Elephants "R" in Season

Sir: With Reagan, Romney and Rockefeller triumphant, it seems that Republicans "R" in season!

ALLEN GLASSER Brooklyn

Sir: It seems to me that Nixon deserves a great amount of thanks for his role in helping many Republicans to victory. Nixon is one of the few nationally prominent Republicans who have been interested in unifying the Republican Party, and in the past two years he has been working very hard to achieve this goal. He has campaigned for nearly 100 candidates in 32 states. No other Republican has campaigned so vigorously and traveled so extensively. All the impressive victories may give Romney or Reagan the presidential nomination, but if you think about it, Nixon has won a more impressive victory than anyone. Nixon has unified the G.O.P. across the nation.

RICHARD STRATON Anaheim, Calif.

Sir: Defeated Nov. 8: O'Connor in New York, Brown in California, Lucey in Wisconsin, Douglas in Illinois, Williams in Michigan and Duncan in Oregon. Was it Bobby Kennedy's "Kiss of Death"?

J. C. PIERPONT

Gainesville, Fla.

Sir: Noting that Lurleen Wallace has won the Governor's chair in Alabama, we can only admit that Alabamians have demonstrated true de-mock-racy in action. JAMES S. DISTELHORST '69 RICHARD C. KOMSON '69 Georgetown University Washington, D.C.

Sir: Hey, if Lurleen was a dime store clerk who married at 16, do we have a high school dropout for Governor now?

J. STONE Huntsville, Ala.

Sir: Our news media will not be content unless they are stirring up race controversy. I voted for Edward Brooke not because he is a Negro but because I felt he was more his own man than Peabody. I tried to use an open mind on this, and I am a Southerner.

By the same token, it is regrettable that commentators felt it necessary to label every conservative candidate who won a "right-winger," a "segregationist" or a profiteer from "white backlash." Newsmen cannot grasp the fact that we are not all liberals with Socialistic tendencies like themselves, but just plain conservatives who still believe in people doing for themselves.

CAROLYN P. NEMROW Boston

Sir: Why not hand-pick a few of the elite to vote in each precinct or ward, give these results to the news services and let them pick the winner for us? Wouldn't that save a lot of people the time and effort it takes to cast their ballots?

Every individual has a right to vote. At 6 p.m. a news bulletin declared Docking the Governor of Kansas. Do newsmen mean to tell me that this doesn't affect the voting? It would seem to me this is a great disservice to the electorate and grossly unfair. To predict a trend is one thing, but to come out and say there is a winner when all the polls aren't even closed is not freedom of reporting. It is license.

FRANCES L. CLEMENTS Topeka, Kans.

Of Pike & Dogma

Sir: Thank you very much for your cover story [Nov. 11] on Bishop James Albert Pike, a man whom I greatly admire for his courage and convictions. It is high time that someone made people think for themselves, instead of letting the church do it for them.

MRS. GEORGE LEWIS Huntington, Conn.

Sir: We are Episcopalians because of Pike's counseling and friendship, one of us a former Congregationalist, who did not believe enough, the other a former Roman Catholic, who was called on to believe too much. Pike is a great mind, a great spirit and a great Christian in the fullest sense of that special word.

The traditional position of the church has been to promulgate dogma, but we live in a day when dogma is a dirty word and to call a person dogmatic means he has a narrow, closed mind. Pike, thank God, has an open mind, a facile, exciting mind, and if he dares suggest we re-examine the meaning of some of those traditional words, he is trying to speak to the people of today, and we say "God bless him" for trying.

RICHARD and KATHRYN MOONEY Milwaukee

Sir: As I wrote to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church just before the farcical meeting of the House of Bishops, I would far rather, if it became an issue, be outside the church with the right to think and with commitment to truth and love with a man like James Pike than remain in it with the hypocrisy, cowardice, bigotry and superstition of his accusers.

(THE REV.) LEONARD P. WITTLINGER St. Mark's Episcopal Church Palo Alto, Calif.

Sir: Reductionist Pike's case reduces to this: the question is not whether he is right or wrong, but whether he is Episcopalian. His non-transcendent, non-omnipotent, non-Trinitarian, nonChristian, nonBiblical god does not represent a new description of the Christian God, but a new god. As long as he holds such beliefs as a member of a Christian church, he shows himself to be without the character to stand for what he believes without the support of those whom his robes deceive.

I would find it easy to say kind words for Pike if he left the church.

(THE REV.) JOSEPH P. SMITH Oxford Bible Church Oxford, Wis.

Sir: What's all the fuss? Even stodgy old Victorian Alfred Tennyson knew that "There lives more faith in honest doubt. Believe me, than in half the creeds."

JOHN C. BONNELL Dearborn, Mich.

Sir: You say that Bishop Pike received a degree from Union Theological Seminary for presenting a book he had written with Dr. Norman Pittenger, The Faith of the Church.

Actually, Bishop Pike did all the academic work expected for that degree. He brought 30 points of credit from Virginia Theological Seminary and ten points from Yale Law School. At Union, he took eight hours of work at General Theological Seminary, which Union also accepted. Contrary to your report, he took most of his work in the basic theological disciplines. He worked under both Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and I remember his brilliant work in a seminar in Christian Ethics. The book was offered as a thesis and was allowed only two credits. JOHN C. BENNETT President

Union Theological Seminary New York City

The Growlers

Sir: I read of the tragic accident of the Oriskany [Nov. 4] with tears in my eyes. Then I turned to the cover story on the presidency, and when I had finished reading it, there were still tears in my eyes--not because I thought you were unnecessarily harsh with him, but because the President and leader of the greatest country in the world so often shows so little dignity, so little sense of what is fitting and proper, so little breeding.

MARY H. WHITE Dubois, Wyo.

Sir: I am shocked and disgusted at this sentence in your cover story: " 'He is an egotistical, maniacal, triple-plated son of a bitch,' growls a Coloradan in an irrational but not atypical reaction to the man."

Non-triple-plates do not go to press with such tasteless wordage about the President--unless the quotation is attributed to Nixon, say, or to Billy Graham or Governor Wallace, in which case it would be legitimate. But not an unnamed Coloradan. It's like saying, with considerable truth, that a Californian growled: "TIME editors are arrogant, bumptious, and not early so sophisticated or omniscient as hey like to think"--the growler being

PAUL D. AUGSBURG Dakland, Calif. Proving the Point

Sir: My biggest laugh of the week came when 1 read that "Americans spend only 8% of their after-tax income for food" Nov. 4]. I spend 29%, and this is done only by buying day-old bread, not eat-ng any of the better cuts of meat, and 5uying only the "come-on" items at the market. No meat over 89-c- per pound has graced our table since the price increases 'his year. We use powdered milk for cooking and all the short cuts that we can.

R. J. CARNEY

Gibsonia, Pa.

Sir: Do those market men really think I have nothing better to do with my valuable time than to follow their idiotic games and jaste their sticky stamps in booklets? This 'Mrs. America" is not attracted by inane supermarket games. I want my winnings in ower food prices. The retail operators do not pay for these games--I do, in the form of higher prices for food. And why should I paste stamps for an item at list price in the stamp catalogues when it is available at two-thirds of the list price at a discount or department store? Why cannot the stores give the shopper the choice of either stamps or a discount on her purchases? Or would this be proving the point too emphatically for comfort?

F. B. HAYWARD West Ashford, Conn.

Calls for Help

Sir: Your treatment of the case of Dykes Simmons [Oct. 28] was a masterpiece of objectivity. Perhaps investigation will be stimulated by your story, and perhaps more people in the U.S. will ask the question that the people of Mexico so consistently ask: "What about the person who actually committed the insane murders?"

(MAYOR) SEABORN CRAVEY Baytown, Texas

Sir: "Until Proven Innocent" is the most accurate and revealing story yet published about my case. The U.S. Consulate-General here shows an attitude of uneasiness over its publication. I am requesting that Senator Wayne Morse place several copies of this piece in the files of his Subcommittee on American Republics Affairs, which will hold hearings on the case in January.

In conclusion, I quote William Jennings Bryan: "The humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error."

DYKES A. SIMMONS JR. Monterrey, Mexico

Handle With Care

Sir: "Inside the Lie Box" [Nov. 4], because it cautions against the truth or guilt robot, must be welcomed by those familiar not only with the machine but also with the feelings of human beings exposed to it.

In 1944 I proposed, and the forensic section of the American Psychiatric Association unanimously passed, a resolution warning that "the hardened criminal is immune from the lie-detector test more than from the free interview and other recognized methods of clinical criminal investigation," that confessions after lie-detector tests are "by no means particular ly conclusive," that the pathological confession of the innocent man "is likely to occur with the lie detector more often than with other methods," and that popular belief in the infallibility of the lie detector may lead jurors "to a belief in the machine rather than in conscientious deliberation."

As the resolution noted, the machine can give valuable results only in the hands of trained physicians and psychologists who use it together with other methods and with the evidence.

W. G. ELIASBERG, M.D. New York City

Sir: The man who put together the first lie detector used in law enforcement had no illusions about its fallibility.

The late John A. Larson warned that physical and psychological forces bear so strongly on the subjects' responses that positive findings of guilt or innocence are quite out of the question.

To illustrate the point, he once said: "My Swedish grandfather could have lied his head off and left no sign on the tape. But my red-headed Irish grandfather, if you had asked him his name, would have bounced the needles off the paper."

HARRY V. WADE Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich.

Wood Nymph

Sir: About women's jobs [Nov. 4]: The other evening, when it was snowing, a very attractive young matron delivered and stacked for me a cord of firewood, hurrying between her truck and my porch because her 11-year-old was babysitting for her younger children. I half-offered to help, but Ruth Bashaw sent me back to my books, saying that delivering wood was her regular job.

PATRICIA K. STANCE

Boulder, Colo.

Diagnosing the Ill

Sir: From Bradley Smith's Spain: A History in Art, you reproduce a picture [Oct. 28] showing people gathered around a physician who holds a flask up before them, and you say the physician is offering Moors and Christians "potions for their shopping bags." While the physician is offering something, it is not a potion. It is a diagnosis based on his inspection of a flask of urine--the flask he holds up. The "shopping bags" so prominent among the onlookers hold other flasks of urine for inspection. This art of uroscopy is a very ancient one, and has frequently been depicted in art works through the centuries.

PATSY A. GERSTNER Dittrick Museum of Historical Medicine Cleveland

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