The Eyes Men Cometh

Sir: Your cover story on Jeanne Moreau [March 5] was a fine tribute. She is not just the greatest actress in films today--she is the only actress. You have portrayed her as someone of such inner strength and integrity that one need not fear that the success she so richly deserves will ever spoil her.

HOPE COBB

New York City

Sir: Viva Maria!, hell; Viva Moreau!

G. F. GRAVENSON

Elkins, W. Va.

Sir: La Moreau, the "Jeanne d'Arc of the boudoir"? Why not the "aardvark of the bourgeois"?

J. BYRNES R. FAVRETTO

J. McMuLLiN Washington

Sir: Jeanne Moreau is a hauntingly beautiful woman. TIME'S cover portrait was just plain haunting.

JOHN MCCLOSKEY

New York City

Sir: The cover portrait of Jeanne Moreau is as it should be. Shadowy and saintly--smooth and stony. Ready to move and become any or every woman. But how can it be Moreau with no eyes?

FRANK REGAN

New York City

Sir: For an artist to see the lyrical in the prosaic is comprehensible, and perhaps the essence of his trade--but the other way around? Moreau is a lovely woman, not a sloe-eyed Orphan Annie advertising 50 cigars to the 12th century. Please, next time find someone who can draw.

HANS LIPP

Chicago

Sir: Moreau by Tamayo looks like a rather sour Kore in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Or perhaps Mr. Tamayo was influenced by the Kouros in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Either way, let's leave the Greeks alone. Moreau, as your writer says, is all woman, every woman.

WILLIAM G. CONWAY

Orange, Conn.

Sir: Moreau's best film, which you mentioned in your fine article, has for some mysterious reason not been released in the U.S., in spite of its success in Europe. It is R. L. Bruckberger's Le Dialogue des Carmelites, in which she plays an 18th century nun rather than her usual 20th century love goddess. Moreau displays such remarkable strength and dignity in the film that the audience becomes convinced that these are personal virtues as well as professional tools. At the end of the film, all of the nuns are beheaded by French revolutionaries, except Moreau of course. She is left as the last Carmelite; only Moreau could carry it off.

HENRY WALKER

New York City

The Late Malcolm X

Sir: I don't think your article on Brother El Hajj Malik El Shabazz [March 5], better known as Malcolm X, was fair at all. As members of the Afro-American Unity Organization, we are not taught to hate whites but to judge a man according to his prestige. We are taught not to turn the other cheek to the Ku Klux Klan but to defend ourselves in event of attacks. You mentioned all the malicious things done during the life of Brother Malcolm, but you never mentioned the things he has done for Afro-Americans, such as scholarships given to Afro-American students to attend universities in the United Arab Republic. No matter what may be said about Brother Malcolm by the power structure and Uncle Toms, deep down in their hearts Afro-Americans are in accord with Malcolm X.

J. L. LILLY

Afro-American Unity Organization

New York City

Sir: It is hard to believe that we white folks wouldn't be just as angry if we were condemned to the same kind of hopeless existence to which we condemn our black brothers.

(MRS.) ALBERTA WYLUDA

Brookline, Mass.

Sir: Your article on Malcolm X is a great service to this country. One can hardly be sad that this despicable human being was assassinated. But heaven above, did you have to put in your article that he was from Michigan? We don't want any credit for this "black devil."

(MRS.) LIL BUNDY

Petoskey, Mich.

Fangs & De-Fangers

Sir: Your Red China survey [Feb. 26] was blessedly factual and realistic, but please consider further and more seriously the alternative of bombing China. Is it not less immoral to bomb nuclear war plants and airfields in China than it is to bomb villages and foot soldiers in Viet Nam? To plan a war of attrition against ignorant, misled masses that the militarists push onto the firing line--that is immoral. As we undertake an operation to "defang" China, we could make it clear to the Russians that it is strictly meant to force China into adopting Russia's own policy of "peaceful co-existence." Russia would rant, surely, but it would not start a nuclear war, and would adjust itself to a weaker China most rapidly.

PAUL WHEADON

New York City

Sir: It is ironic to note that while the figure of the fanged tiger appearing on your cover was executed in bronze during the Chou Dynasty in the 10th century B.C., and epitomizes the animal ferocity of a particularly vigorous period of China's Bronze Age culture, the same symbol is equally appropriate in connection with the regime of the current Red masters. An ideal selection by TIME.

ED CURRAN

San Francisco

Sir: If war comes to the Far East in 1965, then the burden of guilt must rest upon the shoulders of a U.S. wallowing in a sea of uncompromising hostility and divorced from all reality and sanity. Prestige will always allow compromises and the acceptance of new formulas. Is the U.S. so worried about prestige that it must rely solely upon arrogance and threats in conducting its foreign policy?

I. M. MCDONALD

New Glasgow, N.S.

Sir: Your cover story is dangerously close to doubletalk. You accuse China of overweening imperial ambitions. But besides some references to impolite speeches out of Peking, you give no specific evidence that China has transgressed. On the contrary, you acknowledge that "Chinese jets have not left their borders, even to make a show of force over North Viet Nam." What must make the article embarrassing to your discerning readers is that you include a map that distinctly makes the U.S. look like a potential aggressor. You do this very effectively by displaying American military might on the outskirts of China in blood-curdling red. You at least pose the possibility that the U.S. might drop unmentionable Things on The Enemy.

Yi-Fu TUAN Albuquerque

Sir: When the U.S.S.R. roundly condemned us for bombing the Viet Cong, it reminded me of our condemnations of the U.S.S.R. during the Hungarian uprising. Though they will rant and rave, the Russians will not do any more than we did in 1956. They have their spheres of influence, and we have ours. We must only have the resolution to hold those areas that are in our interest to hold--and those are all the areas not now under Communism.

CHARLES H. CALISHER Washington

Pacem, Love & Law

Sir: Re your fine coverage of John XXIII's Pacem in Terris [Feb. 26]: As one of those who was enthusiastic about Pope John's whole spirit, I can only be happy about the symposium. However, Pope John's laudable and warmly human vision of peace is unfortunately too closely tied to a philosophically questionable if not outdated view of law. The roots of the type of natural law discussed by Pope John lie in another age, in a world in which metaphysics and nonatomic physics prevailed, in which church and state were looked upon as partners in a theocracy. Surely this state of things no longer obtains. John's heart was way ahead of his rationalistic thinking. His world of peace rests on renewal, but that must also include the questionable theory of natural law. GEORGE J. SMITH Lake Zurich, Ill.

Sir: I must add my commendation for your report of the meeting on peace. I rejoice to see that a reputable newsmagazine is interested in reporting the thinking of such a minority--but very important--group of people. I rejoice most of all that such meetings are being held. Einstein, you remember, called nationalism the "measles" of mankind. Science and technology have so changed man's environment that he must now live as a citizen of one world under world law.

(THE REV.) ALBERT R. ASHLEY Broad Ripple Methodist Church Indianapolis

Sir: It is fine to talk about "how the world might look under the governance of love." It is also nonsense. Love is a concept appropriate in personal relations and theology but not (directly) in matters of government. In large-scale human relations, justice, and not love, is probably the ultimate value.

PAUL F. DELESPINASSE Adrian, Mich.

The War-Crimes Deadline

Sir: Even if the 20-year statute of limitations on murder were allowed to expire, that would not grant immunity to those nearly 14,000 suspected Nazi criminals against whom legal action has been initiated [March 5]. As in the U.S. and elsewhere, the statute of limitations stops running as soon as any court action to prosecute a suspect has been taken. Precisely for this reason, West German prosecutors have been working feverishly to discover persons before the May 8 deadline takes effect. To be doubly sure, they even took the precaution of starting proceedings against Adolf Hitler, although he is presumed dead. Nor would men like Martin Bormann be able to surface with impunity: a warrant against him was issued long ago.

DR. EWALD BUCHER

Minister of Justice Federal Republic of Germany

Myth Destroyed

Sir: I note, with a considerable amount of amusement, your footnote to the sad story of Sir Roger Casement, whose body was disinterred from its prison grave [March 5]. The footnote states that "because of an unexplained chemical reaction, the quicklime had not destroyed Casement's corpse." Of course the quicklime had not destroyed the corpse, just as it fails to do this in every case where it is used for this purpose--except in detective stories. Poor Sir Roger's body was probably in a better condition than it would have been otherwise, since quicklime actually preserves rather than destroys bodies. This same "mysterious" failure of quicklime occurred in the Bobby Greenlease kidnaping and murder in St. Louis and, more recently, in the Anthony Biernat murder in Kenosha, Wis. This revelation may cost the lime business some tonnage, but it just ain't so.

C. E. LAGERMAN

The Western Lime & Cement Co.

Milwaukee

Slam

Sir: Why does TIME waste TIME by writing articles on Willem de Kooning's new women [Feb. 26]? His nudes are sensuous? They are hateful and macabre-looking, painted by a third-rate news reporter who reports his own feelings.

INA ANDERS

Los Angeles

Boom

Sir: If those four who conspired to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, and the Liberty Bell [Feb. 26] had been content to level the new Rayburn House Office Building, I know of a few Congressmen who would have supplied the dynamite.

ART GLICKMAN Arnold, Md.

Prison Chaplains

Sir: If there is a prison chaplain who is genuinely interested in improving the attitudes of imprisoned criminals [March 5], I suggest he try setting a personal example. In the course of serving almost seven years as a prison inmate, every prison chaplain I met was a sanctimonious bureaucrat who was more interested in saving his job than in saving souls.

JAMES G. CAREY Detroit

Who Will Do?

Sir: The name Adam Clayton Powell is a mockery to the cause of civil rights, representative government, and responsible ministry, if certainly mocks the idea of creative originality. His stirring statement [Feb. 26] on the House floor--"I am only one. but I am one, I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, that I ought to do, and what T ought to do, by the grace of God, I will do!"--was not his at all. It was made about 1880 by Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903), canon of Westminster and later dean of Canterbury.

ROBERT KOLOVSON

Derby, Conn.

The quote is also attributed to Author Edward Everett Hale.

Over the Bounding Main

Sir: Ondine [March 5] has consistently beaten Stormvogel, including the Rio race, 1962. and the Bermuda race, 1964. I believe that Ondine has won more races in class or overall than any other modern yacht. All ocean races are handicapped events, depending on the size of the yacht.

W. H. TRIPP

Port Washington, N.Y.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.