Man of the Year

Sir: Thank you for choosing General Westmoreland as Man of the Year [Jan. 7]. It is the greatest tribute anyone has paid our men fighting in Viet Nam. I look on it as TIME'S thank-you to the men dying for our lives.

PETER J. MOLAY

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

Sir: How apropos that the bust of General Westmoreland should be photographed in the original clay. It seems truly representative of all G.I.s who are winning this one on their bellies in the mud of the Viet jungles.

(MRS.) GEORGIA SOUTHARD

East Greenbush, N.Y.

Sir: The choice of Westmoreland is outrageous and is offensive to all who work and pray for peace. We need recognition for men of heroic stature in thought and action, not for military mediocrities who achieve incidental prominence through a tragic error of history.

Y. KRASNA

New York City

Sir: Your choice would be one of the great jokes of history if it were not so frightening. In a world that needs ideas, that needs truly inspired leadership, how can TIME settle for a professional soldier? Better Sandy Koufax!

JOHN A. RAMSEY

Arlington Heights, Ill.

Sir: Congratulations on the good sense you displayed in selecting General Westmoreland for Man of the Year. His has been a lonely, unpleasant assignment, but he quietly carried on with high effectiveness and without complaint. To appreciate his worth, one has only to remember the contrasting career of General MacArthur in Korea and the Philippines. General Westmoreland, I suspect, is totally uninterested in his image.

RALPH E. SAMUEL

New York City

Sir: Congratulations on your choice of General Westmoreland. However, I would like to voice my disappointment that you never chose General Douglas MacArthur as your Man of the Year. MacArthur was the main reason we haven't lost more of Asia.

BARNEY PHILLIPS

Encino, Calif.

Sir: While we all realize that General Westmoreland is doing his best at a job that has to be done, would it not have been more appropriate to choose someone who is working to make that job unnecessary:

WALTER A. SCHANKE

Bono, Ohio

Sir: I failed to guess the Man of the Year. However, I now realize that General Westmoreland is the logical choice. He is directing a battle that will undoubtedly decide the future of Asia and probably the world.

PATRICK NOLAN

New York City

The Keynesian Influence

Sir: I feel deeply grateful to you for your tribute to John Maynard Keynes [Dec. 31]. It is so understandingly appreciative and so effective. In the crude early days of our economic development, Marx shrewdly appraised our system's weakness --workers got only a subsistence wage, were thus unable to buy back the product of their labor. Marx advocated revolution as the remedy. It was Keynes who saw the way out. As a result of his influence, wealth circulates with great freedom in our whole society, as you so well state. It is this triumphant answer to Marx that makes the teachings of Keynes so valuable to the capitalist world of 1966.

BENJAMIN H. KIZER

Spokane, Wash.

Sir: Your excellent article will ghost many a freshman paper on income determination and many a lecture for those of us who try to teach it. Some will pan your critique as an oversimplification, but it is a wisp of fresh air in a subject polluted by pedantic and prolix alchemists.

DAVID S. LAWRENCE

Economics Faculty

Bridgeport Engineering Institute

Bridgeport, Conn.

Sir: The success of the Keynesians is like the doctors' success, via diet and insulin, with diabetics: the patient remains a sick man. The Keynesians bypass the search for the cause of our economic disease, and so, with all their prescribed economic medication, we are and must remain an economically sick nation, constantly taking pep and dope pills.

NOAH D. ALPER

President

Public Revenue Education Council

St. Louis, Mo.

Truth from Sincerity

Sir: About the dilemma of the historian as participant, so well described in your Schlesinger cover story [Dec. 17]: that dilemma has been poignantly recounted by Marc Bloch, the French Jewish historian, who in his Strange Defeat analyzed a burning issue in which he was deeply involved--the fall of France. He discounts any claim to objectivity: he says that all one can demand from a contemporary historian is sincerity and that out of the comparison of many sincerities, the truth will ultimately emerge. I believe that Schlesinger satisfies that criterion. I myself found consolation in Bloch's dictum while writing The Edge of the Sword, the history of Israel's war of independence.

NETANEL LORCH

Ambassador of Israel

Lima, Peru

Meaning of the Monument

Sir: How ghoulishly appropriate--the proposed Dallas memorial for John F. Kennedy [Dec. 24] looks like an enclosure for a firing squad.

STANLEY MITRUK

Galena, Ill.

Sir: The Kennedy cenotaph reminds me of nothing so much as those useful structures that abound on Parisian boulevards for the relief of the weary traveler.

H. B. MERRILL

Lakewood, Calif.

Sir: The monument resembles the cattle yards used in my home village to sort bulls for shipment.

MANUEL MATEOS

Madrid, Spain

Sir: My congratulations to Architect Johnson on the very beautiful model of the cenotaph. To those who think that simplicity is sterility, I quote the great Rumanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi: "Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things."

FRANK W. HEINZ

Lone Pine, Calif.

Miracle of Understanding

Sir: I am disappointed in your Essay, On Not Losing One's Cool About The Young [Dec. 24]. Are we teen-agers to be shunned by society and merely tolerated? How shall we grow up in a world where adults condemn instead of guiding us? If we are the struggling victims of the oceans of evil, who will throw us a rope and tow us to shore? In our day there have been countless miraculous achievements, literary, musical, industrial, chemical. Why is the miraculous achievement of understanding--something that cannot be stamped out of a machine or discovered in a test tube--pushed aside and replaced with bitter, discouraging accusations and condemnations?

REGINA POLK, age 15

Willcox, Ariz.

Sir: Someone should give your Essayist a medal. I used to think that only a fellow member of my generation could understand us as well as that; it is truly remarkable that an adult could have such insight into what we are really like.

M. JANUS

Buffalo

Sir: Your Essay was excellent, but it failed to mention a principal adult criticism of today's generation: that we refuse to face reality. But "reality" was created by adults, not by us. It was not our generation that refused to recognize the fascist threat in the 1930s, that produced the bomb, that stood idly by as half of Europe was enslaved, that lets Communism loom in Asia by preventing victory on all fronts. This reality is rejected by youth because it is incompatible with our ideals. We rebel against the adult ideal of "not getting involved"; we rebel against being treated by the Government as numbers, not individuals. You quote Robert Louis Stevenson as saying, "Youth is the time to run a mile to see a fire," and you added that it still matters who set the fire. The adult generation has set the fire, and we are running to extinguish it before it consumes us.

ALEXANDRA KRITHADES

The Bronx, N.Y.

New Faces for the Donkey

Sir: Sure is good to see TIME pointing out new faces in the Democratic Party, like Mayor Whelan of Jersey City [Dec. 31]. We Democrats ought to have an alternative choice in the future--a choice other than Hubert Humphrey or one of the Kennedys.

M. A. LONG

Glendale, Calif.

Sir: Your story on Mayor Thomas Whelan of Jersey City was excellent. Yet, although everything you say is true, none of the reforms mentioned have helped the majority of the city's residents. Whelan won the 1965 election because he was the lesser of two evils.

RONALD ONORATO

Jersey City

Moving Toward the Status Quo?

Sir: Father Cahill of St. John's University [Dec. 31] is not the first university president to get fed up with faculty members, but he is probably the first in modern times to silence the opposition by action that is unprofessional, undemocratic and unbelievable. True, a certain faculty element has been extremely militant in pressing for needed changes, but this is motivated by anxiety, not thirst for power or desire to embarrass the Vincentians. As a former member of the St. John's faculty, I assure you that promises made by the Vincentians are seldom kept, and that their concept of progress is to move resolutely in the direction of the status quo. Their obvious inability to understand the basic concept of academic freedom and their refusal to tolerate dissent are harmful not only to education but also to Catholicism.

THOMAS F. MADER

Assistant Professor of Speech

Amherst College

Amherst, Mass.

Jewish Education

Sir: TIME'S accurate report on Jewish day schools in the U.S. [Dec. 31] contained one allegation that calls for clarification: that many schools "have to import teachers from Israel" because of a "nationwide teacher shortage." Irrespective of a teacher shortage, the deployment of Israeli instructors to Jewish educational institutions in the U.S. is an integral part of the Zionist aspiration to increase immigration to Israel from the U.S.; to link "Jewish communities" outside Israel to the national state of the so-called "Jewish people"; to utilize that linkage for greater political and financial support; and ultimately to "ingather" all Jews into "their" sovereign state.

RICHARD KORN

National Vice President

American Council for Judaism

New York City

The Psalms & Their Translators

Sir: In your story on the Book of Common Prayer [Dec. 31], you credit modern scholars with "drab, bureaucratic writing" that renders the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing." The "blame" lies not with T. S. Eliot et al. but with Bishop Miles Coverdale, who wrote the psalm that way in his "Great Bible" of 1539. When Archbishop Cranmer drafted the first Prayer Book in 1549, he used Coverdale's version of the Psalter; that version is still used in British and American Prayer Books. The King James Bible, of course, was not issued until after the Prayer Book, in 1611.

WILLIAM F. FREEHOFF JR.

Kingsport, Tenn.

Floodlights in the Lab

Sir: For satisfactory Human Sexual Response [Jan. 7], it takes moonlight on the beach, not floodlight in the lab.

(MRS.) NANCY TISDALE

Grosse Pointe, Mich.

Sir: I can hardly wait for episode No. 2 of "The Nature of Sexual Response." The response of the red-blooded male should make for even more vivid reading than that of the woman. I am joining with the hundreds of public school teachers who will be canceling their class subscriptions to your magazine after this article is read and thoroughly digested by their charges.

R. H. STEVENS

Fulton, N.Y.

Sir: Reading your story, I find I must add one more item to the already big job of being a mother--that of censorship.

MRS. JOHN F. LORBIECKI

Milwaukee

Sir: Drs. Masters and Johnson sure know how to take the bloom off the rose.

(MRS.) SANDRA LERNER

Newton, Mass.

Sir: I nearly lost my cool reading about Dr. Masters' study. A major physiological aspect the doctor failed to divulge is that he suffers from an engorged blabbermouth! There always have been a few doctors who, in the name of medicine, resort to sensationalism to make their mark. A mottled pox on Dr. Masters for his work and on TIME for printing it.

(MRS.) ANITA A. FISHER

Flourtown, Pa.

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