I am approaching 40, and I have had to make zero concessions to getting older. Well, sure, when I wake up my joints sound like monkeys on drugs fencing with baseball bats. Think I'll just sit right down here and Uhhh!...Oh, my, oh, my, Hmm, hmm, hmm. Ah, what the heck, if those young lions want me, they can come get me, but I am not getting up. ALEX KASEBERG San Diego Via E-mail

As one who emits a grunt on entering automobiles, I appreciated Kluger's Essay on the middle-aged grunt. But has he noticed that ever since tennis star Monica Seles popularized the "tennis grunt," it has been spreading? And she is definitely younger than middle age. What can be deduced from this trend? Maybe that grunters are "coming out"? BILL DILLON South Bend, Indiana

TWA: RUMORS ABOUT A MISSILE

A theory about the crash of TWA's Flight 800 [NATION, Sept. 30] has been circulating claiming that a missile from a U.S. Navy warship on maneuvers may have downed the aircraft. Although this rumor has been vehemently denied by the Navy and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, what a sorry state of affairs it would be if this proved to be true. It would be one of the biggest and worst cover-ups in U.S. history. VICKI DUCANOIS St. Avertin, France

POISONS FROM THE GULF WAR

The possibility that combinations of chemicals, some of them known toxins, have caused effects in Gulf War veterans [WORLD, Sept. 30] is based upon a well-established premise: adverse drug interactions. Known instances of adverse chemical reactions are numerous. However, even more insidious hazards can arise from interaction of substances that alone pose no recognized threat to life and health.

There is a virtually endless list of "harmless" substances, with a nearly infinite number of possible combinations that might be biologically hazardous. Thus a sort of "malchemy" exists, of which we should be cognizant but by which we should not be surprised. JACK MCBROOM, Professor Department of Physiology and Neuroscience St. George's University University Center, Grenada

As a former United Nations interpreter, I remember the lengthy preliminary negotiations of a chemical-weapons-ban treaty at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Month after month and year after year, U.S. and U.S.S.R. chemical-weapons specialists endlessly discussed modalities of destruction of the chemical weapons stockpiled by both superpowers. What was obvious to me as a layperson was the extreme difficulty, complexity and danger involved in destroying chemical weapons. Safe destruction could take place only in complex and specialized installations.

For that reason, I was appalled to read in Mark Thompson's story "The Gulf War Poisons Seep Out" that U.S. Army Engineers "blew up" nerve-gas-weapons depots in Iraq in 1991. Who made the decision to risk blowing up the chemical and biological ammunition in situ? Was the risk factor properly appraised, not only with regard to allied troops temporarily present in the vicinity of the destruction site but also with regard to the Iraqi civilian population? If "blowing up" is a correct description of what happened, and if even minute quantities of nerve gas can be a severe health hazard, one shudders at the possibilities of long-lasting contamination of the Iraqi countryside and population. And I cannot help remembering the distressing consequences of the use of defoliants in Vietnam. DIMITRI GEYSTOR Narbonne, France Via E-mail

KURDISTAN POLITICAL REALITIES

It's incredible that Washington continues to try to fix things in the Middle East that are not fixable [NATION, Sept. 16]. How can the U.S. or anyone else provide safety and stability to a people who have never got along with their neighbors and who cannot even agree among themselves? The U.S. may spend billions of dollars to buy the allegiance of the Kurds against Saddam Hussein, but the Kurds, understanding the political realities on the ground, will not stay bought. The fact that one party of Kurds begged the succor of Saddam, the man who gassed about 4,000 Kurds only eight years earlier, should not be surprising to anyone who remembers that Iraq asked Iran for help during the Gulf War only a few years after the long and bloody struggle between their two countries. Meanwhile Washington, $5 trillion-plus in debt, deploys to the region a military force, deemed necessary to thwart Saddam's ambitions, that costs about $40 billion a year. O. VOLLEY Estepona, Spain

The Iraqi bombing and invasion of the city of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan is not an internal Iraqi affair. Erbil is situated inside the safe-haven zone imposed by the U.N. in 1991. Since the invasion of Kuwait, the Arab world has expelled Saddam and his regime. Since then, he has broken every law in the book. The Arab countries, in objecting to the American air strike, give the impression that they didn't like President Clinton's support of the Kurds. But why didn't they object to the air strikes on southern Iraq in 1993 and 1994? Why didn't they condemn the bombing of Erbil? The Arab countries condemned the chemical-weapons bombing of Halabja in 1988, which killed 4,000 Kurds, including children and women, and also the tragedy of Anfal, when 182,000 people disappeared. The Arab countries have never accepted the Kurds as a nation. But the Arab countries joined the allied forces to liberate Kuwait just for the reason that Kuwaitis are Arabs! RIZGAR JIAWOOK, Representative Kurdistan Human Rights Organization Lund, Sweden

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN TENSIONS

The situation in the Middle East was inevitable [WORLD, Oct. 7]. The U.S. Congress killed the peace process in July when it gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a standing ovation after he declared that he would in essence never allow Jerusalem to be divided. There is no reason for the Israeli government to pursue peace any further. Israel has one of the most modern armies in the world, thanks to the U.S. This, along with Israel's nuclear weapons, makes it unbeatable in the Middle East. With several of our Western allies taking sides, some with the Arabs and some with the U.S. and Israel, we might find ourselves in a Middle East war that could escalate into something no one wants to think about. JOHN J. MCGINTY Coventry, England

IS SCIENCE HISTORY?

One has to treat the title of John Horgan's The End of Science with a grain of salt [IDEAS, Sept. 9]. Some writers scramble to make "history" when running out of topics, which is hardly the case with science. How about some humility, like the kind Sir Isaac Newton had when he saw himself as "a boy playing on the sea-shore...now and then finding a smoother pebble...whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." With the inner universe waiting for an Einstein to formulate a unified theory of mind and body, there is much to be done. Maybe then we will understand those people who think we know it all. ISRAEL SPIEGLER, Chair Information Systems Department Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv

The supposedly triumphant field of science hasn't even scratched the surface of explaining all. It hasn't told us how life could have arisen out of a cold, dark nothing. What science did discover was that we utilize about 10% of our brain capacity and that fully 90% of our gray matter is awaiting our resolve to stop gazing through radio telescopes in order to discover our beginning. LEO FIALKA Dauphin, Manitoba

CIA TIES TO DRUG TRAFFICKING?

The San Jose Mercury News has charged that the CIA possibly cooperated with the Nicaraguan contras to flood America's black ghettos with cocaine to get money to fund the 1980s war against the Sandinista government [DIVIDING LINE, Sept. 30]. These accusations are more than a problem affecting just black America and the CIA. Senator John Kerry's committee reported in the 1980s that the CIA, the FBI and the DEA knew of the contras' drug dealings, yet drug traffickers continued to be paid by the U.S. State Department, "in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law-enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies." Tragically, the U.S. Justice Department was slow to respond to the threat. But if all these federal agencies knew of the drug trade in the '80s, why didn't they expose and stop it? The drug trade posed a far greater threat to the U.S. than the leftist Sandinista government ever did. Despite recent CIA and Justice Department vows to reinvestigate, how likely is it that these agencies will produce important new discoveries that would publicly expose their prior inadequacies? You are right to call for an independent investigation. GARY L. AGUILAR San Francisco

During the original Iran-Contra hearings the CIA defended itself by saying it didn't know Ollie North was running a private air flotilla to illegally supply the contras. And now we are to believe that the agency didn't know planes were coming back loaded with cocaine that addicted Americans? Does such astonishing, habitual ignorance by our top "intelligence" agency show anything but gross incompetence and wasted funding? Maybe the CIA was distracted by its primary mission: not knowing the Soviet Union was going down the tubes. Surely we can find another group that does not know all this--much cheaper. JOHN BURKE Bayville, New York

A SUPERB LEADER

Whatever one makes of the life of McGeorge Bundy [NATION, Sept. 30], former adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he deserves more than a mention about his superb contribution to the public well-being during his 13 years as president of the Ford Foundation. I worked for the foundation under Bundy, and while he was there, he inspired a staff of independent spirits to make major advances in public broadcasting, civil rights, public-interest law, energy conservation, the education of minorities at all levels, agricultural research in developing countries and much more. RICHARD MAGAT Bronxville, New York

I knew Mac Bundy for more than 40 years. In the White House he was my immediate boss, and thereafter he became one of my closest friends. Your description of him was unrecognizable. "Cold"? To me and a number of other people, Mac was an intensely loyal, warm and attentive friend, caring and supportive in good times and bad. To say he "marched America with a cool and confident brilliance into the quagmire of Vietnam" is to ignore his prophetic June 30, 1965, memorandum concerning the major troop-deployment decisions that were to transform the conflict into an American war--a memo that characterized the plan for massive U.S. ground-force involvement as "rash to the point of folly." Your article also made a grotesque fiction of Bundy's life after he left the government. He was a superb president of the Ford Foundation. Serious historians of the nuclear age consider his book on the atom a great work.

The story of Lyndon Johnson's tragic decision of July 1965--the story of his reasons--has never been rightly told. I don't believe there was anything that Bundy could have said to the President that would have changed his mind. FRANCIS M. BATOR Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

A BLACK FOR MISS ITALY

The woman chosen Miss Italy should have Italian roots, Italian patterns; simply to be an Italian citizen is not enough [PEOPLE, Sept. 23]. It's not a matter of skin color; she has to be Italian through and through, and not just on paper. What has happened here is reverse racism, against Italian folks who have few rights in their own country. CHRISTINA RAVENE Aulla, Italy

CORRECTION

In our report on the congressional fight over legislation concerning a controversial abortion procedure [Nation, Sept. 30], we said, "Partial-birth abortion accounts for perhaps 600 of the 1.5 million abortions performed in the U.S. each year." Although there are no precise figures on this procedure, recent reports suggest the number is far greater than 600 and could be as high as several thousand.