Man of the Year

Sir:

Harlow Curtice--what an astounding selection ! Just offhand, I can name a hundred likelier choices, among them Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Dulles, the Pope, Schweitzer and Sibelius. I regard your choice as a cowardly surrender to your business office, and I will never read your magazine again.

JOHN C. MOYNIHAN Andover, Mass.

Sir:

Hooray for Curtice as Man of the Year. It is great to have the Curtices, the Watsons, the Fords, the Wilsons, the Eisenhowers--the doers in place of the do-gooders guiding the country.

BOB ELY Roswell, N. Mex.

Sir:

Since when did Curtice really do anything more world-shaking than sell a few highly overrated cars? It was Jonas Salk all the way . . .

HOMER HUMBERT Rockville, Md.

Sir:

Having just walked home in freezing weather for the second time in a week due to one of Mr. Curtice's new lemons, I was shocked to see him on your Jan. 2 cover.

EARL BOONIN Philadelphia

Sir:

I can hardly wait to read the squawks from the fogheads (better word than eggheads) about your choice of Curtice.

E. C. IMBRIE Pittsburgh

Sir:

A sign of the times! TIME worships the golden calf.

RICHARD HENSCHKE Utica, N.Y.

Sir:

Outsiders can see why we worship Curtice. He is successful. He heads the outfit that did more trumpeting, and gorged the style-frantic buyer with more overpowered automobiles than can fit on U.S. roads today.

DONALD E. CLARK

Philadelphia

Sir:

Though I would have personally chosen another, I must admit that your selection touches the pulse of our economic system. Your statement that much American prosperity "was directly attributable to ... the automobile" is perhaps the truest yet made in estimating our big year of 1955. Those of us who live in the "steel city" feel keenly that the automobile is indirectly a product of our labor, and when that industry is healthy, we are healthy . . .

J. L. WAARA Pittsburgh

Sir:

Why award the palm to the man who has rammed 4,000,000 cars down the throats of helpless dealers, putting many of them out of business, gone farthest toward bankrupting the country with credit sales of unneeded cars at extravagant prices and got safely away with a boasted billion dollars of net profits?

E. M. CLARK Austin, Texas

Sir:

I heartily endorse your selection of Harlow Curtice as Man of the Year. His foresight and courage paid dividends for every American.

J. H. HOWARD Omaha

Sir:

Curtice is a true symbol of our debt-burdened generation. Could he be the paid piper of mammon, whose honking horn lures us into the quicksand of two-toned time payments ?

LINDSEY C. FOSTER Pennsboro, W.Va.

Sir:

Commendable indeed is TIME'S selection. Curtice is more than spokesman for big business in the fight against Communism; he's spokesman for the big heart and the big sou] in human relations in all business, and small businessmen have little to fear from such leadership. Even "big labor" and "little labor" know Curtice as a fair guy.

EVERETT VAN EVERY Berkeley, Calif.

Sir:

The last paragraph of your story was read by me with special interest. The line of reasoning which you presented--the possibility of building a better culture on the firm foundation of quickly earned, material well-being--is one of my main beliefs. During the past ten years, I have been going back and forth around the nation, trying to persuade our fellow countrymen that the American economy is stronger than they think and that there exists the possibility of our building . . . a better and more beautiful America. I suspect that many of my hearers have thought that these ideas represented nothing more than idealistic optimism.

PHILIP WERNETTE Professor of Business Administration University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sir:

I heartily approve of your selection. I criticize, however, the picture you ran of him sitting at his desk, next to a large brass cuspidor. If Mr. Curtice likes to indulge in a quiet chew of plug tobacco, it is all right with me, but the majority of people consider this a filthy habit.

HERMAN PINETTI, M.D. La Jolla, Calif.

Sir:

Does Curtice use that shiny goboon? It's quite out of character with the plush surroundings.

MARTIN McGowAN JR. Appleton, Minn.

P:Curtice, a tidy cigarette smoker, uses the brass goboon as a floor ashtray.--ED.

A Man & His Prayers

Sir:

May we thank you for the sympathetic story you wrote [Jan. 2] about Adlai Stevenson? We are so used to picking up the magazine, bracing ourselves when we come to "Democrats," all prepared to see the most unflattering picture of the week depicting someone or something, and reading a slanted article. This was a most .welcome change. GENEVIEVE J. PRYOR Fayetteville, Ark.

Napoleonic Whodunit

Sir:

In your Dec. 26 item, dealing with the cause of Napoleon's death, it seems odd that the French magazine Arts, which now charges the English with inventing a verdict of cancer to suppress news of a tropical disease contracted on St. Helena, doesn't know that the same charge was made in 1937 by Raoul Brice, Lieut. General of the French Army, in a book called The Riddle of Napoleon. He says the malady was an abscess of the liver complicated by amebic dysentery contracted on the island--approximately the sense of your article. He also flatly accuses the English of fabricating carcinoma, to quiet the Boney faction, and to get off the hook of cruelty to an eminent prisoner by confining him in an unhealthy place.

JAMES M. CAIN

Hyattsville, Md.

Sir:

No need for Arts to look for the Machiavellian machinations of perfidious Albion in the erroneous diagnosis, because pathological anatomy was, at the time of Napoleon's death, only in the initial phase.

ALBERT DE GROAT, M.D. Detroit

Arabian Blight

Sir:

TIME'S coverage of what is happening in the explosive Middle East has perhaps surpassed in objective accuracy that of any other American periodical. I was, therefore, shocked by the interpretation of what is happening in Saudi Arabia in your issue of Dec. 19.

I shall not argue any of the specific and highly arguable charges your reporter made. Let me only say that it was not fair to rely on H. St. John Philby for an analysis of the present regime in Saudi Arabia. I have great respect for Philby as a historian; having failed in his mission in Saudi Arabia and having been booted out of the country, he is hardly an objective commentator on the present regime. Nor can Benjamin Shwadran, the editor of the pro-Israeli, anti-Arabic journal, Middle Eastern Affairs, be properly quoted without balancing his charges with the defense of an anti-Israeli, pro-Arabic writer.

No country in modern times, if ever, has advanced so rapidly as Saudi Arabia. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it has caught up with 700 years' lag in one generation. If there are still a hundred or so years to be caught up with, what is needed from a responsible reporter giving millions of Americans the only picture they have of the country is praise for the enormous accomplishments that have been made and encouragement for the difficult metamorphoses still ahead.

The real hope for the future of Saudi Arabia is that the former strong friendship and admiration for America, now strained and wearing thin because of unwise American policy in the area, may be restored, and the promising partnership of a few years ago revived.

GARLAND EVANS HOPKINS Executive Vice President American Friends of the Middle East, Inc. New York City

Sir:

For two years I was with the Arabian American Oil Co. in Saudi Arabia. I had long hoped to see an article such as yours. It is long, long overdue. But whose fault is it that the money is being squandered by men with no civic consciousness? The Americans in the Arabian American Oil Co. are responsible for King Saud's position, and, when there was a chance to start him off on the right track with his millions, we lacked the faith in ourselves to do it.

AUSTIN M. KELLAM Binghamton, N.Y.

Sir:

With a few figures, your "Decay in the Desert" makes it startlingly clear why King Saud trembles with anger and fear at the very thought of Israel. This young, vigorous neighboring democracy is a palpable threat to his disease-festered, corruption-ridden, feudal police-state.

FRANK HALL

Philadelphia

The Snark Facts Sir:

I read with interest your Dec. 19 article "Pioneers in Space," in which you mention the "mishaps" attendant on the Snark missile program. I am sure that not only the employees of Northrop Aircraft, Inc., but the military personnel close to the project, share my conviction that the Snark has contributed far too much to U.S. missile technology to be dismissed with a feeble witticism ["the Snark-infested waters of Cape Canaveral"]. At the time the Snark program began, immediately after World War II, the problems of developing an accurate intercontinental missile were widely considered impossible of solution; the project has yielded both an airframe and a guidance system which have been tested and proved to an unexampled degree. There is no doubt that in actual accomplishment the Snark is the most advanced long-range missile in the U.S.

KENNETH B. YOST Supervisor, Hydraulics and Controls Dept., Engineering Test Northrop Aircraft, Inc. Hawthorne, Calif.

P:The witticism should not be credited to TIME but to irreverent members of the armed forces.--ED.

Christ's Grandmother

Sir:

Novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes has quite a story in St. Anne, Grandmother of Our Saviour [Dec. 26] ... But if this "Anne" was so wonderful, why didn't her daughter Mary turn at once, and naturally, to her at the moment of the Annunciation? In Mary's moment of perplexity, amazement and exhilaration, she went with haste to her cousin Elisabeth and stayed with her for about three months! (Luke 1:39 and 56.) (THE REV.) FRANK LAWRENCE

First United Presbyterian Church Indiana, Pa.

Sir:

It seems to me that Novelist Keyes is being unfair to Christ's grandfather, and I protest against this slight against us males.

M. NOVELLA Miami

Beersheba's Hospital

Sir:

In reporting a gift of $1,000,000 by the I.L.G.W.U. to build a new hospital in Beersheba, Israel, we were distressed to read [Jan. 2] that the city of Beersheba "has no hospital." It is my duty to report to you that Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, has been maintaining a hospital in Beersheba since November 1949. It currently has 101 beds, and annually treats more than 5,000 patients, including a substantial percentage of Arabs . . .

MIRIAM FREUND Vice President-in-charge Hadassah New York City

MacArthur & Mitchell

Sir:

Regarding your Dec. 26 review of The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell: throughout the years I've read Emile Gauvreau's and Lester Cohen's Billy Mitchell, Isaac Don Levine's Mitchell: Pioneer of Air Power and others. I do not recall any more than an unsubstantiated rumor that MacArthur voted for acquittal . . .

CHARLES R. KELLER JR. Colonel, U.S.A.F. Mobile, Ala.

P:Author Levine reports that after the trial a newspaperman, rummaging through a wastepaper basket which held the discarded ballots, discovered that MacArthur had voted for acquittal. In a letter addressed to Senator Wiley of Wisconsin (who had requested confirmation of the story), and published in the Congressional Record (Feb. 19, 1947); MacArthur said: "... Your recollection of my part in [Mitchell's] trial is entirely correct. It was fully known to him and he never ceased to express his gratitude for my attitude . . ."--ED.

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