Valuable Ten

Sir:

Your selection of the Senate's ten most valuable members [TIME, April 3] should meet with everyone's approval. Your statement that Senator Taft is the Senate's "finest legal mind" was especially gratifying to my thinking . . .

ROBERT S. ORR Mercer, Pa.

Sir:

TIME deserves a compliment for not showing any political preference in its choices . . .

HOWARD SIMONOFF

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Sir:

. . . I don't see how you could shut out Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Many of us . . . see him as the clear-thinking, fact-facing hope of his party . . .

JOHN NEARY

Hamilton, Mass.

Sir:

Where is Senator Byrd?

V. E. MARINE

Charlotte Hall, Md.

Sir:

When one views TIME'S selection of "The Senate's Most Valuable Ten" to grapple with domestic affairs and frustrate Stalin and Communism abroad, the logical reaction may be expressed in the words of the old Duke of Wellington when he inspected a contingent of new troops: "I don't know what the enemy will think of them, but by God, they frighten me to death."

TIME, the best edited of all weeklies, has the fatuity of a fat cat when it presumes to add critical appraisal of Senators to its legitimate and well-done job of reporting what they do. Frank Costello would have gone broke if he had not been able to pick winners better than TIME.

E. L. McCOLGIN

Detroit, Mich.

Gulliver & the King of Siam

Sir:

To readers of your Siam cover story [TIME, April 3] who are also acquainted with the internal affairs and foreign policy of the lands visited by the late Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, the similarity of names between the hierarchy of Siamese princes and politicians on the one hand, and the movers & shakers of the Lilliputian empire on the other, is almost irresistible. There is a close parallelism between Phibun Songgram, in-&-outer and erstwhile Jap collaborator, and Admiral Skyresh Bolgolam, whose undying enmity Gulliver incurred; between Pridhi Banomyong and Reldresal, Lilliputian Secretary for Private Affairs, friend and champion of the Man-Mountain; and between Siamese princes of the blood such as Prince Chumphot and the Frelock brothers, who were entrusted with the diplomatic mission into Gulliver's pockets.

May the smiling Lilliputians of Southeast Asia find the courage and unity to resist the Big-Endian blandishments of their Blefuscudian cousins in Red China and Viet Nam, to say nothing of the far greater danger menacing them from the Muscovite Brobdingnag giant to the north; and may the good Quinbus Flestrin of the West, the democratic big brother Gulliver, realize before it is too late that their small-scale problems are to an alarming degree his problems, too.

CHARLES CASSIL REYNARD

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

Sound Asleep

Sir:

Wasn't General George Catlett Marshall, rather than General Joseph Lawton Collins, Chief of Staff during World War II [TIME, March 27] ?

SOL K. NEWMAN

Chicago, Ill.

P: Of course. For falling asleep at his post, TIME'S People editor is reviewing his basic training.--ED.

Preoccupation with Destruction

Sir:

Regarding Dr. Frederick Seitz's "Call to Arms" [TIME, April 3]:

If Physicist Seitz wants to prostitute his scientific talents inventing weapons of destruction, that is an affair of his own conscience and he should be free to do so, but he is guilty of the very thing he most decries when he attempts to dictate to the consciences of his colleagues . . .

In his efforts to divert the scientific minds of this country towards ever-increasing preoccupation with means of destruction, Dr. Seitz unwittingly joins his militaristic counterparts in the Kremlin in spreading the infection now ravishing the body of our tottering civilization.

JOHN CUMMINGS

San Francisco, Calif.

Sir:

. . . Science does not grow because of superheated patriotism . . . The essential detachment and creative process involved cannot be hurried by imposing fright, coercion or high pressure upon scientists . . .

Let them keep their "sense of guilt" about the destruction wrought by their little monster. More such feeling and less of that on how fast can we race to obliteration may give the good doctor a longer time in which to indulge his shortsightedness.

JAMES L. LUCAS

Ithaca, N.Y.

Sir:

Professor Seitz truly states that what we need most today is a sense of desperate urgency. However, it ought to jolt us that he can recommend for this need only the invention of new means of mass slaughter . . .

Can anything besides military effort ever rouse either experts or public to "pitch in and help?" If nothing else will, perhaps we have already lost what Professor Seitz says we must defend--the confident Renaissance faith in man's freedom to make and execute new, creative plans.

M. F. LYBARGER

Chicago, Ill.

Literary Stepchildren

Sir:

I agree heartily with Psychologist Don C. Charles that the stepchildren in U.S. literature are our schoolteachers [TIME, April 3]. Furthermore, I feel that if they were pictured more truly and appealingly, taxpayers would raise their salaries, and ambitious youngsters would enter the profession . . .

LUCILE ROSENHEIM

Highland Park, Ill.

Sir:

Psychologist Charles's attack upon literature's one-eyedness respecting the American schoolteacher is, I fear, one-eyed also.

Of Look Homeward, Angel's schoolmam Margaret Leonard, Thomas Wolfe wrote: "It was the most tranquil and the most passionate face he had ever seen . . . If he noticed her emaciation at all now, it was only with a sense of her purification . . . One by one the merciless years reaped down his gods and captains. What had lived up to hope? . . . Enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested his hooded houseless soul . . ."

RICHARD H. DAVIS

Norman, Okla.

Sir:

. . . I think it would be wise if Psychologist Charles would read a few lines written by Robert Burns on the subject of talking about other people and their manners:

0 wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae many a blunder free us,

An' foolish notion

What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,

An' ev'n devotion . . .

GORDON L. MOSTELLER

Newberry, Fla.

Fighting Doctor (Cont'd)

Sir:

. . . Your article "Fighting Doctor" [TIME, March 20] pointedly intimates that I was blocking the reforms sponsored by the Hoover Commission . . . I have always stood for progress and change which is constructive. I do not shun being critical if thereby I am constructive. The record of the Hoover Commission is monumentally constructive in the main and has been a Herculean accomplishment, but it has not been a work in which there is universal agreement for every task-force report or which is supported item by item by its members themselves. If a member of the Commission or any other citizen cannot support some item or a phase of it, there is no justice in saying or implying that he was blocking reforms . . .

I "did not deny waste and duplication" in my testimony before the Congress, but I could have argued that military hospitals are like manned firehouses. Municipalities employ firemen, and maintain costly equipment in comparative idleness for the sake of having a well-trained, well-equipped fire-fighting force in an emergency. Cities do not close down firehouses because they have suffered no recent holocausts . . .

JOEL T. BOONE

Rear Admiral, M.C., U.S.N.

Bethesda, Md.

Roll or Drown

Sirs:

. . . I resent your slur on the shipbuilders of New England: the presidential yacht Williamsburg "rolled and pitched and yawed with sickening vigor . . ." [TIME, March 27].

Get this straight, Mr. Editor--there is no "built-in crankiness" in the Williamsburg. She was designed by three of the best shipbuilders this country ever produced: John Burkhardt and James Hunter of the Bethlehem Ship Building Co., and William S. Newell of the Bath Iron Works [he built her]. She came out as the Aras and [her original owner, Hugh Chisholm] took her around the world . . .

The big brass of the Navy picked her as an ideal boat for the President, and because a bunch of Missouri Democrats couldn't take it, don't blame it on the ship. (Seventeen big ships hove to in the North Atlantic that week.) Any sailor knows that a ship has to roll or drown in her own smother.

REGINALD H. SPRAGUE

Orleans, Mass.

Two-Way Trade

Sir:

Although I have a high regard for your publication, I found the item about the eleven U.S. businessmen persuading their British counterparts that Great Britain could sell more in the U.S. market [TIME, March 27] certainly irritating . . .

It is not only your rate of tariffs which operates to discourage other countries' exports to you, but your complicated custom laws and your absurd methods of customs appraisal . . . The offhand way in which Arthur Motley brushed off this issue suggests that he does not realize that this is really the crux of the problem of two-way trade between Britain and the U.S. I believe that lecturing so complacently to the British under these circumstances is the sort of thing that can give your well-intentioned countrymen a reputation for brashness.

J. M. DELORME

Kitchener, Ont.

State of Mind

Sir:

Your article about Harold Laski [TIME, April 3] points out the fundamental weakness of both Socialism and Communism. Socialists and Communists don't like the world we live in but they aren't sure what kind of world they do want.

I suppose they are striving for security and prosperity for everyone. But security and prosperity mean different things to different people. An income of $10,000 a year would mean poverty to some families and wealth to others . . .

In the last analysis, security and prosperity are states of mind otherwise known as contentment. Zealots and crackpots can stir up our economy . . . but they can't make anybody happy. Each person has to do that for himself.

E. V. LOCKHART JR.

Yakima, Wash.

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