Texas, Florida, Here They Come!

To the Editors:

It is 8DEG, my thermostat is set at 62DEG, and my monthly oil delivery was over $80. Now the President wants an additional tax on our heating oil, which also generates our electricity. Perhaps the answer is to move south. Are California, Texas, Florida, etc., ready to absorb all of us New Englanders?

Carol Butzow

Brewer, Me.

With Gerald Ford's proposals for increased taxes on oil, the good old six New England states are getting the boot again.

Maybe it is time for us New Englanders to unite again and break away from Jerry Ford and his United States. What a way to celebrate our 200th birthday.

David R. Elms

Keene, N.H.

Why not have a rationing system that would allow the purchase of a specified amount of gasoline at near present prices with the option to buy more gasoline at higher prices? The extra money from that premium-priced gasoline could be well used in the development of alternative energy sources and public transportation.

Michael L. Hart

Evanston, Ill.

The call for gas rationing in peacetime is the most moronic proposal I have ever heard.

Increasing the cost of gasoline will reduce consumption and hurt financially, but at least Americans will be able to get gasoline, if necessary.

The Democrats would remove that ability and create a huge and costly federal bureaucracy. Furthermore, gasoline rationing would exacerbate our recession. Americans would not buy new cars, and their ability to get to retail outlets to make economy-stimulating purchases would be sharply curtailed.

Gas rationing is a simplistic idea which attacks the effect, not the cause.

Stephen J. Lehrman

Spring Valley, N. Y.

The President and his associates seem genuinely to feel that there is something dangerously socialistic about gasoline rationing. The best answer, as they see it, is to permit the raising of prices until a balance is reached between supply and demand. But their thinking omits one major factor. In a period of shortages and spiraling prices, petroleum products are most likely to go, not to those who most need them, but to those who can pay the most to get them.

As President Roosevelt's price and rationing administrator during World War II, and later as President Truman's director of economic stabilization, my most complex task was to work out a rationing system, including all petroleum products, that would assure a fair distribution to the consumer, wholesaler and producer.

Our gasoline and fuel rationing program, like other rationing programs during the war, was handled by 5,400 local rationing boards manned by some 750,000 unpaid volunteers. It was not faraway bureaucrats, but more often your neighbors and friends who, according to rules set down by Washington, made the final decisions on allotments based on individual needs and the importance of the applicants' work to the war effort.

Opinion polls taken during the war period indicated that three-fourths of the public consistently supported the petroleum rationing program and felt that it was effectively and honestly handled. It is particularly reassuring--and says something for the fairness and success of the wartime effort --that recent polls have indicated that a sizable majority of the American people favor rationing over the dangerously inflationary approach that is being proposed today.

Chester Bowles

Essex, Conn.

Trade: Plain Baloney

It is stupid to waste tears over the rejection by the Soviets of the trade bill granting them most-favored-nation status on the condition that they permit some of theu-oppressed people to emigrate [Jan. 27].

It is totally proper that we employ our economic clout rather than the lives of our young men for humanitarian purposes and the freedom of others whenever and wherever we can. To acquiesce in the Soviets' position that this is unjustified as an unwarranted interference in their domestic affairs would be like justifying the continuance of business with Hitler while being aware of his murder camps for fear of being criticized for interfering with Germany's domestic affairs. This is plain baloney.

It should be obvious now to the most naive: if and when it is advantageous to the Soviets to promote detente and/or have other agreements with us, then and only then will they do so.

We are our brothers' keepers ... or damn well should be.

Stanley J. Ellias

Trenton, Mich.

Class of '75

The reorganization drama in Congress [Feb. 3] showed that the House must become more representative in its own structures if it is going to respond to national concerns, and that the "mandate" from the election has been parlayed into a workable legislative force.

There were 75 of us--new Democrats elected last year--and we were well aware that we represented a post-Watergate expression of public will. We carried this with us to the party organizational caucus last December.

It was clear that we had the numbers to help change things then, and we did. Most of us continued to communicate as a group until we returned to Washington last month. We had an identity. The mere fact that committee chairmen presented themselves before us was a sign that the seniority system, party loyalty notwithstanding, could no longer prevent accountability.

Why, in the House, of all places, should leadership be unrepresentative simply because of seniority?

We are working within the House structure to make certain the mandate from last year can do more than just change the shape of the House. We want immediate, solid legislative programs.

Helen Meyner, U.S. Representative,

13th District, New Jersey

Washington, D.C.

To the Manor Born?

Now that a private house is becoming out of reach for the average American family, Happy Rockefeller's description of the 21-room vice-presidential residence as "a nice little house" comes off as one of the least sensitive comments since Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake." I personally consider our new six-room house a mansion and only wish we could pay the same proportion of our income in taxes that the Rockefellers do so that we might finish the interior this year.

Barbara van Achterberg

Easton, Conn.

Leapin' Johnson Lizards

Re CIA "Revelations and Resignations" [Jan. 13]: Wow! For security reasons, in '62 during the Kennedy Administration a Domestic Operations Division (DOD) was set up in the CIA! Holy Democrat! And--wiretaps in the '60s! Leapin' Johnson lizards! Not only Watergates, but also Demogates!

Will Bartlett

Dover-Foxcroft, Me.

The information on citizens in the CIA and FBI dossiers [Feb. 3] gives these agencies power over Americans. At the same time, the secrecy with which these agencies operate denies citizens information, and therefore power, over them. In the case of the CIA, even its budget is secret. The Constitution's requirement that "a legal statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time" has simply been disregarded.

We need two reforms. We need an end to all political dossier building by the FBI, the CIA and all other government agencies. We also need full information on what our agencies of government are doing.

A government with information about us that denies us information about it turns the very idea of a democracy upside down.

Aryeh Neier, Executive Director

American Civil Liberties Union

New York City

A Package Deal

I'm a dues-paying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I believe that freedom of speech is a basic human right and one that must be most highly prized when its exercise is most offensive, as it was to some of the students at Yale last year [Feb. 3].

Anatole France once said, "All Frenchmen are free, free to sleep under the bridge of their choice." His point was that human beings have many rights --the right to eat, to be adequately clothed and sheltered--and that these rights constitute, as it were, a package deal. Liberty simply cannot be separated from equality and fraternity.

Yet most American universities today extol civil liberties as a separate virtue, divorced from social justice (see the C. Vann Woodward report just issued at Yale). In so doing they betray the high purpose that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when in 1779 he outlined his plans for the University of Virginia. The university was to exercise an independent criticism of those forces of church or state that "fear every change as endangering the comforts they now hold." The university was to "unmask their usurpation and monopolies of honors, wealth and power."

I think Jefferson saw free speech as a means to many ends, rather than an end in itself. With him, I still feel that the primary role of the university is the public examination of the moral and spiritual quality of life. But alas, most universities, like churches, are citadels of caution.

So I shall continue to pay my dues to the American Civil Liberties Union and hope that more professors will see that civil liberties are wed to social justice as wisdom is wed to compassion.

William Shane Coffin Jr.

Chaplain, Yale University

New Haven, Conn.

Gag Jane

So Jane Alpert has dropped bombing and is into women's lib [Jan. 27]. What greater "recommendation" could we ask for the women's liberation movement and the Equal Rights Amendment? Couldn't somebody have put a gag in her mouth, at least until the ERA is passed?

Roberta Wilson

Los Angeles

The Pinch of Friendship

After reading your article on Genevieve Waite, myself and Man on the Moon, I must say I was amazed at your publication trying to create a pseudo feud between us (which other publications have tried to do). I thought your magazine would be above this type of journalism.

I must admit Genevieve has never tried to take away any of my "good" songs. Her songs were given to her outright by her husband, who indeed wrote the show for her. I am quite satisfied with the songs I have (one of which stops the show).

The spotlight is aimed only where either the director or the lighting man orders it; therefore, one has little to do with where it goes.

Genevieve and I have become good friends since the beginning of the production. If she "pinches" me, it is done only out of friendship and not to take away any of my good songs.

Vive Genevieve!

Monique Van Vooren

New York City

Lawyers Beware

Your article "Therapists and Threats" [Jan. 20] certainly indicates how physicians, and more specifically psychiatrists, are being told to practice medicine by lawyers. We all know of many instances of people not only with potentially harmful thoughts and feelings but who have already committed violent acts including murder, being released on technicalities or other rulings and essentially given license to commit another violent act. I have heard pressure from no quarter suggesting that the lawyers be held responsible for the violent acts of their clients.

Lewis H. Richmond, M.D.

San Antonio

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