The Diplomat

Sir: As a student of international relations, I was greatly impressed with your article on French diplomacy [Feb. 7]. There is no doubt in my mind that the brilliance of French diplomats has enabled that country to climb not only to a position of effective opposition to Communists, foreign and domestic, but also to increased independence from American power.

In your "roll call of great French diplomats," two more personalities should be mentioned: Schuman and Pleven, who planned two brilliant strokes of French diplomacy on the question of postwar German rearmament.

MANUEL P. DOVOLIS San Francisco State College San Francisco, Calif.

Sir: Congratulations to Boris Chaliapin for a thoroughly delightful cover picture of Foreign Minister Couve de Murville. It was gratifying to note that the Virginia Museum's Le Lorgneur by Jean-Antoine Watteau (see cut) was the basis for his background cartoon.

Your readers may be interested to learn that the original model for the General de Gaulle figure was the 17th century actor, and friend of the artist, Philippe Poisson. Also, there was a fourth figure in the original, seated at lower left, but X rays show that Watteau apparently changed his mind and painted it out.

LESLIE CHEEK JR. Director

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Richmond

Sir: You mistakenly said that last year at the U.N. Peking got 57 votes, 17 short of the necessary two-thirds of the General Assembly.

The fact is that the vote in the General Assembly, taken on October 21, 1963, on an Albanian proposal to seat the Peking regime, received only 41 votes. Fifty-seven nations rejected it, while twelve abstained.

I-CHENG LOH

Director

Chinese News Service New York City

Sir: Thank you for putting Couve de Murville's picture on the cover of last week's TIME Magazine. This will enable thousands of people like me to tear it up, burn it, or even step on it. How dare France call Taipei the government of

Formosa and recognize Mao's Peking as the government of China?

It is true that my country is small and may seem unworthy to President de Gaulle, but it is still a country, a democratic country that is fighting for freedom for every Chinese and being in this world. PETER HYUI JR. Cambridge, Mass.

Bouquets to Rowan

Sir: When Carl T. Rowan enrolled at Tennessee State University in Nashville, he was taught Negro history by my father, Merl R. Eppse, who encouraged Mr. Rowan to join the Navy's recruiting program for capable Negro men [Jan. 31]. The true conviction and deep understanding of this fellow Tennessean are firmly expressed in his book, Go South to Sorrow. I am proud of Mr. Rowan as an outstanding Southern American who has simultaneously become an outstanding Southern Negro.

HENRIETTA EPPSE BAYLYFF Los Angeles

Good, But Baffled Neighbors

Sir: As a Brazilian studying Latin American economics, I congratulate you on your fine cover story on Mr. Mann [Jan. 31]. Finally the U.S. State Department has an effectual person who realizes the necessity for a diversified policy for Latin America. To quote the Chilean poetess Gabriela Mistral, "The only thing that keeps Latin America united is its unified fear of the U.S."

JOACHIM J. ESTEVE JR. Georgetown University Washington, D.C.

Sir: Having observed first hand and worked with Mr. Mann in El Salvador when he served as Ambassador to that Central American country, I can assure you he is widely respected and admired by Latin Americans of all walks of life, as is his lovely wife Nancy.

CHARLES HILLINGER Los Angeles Times Los Angeles

Sir: Mr. Mann says that the job of the U.S. "is to convince Latin Americans that their interests lie parallel to ours--not because of sentiment, but in their own self-interest. Democracy is a tie in these cases, economics is a tie, and Christianity is another tie." All those things that have been said are half truths. Economics cannot be a tie if the prices of our raw materials continually decrease while the prices of your manufactured goods continually increase. Democracy and the idea of constitutional government cannot be a tie when dictatorships, unfortunately, now govern more than six countries in Latin America. It is necessary for the U.S. State Department to abandon the idea that only those dictatorships that exist beyond the Iron Curtain are bad.

JAIME ASPIAZU Guayaquil, Ecuador

The New Math

Sir: As an elementary teacher of the modern approach to mathematics, I wish to commend you for your informative, understandable, enthusiastic and basically honest account [Jan. 31] of the much-needed attempts to improve mathematics teaching throughout the child's school years.

The vast majority of parents applaud the school's effort in this respect. Teachers genuinely enjoy teaching mathematics using the modern approach, thereby increasing their own and their pupils' mathematics literacy and making unnecessary the use of "strongarm" rote methods of teaching and learning.

Many children are now operating mathematically on a much higher plane than their contemporaries of a decade ago. Those of us who see what is happening from the inside believe we will soon reap a considerable harvest from our present efforts.

RICHARD A. ANDERSON Schenectady, N.Y.

Sir: As a high school student who was caught in the middle when New York City schools switched over to "new" mathematics, I differ strongly with the viewpoint you expressed in Education.

The basic fallacy in new mathematics is that it fails to see why mathematics is taught at all. For the very few who intend to pursue mathematical philosophy as a career, new math is dandy. But for the vast majority, who learn math in order to deal with the arithmetical problems of life, new math is a hodgepodge of abstractions that range from the irrelevant to the absurd and merely interfere with the practical applications of mathematics.

LARRY KAPLAN Bayside, N.Y.

Sir: You will be interested to know that three-to six-year-olds in Montessori schools in America and throughout the world are working with mathematical apparatus such as beads, rods, counters, square and cube formations, etc., taking the common-sense road from the concrete to the abstract.

Maria Montessori stated that there was no such thing as a nonmathematical mind. It was only the result of poor teaching. It would appear that she was far ahead of her time.

MARIANNE T. MILLER Washington, D.C.

Muscles, Now & Then

Sir: Wasn't isometric exercise [Jan. 31] the basic principle of Charles ("I was once a 97-pound weakling") Atlas' course of body building called Dynamic Tension? According to his reasoning, caged zoo animals pitted one muscle against another to maintain muscle tone. Incidentally, what ever became of Mr. Atlas?

JACK A. TWEEDLE Bloomfield, N.J.

> Now 71, Charles Atlas still takes his own body-building course of Dynamic Tension, works out daily in a New York gym, actively runs his worldwide body-beautiful empire. Isometric contraction, he says, is only one-half of dynamic tension. It exercises one set of muscles by pushing against an object, but the Atlas method involves pushing and pulling, therefore exercises two sets. Isometric experts, however, claim that the two methods are practically identical.--ED.

Sir: Your report on isometrics was a little gem. However, as manufacturers of isometric equipment, we wish to clarify just one statement, namely, that "ordinary laymen need no equipment."

Upon reading that, our isometrics director (an extremely ordinary layman) took umbrage and aspirin and locked himself in his office. So to set things straight: It's true that anyone may practice isometrics, with or without equipment. However, in order to make certain that the proper muscles (rather than gross muscle groups) are being strengthened, and progress accurately recorded, certain basic equipment and a reliable method of measurement are essential.

W. D. VOIT Chairman of the Board W. J. Voit Rubber Corp. Santa Ana, Calif.

Cooperative Team

Sir: TIME draws an unwarranted conclusion by using the quotation "It's a tragic mistake" as a Cassandra warning against the association of Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth & Son, who are collaborating on the twin-towered World Trade Center in New York [Jan. 24]. Yamasaki's "usual no-detail-is-too-small control over the project's construction" will in all probability be well protected by his association with Roth & Son. During my own collaboration with Richard Roth for the Pan Am Building, he has patiently supported and understandingly taken part in the search for a consistent detailing of the building. I don't see that any good purpose is being served by casting doubts on the Yamasaki-Roth team when its work has hardly even started.

WALTER GROPIUS Cambridge, Mass.

Sex & Morals

Sir: There are so many times that your magazine is helpful and constructive that I hesitate to condemn. But I found your feature, "Sex in the U.S.: Mores and Morality," together with your cover [Jan. 24], disgusting and demoralizing. There was little revealed that we did not already know, and it is doubtful that anything in the article strengthened either men or nations. It was a story depicting the "Flower of Evil." You have provided a national Cinerama on which to display dirty linen.

After wading through the paragraphs of corrosive and malodorous statistics, the words of historian Will Durant came as a refreshing breeze.

JOHN WESLEY LORD Bishop, the Washington Area Methodist Church Washington, D.C.

Sir: Once again, a TIME cover story has cast a searchlight of brilliant but not garish illumination and in near-perfect focus on probably the most murky and chaotic sector of contemporary life. "Sex in the U.S." is one of your best on morals and religion. From continuous and fairly intimate association with three successive "younger generations," I would not alter or add a syllable to its exposure.

What American morals most need is not rules or a code, old or new, but a norm: the "ideal" (if the word be permitted) development and experience of sex for normal men and women. A norm cannot be legislated or regulated, but only illustrated. The only effective persuasion for Christian, or any other, conviction on sex and marriage is demonstration, in the most literal sense incarnation.

For those who have been fortunate enough to bypass the morasses and escape the miasmas of contemporary experiment and its rationalization, this is wholly convincing.

HENRY P. VAN DUSEN Union Theological Seminary New York City

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