Beware, Sir Winston

Sir:

If Churchill doublecrosses us, let Russia have the British Isles. Then we can justifiably atom-bomb the Gulf of Mexico until the Gulf Stream flows into Canadian waters, and England will be frozen stiff next winter . . .

EDWARD BODIN New York City

The Vulgar Facts

Sir:

I know the United States very well, and after reading Clement Attlee's speech in full, I'm damned if he didn't hit the nail right smack on the head.

A. A. MARSHALL Toronto, Ont.

The Respectable Comrades

Sir:

Is Senator McCarthy so occupied with cloaks, daggers, slouched hats and time bombs carried at the ready that he does not yet know that the normal form of address between members of the British Trades Unions and Labor Party members is "comrade"? And what is wrong with the word which we have unfortunately been obliged to use so often in the phrase, "comrades in arms"? . . .

JOE QUINN Stanley, Durham, England

Life With Lizzie

Sir:

Your Ford empire story [May 18] was excellently done--with one exception: "The vast empire was as shaky and ready to collapse as a 25-year-old model T trying to make its way through deep sand."

As the owner of a 1911 model T, I find the simile quite distasteful . . . My 42-year-old T is neither shaky nor ready to collapse, and is occasionally run through deep sand just for the exercise . . .

HARRY W. PIERSON Chicago

Sir:

If the longing expressed for a return to simplicity and economy in our automobiles is out of pace with the times, I shall then presume on an old man's (44) right to dream and remember the day when a Ford was a Ford, and not a composite of a Cadillac, a Buick, and a snorkel submarine rolled into one.

It strikes me "that our return to political sanity, as evidenced at the polls last November, might just possibly hold some promise of a return to economic sanity and automobiles that are functional to a degree, with the gingerbread and built-in mortgages left out.

KEN MILLER Cleveland

Sir:

Congratulations on your article . . . Too bad HF II doesn't realize that he has got to build a better car before his company can again be first.

JOHN W. HEATH Verona, N.Y.

Keeping Score for Ike

Sir:

I have been reading President Eisenhower's golf scores in your columns without being too disturbed at their being given as much space and coverage as the budget, but, alas. Now it's bridge scores, yet [TIME, May11] . . .

HENRY L. KIRCHNER Bellevue, Texas

Sir:

If you must persist in reporting such trivia, put it in Sport.

NORMAN E. HUME Long Beach, Calif.

Sir:

I have no doubt that Ike plays bridge as well as you and the experts say, but . . . the bid and play of his hand was just normal bridge--kitchen-garden variety. Some day, perhaps, you will tell us how the President plays a difficult hand.

DESMOND K. LAUB Los Angeles

Pistols for Two

Sir:

Re Secretary John Foster Dulles' trip to the Middle East--TIME, May 18: To one humble Canadian citizen living in England, the President's tactlessness in presenting a pistol to General Naguib--a dictator who sometimes advocates lawlessness--is on a par with the irresponsible and mischief-making remark of Mr. Attlee, to the effect that some Americans do not want peace.

C. C. McKINNON Herne Bay, Kent, England

Sir:

[If] John Foster Dulles' . . . oral support of Naguib--aided and abetted by Eisenhower's token Colt pistol--in driving out the enemy (British) from the Suez Canal Zone is an indication of the new Republican foreign policy in the Middle East, may I suggest that it appears a little shortsighted. If, with America's approving eye, Naguib with his Nazi-advised army manages to dislodge the British from the Canal Zone, who then defends this vital international gunpowder heap in the future? With the British gone, only two powers are capable of the rough and tumble of the Middle East intrigues--America and Russia.

As to Britain's right to be in the zone, there is no doubt. Although torn up by the Egyptians in 1951, the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 does not expire until 1956. It might prove more interesting to probe into America's right to occupy the Panama Canal Zone. The State Department's 18-year-belated $25 million compensation to Colombia was surely an admission of Theodore Roosevelt's high-handed methods earlier in the century . . .

One can imagine the uproar in Washington if Britain's Foreign Secretary Eden presented a sword from Queen Elizabeth II to Colombia's President [Laureano Gomez] and encouraged the Colombians to reoccupy Panama.

PHILIP R. STEPHENSON Toronto, Ont.

In a Crate over Spithead

Sir:

Thanks for your May 18 story about Christopher Draper, England's "Mad Major.'' True, a rather pathetic tale of stunt flying, but let's give the old boy his due -- once upon a time he was the Bill Bridgeman [TIME, April 27] of his day.

Thirty-six years ago, as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, I saw the "mad major" test an incredible looking crate called a triplane-- three wings, one below the other--top wing long, second shorter, third shortest. About 10,000 feet up over Spithead (the strip of water separating the mainland from the Isle of Wight) he made that crate do every trick . . . then put it in a dive and on the way down executed three close loops--one after the other.

BASIL LIVINGSTON Ann Arbor, Mich.

Quiet Flows the Coaxial

Sir:

Puzzled George Van Dorp and his waterworks engineer colleagues [who found a rise in city water consumption at the end of each popular TV program -- TIME, May 18] are some 15 years behind crusty old Oscar Edwin Hewitt, Ed Kelly's -- and Chicago's -- commissioner of public works in the '30s. Oscar, a onetime Chicago Tribune reporter, kept tabs on the popularity of radio programs by the drop-in-city-water-pressure method. The end of a broadcast Joe Louis fight called forth the mightiest efforts of Chicago's Lake Michigan intake stations. Especially if the fight went the route.

Perhaps it was this experience which caused Hewitt to cry "stop" when civil defense authorities prescribed filling of every bathtub at eventide during the fire bomb scare period in the early days of World War II. Oscar asked his engineers to figure out what would happen if this suggestion were carried out just at dusk all over Chicago. The verdict: Chicago's water supply would dry up in 40 minutes. Bathtubs went unfilled in Chicago.

Will O'Neil Evanston, Ill.

Hot Potato (cont'd)

Sir:

Re W. Stanley Rycroft's statement that the Roman Catholics "fight the public school system" [TIME Letters, May 18]: This is a pure and simple lie. It is as utterly ridiculous as saying that the country-club set fights the public recreation system.

I am a Roman Catholic who supports the public school system in the same manner as any Protestant or Jew . . . My child attends a parochial school because I believe that exposure to a religious atmosphere will better prepare him for his life ahead . . .

JOHN A. GRIFFIN

Alexandria, Va.

Sir:

. . . I am not a Roman Catholic; I do not believe in parochial education. But, I cannot help but become thoroughly irked, even to a point of disgust, at the hypocritical concern for "safe" education for their children shown by an American public when supposed dangers of Catholicism on one hand or Communism on the other are suggested as threatening. This same American public is so concerned they even pay school teachers who are privileged to dedicate their lives to serving them. Of course, they pay factory hands more.

. . . When this "concerned" American public voluntarily vote to tax themselves enough to spend as much on their schools as they do on entertainment and pay their teachers as much as they do their plumbers, we might believe they have become concerned.

HERMAN H. KELLERMANN Lexington, Ky.

The Character of Foxes

Sir:

Your simultaneous May 18 reviews of The Rommel Papers and the Rommel movie [The Desert Rats] bring into better focus a picture which is becoming clear as the light of history dispels the fog and battle smoke of the contemporary scene. We see a nation in which psychopathic personalities gained dominance over clearer minds who might have been its better leaders . . . Apparently the public is pushing Hollywood into a distortion of [this picture] if Rommel must be drawn as an unbalanced personality--contrary to fact--to help us maintain pleasant illusions in place of an honest view of the picture.

Can we squarely face the fact that Hitler--an unbalanced man of irrational emotions--through an unfortunate series of circumstances became superior commander to the balanced, rational, likable Rommel--and many like him? . . .

MARY E. COFFEY New York City

Zionism, Judaism & the Vote

Sir:

TIME, May 25 reported that Secretary of State Dulles "delighted" Premier Salaam of Lebanon by denying that "U.S. Middle East policy is Zionist-dictated." Apparently in an effort to frame his point, Mr. Dulles then said that "the Jews as a whole had voted against him in the 1949 New York senatorial race . . . and generally against Ike in 1952."

[Few] American Jews are Zionists. Even assuming that the Zionist organizations control the votes of their members (an undemonstrable assumption), there is absolutely no way of knowing how Americans of Jewish faith vote. Obviously, in the last election, a great many Jews voted the Republican ticket. In New York City, with its large Jewish population, Eisenhower received 43.9% of the vote--an unusually large percentage in this heavily Democratic city.

As the Middle East comes more & more to public attention, it will be well to keep these important distinctions between Jews and Zionists and Judaism and Zionism clearly in mind. Otherwise, the myth of a powerful Zionist vote may continue to be a political football in the U.S. and serve as a fragmentizing and detrimental force in American life.

HENRY S. MOYER Vice President The American Council for Judaism New York City

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