The U.N. & Red China

Sir:

If the United Nations is to become a place where we can properly attempt to resolve our problems with other nations, then I think it is high time that the U.S. stop trying to solve the Red China problem by pretending that Red China doesn't exist.'There is no question that Red China should be represented in the U.N. If we are insistent on keeping our enemies out of the U.N., then we are destroying it.

FRANCIS N. THOMAS

Buffalo, N.Y.

Sir:

I cannot seem to get it through my head why anyone, except a Communist, would want Red China in the United Nations at this time. Granted that there can be no world disarmament without her, why not wait until Russia has agreed to arms inspection and then insist that Red China also must accept arms inspection as the price of admission? This might even act as a spur for them to put pressure on each other. However, in the meantime, for the free and neutral nations to have to take on faith two such world-conquest-minded troublemakers (when the one already in the United Nations will not submit to inspection) would merely compound all of the other problems.

JOY E. BRAND

Austin, Texas

Sir:

Once Mr. K. felt sadly

For his cause in the U.N. was doing badly;

But now he looks on quite gladly

Because the U.N. has Adlai.

RAY NEIHENGEN JR.

Chicago

The U.N. & the Congo

Sir:

Re disintegration of the U.N. in the Congo, Christendom has already lost the cold war in Central Africa, not so much because of Franco-Belgian-British imperialism as because of race prejudice. The oppression of the colored in South Africa, the rear-guard action of the whites in Southern Rhodesia and Arkansas, are decisive.

One of two religions with no color bar will win Africa: the religion of Karl Marx, or Islam, where monarch and slave pray side by side in complete equality. It would be wise for the West to invest in Islam, which has tens of millions of missionaries on the spot, and which so far has held the line steadfastly against Communism.

WILLIAM A. EDDY

Colonel, U.S.M.C. (ret.)

Beirut, Lebanon

Aspirin for a Severed Arm?

Sir:

Kennedy's solution for our domestic problems can be likened to giving a man who has had his arm cut off an aspirin. You might lessen the pain while he bleeds to death. The answer to unemployment does not lie in stimulating buying power through increased social security benefits, increased unemployment benefits, or raising the minimum wage.

Wage rates geared to productivity, proper depreciation laws for industry permitting sensible write-off of equipment, and curbing the monopolistic power of unions in large industries that create a continual inflationary trend are the only ways to help the economy.

J. F. HELSEL

Salem, Ind.

Sir:

If a fraction of Mr. Kennedy's spending projects is passed, the New Frontier is liable to turn into the Last Roundup.

R. S. HAYES

Fresno, Calif.

First Ladies

Sir:

I very much admired the picture of Mrs. John F. Kennedy on your cover. I would like to know how many other First Ladies have appeared on TIME'S covers before.

LEENA KAPRIO

Alexandria, Egypt

P: Four. TIME'S first First Lady (Sept. 17, 1928) was Grace Anna Goodhue Coolidge, wife of President Calvin Coolidge. President Herbert Hoover's wife, Lou Henry Hoover, appeared twice: once before her husband was elected (April 21, 1924), when she headed the Women's National Law Enforcement Committee which urged enforcement of Prohibition, and once after she became First Lady (May 13, 1929). Eleanor Roosevelt was on TIME'S cover twice during her husband's terms in office (Nov. 12, 1933; April 17, 1939) and once since his death (April 7, 1952).

The cover on Mamie Doud Eisenhower (Jan. 19, 1953) appeared just before her husband took office.--ED.

No Need

SIR:

I AM GLAD TO SEE YOU ARE STILL BATTING 1.000 REGARDING ANY INFORMATION CONCERNING ME. AS USUAL YOUR INFORMATION STINKS. I NEED A HOUSE AND A NIGHTCLUB IN PALM BEACH LIKE YOU NEED A TUMOR.

FRANK SINATRA*

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.

Stults, Nargles & a Gort

Sir:

My roommate disapproves my reading of TIME instead of The Teaching of Reading or Man and His Chromosomes, but we both unzipped about six layers of tension while reading about Shelley Berman's plastic-bottomed, American-made flack. I wonder where he picked it up, and why it wasn't already in the repair shop, instead of sitting in his apartment confusing TIME'S reporters.

Besides, if Mr. Berman has four stults and isn't using them, it is about time he confessed! Someone took the sole stult from my residence hall two years ago, and we can barely exist without it.

BARBARA MANNING

Mills College

Oakland, Calif.

Sir:

I have 164 blue and white, near-perfect nargles, complete with nargle pouch, which I will be happy to trade for Mr. Berman's extra (?) pair of stults. Will also throw in a foot-operated gort (total invisibility guaranteed by manufacturer for life of product).

MRS. ANNETTE STEUCKE

Richmond

Life in Los Alamos

Sir:

Having read the article on Los Alamos, N. Mex., I am concerned over the statement of Physicist Tom Putnam: "In fact, we have everything."

He said not a word concerning the church and spiritual life of this atomic community. He mentions everything else that would complete community living but religion.

THE REV. CLARKE B. SCHAAF

The Second Congregational Church

Attleboro, Mass.

Sir:

When you report that the Manhattan Project took over a "deserted" boys' school in 1943, I have to write you, in justice to my old friend Albert J. Connell, who bought Los Alamos ranch from Ashley Pond, organized and operated a boys' school for 20 years until it was appropriated for public use in 1942.

Connell told me that Robert Oppenheimer had taken over his headquarters and he had to notify the staff and students that the school would not open in the fall. The next winter his brother wrote me that Albert had died of pneumonia, but that he thought really it was from a broken heart over losing his school.

DON P. JOHNSTON

Wake Forest, N.C.

Moral v. Right

Sir:

It seems to me that Arnold Toynbee, in his so-called "moral" comparison between the murder of 6,000,000 Jews and the displacement of 800,000 Arabs, has neglected to notice the very fundamental difference between murder and eviction. He may rest assured that if 6,000,000 Jews had been given the opportunity of leaving their homes and countries alive instead of being exterminated, they would have long since been readily assimilated and settled in other parts of the world, as are their more fortunate brethren who managed to survive.

EVA E. NEUMANN

Elmhurst, N.Y.

Sir:

After all the parlor-nice distinctions have been drawn and the charges of antisemitism have been hurled, the unavoidable irony is this: that these 800,000 wretched Arab refugees were made homeless by a people who pointed at their own great persecution not so much in accusation of their persecutors but in moral justification for their own transgressions. I wept for the long-suffering Jews of Europe until I saw the Arab refugees at Gaza; then I wept for humanity.

PHILIP J. GANEM

Wolfeboro, N.H.

Sir:

It has taken A. J. Toynbee to face up to some of the harsher ramifications of the Palestine problem. If one wrong (Nazi persecution of the Jews) can be righted by another (expropriating the land of 800,000 Arabs), then, and only then, can Israel be justified.

DEAN JABARA

Plymouth, Mich.

Head & Tail of It

Sir:

I note that your book reviewer (Story for Icarus) and the Culver illustrator like their Minotaur with a human body and a bull-like head. How come? Ovid, of course, is evasive, but old Bulfinch (ponder the possibilities in that name!) tells it just the other way around. A minor existential choice, perhaps, but not, indeed, without its psychological implications.

F. X. MATHEWS

P: Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867) indeed grasped the Minotaur by the tail; most scholars since then either evade the issue or take the beast by the horns.--ED.

Campus Conservatives

Sir:

Heartiest congratulations on your accurate portrayal of conservatism on the campus. It is indeed the liberals who are on the run, and many of those of "New Deal vintage" (mainly professors) can no longer run too fast. Liberals aren't really "dirty people"--they are merely living in the past, the same charge they use against those of us who reject the pat formulas of the welfare state.

Barry Goldwater and William Buckley are the intellectual spokesmen for the new generation, not Arthur Schlesinger. Conservatism ought not to be equated with backwardness. Liberalism in its modern sense looks back to Marx, while conservatism goes back to basic human nature and man's natural inclination toward freedom.

ALLAN C. BROWNFELD

Associate Editor

The Flat Hat

College of William and Mary

Williamsburg, Va.

Sir:

"Conservative Roger Hamowy'' does not favor "disarmament in the interests of 'freedom,' because then the Government would be forced to cut taxes." Libertarian Ronald Hamowy favors disarmament because of the conviction that nuclear war would certainly involve the total destruction of civilization and that some sort of disarmament agreement with Soviet Russia is feasible. That such disarmament would allow for a reduction in federal expenditures of many billions of dollars and would, perhaps, result in the lowering of taxes is a worthwhile, but ancillary, consideration.

RONALD HAMOWY

University of Chicago

Chicago

What's Swat

Sir:

What, what, what? All these years I have presumed that although the Akhoond of Swat is dead, long liveth the Akhoond. But according to your article [Feb. 3] he is now a paltry Wali. What's Swat?

J. ELLERY

Fort Miller, N.Y.

P: Far from paltry, Wali is a Persian word meaning ruler. It is a title selected by the present Swati ruling family after it unified the local tribes and won British recognition in 1926. The Wall's grandfather enjoyed the title of Akhoond, a Persian word meaning religious teacher. But in the 20th century secular titles have displaced religious ones; the Wali of Swat, no longer Akhoond, is the only Wali among the Pakistani princes.--ED.

Thoughts or Yaktion?

Sir:

Seven out of the 25 letters in your Feb. 10 Letters section were from Californians. Does that suggest that in our modest pioneer state reside the nation's largest percentage of informed, thinking, action-taking citizens? Or are we just the yak-yakinest?

HOWARD BLAKE

Hollywood

P:Wel-1-1-1-1 . . .--ED.

* TIME reported: "Word appeared in the columns that Sinatra was about to buy a Palm Beach pad and a nightclub, too, so he could wage war with an established nightclub owner who had refused to offer Frankie $5,000 for a one-shot appearance."

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