Kennedy & Cuba

Sir:

I am in favor of supporting a Cuban revolt. I feel this is imperative. I am sympathetic with our failure. It is understandable that errors were made.

What I cannot tolerate is the evidence of moral decay in our Government--deceit and dishonesty! To think that we yell to the world that the invasion is strictly Cuban, and then publicly bemoan our failure--rehash it thoroughly! This has so thoroughly disillusioned me, I'll never fully believe our leaders again. What an awful way to feel about our wonderful country.

MRS. LYNN DAVIS

Visalia, Calif.

Sir:

There was a time when actions like our now admitted intervention in Cuba were called "brinksmanship." There was a time also when Adlai Stevenson would have spoken out against our conduct in this affair as did, to his lasting credit, Senator Wayne Morse. Those were the days when Senator Kennedy was rapping President Eisenhower for publicly and vainly lying about our role in the U-2 incident.

Now Kennedy has evolved from U-2 to me-too, strengthened Castro, and made the U.S. and its unintelligence service the laughingstock of the world--amidst new threats of direct military intervention and a frantic quest for testimonials from Goldwater and Nixon, from Eisenhower and Truman and Rockefeller. President Kennedy has taken the official blame but is busy trying to establish a future innocence-by-association.

FELIX ANSELM Madison, Wis.

Sir:

How ironic that Mr. Kennedy succeeded (briefly) in pushing his brave New Frontier to--of all places--the Bay of Pigs!

Matthew (7:6) must have had Mr. Kennedy in mind when he wrote: "Neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you."

RAY (no kin) KENNEDY Glendale, Calif.

Sir:

"The moon is red. Message to Stanislav. The moon is red." These are the words that came across the air to Guatemala on D-day-plus-one. We all felt as though we were on a sinking ship; Cuba was going to be lost. I, as an American citizen married to a Guatemalan, would have a lot of explaining to do.

The Guatemalans are completely incredulous as to what has happened. I hear all around me: "How can your countrymen allow the establishment of a Communist base in Cuba, a menace to the U.S. and all of Central and South America?" The people here have retained the memory of a past Communist regime too vividly to bury their heads in the sand.

Your article "The Cuban Disaster," as one of the thermometers of the American people, will help to show the Latin Americans that someone in the States is on their side.

DORIS SMITH TOePKE Guatemala City, Guatemala

Sir:

TIME'S sagacious reporting of the Cuban invasion disaster was a real eye opener. Perhaps the only good to come from this ugly mess will be the awakening of the average American as to his naivete in global politics. If this is representative of the New Frontiersmanship, the prospects look dismal indeed.

JOHN R. HEMBY Cincinnati

Sir:

Did the CIA also advise George III of England?

ELIZABETH BARRY Arlington, Va.

Sir:

What does President Kennedy mean--making the U.S. the laughingstock by backing a weak, hopelessly inadequate invasion attempt on Cuba and saying: "The soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history"?

EVERETT A. HELLMUTH Hedgesville, W. Va.

Sir:

One is reminded of Anthony Eden and Suez, but there's a difference: we're stuck with our man for four years.

JOHN R. BURROUGHS

Steamboat Springs, Colo.

Sir:

You made some particularly stupid remarks regarding the "naive notions" that President Kennedy brought with him to the office of President of the U.S. Because of these "naive notions" he was elected President. I, for one, hope he doesn't lose a single one of them!

MRS. H. L. VAN CAMPEN Castro Valley, Calif.

Sir:

I know exactly how our President feels. I was once considered a good amateur boxer. Then came the first professional fight. Bang--pow--crash--wow!

CARL E. SCHULTZ

St. Joseph, Mich.

Sir:

Even in my wildest Republican dreams I could not have envisioned anything which could so quickly and completely tear down the image that the U.S. has worked so hard to build--of strength, tempered by honesty and nonintervention.

Let President Kennedy find some extraordinary hobby (parachute jumping, for instance) that will prove his "courage" at a risk to himself instead of to all of civilization.

HELEN FRANCIS

Hays, Kans.

Sir:

I note the news media are "crying" because of the so-called lack of free flow of information from the Pentagon. I personally hope the President imposes complete censorship until we actually have the Communists on the run.

This is a war we are in--not a cold war, but lukewarm to hot. Why are we telling these facts about the Cuban invasion? We don't give away our strategy or the strategy of our allies during total war.

If television, radio and newspapers continue to put the "big scoop" ahead of our nation's security and continue to show such irresponsibility, they are only asking for censorship.

EVELYNE L. GORDON Wichita, Kans.

Sir:

My faith as an American is reinforced by your objective reporting on the invasion of Cuba. Temporary reverses in foreign policy for our nation are endurable if the freedom to print the truth survives. I'm sure it was as disheartening for you to print the tale as it was for me to read it.

GERALD E. BROWN Chula Vista, Calif.

Sir:

In your account of "The Cuban Disaster," you quote Ramon Barquin, "a military expert of the Revolutionary Council." I am not nor have I been a military expert of the council, nor have I any official relationship to the council. I took no part in the planning or execution of this operation. In fact, as you point out, I doubt that any responsible Cuban was consulted or had any responsibility for this operation.

RAMON BARQUIN Miami Springs, Fla.

P: At the time of the invasion, Ramon Barquin was the military expert of the People's Revolutionary Movement, one of the autonomous organizations with representation on the council.--ED.

Sir:

It can do no harm to constantly remind Mr. Kennedy and his staff that one overly enthusiastic error in calculation could make him the vigorous President of a radioactive crater called America, to whose wretched survivors the word Kennedy would be the supreme obscenity.

L. R. NICHOLL Colorado Springs, Colo.

Sir:

As a member of the younger generation, I say it's not all right to be second in space, to lose Cuba to Communism, and to appear foolish to the world. What do we have to do, wait to be blown from our rocking chairs?

MARY CONNOR

New York City

Sir:

One seems to hear nothing but breast beating mea culpas, and what a bunch of fools you all are. You have the courage and ability to lead the world. In heaven's name, get on with it.

The free world looks to you for leadership, not a demonstration on how to make a public confession. Away with the sackcloth and ashes. You have much for which to be thankful.

JAMES F. BROWNE

Toronto

The Real Yo-Yos

Sir:

The subjects of Strombotne's painting, Yo-Yo, were easily recognizable as Pablo Picasso and Kathy (his stepdaughter since his marriage to Jacqueline). The photographs he used as models can be found in The Private World of Pablo Picasso, by David D. Duncan. The "Lolita-like" girl is Kathy, the figure for the man is, of all people, Gary Cooper, and the face of the "sinister" old man is Picasso.

PATRICIA HEARD

Whittier, Calif.

P: Painter Strombotne says that the figures were indeed inspired by Duncan's photographs of Kathy and Cooper, but denies that the face is Picasso's.--ED.

No Columbus, He

Sir:

Gagarin was named hero. But Gagarin was only an experimental object whom the scientists placed into a cabin for a flight around the world, not unlike what they did to dogs and monkeys. What a shame to compare him to Columbus. Columbus was the leader and explorer who sailed on his own with full responsibility for himself and for his men.

O. TARNAWSKY Philadelphia

Top Teacher

Sir:

Mrs. Mullen of the Mill School in Whittier, Calif., was the best second-grade teacher I saw in almost three years of visiting classrooms. I am distressed to find her portrayed in your article about my book as the prime example of the teacher who underestimates the children in her class.

Your writer is certainly justified in his fury against the wretched bell that calls seven-year-olds away from writing when they want to write. But of all the evils introduced by the bureaucratic organization of schools, the fixed schedule for rest periods is probably the most necessary. The point of the episode as a whole was Mrs. Mullen's success in stimulating these children to want to write, as part of the Whittier schools' success in building reading skills through writing.

MARTIN MAYER New York City

Anyone for Urdu?

Sir:

The four-page questionnaire that has been issued to President Kennedy's Peace Corps members includes a question about Urdu, the third-largest spoken language in the world.

Urdu, which is a Turkish word for lashkar (army), developed under the influence of the Mogul kings some 400 years ago as a sort of lingua franca, originating in the northern parts of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. Later during the centuries, it spread very rapidly throughout the subcontinent and became the principal language of the people. For the first time in its history, Urdu has been declared an official language (in Pakistan, pop. 95 million)--the other official language being Bengali. The Urdu script is Arabic, written from right to left.

Some of the many words Urdu has given to the English language are: khaki, pundits, kismet, pyjamas.

IBNUL HASAN Rawalpindi, Pakistan

The Walrus & the Carpenter

Sir:

With thanks to Lewis Carroll, we herewith comment on the meeting of our new carpenter and builder, Kennedy, with the walrus-mustachioed statesman, Macmillan:

"A slice of Laos," the walrus said,

"Is what we chiefly need,

Congo and Arabia besides

Are very good indeed,

Now, if you're ready, taxpayers,

We can begin to feed."

DR. ERNEST F. BURGER Glen Head, N.Y.

Hesburgh & Notre Dame

Sir:

Thank you for the good things you said about Notre Dame and me. Some of the quotations, while verbally correct, were so much out of context that they seemed to say what I did not really say. The "abysmal mediocrity" was part of a long historical summary on the ups and downs of Catholic higher learning, not an indictment of present-day efforts. The charge of being "almost universally destitute of intellectual leadership" was from a paragraph much later on that referred to a specific problem: "As to civil rights and equal opportunity for all races, we have been almost universally destitute of intellectual leadership in our colleges and universities. I know of no research in this area." This latter is an indictment, of course, and unfortunately it is true of the vast majority of all colleges and universities, public and private.

The final quotation is again a mixture of two sources. All doctrines, even Communism, are of course studied and discussed in a Catholic university. My not wanting to be a medieval man came from another context, wherein I described St. Thomas as doing a vital work in his time and our need to apply the ancient wisdom with equal vitality to the monumental and unprecedented problems of our own times.

(THE REV.) T. M. HESBURGH President

University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Ind.

Sir:

As a graduate magna cum laude of a ranking Jesuit institution, Fordham, I observe that the fatal intellectual schism that rends Catholic colleges has seldom been more openly revealed than in your story on Notre Dame's Father Hesburgh.

Newman's dream of a first-class, thoroughly Catholic university went up in the smoke of a thousand bonfires five hundred years ago. The church cannot and will not tolerate any thoroughgoing study of man as part and parcel of nature. Whether he likes it or not, Father Hesburgh cannot be other than a medieval man. His profession compels it.

JOHN VAN LAER Evanston, Ill.

Redbrick Rebuttal

Sir:

Congratulations on your excellent photograph of Nottingham University. At first glance, I was unable to account for the absence of student life on the lawns and lake, but on reading the article it became quite clear that at the time we were either working hard, at the chemist's buying tranquilizing pills, or attending group therapy classes.

Presumably, the same thing was happening at Manchester, but how do you explain the three apparently carefree students pictured outside Birmingham University? Don't they care about white collars?

J. M. TAGG

Nottingham, England

P: Chances are they were visitors from Oxbridge.--ED.

Re-View

Sir:

All too often, you depict every run-of-the-mill, nondescript, Caspar Milquetoast, blend-into-the-woodwork type gangster as looking like a bank clerk. And now Eichmann! Come, come, TIME. Where are you doing your banking? Surely not out here in the West, where I am married to a banker who looks like a gangster!

RITA LYNCH ROAKE Sheridan, Ore.

Sir:

Your movie reviewer must have meant to say (in the review of Mein Kampf) that Hitler resembled a wheyfaced, flabby movie reviewer, as there are no postal clerks answering that description.

DANIEL EAST Legislative Representative National Federation of Post Office Clerks Peoria, Ill.

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