The U.N. & Mr. Lodge

Sir:

I sincerely congratulate you on the Aug. 11 article on the U.N.'s Henry Cabot Lodge. During the last five years, I have witnessed the excellent work performed by Ambassador Lodge in defending the highest principles of international morals. His uprightness in opposing the sinister maneuvers of the representatives of the Soviet Union and its satellites and quasi-satellites deserves high praise from the free men of the world.

EMILIO NUNEZ PORTUONDO Ambassador of Cuba to the U.N. New York City

Sir:

Congratulations! TIME and Henry Koerner have accomplished what television and news photographers have failed in doing over the years. You've taken a handsome man and made him look like a fat idiot.

CARTER MULLALY JR. West Los Angeles

Sir:

Ambassador Lodge speaks a clear and muscular language that warms my heart every time he addresses the Russians. As one who has viewed all things Republican with a jaundiced eye, I think it is a great relief to hear him after listening to the usual toplofty, mush-mouthed types who use elliptical sentences that seem, lately, to be the voice of America.

Someone should consider Henry Cabot Lodge for the next Republican President. He might be prevailed upon to consider changing one thankless job for another. Furthermore, he just might win.

WILLIAM C. DA VIE Rosedale, N.Y.

The Pictures' Story

Sir:

After looking at your Aug. 4 pictures of the Baghdad victims, I have decided to resign from the human race.

(MRS.) ELLEN LOVETT, R.N. Seekonk, Mass.

Sir:

For the second time I have found it necessary to tear a page out of TIME before taking it home. I wonder why any editor who is a human being could think of printing the "Victims of Baghdad" pictures.

GERARD FAY London

Sir:

Thank you for publishing the pictures of the victims of the "bloodless" Iraqi revolt.

At first I tried to forget these horrors, but I soon realized that I couldn't and shouldn't.

JIMMY BAIRD Dallas

Sir:

When one reads of the inhuman and needless carnage of the Iraq revolt, one wonders if the teeming masses of the Arab countries are capable of, or indeed have a right to, self-determination.

CHARLES R. GALE

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sir:

My most fervent hope is that the "Ike was stupid" crowd took a good look at the pictures.

MRS. CHARLES G. STUVENGEN San Francisco

Escape to Reality

Sir:

I am one of the many, though silent, Americans who appreciated TV's on-the-spot coverage of the U.N.'s handling of the Middle East crisis [Aug. 4]. Ordinarily, I wouldn't waste my time on the trash that litters the daytime TV screen, but I stayed glued to my set to watch U.N. representatives at work on a grave international problem. If the members of that "peace-loving audience" of popular programs truly cared to preserve the pleasant status quo of their lives, they would do well to pay less attention to the meaningless escapism of Dotto, Play Your Hunch and For Love or Money.

ANN NORTON Beverly Hills, Calif.

Sir:

When the networks encountered complaints, they might have reflected on the probability that their normal fare has alienated all but the most naive.

P. S. BARROWS Del Mar, Calif.

The Cultured Admiral

Sir:

A "Well Done" for your Aug. 4 cover and fine story on Admiral Holloway. Unquestionably one of the most cultured and erudite admirals in the Navy, it has been his practice for years to travel with a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, edition of 1914 or earlier, as, in his opinion, editions subsequent to World War I laid more stress on science and inventions than on the arts.

Your quotation from Mahan is a paraphrase of a very old proverb, and written in many tongues, namely, that "one sword keeps another in the scabbard." In an evil age, the man who bares the sword is the man who bears the peace.

EDGAR K. THOMPSON Captain, U.S.N. Washington, D.C.

Nasser's Size

Sir:

Your cover story on Nasser shows again that your evaluation of a man's policy and character doesn't rest on the integrity of this policy but on how harmful or helpful the man is to the West. Every so-called pro-Western government in this area has proved to be undesirable to the people. The fact is that the people are sick of being ruled by agents who care more about their own security and the interests of the American State Department than the welfare of their country. Nasser is nobody's tool.

LAILA ROSTOM Cairo

Nice Note from Nancy

Sir:

I don't mind being criticized, but I do mind being called "acid-tongued." You see, I am trying to be a Christian, and acid tongues don't help you on the way. I enjoy your pages--or I would not trouble to write you.

P.S. All is forgot, forgiven.

NANCY ASTOR London

Thoughts for the Family

Sir:

Now that the delegates at the National Catholic Family Life Convention in Buffalo have censured romantic love among teenagers, mixed marriages and birth control, I would like to ask the following question: How can these ecclesiastical bachelors consider themselves qualified to make decisions concerning family, marital and sexual problems? A Catholic priest attempting to be an authority on such problems is as ludicrous as a man trying to coach a football team when he has never seen a football game.

RALPH B. RAMING Los Angeles

Sir:

The Most Rev. Joseph A. Burke, Bishop of Buffalo, might look even beyond Buffalo and discover that we have followed God's command to be fruitful--we have multiplied, and the earth is filled; now all we need to do is use our heads.

FRANK MENEFEE Newport, Ky.

Art Class

Sir:

Grandma Moses must be itching to assemble the sullen-looking gang of leading abstract expressionists [Aug. 4] and blister their individualistic behinds.

RICHARD J. O. GREENE Indianapolis

Sir:

Your fine story succeeded in flushing out an old friend, co-worker and protagonist of Jackson Pollock's. It's me. I was a high school chum of Pollock's, later in 1930 we left Los Angeles for New York to broaden ourselves technically. We began a hard classic training at the Art Students League. To pay for our tuition and materials, we shared studios, worked as bus boys, garbage removers and dishwashers at the League cafeteria. School over, we hung up our respective shingles in the Village as professionals.

For ten years Pollock and I worked furiously at our painting, but nothing happened. We bummed around the country and brought our works back to New York galleries, but no one noticed our efforts. The academic painters seemed to have full control, and any deviator or nonconformist was an outsider, thus rejected. After eleven years of this struggle, I gave up to try my hand at ideas I wanted to develop in small towns in California, but Pollock remained in New York and continued his fight against academism in art.

Thus, whether or not one finds merit in Pollock's paintings is immaterial. His works remain as symbols of man's struggle against conformity, complacency, bigotry and methodism. He demonstrated that man's free spirit is more valuable than anything else he possesses.

MANUEL TOLEGIAN Sherman Oaks, Calif.

Sir:

Trundling tripe around Europe merely confirms the average European's impression that we are cultural boors. These so-called A.E. artists are a collection of bone-lazy, pseudo-bohemians who foist five-minute brush floppings onto the usual gullible, snobbish suckers.

F. H. NORMAN CARTER

New York City

Some Old Iceberg

Sir:

In 1932 Ernest Hemingway remarked in Death in the Afternoon, "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows . . . The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." In Hemingway's "refreshing" Paris Review interview [Aug. 11], he remarked, "I always write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate . . ."

It is reassuring to see that in 26 years both Mr. Hemingway's views and his iceberg have remained so solid. One wonders, however, if the move from above to beneath the water is an evidence of Mr. Hemingway's progression in depth, or a reflection of the modern quest for a place to hide.

ROBERT W. LYONS Westmont, NJ.

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