A Heartbeat Away--Too Close?

To the Editors:

Nelson Rockefeller Vice President?

President Ford must be kidding. The ex-Governor has failed in three attempts at another national office, the presidency. What is frightening is that Congress might forget this and confirm him. "A heartbeat away" is too close for comfort.

Glen Ashman Decatur, Ga.

How a man supposedly as intelligent and down to earth as Gerald Ford can pick Nelson Rockefeller for Vice President is beyond comprehension, unless he (Ford) has strings attached to him.

Why would anyone pick a Vice President who 1) wants your job so bad (and admits it) that making you look good is not going to be normal; and 2) has so much money he cannot appreciate the havoc inflation is imposing on the middle-class workingman? Do the oil and banking interests really dictate who is to do what?

Marvin H. Brooks Pitman, N.J.

Rockefeller's dividends amount to $80,000 a week. As a typist doing 75 words a minute or 50 letters a day at 500 a letter, it would take me 13 years to earn $80,000. Maybe if I could increase my typing speed ...

Emily McCormack Lyons, Ill.

Where did Rocky find mountains while horseback riding in Florida in 1972? Even with his wealth, can he move mountains into Florida?

Robert L. Jones Denver

He can't, and neither can we. Those mountains were outside Palm Springs,

Calif.

Is your Rockefeller cover portrait carved out of granite or ice? Either one fits his personality, and they both crack under pressure.

Dorothy D. Pelletier Boca Raton, Fla.

Notes on the New Team

What is all this motherly media clucking about Betty Ford's and Margaretta Rockefeller's being "very private" persons? Aren't we all? The gals knew what they were getting into, the spotlight, when they took public men as their second husbands.

Charles D. Bonsted Syracuse

Your characterization of Gerald Ford as an "internationalist" libels true internationalists. An internationalist, far from advocating America's responsibility to uphold international law-and-order, believes the best path to peace is through cooperation and communication. Ford's view that the U.S. "must be a force on a worldwide basis to try to maintain peace" is the kind of reasoning that got us into Viet Nam.

Kenneth A. Buxton Claremont, Calif.

I could not suppress a somewhat derisive grin when I found President Ford with his dirty shoes resting on the desk at the White House. To us Orientals, any desk is meant for reading and writing and not for putting shoes on, no matter how spick-and-span they may be. I am horrified to imagine what the new U.S. President will do in his office next. Please ask him not to chew gum while deciding the fate of nations.

Eiji Hattori Kyoto

Amnesty and Violence

President Ford gave a courageous talk to the V.F.W. on amnesty. In the reaction of these bitter men, words like cowards, yellow, slinking, shirkers and traitors are used over and over. One must believe that they never heard any of the reasons why millions of us believe the war to have been wrong.

Theirs is the kind of male mentality that is incapable of understanding any man who is not fond of violence. Despite a tendency to blame the emotional problems of American youth on "Mom," these men exert relentless efforts to make their sons "real men." If you want to be brave in their eyes, and no boy wants to be a "chicken" to his father, you must oppose violence only if it springs from minority frustrations and admire it at all other times.

Nina M. Russell Chicago

President Ford has spoken in favor of conditional amnesty. Why conditional? The war resisters should be brought home and given a party at the White House, welcome-home celebrations, parades and new cars. These brave people heeded their consciences rather than follow immoral leaders into an immoral war. They deserve heroes' treatment.

Janet Weeks Loma Linda, Calif.

An Opportunity--Or a Danger?

The greatest problem ahead of us is the enormous cynicism and suspicion with which we now view politicians in particular and government in general.

The new President's main task has to be the restoration of our confidence. He has an absolutely unique and beautiful opportunity to surround himself with the very best leadership this country has to offer. I think it is interesting to note that in Chinese, the character that means "crisis" also means "opportunity."

Ford can reach out to the whole country, to men and women, to blacks and whites, to all geographical areas. I cannot think of anyone of any political persuasion who would refuse if called on to help restore America to what it has been and should be.

We are ready for a different kind of leadership. No longer must so much attention be focused on the President. If the American people have one overriding fault, it is the expectation that some man on a white horse is going to come along to lead us all across the Delaware.

In the future, Americans are going to get away from this idea and pay more attention to who the President's appointments will be--before we elect him.

(The Rev.) Theodore Hesburgh South Bend, Ind.

The writer is president of Notre Dame University and former chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Watergate and Justice

William Ruckelshaus advocates in Forum that 1) if the public believes prosecuting the Watergate underlings but not Mr. Nixon is an inequality of justice, immunity should be extended to all, and 2) the decision to prosecute Mr. Nixon should not be decided immediately.

I could concur in both views but for the fact that some of these "underlings" are now serving sentences for lesser offenses than those from which the presumably more important defendants may be excused.

As a friend and former law partner of Herbert Kalmbach, I have visited him at the correctional facility at Lompoc. It is no country club. Mr. Kalmbach may have served his entire sentence by the time sober study dictates immunity for all other defendants. This would be not only an unequal application of justice but a travesty. May I suggest immediate parole of all imprisoned Watergate-related individuals until the issue of Mr. Nixon's prosecution is settled?

Sherwood C. Chillingworth Los Angeles

The Other Cover-Up?

Those Kennedy supporters who believe that Chappaquiddick will fade from memory as the Nixon scandal fades had better do some fast re-evaluating. Here's one voter who will demand all the facts concerning that cover-up the moment Senator Kennedy announces his candidacy for President. Any other candidates, particularly Democrats, had better be damned certain they've looked through all their closets lest there be a skeleton lurking there.

Robert A. Colletti Bishop, Calif.

Conservative Tenets

You omitted the most cherished tenet of conservatives: belief in the work ethic. "Anyone who wants to work can get a job." I also question your tenet, "Conviction that people have become too selfish and self-centered, putting their own interests ahead of their families and the country." Many whom I regard as conservatives put their own interests above the national welfare.

Mrs. Charles A. Crawford New Orleans

Caveat Cavett

Regarding your review of Cavett (now he belongs to the ages: Churchill, De Gaulle, Hildegarde), may I point out that it contains a selective bias that is either mildly vindictive, editorially incestuous, or else just faulty research.

a) The book was written by a former TIME editor who was a classmate of Cavett's at Yale and is also an employee of Dick's production company. The book was reviewed by a TIME editor who failed to point out that Cavett worked for TIME.

b) The review mentions that Dick used to hang around backstage at Broadway theaters. Actually, I met him in the men's room at NBC where he told me he wanted to get into television and would I help him. Fortunately for him I have a kidney condition; otherwise he might have ended up a contestant. He told me then that he was with TIME.

Your reviewer tried putting a feather in my back by writing that while Paar put on Zsa Zsa Gabor and Buddy Hackett, Cavett presented Katharine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles and Lester Maddox. Your research and/or bias could just as honestly have stated that while Cavett presented Tiny Tun, George Jessel and Totie Fields, Paar put on John and Robert Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Dr. Albert Schweitzer,

George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Levant, Noel Coward, Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Martin, Judy Garland, etc. It all depends on whose ox is being goosed.

In any event, I hope the book is as successful as his TV career. Who would have thought that that pushy little guy in the NBC men's room would one day become so popular that according to his pressagent, "Dick Cavett can no longer go to the theater because he's mobbed." My goodness, I've never been mobbed; neither has Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin. I gather the way to get yourself mobbed is to hire a pressagent.

Jack Paar Lost District, Conn.

The Right to Baptism

A little water isn't going to change anything. Carol Morreale and William Baird knew this. What they really wanted and got was a lot of cheap publicity for the right to abort life.

Joseph Vinci North Dartmouth, Mass.

As a member of BIRTHRIGHT, a prolife, alternative-to-abortion group, I was appalled to read of the refusal to baptize Nathaniel Morreale because his mother supported the establishment of an abortion-information clinic. Father Roussin and Monsignor Meehan have failed to grasp the basic moral premise of the prolife philosophy: the child, born or unborn, should never be discriminated against for the sins or misfortunes of his parents. For example, a fetus should not be punished by murder because his father was a rapist or his mother was pregnant out of wedlock. The fetus, and by extension the infant, is always considered innocent, blameless and deserving of protection.

Mrs. John F. O'Donnell Lancaster, Pa.

A Woid on Brooklynese

Professor Francis Griffith is wrong.

Brooklynese is not dead. Along with the 50 phone call and the 150 bus fare it is still alive and well in New Orleans, spoken by people of all classes and known as Irish Channel speech. Anyone willing to live in the berling heat of this town even for thoity minutes or sample ersters berled in erl will hear enough Brooklynese to last him for quite a while.

Barry Ivker

Associate Professor of English

Dillard University

New Orleans

Billboards and Beautifiers

Your story on the Highway Beautification Amendments is inaccurate in concluding that the House bill would weaken the law and in characterizing me as "sympathetic to the billboard lobby." I served at the request of then President Johnson as floor leader for the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 and defended the act in 1970 when it came within one vote of being terminated.

The House bill presently pending carries out the recommendation of the Highway Beautification Commission that a distinction be made between those signs that simply tout nationally advertised products (cigarettes, whisky, soft drinks, etc.) and those that provide useful directional information as to where motorists may find needed roadside services (restaurants, rest rooms, automotive services, motels). According to two nationwide polls conducted for the commission, a substantial majority of the American public desires that such a distinction be made and does not desire the total removal of such information.

The proposed limit of "no more than three" such signs per mile would be a legal restriction, not an expansion as implied in your story. There is no statutory restriction whatever in existing law.

Jim Wright

House of Representatives Washington, D.C.

There is currently no statutory restriction on the number of signs per mile. But the present law gives the Department of Transportation the power to regulate, and the department permits not more than three signs for a scenic or historical attraction or a natural wonder within a 75-mile radius, and a maximum of one sign per mile. Thus the proposed "limit" of three per mile is an expansion. The bill throws the door open to a tremendous billboard proliferation by enlarging the present "informational" category.

Hacks and Quacks

One can imagine no fate more unpleasant than to be marooned on a desert island with (barring John Kenneth Galbraith) one of the pretentious hacks and quacks who voted for one another as intellectual elitists in the poll taken by Sociologist Charles Kadushin. What else might be expected when the criterion for determining intellect was publication in the New York Review of Bombast or the Prejudice Review"?

Paul W. Ferris Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Kadushin assumed that intellectuals are generalists and eliminated hard scientists, theoretical physicists and mathematicians from the intellectual category. It would be interesting to see how these groups would react to this classification. Perhaps they would say that Kadushin's group are amusing and eloquent exhibitionists who would not measure up to the intellectual requirements in the hard sciences but are articulate entertainers.

Thomas H. Jukes Professor of Medical Physics University of California Berkeley

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