Letters, Mar. 19, 1951

Giant’s Policy

SIR:

DON’T KNOW HOW YOU PEOPLE DO IT, HOW YOU SO CONSISTENTLY EXPRESS MY EXACT ATTITUDE ON THE WORLD SITUATION. “THE U.S. GETS A POLICY” [TIME, FEB. 26] is STATESMANSHIP.

BEN R. AUSTIN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Sir:

. . One sentence seemed to me to define [the course] we must follow . . .: “But to hold back on clearly indicated present action because of [past] mistakes is to make the future a prisoner of the past.”

This has the ring of a basic truth, and it will take courage to use it as a foundation for our thinking—but I reckon we have the courage to think as well as act.

D. B. EMMERT Denver

Sir:

. . . Your two most excellent articles—”Giant in a Snare” [Jan. 15] and “The U.S. Gets a Policy”—are certainly as fine summaries as possible of the situation facing our nation today and the solution we have adopted . . . We are finally facing reality and accepting the responsibility that our position in the world demands.

However, logical and reasonable though this present policy may be, it must be recognized that it is but another example of the same old effort to preserve peace by power politics . . . True, it is the only policy that we can follow under the present system of international anarchy and lawlessness. But must the world continue to be lawless ?

We have curtailed and in many respects eliminated anarchy in our society, locally and nationally, by delegating some portions of our personal sovereignty to various levels of government . . . This could be accomplished [internationally] by strengthening the U.N. into a limited federation, with actual legal power to legislate, enforce, and adjudge against violators of the peace, individual and national . . .

A World Government is inevitable, either by agreement or by conquest, as the achievements of science have so shrunk the size of the earth . . . Let it not be said that it is visionary and impractical; the same chorus was heard in 1787-88, but the farsighted among our leaders, Hamilton, Jay and Madison, the first Federalists for instance, persevered, and achieved the system which we have in our country today. It can and must be done in the world today.

THEO. R. LEUTZINGER Pacific Palisades, Calif.

Sir:

“The U.S. Gets a Policy” was a superb piece, but one point requires amplification. It is true that peaceful coexistence with Communism is impossible without international inspection and control of atomic arms; but it is equally true that today the U.S. could not possibly accept its own plan for such control, or any other plan which called for the eventual disposal of existing stockpiles of atomic weapons . . .

An inspection system might prevent the secret production of atomic weapons, but bombs [could be] concealed before the inspection . . . The U.S. Government could not perpetrate such a fraud, but the Politburo most certainly could . . .

ABRAM V. MARTIN

San Jose, Calif.

Sir:

Congratulations . . . You have taken the part of American leadership by giving form and expression to events and attitudes.

An interesting footnote to your article is provided by Leo Tolstoy’s theory on how national policy gets made. In War and Peace he stated that events transpire as a result of all forces in time and space—not excluding the summation of individual human wills—rather than because of the “commands and proclamations” of those on the “policy level.” The best leaders, he said, are those who recognize and fit in with the trend of actual events, the sometimes subtle will of the people . . .

Your article brilliantly expresses what most of us have already sensed, but not fully understood. Perhaps that is the greatest service of journalism.

GEORGE B. LEONARD JR.

Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

TV’s B Hour

Sir:

Referring to your Feb. 19 TV story and the critic who said “People will watch anything, good, bad or indifferent”:

I would like to recruit an army of people for a final showdown fight at “B” hour of what I would call TV day. I sincerely think that if we would bay loudly enough at that big moon in our living room, we could wipe the leer off its face! . . .

C. RICHARD WOLF

Xenia, Ohio

Seaway to Power

Sir:

I would like to compliment TIME on its Feb. 26 article on the St. Lawrence seaway project . . .

We in the Tennessee Valley know what it means to have cheap power, and we aren’t so shortsighted that we don’t want other sections of the country to share in such benefits . . .

BILL M. WILLIAMS

East Tennessee State College Johnson City, Tenn.

Impeached

Sir:

In the Feb. 26 issue of TIME, you refer to “the attempt to impeach President Andrew Johnson” . . .

President Johnson was impeached; it was not an attempt . . . Fortunately, he was saved [from conviction] by one vote . . .*

AUSTIN V. McCLAiN

Easton, Pa.

¶ TIME stands impeached and convicted of careless usage.—ED.

Runner-Up

Sir:

In your March 5 story on the Women’s National Indoor Tennis championship, you printed a photograph of Winner Nancy Chaffee, “a merry bundle of bounce,” but you didn’t print a picture of Runner-Up Beverly Baker, “a pert, sloe-eyed redhead.” How about it?

GEORGE A. ECKERT JR.

Newport, R.I.

¶Eyes right.—ED.

Hail Colombia

Sir:

Having been assigned to duty with the Colombian battalion due to fight in Korea with the U.N. troops, I found your Feb. 19 article highly heartening.

It is sometimes discouraging to realize how much misunderstood our country is. We are not merely coffee growers and revolution makers (not one revolution has succeeded in the last 48 years, and all of the 14 Presidents we have had during that time were freely elected), but true democrats loving freedom and human dignity . . .

CAPTAIN ALVARO VALENCIA

“Colombia” Infantry Battalion Bogota, Colombia

Pellets & Pullets

Sir:

It was startling, to put it mildly, to read “Case of the Barren Mink” in your Feb. 19 issue. If the writer had concerned himself purely with the problems of the mink growers [whose female minks were made barren by eating the necks of “stilbestrolized” chick ens], we might not raise any questions, be cause that is a matter still to be decided . . .

[But] the reference to a male sex criminal who was given stilbestrol to keep him under control definitely implies an effect from eat ing hormone-treated chickens which just is not so … A person could take a whole pel let used in treating chickens . . . and it would have no effect on him. There is a chance that he might have a slight nausea for a short time. In order to have any effect on his sexual activity, a pellet would need to be consumed daily, or possibly even twice daily, for at least five or six days. We can’t quite imagine anyone eating that number of chicken necks or heads, even ignoring the fact that in pra. tically every instance the pellet will have been completely absorbed by the chicken before it is marketed . . .

J. H. FLOREA

Mount Morris, Ill.

¶TIME neither said nor implied that the sex criminal had eaten hormone-treated chickens.—ED.

Applause & Howls

Your choice of Margaret Truman for the Feb 26 cover— and the story of a daughters independence— deserves lusty applause from the “Family Circle” of American readers . . .

CLARA K. MOREHART

Syracuse, N.Y.

I can hardly wait to read the howls . .

H. G. JONES

Oak Ridge, N.C.

Sir:. . . Margaret Truman is undoubtedly a nice girl, but she is definitely not a singer or a artist, nor is she worthy of the fabulous income she enjoys . . .

WILL GARROWAY Los Angeles be’ Were unknown it to not the for her world . . . father, she would A. M. BERRY JR.

Beaumont, Texas TIME’S policy in selecting front covers from people who make news must have changed to people who make noise . . .

MRS. F. C. HOFFMAN Houston Thanks for a well-written story about a real American girl.

JOSEPH S. MYERS

Houston

Hear No Weevil

Here is further evidence that some of your writers, who so often speak with “authority about the South, know very little about the land of cotton:

In your Feb. 26 issue it is stated: In the nation’s cotton exchanges last week it was quiet enough to hear a weevil nibbling a boll” Boll weevils have a long, hard bill, and they do not nibble a cotton boll. They puncture it.

HERBERT CARVER

Jackson, Miss.

Muted Rustle

Sirs:

Thank you for your Feb. 26 tribute to the artillery support in Korea. It was specially pleasant to me, since I suffered 2½ years service with the Air Corps in World War II after training and peacetime service in the Artillery. The impression the Air Corps boys then held—and possibly still hold—that artillery was an obsolescent arm, is effectively dispelled in your write-up . . ;

For years I have complained about the weird sound effects that are supposed to represent shells in flight, only to be almost completely inarticulate when asked how they do sound. But “the muted rustle of outgoing shells” is perfect . . .

J. CHARLES THOMPSON

Falls Church, Va.

*Said one historian of the impeachment trial (in 1868): “The single vote by which Andrew Johnson escaped conviction marks the narrow margin by which the Presidential element in our system escaped destruction.”