Friday, Mar. 14, 1969

HP-Times.com

The President's Trip

Sir: It was a great honor for us to have President Nixon in the headquarters of both the EEC and NATO [Feb. 28]. His aim is to wipe out egoistic nationalism, unstable coexistence and indifferent neutrality in order to build up a renewed Atlantic alliance: a united people with a united purpose. This is the only guarantee against the Russian nightmare.

Although the President primarily came to listen, I hope that he will do his very best to convince De Gaulle to abandon his continuous European sabotage, which is very helpful to Communism and a threat to the existence of mankind.

The President's visit is a major step on the road toward mutual understanding between nations, where confidence replaces terror and hope takes over from despair. Mr. Nixon is only on his honeymoon of his term of office. We all hope he will sustain his efforts.

ROGER DE BORGER Wolvertem, Belgium

Sir: While the campuses burn and the students bleed and the ghettos decay and the war in Viet Nam worsens, our President comes over here to see Harold Wilson and De Gaulle. I thought the Republican plan was to pull back from world affairs until America's problems at home and in Viet Nam were solved. During the campaign, Nixon said: "If elected, I will go to Viet Nam." It seems to me that he is going the long way to get there. Why is he still campaigning in Europe?

WILLIAM J. MCTAGGART Fulbright Scholar Wadham College Oxford, England

On the Other Hand

Sir: Three cheers for Senator Hollings for speaking up about the startling and uncomfortable facts of hunger in the Southern states [Feb. 28]. While the U.S.'s foreign aid hand stretches out unselfishly, its domestic aid hand slouches lazily in its pocket. Does this hand realize the difficulty in developing potential on an empty stomach?

MARY JANE MASON Yonkers, N.Y.

Sir: How can any group of men, the elected representatives of the people of America, vote themselves a salary increase of $12,500 and then turn around and cut appropriations directed toward the feeding of the hungry of our nation? America, the richest nation on earth, still votes billions to care for other peoples of the world while our own unfortunates--white, black, Indian and others--suffer. How can these same men go to bed each night with a full stomach in comfortable homes with this on their minds, or don't most of them give a damn?

JOHN W. MOVER Michigan City, Ind.

Sir: Books of free food stamps should include stamps for contraceptives. CARE packages, too, without birth control devices and information are incomplete and, in the long run, could well be inhumane. (MRS.) GERTRUDE MILER Olympia, Wash.

Value Judgment

Sir: Every dollar sign in the article about salaries [Feb. 28] gives the lie to your fatuous conclusion regarding judgment. Judgment about selling and profit earns from $6,500 (ad copy) to $733,316 (auto manufacturing). Human life, human values and the future of the earth range from $2,400 (priest) to $200,000 (President).

By your dollar-sign values, a state psychiatrist working 40 hours a week, making decisions about who should be confined and who should be free, exercises about one-third as much judgment as a medium-priced copywriter for cigarette commercials. A social worker deciding which couple will best provide for an ad op table child uses about the same quantity of judgment as a "beginning copywriter." A nurse, caring for critically ill human beings, earns less than any of these.

JUNE WIEST Huntington Beach, Calif.

Sir: Hopefully, mine will not be the sole scream of anguish in response to the inflated figures for faculty salaries. Unfortunately, too many college teachers are still impecunious. If your writer's figures ($18,000-$21,000) were based on the American Association of University Professors statistics for 1967-68, they refer to total compensation (not salary) averages, for full professors (and not the other three ranks, much greater in number) and for universities (not other types of educational institutions). Such incomplete reporting does college faculties a real disservice, for it distorts the picture of the genteel poverty in which most of us still live.

WALTER CHIZINSKY Professor of Biology Briarcliff College Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.

Sir: It may be true that people with individual and unusual skills are paid fantastic salaries; but there is only one Barbra Streisand, one Elizabeth Taylor, one Richard Burton. How about the millions of ordinary people who don't receive such exceptional offers? The typical factory worker may earn a mere $6,500 annually. You mention the Chicago Tribune want ads indicating engineers' starting salaries of $15,000. Have you ever applied for these jobs? These are simply come-ons, and when you make application with these agencies, you had better have several degrees, lots of experience, and still be young, unmarried, willing to travel, etc., or the job simply is not available. I have been down that route.

The article certainly gives a false impression to the workers of this country. After reading it, one would imagine all one has to do is develop a skill and he can expect to earn untold fortunes. The word competition still exists in our economy, and big money reaches only a very small portion of our working force.

MRS. J. D. WILSON Chicago

History Lesson

Sir: In your article on inflation, "Nixon's Fight Against Economic Problem No. 1," [Feb. 21] there is not even a hint to suggest that this problem arises primarily from our being at war.

It is remarkable that we can spend $80 billion annually for defense with a rise in the price level of less than 5%. This in a period without wage and price controls, without any serious effort to apply a national wage-price policy, and with a tax increase that was much too little and too late.

Wars cost money, and must be paid for in one way or another. If not through higher taxes, then through higher prices. But apparently no administration is willing to take any overt step that would cause any financial strain or inconvenience to the voters.

So the old method of trying to curb inflation through higher interest rates is again being followed. This is far from painless but voters won't know whom to blame. It is the worst approach among all possible options. For proof of this look at what happened to the economy from 1952 to 1958 when this approach was taken. During that period we had two recessions. Unemployment was 2,000,000 higher in 1958 than in 1952. The cost of living increased 11% during the period. The country's economy grew only about one-half as rapidly as is normal and necessary for maintaining a prosperous economy. Must history repeat itself?

JOHN C. DAVIS (Economist, President's Council of Economic Advisers, 1947-53) New Port Richey, Fla.

Great Equalizer

Sir: What is so bad about "considering laws cutting off state aid to campus demonstrators who cause physical or property damage" [Feb. 28]? This would not, contrary to the leaping illogic in the article, "threaten free speech," but it might threaten free throwing of rocks. As for its penalizing the poor but not the rich, expulsion is a great equalizer.

The college does not belong only to the 2% who want to wreck it. It is my money (via taxes) that built it, and I don't see why my taxes must support a hooligan while he puts the torch to it. I'll need that money to rebuild it after he's through with his temper tantrum so that the other 98% can get an education. Besides, if I have to support lawbreakers while they destroy property, why should I also support police who try to keep them from it? I'll soon be broke if I have to pay the bills for both sides.

Do you really advocate financial support for people who willfully destroy other people's property? Is this just for college demonstrators, or can any arsonist get in on the gravy? Tax support implies approval. A society that actually subsidizes those who would destroy that society is mentally ill.

DOROTHY BRANSON St. Joseph, Mo.

Sir: Although your article on student revolt will certainly appease the Establishment, I seriously doubt that those individuals who are fighting for their rights and the rights of others will even consider your plea for moderation. There is no such thing as a compromise solution when the issue is one of ending oppression. For purposes of clarification, it would be better for campuses to polarize; at least then the enemy would not be a hypocrite.

ERIC R. FREED, '72 Williams College Williamstown, Mass.

Character Witness

Sir: As a person close to the fine family of Lieut. Stephen Robert Harris, officer in charge of the U.S.S. Pueblo's secret research center [Feb. 21], I was appalled by your shortsightedness and sheer fantasy in assessing the character and appearance of this able officer. Such words as "incompe tent" and "cowardly" hardly describe a man who was decorated after his last mission (just before Pueblo sailed).

Is the U.S. Navy promoting Lieutenant Harris to lieutenant commander because he is a "timorous man who might well lose control under fire"?

As to the lieutenant's "pale" and "skinny" appearance, along with his "rabbity look," we'll simply have to attribute this to special North Korean talents for entertaining U.S. Navy house guests. When Steve left home, he was a ruddy-cheeked 200-pounder. And most of us even went so far as to consider him outright handsome. Of course, when your feet and legs burn and pain all night long and you have to get up and keep taking pills for what eleven months of malnutrition and abuse did to you, you just can't look your best. A 50-lb. weight loss doesn't help much either.

G. F. VAN BUSKIRK Boston

One for the Road

Sir: Whence came the designation "Skid Row" in the article "Passive Protesters" [Feb. 28]? Any old logger who wore duck pants and caulked boots will tell you the district referred to by the writer was Skid Road. It was named after the skid roads of the logging woods, where bull teams numbering as high as six spans lurched against their heavy yokes to drag giant logs across greased crossties set at intervals of 4 ft., called skids.

The pecking order of the men in charge of the operation, beginning at the bottom, was grease monkey, bull whacker (driver), hook tender (operation boss) and bull of the woods (superintendent). These were the col orful men Stewart Holbrook and Zane Grey wrote about. They were the men who piled from flatcars on reaching Seattle from the woods and joined the panhandlers, pimps and ladies of the line on Skid Road.

WILSON K. PEERY Camas, Wash.

Good Lord!

Sir: Jimmy Breslin's agent is not "Sterling Ford ... a Sicilian who can shoot straight" [Feb. 28], but Sterling Lord (sometimes affectionately dubbed "Sterling God" by his more affluent clients), an lowan who plays one helluva game of tennis.

In his spare moments from making millions for Dick Schaap, Pierre Salinger and Breslin, he also represents duffers like me. RAY ROBINSON Articles Editor Good Housekeeping Manhattan

Compliments to the Chef

Sir: I take umbrage at your snide article on Graham Kerr, "The Galloping Gourmet" [Feb. 28]. You make Kerr sound like an inept prancing fool, when, in truth, he produces some of the most incredibly difficult dishes with the aplomb of a master --"naughty innuendos" and "hyper-Briticisms" notwithstanding. I feel, when watching his show, that an amusing, handsome bachelor has asked me to his pad and is preparing this marvelous meal just for me. That, my friends, for a dragged-out housewife and mother of three, is pretty heady stuff.

LUCY SEIBERT Novelty, Ohio

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