The Shock of Chicago

Sir: As a young historian born during World War II, I had never really been able to form a mental picture of the way the Nazi storm troopers came to power in Hitler's Germany. After watching the scenes of the brutal attacks by the Chicago police on the peace demonstrators, I think I know what that tyranny must have been like. Mayor Daley's inhuman repression was a blot on the fabric of human dignity. Daley for anti-Man of the Year.

HUGH B. HAMMETT

Charlottesville, Va.

Sir: My husband and I were among the onlookers who were tear-gassed on Michigan Avenue. We thought it a minor discomfort to endure while the police attempted to control that frenzied, filthy, foul-mouthed mob of cretins. We watched these "innocents," as you called them, doing their "thing," i.e., overturning police motorcycles, setting fires on the sidewalks, rocking a van containing policemen in an attempt to overturn it, foisting signs in our faces reading "F-- the draft," waving the Cong flag as they chanted "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh." Spare me the bleeding heart's account of how they were brutalized. They were a danger to every one of us in Chicago and, unless stopped as they were here, constitute an even greater danger to our nation tomorrow.

MRS. RICHARD J. WATERBURY

Glen Ellyn, Ill.

Sir: As a Chicagoan, I am ashamed of the brutality perpetrated by Mayor Daley and the zoo he calls "the finest police force in the world." Having spent three nights on Michigan Avenue observing the occupation of "Prague West," I find absurd Daley's charge that news coverage of the conflict was one-sided. King Richard was fortunate that the TV cameras could not see everything. One night, a cop overtook a young girl fleeing from tear gas. Grabbing her by the hair, he hit her across the face with his nightstick, ripped off her blouse, ripped off her bra. After clubbing her over the head a few more times, the cop left her--half-naked, bleeding and unconscious in the street--as he ran on into the melee. He was smiling. Daley earlier said that "no mob will control the streets of Chicago." But what do you do when the police are the mob?

Perhaps I'm just overreacting. I had legitimate reason to be on South Michigan Avenue during convention week: I live there. One unidentified policeman didn't think this sufficient and hit me across the back of the neck with his billy club. Dazed by the blow and overcome by tear gas, I could not get up from the sidewalk. Finally, a young Negro reached out his hand, saying, "Let me help you, brother. Now you, too, know what police brutality is."

ROBERT A. BASSI Chicago

Sir: Police brutality? When I was growing up they called it police protection. Police protection for the peaceful citizens on the streets of Chicago and in the convention hall who had been duly elected to represent the people. Police protection for the rights and property of others. Police protection for those who still believe in law and order and who will not be frightened or bullied by impassioned militants who pursue the right to protest but cavil at constructive cooperation. This same police protection, in the past, kept the crime rate down and made juvenile delinquency almost nonexistent.

GEMMA O'DONNELL

Balboa, Canal Zone

Sir: I campaigned for McCarthy in Wisconsin, and worked in the Chicago headquarters. I believed the way to change our system was to work within it. I certainly have strong reservations about that now. After being tear-gassed while singing America the Beautiful in Lincoln Park and clubbed when I tried to go home, I would just like to know why is everyone so afraid of people protesting the end to a war they feel is morally unjust.

MAUREEN O'NEILL

Chicago

Candid on the Camera

Sir: TV needs a good cuff in the chops for acting less like reporters and more like provocateurs. They spend less time telling it like it was than telling it like they thought it was. It was like the coverage of an important sports event where all the air time was spent interviewing the players, confabulating with the coaches, getting "I think" impressions from the fans, punditizing with the umpires. To hell with that! Let's see the GAME.

ART ROBERTS

Indianapolis

Press

Sir: Congratulations to all three of our TV networks for what was the most biased job of reporting ever perpetrated.

Shades of Guebbels and the Propaganda Ministry. Hurrah for Daley and his police force. God help us when things come to pass as our news media would like to see it. I couldn't be paid enough to go into the streets and face what the Chicago police did in their attempt to enforce law and order and protect those who find it so easy to condemn him.

ROBERT A. CAMPBELL

Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.

Sir: My favorite television programs were on during the Democratic Convention. Mayor Daley starred in Garrison's Gorillas, assorted yip-hippies were involved in Run For Your Life. Not to forget the performances of McCarthy and McGovern in Mission: Impossible. Meanwhile, back at the houseboat, Nixon had a Laugh-In.

MILTON WEISMAN

Palm Beach, Fla.

Campaign Drums

Sir: My heartiest congratulations are extended to the Democratic Party for the successful role it played in the campaign of Richard Nixon through the chaos during the Democratic National Convention. Mr. Nixon should be very grateful, for it could not have turned out better for him if the whole thing had been planned.

JAMIE L. SCHWARTZ

Norwich, Conn.

Democrats

Sir: Your remark about Humphrey's strategy ("he seems to play both sides of the fence or simply straddle it") [Aug. 30] aroused the Edward Lear in me: Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey Is guilty of arrant mugwumpery: Now a dove, then hawk, With his fast doubletalk He cozens nonthinkers with trumpery.

SHIPLEY JOHNSON

Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Sir: There has emerged one bright light in a dark political year: the rare and inspiring excellence of Edmund S. Muskie.

(MRS.) MARY VOGT MURPHY

San Diego

Politics

Sir: It amazes me that many people are saying there is no choice at all between Nixon and Humphrey. They may be right but they still have George Wallace, who I believe is the only man who is really telling it like it is. It's just that most Americans are afraid of a "real" change. In their hearts they know he's right.

BILL KWAS

Brooklyn

McCarthy

Sir: I am sure that in 1972 McCarthy will begin again his quest for the White House. But why should it be "lonely"? In '72 as in '68, as his faithful Sancho Panza, Don McCarthy will be accompanied in his "quixotic" venture by all the moral, political and intellectual freaks in this country--and that's quite a crowd.

ANTHONY F. VON GALEN

Miami

Monument to Imagination

Sir: According to the old world politics, the Czechs, facing the overwhelming military might of Russia, had only two choices: to attempt a foredoomed military response or to submit quietly. It is a monument to their imagination and courage that they did neither. The use of passive resistance by thousands of Czechs avoided senseless carnage while confusing the occupying armies (one Russian division was so demoralized that it had to be replaced by fresh troops). It did what neither combat nor submission could have done: forcing a quick settlement by Russia while the Czechs were still unified, without creating a situation in which that settlement would have had to include death sentences for the Czech leaders.

WILLIAM WILKE

Madison, Wis.

Sir: Since Czechoslovakia is my native country, I cannot afford to sit idly by while negative statements are made by Senator Eugene McCarthy and others at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. How cold can politicians be? In your August 30 issue you stated it properly when you said that the equation between the invasion by Soviet forces into Czechoslovakia and our forces in Viet Nam or the Dominican Republic cannot be compared, as America has always tried to do away with dictatorship.

The public forgets that whenever we march in to liberate a people, we bring not only freedom but material goods that the people need--i.e., food, medical attention, and construction crews, and we attempt to restore the country to a full, self-supporting basis. The invasion by the Warsaw Pact forces into Czechoslovakia is nothing but an attempt to continue to drain the economic resources as well as the industrial creativity of the Czech people.

EMANUEL ROHAN

Dallas

Sir: You dismissed the parallel between U.S. intervention in Viet Nam and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia with, I feel, illogical and contradictory reasoning. While the original actions on the part of the two oppressors may seem to be quite incomparable, the intentions, nevertheless, remain the same--the quelling of a nationalistic liberation movement.

JEFF BENEKE

Iowa City, Iowa

Sir: That "thought is free" Shakespeare told us in The Tempest. The German song which Mr. Kahn quotes in his letter [Sept. 6] is quite famous in Germany. It was first published with the title Song of the Persecuted in the classic collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn at the beginning of the last century. Then it was sung by the people during the German revolution in 1848, finally became a song of the German students.

Mr. Kahn omitted the most appropriate line:

Thoughts are free . . .

No man can know them,

NO HUNTER CAN SHOOT THEM,

One thing is sure:

Thoughts are free!

ERIKA STRAUSS

United Theological Seminary

Dayton, Ohio

Hardly Having a Ball

Sir: Re your story on the two sumptuous housewarming gatherings in Portugal [Sept. 13]: I am amazed that TIME would have me saying "an earthquake . . . is no reason for me not to go to a ball" without troubling to check the authenticity. For your information, I have never made such a statement. Furthermore, since you do not clearly mention it in your article, let me also inform you that I did not at tend either party precisely because of the disaster that struck my country.

SORAYA ESFANDIARI

Rome

> TIME notes the demurrer by Iran's ex-Queen.

Indian Signs

Sir: The Basque language [Sept. 6] has intrigued me ever since I heard of Maurice Ravel's pride in his ability to speak this mysterious tongue. But there now exists a work which offers an explanation of its origin that is as intriguing as the former mystery: Dravidian Origins and the West, by N. Lahovary. The author offers phonetic, lexical and morphological evidence for close links between the Basque language and Dravidian, an Indian language. He concludes that these languages are members of an ancient pre-Hamito-Semitic family whose single origin and single center of diffusion is the Near East.

(MRS.) PHYLLIS JUSZCZYK

Philadelphia

Call Out the Coast Guard

Sir: To most safety experts, licensing of boat operators isn't an "obvious answer" [Sept. 6]--it's a superficial one. Could a license have saved the boob who drove through the cabin cruiser or the nine nuts who went off without life jackets? Hot-rodders in cars have no trouble passing licensing tests. Neither would hot-rod skippers. More lives could be saved for less money by beefing up Coast Guard and state patrols to enforce our boating laws.

FRED B. LIFTON

Boating Industry Association

Chicago

Long Live!

Sir: Leonard Bernstein has once more been quoted as saying "the symphonic form is dead" [Aug. 30]. As one of the composers whose symphonies he has championed, I have never heard him utter these words; I have only read them and they have always irritated me. He has never clarified this spurious statement, has himself composed in this form. His repeated performances of my symphonies, the symphonies of Copland, Schuman, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and many others are sufficient evidence that he is quite wrong. Bernstein's statement is paradoxical, but as long as he himself composes in the symphonic form, he gives himself the lie. Long live Leonard Bernstein and long live the Symphony!

DAVID DIAMOND

Rochester, N.Y.

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