Watergate and the President

Sir / Do not expect a Nixon resignation. He has to stick around to grant pardons.

DAVID R. LINDBERG

Richmond Sir / We need solid, stand-up men like Nixon. He will stay in the kitchen--he can take the heat.

SAM ANSHER

Los Angeles

Sir / I for one choose, as most Americans do, to put a shield around our President. Our man in the Oval Office must be protected. His goals are our goals, and no one in his right mind should prevent him from implementing them. Just do not push impeachment, because the country will not have it. Pushing our leader into a corner will only make a milquetoast President, which this country does not need or want.

HELEN MOWER

Irwin, Pa.

Sir / Watergate points put the intrinsic contradiction within presidential democracy. The religious reverence due a national figurehead and focus of patriotic allegiance is incompatible with the critical scrutiny due to a country's most powerful policymaker. One either concedes. "After all, he's the President," or one feels as if he has thrown mud on the flag. Perhaps it is not too late to consider a switch to parliamentary democracy, which is based on the principle that he who reigns should not govern.

CLARK BUTLER

Fort Wayne, Ind.

Sir / Rather than impeach Nixon, if it turns out that he lied about knowledge of the Watergate coverup, I propose that Congress or at least the Senate, pass a resolution censuring him for his conduct in that one matter. Neither impeachment nor resignation is desirable, yet such a resolution would express the country's indignation. With that done. Nixon could remain in office, chastened but not ruined.

JAMES F. ZARTMAN

Niagara Falls

Sir / I used to feel one good reason for not impeaching Richard Nixon was Spiro Agnew. Hell, now I'll take Spiro.

JOHN NEALE

Atlanta

The Glass Eaters of Harvard

Sir / I can just see your Letters column with cute notes about glass-eating at Harvard [May 28]:

Watt a current switch this is.

Students are turned on by light bulbs.

Humans consume lumens (debasing and revolting).

Do the more enlightened students get an A.C. degree?

Get high with grass, but get lit up with glass.

When you get addicted, it's hard to pass a light bulb.

Glass slivers give you shivers

When you gotta glow.

Thank God I'm too old to eat light bulbs or write such drivel.

BOB SCHWARZ

Allentown, Pa.

Sir / My Bedlington was just a pup when she ate, with no preparation whatever, some light bulbs--disdaining the filament and socket screw. And I thought her wacky rather than precocious! Evidently it takes a Harvard education to garnish with Granola.

MARGARET C. NEWTON

Philadelphia

Sir / We read with interest, and then alarm, your article "The Glass Eaters." A standard tumor used in cancer research is the plasma cell tumor. It is induced in mice by implanting fiber-glass or spun-glass fragments (it can also be induced by other methods). Glass chewed into a "fine powder" creates lots of surface area and greatly increases the chance for an unwanted, unfortunate cell-glass interaction. The exact nature of this interaction is still not known; however, the cancerous outcome has frequently been observed. Cancer is an insidious disease. It may take months or years for the full effect of an "irritation" to become apparent. Therefore, we recommend that the glass eaters make a semiannual visit to the doctor for the next five or ten years.

PAUL FRE1DI IN

DENNIS RODR1GUES

Laboratory Technicians

Bionetics Research Laboratories

Tumor Immunology Division

Kensington, Md.

Feed the Germs

Sir / Your Medicine capsule reports the discovery that sugar can clear up bedsores [May 28]. Six years ago I watched an aide apply sugar poultices to advanced bedsores on an elderly person in a nursing home. Her explanation: "Feed the germs and they won't feed on the patient."

OLIVE FISCHBACHER

Santa Barbara, Calif.

The RAG1 Men of the Year

Sir / Although there is perhaps a long road to be traveled before the bugs, so to speak, are ironed out of RAG-1, Professor Eugene Rosenberg's oil-eating bacteria [May 21] are probably the most important and hopeful news of the decade to a world on the way to suffocation, through the destruction of oxygen-producing plankton, by don't-care dumping and accidental spillage of crude oil at sea. An early vote for Rosenberg and David Gutnick as Men of the Year --and perhaps of the century.

J.C. ARMSTRONG

Singapore

The Absurdity of Alice

Sir / TIME did something that Rolling Stone, Creem or Tiger Beat have not accomplished. The article about Alice Cooper [May 28] was actually tied down to a rock of reality. The author performed the hitherto unattainable feat of escaping from Alice's absurdity without having his objectivity blurred. But still the entertainment value was recognized.

Congratulations--with special kudos to Charles Reynolds for the scary photos.

NORM GREGORY

Burton, Wash.

Sir / Your article on Alice Cooper was obviously written by one of the older people on your staff.

Along with some friends, I went to see Alice Cooper's concert in Tulsa, Okla. Everyone agreed that it was fantastic. The thing about hard rock, and Alice Cooper, is that the performers don't just stand up there and sing. They put some feeling into their music.

TOMMY DURHAM

Prairie Grove, Ark.

Sir / Since the U.S. is a relatively isolated country and unlike ancient Rome cannot be invaded by barbarians, it is necessary for us to raise our own barbarians. Alice Cooper shows us that this can be done.

GERALD BLANKENSHIP JR.

Fresno, Calif.

Sir / A generation weaned on TV produced Alice [a minister's son]. Maybe a generation weaned on Alice will produce ministers. Who knows?

CHUCK REHMER

Enfield, Conn.

Farm Tragedy

Sir / It seems strange that in your article about farm conditions [May 28], nothing was said about the tragedy of a farmer losing his whole year's earnings because of inclement weather. No mention was made of the heartbreak of lost calves and flooded farm land. The whole gist of the story was the hope that food would be cheaper.

GERALD BROWN

Two Buttes, Colo.

A Misinterpretation of Medvedev

Sir / In your story describing my book Ten Years After One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [May 28], you were quite wrong in attributing certain statements to me, and in making some of your interpretations. I have never written that Victor Louis "planted a stolen copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Cancer Ward with the Russian emigre publication Posev," nor have I myself described Louis as "a special agent of the KGB." I merely wrote that some foreign commentators regarded him as such.

Moreover, I have written nothing to suggest that "perhaps the worst villains in the book are the Swedes." I made it quite clear that the Swedish Academy did everything to help Solzhenitsyn, including awarding him the Nobel Prize. Perhaps not everyone in Sweden was pleased, but this scarcely justifies your generalization.

I have made it plain that I believe I will be allowed to return to the Soviet Union, and that I do not expect any immediate measures to be taken against me. I now see that any troubles I may have in the immediate future can stem only from such arbitrary and misleading interpretations of my book.

ZHORES A. MEDVEDEV

London

Selling the American Cause

Sir / Re "Advertising, The Cause Agency" [May 28]: while Adman for a Cause Maxwell Arnold of San Francisco was raising $500,000 for an enemy hospital that was not destroyed, the Community Association for the Retarded in Palo Alto, Calif., faced a $25,000 operational deficit, and I was rotting in my sixth year in a North Vietnamese jail. If Arnold cannot sell the American cause, he ought to go back to selling soap!

RICHARD A. STRATTON

Commander, U.S.N.

Palo Alto, Calif.

The Insanity of Infanticide

Sir / We do not look forward to the prospect of infanticide, the logical extension of abortion [May 28]. Just how do we reject all this insanity? Can we look to Dr. Watson to lead us away from this modern Inquisition, this 20th century witch hunt?

TOM AND MADELINE SATWICZ

Detroit

Sir / Why not push the time of "aliveness" back to the 21st birthday, the day when the law grants citizens their full legal rights?

Parents (and presumably the state too) would then have 21 years to judge whether a "nonalive person" was worthy of the status of life. If the adolescent were good looking, athletic, clean-cut, healthy and academically successful, the coveted status of life could be conferred. However, if the adolescent had some deformity, low intelligence, a criminal inclination or addiction to drugs, he could be denied life.

JOHN G. ARCH

Pittsburgh

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