Letters: May 28, 1965

Kerouac ‘n’ Roll

Sir: The article on rock ‘n’ roll [May 21] was both forceful and revealing. Primitive, noisy, anti-intellectual, coarse, unlyrical, and provocative as it is, rock ‘n’ roll provides an active means of honest, uninhibited expression, and an escape from the pressing realities of a 20th century world that is all too often the burial ground of lighthearted amusement.

JOHN WINEBRENNER Washington, D.C.

Sir: Your article finally acknowledges the fact that rock ‘n’ roll today is not reserved for the totally ignorant.

THOMAS WERMAN Columbia University New York City

Sir: Moaning and grunting like tortured hogs in some gloomy and obscene den, and thrown into ecstasies by the frantic cavortings, whoopings and gurglings of dim-witted adolescents more akin to 17th century Algonquin Indians than to the founders of this great Republic, devotees of rock ‘n’ roll music prove conclusively that Homo neanderthalensis is still with us. If politicians in Washington go for it, then assuredly Spengler was right.

JAMES C. MILLER Bloomington, Ind.

Sir: News, it may be. Timely, it is. But music, it is not.

MRS. JOSEPH L. DE GROOT Flainfield, Ill.

Sir: I am 30, and, as often happens to oldsters in their senility, impressions of the long ago are much more lasting than those of the recent past. Thank goodness for Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Wayne King and the Dorseys.

MRS. D. H. WINSHIP Milwaukee

Sir: Several years ago, there was a movement to intellectualize “action writing” and Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, et al. This was followed by the effort to intellectualize action and pop painting, which, I guess, is still with us. Now we are in the throes of a movement to lend some sort of credit to beat music. TIME can see no farther than the end of its nose.

WILLIAM BLAKEMAN New York City

Sir: I have a feeling of disgust for middle-age people doing dances like the frug or jerk. We have not as yet invaded their “adults only” world, so please, if you can’t give us anything to grow into, kindly leave us something to grow out of.

JOEL ROSENBERG Highland Park, Ill.

Black Looks

Sir: I attended the teach-in at the University of Michigan [May 14] with more than passing interest. I was, however, dismayed to hear clichés and slogans instead of the searching discussions I had expected. During the polemics, the armband wearers bustled about with ludicrous selfimportance, contributing only rudeness and epithets to the “search for alternatives.” There appeared to be no cognizance of the complexity or even the reality of the situation in Viet Nam. The entire problem seemed to boil down to being for or against the burning of Vietnamese children. During one of the intermissions, however, my dismay was dispelled when I heard a bright-eyed young coed squeal, “Oh, I feel so anti.” I left comforted by the thought that the whole simple-minded display had nothing really to do with Viet Nam; it was rather an exercise in group therapy designed to save wear and tear on a lot of fathers.

THADDEUS C. RADZIALOWSKI

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sir: The disrespectful and obnoxious conduct of some of our students toward the Government team discussing Viet Nam was very embarrassing—especially to the 6,000 university students who signed a petition supporting the President’s policy.

MARY ANN THUROW

University of Wisconsin Madison, Wis.

Sir: The real immorality of the war in Viet Nam is that good men—most of whom have never had the advantage of a higher education—are making countless sacrifices to protect the rights of the pseudo intellectuals at Iowa and Wisconsin, most of whom have probably never served, and probably never will serve, this country in a military capacity. They sit safely in their academic shell and yell “foul” at men dying to protect their right to yell.

MARY C. CANESTRARO Cleveland

Sir: As a college student, I firmly believe in our right to question everything. Our youth entitles us to be idealistic and perhaps rebellious; the state of the world that we are about to inherit entitles us to be a little cynical. But I fear that the hardest lesson some of us will have to learn is that neither idealism, rebellion, nor cynicism can successfully cope with the world—only realism. The real tragedy of those students would be a continuation of their sophomoric behavior after they leave their ivied limbo.

JAMES ROBERTSON College of William and Mary Williamsburg, Va.

Sir: Contrary to the impression left by your article “The Black-Banders,” there are numerous campus ministers, faculty members, undergraduates, and graduate students disagreeing with our nation’s present foreign policy who are neither disheveled nor degenerate. Here at Duke University, an overflow crowd heard four of this university’s leading professors take issue with our policy in Southeast Asia. As moderator for five hours of that debate, I saw no hooting or jeering. I am convinced that even though those who are at odds with our war efforts in Southeast Asia are in the minority (at least on this campus), and even though the entire issue is an emotional one, there are responsible, well-educated men who honestly and sincerely oppose our military actions in Southeast Asia.

JOHN R. KERNODLE JR. Durham, N.C.

Looking Ahead Backwards

Sir: Now that Pentagon officials have uncovered Walter Lippmann’s unwisdom on the 1947-49 Greek crisis—”My God, Walter would have given away Greece too!” [May 14]—they would do well to pursue their researches further back, to the days before Pearl Harbor, and in a more immediately relevant area, Asia. They would discover that Mr. Lippmann consistently opposed American aid to China in its life-and-death defense against Japanese aggression, insisted that the United States’ vital interests were confined to the Atlantic, and warned that, under no circumstances should this country allow itself to become embroiled in a “two-ocean” war, which it could not possibly win. Despite his Olympian stance, pontifical self-assurance, and popular prestige, history is likely to judge Walter Lippmann, as a prophet, to have been more gravely mistaken more often on more major issues than any other leading commentator.

HENRY P. VAN DUSEN Princeton, N.J.

Sir: The Essay “Viet Nam: The Right War at the Right Time” is a masterpiece. Someone has finally explained to the critics of American policy that the Communists have a reputation for ignoring the terms of negotiations. Perhaps, now that TIME has made these critics aware of their own ignorance, they will realize that President Johnson is correct in Viet Nam.

DONALD MUNTER Rockville Centre, N.Y.

Sir: As a liberal who favors our Government’s policy of intervention in Southeast Asia, I wonder about Professor Hans Morgenthau, Walter Lippmann and their supporters. They strive to isolate American military and political power from non-Chinese areas that they imperiously assign to China’s sphere of influence. But they are found to be articulate pleaders for diplomatic and economic intervention by the U.S. insofar as recognition of and trade with Red China are concerned—the wave of the Communist future to be ensured inevitably with aid from the wave of the capitalist past!

At the Washington teach-in Professor Morgenthau was mindful to write off Thailand as a “client state” of the U.S.—clearly implying that Thailand’s independence is a fiction and that it is suitable for inclusion in China’s sphere of influence. Nearly 1 billion non-Chinese Asiatics, including the North Vietnamese, are not anxious to slip under the bamboo curtain lowered over them ever so casually by Messrs. Morgenthau and Lippmann.

MURRAY BARON*

New York City

Eggheadry

Sir: Having had good opportunity to study American intellectualism, quasi intellectualism, pseudo intellectualism, and anti-intellectualism, I should like to add a qualifying remark to your most stimulating Essay [May 21]. A great deal of the “respect” you are talking about is paid not to the intellectuals but to the intellectual charlatans of a TV quiz-show type. The true intellectual, the quiet, original thinker who has the acumen and the courage of original thought, still receives only a trifle of the recognition paid to the pseudo intellectuals who often dominate the scene. If those criteria are applied, it becomes doubtful whether present-day America can boast a population ratio of intellectuals 7.5 times as large as that attributed to the Greece of Socrates and Plato.

R. MATTESSICH Berkeley, Calif.

Sir: If your letters to the editor concerning the Administration’s actions in Viet Nam [May 21] are any indication of predominant current feeling toward intellectuals, your statement in the Essay seems to be contradictory. If “anti-eggheadry is at a new low,” why are university students referred to as “boorish malcontents,” professors accused of having “tortured and specious reasoning,” and why is it suggested that “more of our officials take McBundy’s example and slap a few of these intellectuals down”?

KAREN PELZ ALISON TARTT University of Delaware Newark, Del.

Sir: The fancy folklore notion that there was widespread anti-intellectualism never really held up. What we, millions of us, were anti, a decade or three ago, was not intellectualism, but “intellectuals.” Modern America grew great through widely applied intellect; but too many “intellectuals” were just playing.

FRANKLIN COURTNEY ELLIS Winnetka, Ill.

Sir: Recipe for all undergraduate college students: take one set of dirty clothing and wear with pride, pretend you are poor, grow hair long and stringy, wear eyeglasses either on the nose or just above the forehead, join and work for a civil rights group (this is essential), appreciate modern art and jazz, speak only of free love and never of marriage, never deviate from the popular political beliefs and practices of the professors and other college students—and you have an intellectual. Or do you?

HENRY H. SHULTZ School of Law Boston University

Imaginative Mistress

Sir: I was happy to be of help in the preparation of your April 30 report on cryosurgery. I was amused by some of the letters and phone calls that I have received. One letter came from an eight-year-old boy in Minnesota who wanted to know more about cryosurgery for a classroom report, and a phone call came from a woman in Beverly Hills who wanted her dog’s uterus destroyed by cryosurgery.

ROBERT W. RAND, M.D. University of California Los Angeles

Lifesaver

Sir: Re the broadening concept of evangelism [May 14]: I’m sure it would have been comforting to the antediluvians who were perishing in the flood if Noah peeked out from the safety of the ark and informed them: “It doesn’t matter whether you are inside the ark. We just want you to get the ‘significance of God’s love.'”

(THE REV.) W. ERNEST OLDFIELD Full Gospel Tabernacle Waukegan, Ill.

Nonfatal Notch

Sir: TIME sympathetically noted the rejection of apparently qualified students by Ivy League colleges [May 7]. But TIME created the impression that high grades have become virtually the sole factor in determining admission. This false impression arises from your failure to realize that numerous other considerations enter into a decision for acceptance. It would be regrettable for prospective students to forsake their nonacademic interests so that their grades do not slip the “fatal notch” that TIME says would result in rejection.

CHARLES ESTES JONATHAN FUERBRINGER BARRY FURROW RICHARD LARM

Harvard University Cambridge, Mass.

Too Tough Standards

Sir: John W. Macy Jr.’s formula for selecting key staff for the Johnson Administration [May 7] would probably eliminate people of the caliber of the President himself. It would certainly have eliminated Winston Churchill, who was not in the Phi Beta Kappa or Rhodes-scholar class. On the other hand, the formula might not have eliminated Alger Hiss. From outside, one gains the impression that the U.S. is being taken over by textbook experts at a time when down-to-earth common sense is its greatest need.

CLIVE CHAPMAN Sydney, Australia

* A founder of the U.D.A. (forerunner of A.D.A.), former chairman of the Socialist Party of New York and a founder and vice chairman of New York’s Liberal Party.