What Smith Said About Women

Sir: My advice to the American male before he plunges, with a buzzy head and starry eyes, into the sea of matrimony, is to read and take heed of Gilbert K. Smith's short, factual letter to the editor of TIME Magazine [Reader Smith was baffled "at the never-ending plunge of the American male . . . into matrimony" -- Dec. 10] . . .

CARL T. FLISS Racine, Wis.

SIR: I AM ENDLESSLY BAFFLED AT THE NEVER-ENDING PLUNGE OF THE AMERICAN FEMALE, LEMMING-LIKE, INTO THE SEA OF MATRIMONY, TO SINK BELOW THE WAVES OF DISHWATER, BABY BATHS, LAUNDRY, SCRUBBING . . . NOBODY BUT A HOPELESS FOOL WOULD SACRIFICE HER FREEDOM FOR SUCH A HORRIBLE REWARD . . .

BUT SMITH HASN'T TRIED IT AND I HAVE, SO SCORE FIRST FOR THE WOMEN, BECAUSE I LIKE IT.

BETTY MAYER FRIED MILWAUKEE, WIS.

Frankly, how did Gilbert Smith's letter happen to get past the 15 female, tea-drinking members of the Letters department described in your Dec. 3 Publisher's Letter? . . .

E. M. WALKER New York City

P: It was smuggled in by a henpecked editor.--ED.

Landed Gentry

Sir:

... I object most strongly to the wording, "in a rickety office in Fleet Street," in your Dec. 10 article on Burke's Landed Gentry. I also wish to make it absolutely clear that I never authorized the word "bribery," e.g., "Editor L. G. Pine has always been besieged by applicants who by cajolery, trickery or even bribery attempt to crash the book." I wish to make it clear that no attempt at bribery has ever been made . . .

L. G. PINE

Managing Editor Burke's Peerage Ltd. London, England

P: TIME apologizes to all gentry concerned for using the term "bribery." As for Editor Pine's office, which is in a 50-year-old building, he thinks a happier description would be "modern."--ED.

Other Looks at Russia

Sir:

Mr. John Lindsay Eric Smith cannot be blamed for his probably unintentional misrepresentations in "One Man's Look at Russia" [TIME, Dec. 17]. As he says himself, his visit to Russia was brief. "No favorable account of Western overtures or conditions can ever reach the Russian public," pessimistically declares Mr. Smith. He is wrong. The Voice of America reaches Russia . . . Soviet publications have repeatedly denounced the Voice. If it did not reach Russia, it would not have been mentioned in the Soviet press at all.

Mr. Smith exhibits surprising ignorance when he says: ". . . It is very doubtful whether the Russians are capable of conversion, even if we could reach their ears." Oksana Kasenkina, former Soviet schoolteacher, jumped to freedom from the third floor window of the Soviet consulate in New York, Lieut. Peter Pirogov flew his bomber from Soviet Ukraine to the U.S. zone in Germany to seek freedom ... In Mr. Smith's own England lives former Red Air Force Colonel Grigory Tokaev, who also escaped . . . These are only a few of many thousands who have been converted. Half a million of Russian displaced persons preferred hand-to-mouth existence in Free Western Germany rather than [live] in Soviet Russia.

Mr. Smith is naive enough to say: "All the Russians I met . . . were quite obviously content under the regime . . ." Mr. Smith is apparently ignorant that expressing dissatisfaction with the regime is high treason in Soviet Russia; 15 million inmates of Stalin's concentration camps, and their relatives left behind, don't share Mr. Smith's view. The author goes on to say: ". . . The discontented have long ago been converted or dispatched . . ." As long as tyranny exists, there will be the discontented, and if the Communists had to "dispatch" (presumably to Siberia) all of them, this would mean 90% of the Russians.

GENE BYLINSKY New York City

Sir:

As a former Soviet citizen who left my native Russia for the first time in 1944 I feel there is a passage in "One Man's Look at

Russia" which may dangerously mislead your readers . . .

I admit it is universal for Soviet Russians to use doubletalk when speaking to a foreigner (who is recognized by his clothes before he even opens his mouth). But in my 30 years of life in Russia, I never found enthusiasm for the regime to be anything but doubletalk, to be employed on formal occasions; the universal real attitude towards the authorities was one of reluctant submission.

I have just returned from the latest of a number of visits to Western Germany, where I have been talking to the Soviet defectors who, ever since V-day, have been risking their lives crossing the frontier to freedom. These people are not neurotics, who would have been misfits under any system; they are spirited and intelligent people, often with assured careers in the U.S.S.R., had they cared to stay subject to its tyranny. The message they one & all want conveyed to the West is: "Do not identify the Russian people with the Kremlin. The Russians, if you have the wit to use them, are your best potential allies against your joint enemies--their masters."

TANYA MATTHEWS*

Pans, France

Ike, Taft & Gallup

Sir:

The Dec. 17 article on the Taft-Ike battle was restrained and informative, but I disagree wholeheartedly with one sentence: "Taftmen have very little basis for arguing that their man would have as good a chance to win the election as Eisenhower."

. . . General Eisenhower has never even run for office . . . public-opinion polls are not infallible, and is Ike's margin over Truman so much greater than was Dewey's around convention time, 1948? Didn't the Gallup poll report last summer that Ike's popularity had slipped 5% in one month? . . .

TOM HANKS St. Louis

Sir: . . . Taft support does not come from "Republican businessmen" . . . but from thousands of little people like myself -- conservative people, who love our America and worry about its future . . .

We are told that Eisenhower is a Democrat when it comes to foreign policy. Then with Ike as President, Dean Acheson could stay right on as Secretary of State. Eisenhower has been hand-picked for us by the professional left wing (Drew Pearson, Joseph Alsop, Marquis Childs, et al.), and he has received the kiss of death from Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon . . .

(MRS.) DOROTHY MCELFRESH Zillah, Wash.

Ike & the Bible

Sir:

Bible-quoting General Dwight Eisenhower might have been more accurate ... if he had completed the quotation of Jesus' statement in Luke 11:21, to the effect that: "When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace" [TIME, Dec. 10]. Quite realistically, verse 22 counters with this: "But when a stronger than he assails him and overcomes him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted, and divides his spoil."

This significant omission indicates the makings of a great political strategist--but it hardly reflects the Christian moral honesty which is the precondition of genuine peace. HAROLD H. GROSS Freeman, S.Dak.

*Not all spirited and intelligent Russians were so fortunate as Reader Matthews, whose marriage to the London Daily Herald's former Moscow correspondent made it possible for her to escape. She told about it in her autobiography, Journey Between Freedoms--TIME, Nov. 19.

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