Letters: Dec. 25, 1964

Man of the Year

Sir: If TIME’S Man of the Year is the man who most dominated the news, then Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, will have to agree that that man is Barry Goldwater.

ARTHUR STAWINSKI

Stanford, Calif.

Sir: Gutsy, brainy Secretary of Defense McNamara. May his kind live forever!

DANIEL L. AUBRY

New York City

Sir: L.B.J., who outtalked, outshook, outran and out-White-Housed them all.

CRAIG A. STARKEY

San Diego

Sir: Damn, damn, damn, damn! You’ve grown accustomed to his y’alls, his doags, his coarn! L.B.J. will be your Man of the Year, but rightly, it should be J.F.K., our brilliant young President to whom we owe so much. It was his presidency that set our lives on fire with love and pride for America. In years to come, American greatness will prevail because John Kennedy so deeply inspired all of us.

BROTHER DOMINIC

Passionist Monastery

Chicago

Sir: Robert F. Kennedy. He showed his courage at a time when ordinary men would have faltered.

PAUL H. ZAREFSKY

Bellaire, Texas

Sir: California’s George Murphy, the only man ever to beat the Kennedy image.

HUGH SCARAMELLA

Fresno, Calif.

Sir: The Beatles (Yeah! Yeah!)

KATHY MANCUSO

Schenectady, N.Y.

Sir: Pablo Casals, whose artfulness in intertwining freedom, music and even politics is beyond contemporary comparison.

BARTLETT COURTEEN

Pompano Beach, Fla.

Sir: Moise Tshombe, El Cid of the 20th century.

(MRS.) MARGARET SULLIVAN

Chicago

Sir: Major Michael Hoare and his mercenaries in the Congo.

GERALD D. MURPHY

Haddonfield, NJ.

Sir: Joseph Cardinal Ritter, Archbishop of St. Louis, the most forward-looking church leader in America.

WILLIAM J. CONWAY

Dallas

Sir: Pope Paul VI, for pioneering papal travel, trying to “reconcile Christian revelation with contemporary culture.”

RAJA GAVANKAR

Chicago

The Way-Out Middle

Sir: Your very interesting article on Buddhism with the picture on the cover of the Dai Butsu of Kamakura [Dec. 11] reminds me of an unforgettable notice inside the stomach of the Buddha (which one can climb into, like the Statue of Liberty). It read: “American soldier beware. You are entering the womb of the cosmic forces of Universe.” This was in September 1945, and doubtless was a reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

CLARENCE W. BARTOW

Tuxedo Park, N.Y.

Sir: Your statement about “Buddhism’s strident inner contradictions” is as naive as saying, “Once a man is an American, he must immediately recognize racial equality because the Constitution of the U.S. recognizes racial equality.” Like Americans, Buddhists are human beings. Some of them practice the teachings of the religion; others do not. Buddhism forbids killing, stealing, adultery, lying, use of alcoholic liquor. But among those who don’t practice the teachings, there are killers, thieves, adulterers, liars, drunkards. It is simply a case of man against religion—just as racial trouble in the U.S. is a case of man against an ideal. As for your statement that many Buddhists secretly believe they “can tame Communism,” I have known several instances where Buddhists turned down some Communists who posed as friends of Buddhism by pointing out this or that common denominator in the two “isms” and by saying that Buddhism and Communism are the same. Buddhists call the trick the “Communist killing-by-clinching method.” History shows that Buddhism has never been a prey to other isms. When Buddhism dies, it will die a natural death, as Gautama Buddha said, after it has completed 5,000 years.

TIN SWE

Rangoon, Burma

Sir: Although I am not a Buddhist, I interpreted your article on the subject as an unregenerate evaluation of the antinomies of a great religion. The adroitness of this article does not, in my opinion, redeem it from constituting an affront to the exponents of this faith. Antinomianism is not peculiar to Buddhism, but is rather an inherent pitfall in any religion. The deeper the spiritual insight one attains, the more dramatic the manifestations of this particular pitfall might become.

THOMAS C. McGOWAN

Centerville, Mass.

Sir: Perhaps Madame Nhu, the “Dragon Lady,” was right after all. She said the Buddhists in South Viet Nam were trying to embarrass the government and cause dissension with their continual harangues and displays of public immolation by fire. Their actions have only served to point up some of the reasons Christian missionaries have tried for years to truly enlighten these unfortunate people. Unlike Madame Nhu, I do not propose fighting fire with fire, but I have to agree with her that as a group they are certainly exasperating.

(MRS.) ARLENE HALL

Joliet, Ill.

Death Down South

Sir: I suggest that Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price [Dec. 18] volunteer for the Peace Corps and serve in the Congo.

M. L. MASON

Littleton, Colo.

Sir: Just the thought of Mississippi scares the daylights out of me. But having a somewhat adventuresome spirit, I’m going to Mississippi this summer, merely to understand how it feels to be in a land where methods of controlling thought and action are probably as strong as those employed by Eastern European Communist states. For protection I’ll get false membership cards in the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Council. I don’t have the guts of Schwerner, Chancy or Goodman.

JOHN L. BAILEY

Pittsburgh

Sir: The “White Knights” of the K.K.K. could well be renamed The Simbas of the South.

MANETTE BUSTANOBY

Syracuse

Sir: I favor dropping an atom bomb on the state of Mississippi. I am ashamed that such a savage state exists in the country.

C. M. MOORHEAD

Bucyrus, Ohio

Sir: While there’s Mississippi, how can there be the Great Society?

LEONARD SOLOMON

Indianapolis

Sir: Your reference to Mr. Edgar Killen as a Free Will Baptist preacher is in error and casts a serious reflection on our denomination. Mr. Killen is not, and has never been a Free Will Baptist preacher.

BILLY A. MELVIN

Executive Secretary

National Association of Free Will Baptists

Nashville, Tenn.

> TIME erred.

Free Speech at Berkeley

Sir: As a Republican and a student, I am very aware of our fine American traditions, including our freedoms of speech and of political action. Every American must always be willing to guard these precious liberties. The students and faculty of Berkeley [Dec. 18] are doing just this and deserve the admiration and support of every American who believes in democracy and the freedoms it guarantees. If it is the “Trotsky groups” and “members of the Communist front” who protect and defend these aspects of our heritage, I would clearly have to desert the Republican Party and register as a Communist!

RICHARD INLANDER

Berkeley, Calif.

Sir: The “civil rights militants, Trotskyites, and members of a Communist front” do not represent a majority of the students as far as their pro-Communist beliefs are concerned. We realize there are Communist-front groups at Berkeley, but the members of these groups are often the same civil rights workers in Mississippi whom TIME heralds as brave and devoted humanitarians. Why the distinction? The tactics of the students were not those of Castro but rather those of Gandhi.

PETE MOTOLA

University of California

Berkeley, Calif.

Fallingwater

Sir: May I speak in regard to two men who are not around to speak for themselves? There was no occasion to “talk” my father into building Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater [Dec. 11], now in the care of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. My role was to make Wright and my father acquainted, some two years before Fallingwater was designed. From there on, Wright’s architecture needed no sales talk, and my father’s quality as a client has been appreciatively described by Wright in print. Thank you for your good words about the Aalto room.

EDGAR KAUFMANN JR.

New York City

Pitching Camp

Sir: Re Susan Sontag and the derivation of the word Camp [Dec. 17], how the reference to the Aussie term “low saloon” was dug up is beyond me. Camp may be purely New York slang, argot. I first ran across it in the early ’30s. At that time, groups of homosexuals lived together in apartments they rented en masse. The apartments were called “camps,” and by extension the residents thereof were also called camps—I don’t know why not campers, but they weren’t. “He’s a camp,” was not an uncommon phrase.

JACK OSWALD

Miami, Fla.

Sir:

A Tiffany lamp is very “low” camp, Old postcards are Early Heterosexual, Scopitone’s the rage, for those college age, And Miss Sontag’s the square’s intellectual.

MAGGAIE RAE

New York City

Sir: By publishing your recent analysis of “Camp,” you have ensured that Camp will no longer be Camp, if you see what I mean. We philistines will now recognize the unique virtues of vulgarity, while the avant-garde will be driven to rely once more upon their taste, if any. Western civilization has again been snatched from the brink.

DAVID W. SIFTON

Patrick A.F.B., Fla.

Sir: Whether the derivation of “Camp” comes from the low “Aussie” saloons, or from the police rating “K.M.P.” (Known Male Prostitute), or from the World War II concentration camps, where homosexuality was supposedly rife, “Camp” is here to stay. True—the vulgar and outrageous is Camp. What could be more ostentatious than Victorian “Tatt” and Barbra Streisand and superlatives like “divine,” and “delicious.” But I must add that the term Camp (Down Under, anyway) is not derogatory in implication.

JOSEPHENE OSBORNE-BROWN

Wellington, N.Z.

Ancient Trade

Sir: The photograph in your Cinema section [Dec. 11] of a slave trader coolly examining the teeth of a naked woman closely parallels the 19th century French painting Slave Market, by Jean Léon Gérôme, in the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass, [see cut].

ALLEN M. BURNHAM

Manhasset, N.Y.

Consultant Competition?

Sir: The “Executive Peace Corps” [Dec. 4] seems an ironic commentary on the modern concept of free enterprise. There are a number of experienced consultants in the “developing” countries providing the continuity of contact essential to effective consulting who will now be faced with cut-rate competition sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer.

SPRUILLE BRADEN JR.

Bogotá, Colombia

Home, Sweet—Home

Sir: I got quite a chuckle out of your use of German in your treatise on sculpture [Dec. 11]. Did you mean Lebensraum (room or space to live in), or Liebesraum (room to love in)? The implication of the combination was delightful, Miller’s Mary: Walking Sequence—beautiful!

ERIKA B. PAULSON

Muskegon, Mich.

> It depends on the sculpture. Miller’s Mary obviously needs both.