Running Mate, Running Comment

Sir:

As a Republican, I feel you insult the intelligence of your readers by your laudatory, transparently one-sided, and gossipy story on Senator Nixon [TIME, Aug. 25]. Is not his congressional record a bit more important than the fact that he lived in a shack during law school, and his skill at getting the vote by using nonpolitical issues? What about his record concerning: housing, price control, governmental reorganization, taxation, the steel dispute and tidelands oil?

ELEANOR RUCKLEY YOUNG Hartford, Conn.

Sir:

Congratulations on your clear, explicit write-up on Richard Nixon. There is very little--if anything--that his opponents will find in his career to criticize.

May your readers remember that he was a friend of Chambers, not Hiss, when they cast their vote this fall.

LAWRENCE G. NELSON

Hudson, N.Y.

Sir:

The huffing & puffing locomotive on your cover to symbolize Dick Nixon is another flash of genius. But for me and my house, we'll ride the bus.

JOEL DEESE

Fallston, N.C.

Sir:

The tactics used by Nixie the kind and the good against Helen Gahagan Douglas . . . ("He audibly and publicly worried about her health . . .") recall a similar Republican ploy of 1932 when the New York Sun piously trusted that the crippled Franklin D. Roosevelt could be kept out of the presidency "for his own good."

COLES TRAPNELL Los Angeles

Sir:

Surely I'm not the only TIME reader who is now convinced that the G.O.P. picked a lemon in ex-Lemon Picker Nixon. In their eager grasp for the California vote, the men in Chicago apparently forgot that only the shadow of Fate would stand between their choice and the presidency of our United States.

GEORGE BRASINGTON JR. Waycross, Ga.

Of Men & Mice

Sir:

In the issue of TIME, Aug. 18, there is a picture of a little mouse undergoing, as the caption reads, his "Fatigue Test" . . . Vivisection constitutes a dark shadow in the history of any nation. We can take hope, however, in the ground swell that is arising. Until it becomes a roar of public disapproval, the little mouse will have to continue his "Fatigue Test," until from sheer pain and despair, he will close his tiny eyes and sleep, and his captors can hurt him no more.

GLADYS F. TAGGETT Bangor, Me.

Sir:

Is it not enough that hundreds of defenseless creatures are sacrificed to cancer and vivisection experiments every day without it being necessary to conduct "fatigue" tests? I would like to see Photographer Roy Stevens in an asbestos bottle undergoing a fire test.

MRS. C. B. GNADE

Johannesburg, South Africa

For the Candidates' Consideration

Sir:

The time available for raising money for the presidential campaign is really too short to develop a close-knit, grass-roots organization, for the purpose of giving quotas to each county and state, which in most instances would yield enough money to carry on a nationwide, intelligent, intensive and hard-hitting campaign. So the men who are responsible for raising money find that the chips are down and their backs to the wall in most instances during the last 30 or 45 days of the campaign. They then are tempted and do accept money from pressure groups, minority groups, big business and large individual contributions; in many instances, a lot of this money should never be accepted . . .

I enclose copies of ... letters I have sent to Eisenhower and Stevenson, suggesting that they should go direct to the American people--to educate them, not only to vote, but to give financially to the party of their choice. The main point of my message to the two candidates is this: "Some of the money collected [by both parties in the past] really has cast a cloud on the title of the presidency. "A well-defined and intensive campaign in every county and state in the Union could raise from $7,200,000 to $10 million. If each and every state would raise an average of $150,000--the amount that Arkansas contributed in 1936 to the Democratic Party--the party would collect $7,200,000. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New York, California, Michigan and Texas can and will give a minimum of half a million each, if properly organized. "I think you should go direct to the American people on one of your speeches in early September on both TV, radio and other media, and appeal to men & women to give to the party of their choice after giving deliberate and sincere consideration to the platforms . . . and the respective candidates . . ."

C. H. SCOTT Dallas

Murder Weapon in France

Sir:

Re "Murder on a Holiday" [TIME, Aug. 18]: France is grieved by the horrible murder of Sir Jack Drummond and his family near Lurs. TIME might help in finding the murderer. It is established that the weapon was a U.S. Army Mi carbine. In this sector, this arm has only been in the hands of American units [who arrived in 1944]. None was parachuted in, none was allotted to the French First Army.'

On the route Napoleon there was no battle, with the exception of a skirmish at Digne, where one of my officers was wounded when the task force of Brigadier General F. B. Butler pushed towards Grenoble in August. There could have been no abandoned arms. It is possible to believe that the carbine with which Sir Jack, his wife and their daughter were killed was traded in by a G.I., likely on the very road of the murder, and to the very man who was the killer, eight years later . . .

CHRISTIAN SORENSEN Chief of Inter-Allied Mission, 1944 Algiers, Algeria

P:The U.S. Army's records show that before 1944 it issued 16,000 Mi's to French forces and parachuted more to the French underground.--ED.

A Visit to the U.S.

Sir:

After reading your Aug. 25 article, "How Not to Make Friends," I couldn't help but wish you had published the names of the drugstores and restaurants which refused service to S. Thava Rajah, so that the decent-minded people of Washington, D.C. would know better than to patronize such . . . places.

NANCY THORNE Pasadena, Calif.

Sir:

I say "fie" on the people of Washington, D.C. when I read that a Malayan, S. Thava Rajah, had to spend 90 days as a guest of our Government to show us that we only preach democracy. Racial discrimination, whether North or South, is the blackest spot on our nation's record of freedom for all men. If the national capital cannot set a better example, let's move the seat (and head) of our Government back to Philadelphia, "the city of brotherly love."

DAVID H. CARLSON Minneapolis

Souls in Space?

Sir:

Re your "Theology of Saucers" [Aug. 18] article: It is well for Father Francis Connell to know that whether flying saucers are real or ionized air bubbles, people on other planets do exist. According to Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Swedish scientist, theologian and mystic, God created myriads of worlds and they are all peopled. Father Connell has labored mightily, like a 20th century Aquinas, to classify the status of beings from other planets, but actually, as to religion, they fall into no specifically Catholic categories.

He can take comfort, however, from Swedenborg's assertion that "such as are not idolaters acknowledge the Lord (Christ) to be the only God" and that charity or good toward the neighbor is the Way of Life. Those who are religious in this fashion go to heaven, baptized or (scandalous heresy) unbaptized and see God face to face. They are not evil angels nor are they immortal but humans, differing only slightly from us ...

VERNA DRESCH LARRABEE Tujunga, Calif.

Sir:

In my opinion there is an omission in Father Connell's suggested classes into which those outer-space dwellers who propel the flying saucers might fall. Why couldn't they be the departed Jews and Protestants, in as much as, according to the teaching in some parochial schools, only Roman Catholics go to heaven? Or does he include Jews and Protestants in Class II, with the luckless infants doomed not to see the literal face of God? . . .

R. LOUISE TRAVOUS Edwardsville, Ill.

Sir.

Regarding Father Connell: Has God been informed of all this?

R. C. BLAKES Portland, Ore.

Neolithic Mining

Sir:

The story "Mysterious Trail" in TIME, July 28 of Professor Ernest Rudge and the pudding stones was of more than ordinary interest to me. Two years ago, my wife and I visited Grime's Graves at Weeting in Norfolk and were taken by the British Ministry of Works' custodian, by means of a cat ladder, to the bottom of one of the pits. This pit, one of more than 300, is approximately 30 feet deep, and at the bottom, galleries radiate in all directions. These galleries, mined by Neolithic man in his search for flints, are only a few feet high and can be entered only by crawling on one's belly. The custodian was disgusted when we refused his offer of a torch with which to explore these workings. "Why," he said, "I've had people lost in 'em for two days or more." He told us that archeologists estimate that the earliest mining took place on the site of Grime's Graves about 10,000 B.C., and that they were last worked approximately 2,500 years ago . . .

Incidentally, Brandon, the next village, is the home of the world's last flint knapper and used to be famous for its flints which were exported to all parts of the world. Flints are still exported from Brandon to the U.S. for flintlock guns (some years ago a request was received from an Eskimo for flints for his tinderbox) and to West Africa for the same purpose. Sadly enough, the craft is rapidly dying out, and mining ceased with the death of the last flint miner some years ago.

N. J. W. PARKER Durban, Natal, South Africa

Offensive Crusade

Sir:

We at last see the words which the human beings of this century had long been waiting for [quoting John Foster Dulles on the Republican attitudes toward foreign policy--TIME, Aug. 18]. "We . . . abandon the policy of containment and will actively develop hope and resistance spirit within the captive peoples" and "assume a psychological offensive and not be satisfied with a mere defensive policy."

The new kind of selfishness of "first-class" peoples--policy of containment--is for the first time being checked by Mr. Dulles and General Eisenhower, the . . . leader, of a new crusade against Communism. To be a crusade, it must be offensive. As soon as the psychological offensive is established, it must be followed by cultural, economic, political and military offensives--the only way to defeat Communism.

P. P. CHING

Tokyo

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