The Widening Watergate

Sir / Congratulations to your correspondents for their determination in bringing more of the facts of the Watergate "caper" into the open.

The First Amendment is alive and well in this nation, in spite of Justice Department and Administration harassment, because so many correspondents had the courage and integrity to seek out the truth.

KENNETH FOX

Sebastopol, Calif.

Sir / The American people should now realize to whom they owe a debt of gratitude for whatever morality is left in official life. If the press ever allows itself to be stifled by a cunning President or his overzealous staff, we, the people, will be the only ones to suffer.

BERNICE SIROTA

Miami Beach

Sir / "Amnesty" would be something like being able to forgive and forget Watergate.

L. LAMONT WILTSEE JR.

Long Beach, Calif.

Sir / The President should resign. That is the only honorable course open to him. In no self-respecting European democracy, and perhaps only in that of our allies in South Viet Nam, could a regime conceivably ride out a scandal of the magnitude of Watergate. Mr. Nixon, who has delighted in setting precedents, should set one more and thereby help patch a yawning loophole in the Constitution.

JOSEPH E. HAWKINS JR.

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sir / Hugh Sidey's "Sadness of America" [April 30] sums it up pretty well, but what has infuriated me is the President's and his unassailably righteous untouchables' evident belief in the unfathomable stupidity of the average American.

TOM SISTO

Laguna Beach, Calif.

Sir / Happiness is a McGovern Democrat reading TIME'S Watergate cover story!

KATHARINE K. MOORE

Glen Ellyn, Ill.

Sir / Little men who rise to positions of greatness have to choose between enlarging their own characters to suit the office or diminishing the office to suit themselves. The Nixon men, through the Watergate debacle, made their choice clear.

CATHY SOETE St. Louis Sir / I feel sure that spying has been going on just as long as we have had two or more political parties. The only difference this time is that the men were caught. I have lost no faith in President Nixon.

CONNIE R. CHAPIS

Denton, Md.

Sir / I am dying to know all about Watergate and the Pentagon papers, but then I was dying to know all about Chappaquiddick too.

CAROL W. PETTY

Newport Beach, Calif.

The Energy Crisis Sir / I commend TIME for its excellent treatment of our world's worsening energy situation [May 7]. A significant and commendable step to promote consumer awareness and understanding was your recent Nassau conference, which brought together political, business and environmental leaders. Perhaps the most difficult task ahead is to undertake informed and intelligent discussion to arrive at solutions to our energy and environmental problems.

JENNINGS RANDOLPH

U.S. Senator, West Virginia

Washington, D.C.

Controversial Encounters

Sir / You presented an adversary's point of view on the controversial subject of "hazardous" encounters [April 30].

Encounter is a humanizing way of relating, enabling people to change and learn by having them take responsibility for themselves, focus on feelings, and engage in feedback. Encounter is relevant to the development of creativity; it can help people who live and/or work together get along more happily and productively; it is an effective way of dealing with social conflict; and it can also serve as a model for all human relations.

S. RICHARD SAUBER

Boston

Sir / I appreciated your article on the questionable merit of various shadowy encounter-therapy programs. It is important that laymen be informed that techniques such as Daniel Casriel's simply break down the patient's psychological balance and result in no constructive, integrated experience.

However, the comparison of encounter groups with Arthur Janov's primal therapy is completely out of order: The primal patient is directed to specific feelings and is aided by the therapist to integrate the experience, so as not to become subject to unconnected, dangerous, psychologically damaging feelings.

DAVID GRANT SVOBODA

Omaha

Israel as Miracle

Sir / The fact that Israel has "grown and prospered," though surrounded by enemies, is not, as you described it, "something of a miracle" [April 30]. Israel's continued prosperity is instead a result of the successful combination of Manifest Destiny and technological superiority directed against the underdeveloped, poorly organized indigenous population of Palestine. Americans should be only too familiar with this sort of "miracle," since our own history with regard to the American Indians is in many ways similar to the conflict between Israel and the people of Palestine.

THOMAS K. MANNION

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Sir / People must realize that the Israeli attack on the Arabs is justified by the fact that one of the Arabs' major goals is to demolish Israel. How can a country strive to survive without some means of counterattack? After all, the Arabs attacked Israel to begin with. Should such a tiny country not fight back?

BRAD STONER

Indianapolis

Sir / All kinds of good things might happen in the next 25 years. Lebanon, Jordan and Israel could agree to harness common rivers for electric power and irrigation. Egypt and Israel build a trans-Sinai railway from Tel Aviv to Cairo. All the nations of the Fertile Crescent join in a Middle East Common Market. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya each contribute one-half of 1 % of oil revenues toward the education and resettlement of Palestinian refugees.

Syria could help finance a Disney World on the Golan Heights, and Iraq and Algeria face each other in a super soccer stadium at Sharm el Sheikh. Yassir Arafat could retire on a pension, Anwar Sadat take a job as headwaiter in a kosher restaurant, and Colonel Gaddafi mount his white camel and ride off into the desert forever.

So why not? The first 5,733 years are the hardest.

STANLEY SCHWARTZ

New York City

Derogatory Term

Sir / You quoted Father Pedro Arrupe, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, as saying "When we send a man to China, he becomes a Chinaman" [April 23].

Doesn't he know "Chinaman" is a contemptuous and derogatory term, which is resented by the Chinese people?

VICTOR WEN

Pacific Grove, Calif.

* Father Arrupe used the word "Chinese." TIME mistakenly used the word "Chinaman" and had no intention of offending.

Sex and Mao

Sir / Regarding your article "Sex and Mao at Princeton" [April 30], I was sorry to note that you seem to have misread the introduction to the birth control handbook as myopically as Mr. Buckley. The booklet does denounce birth control, but not birth control as we know it, through contraception. The booklet denounces birth control through such methods as India's "voluntary" (i.e., paid) sterilization by surgery, a practice that was used as a "preventive measure" against hereditary mental defectiveness in some states in this country at the outset of this century.

Opposition to such practices is not Maoist -- it is humane.

CHRISTOPHER SEYMOUR ('76)

Princeton, N.J.

Intelligent Signals

Sir / This is about your very interesting article "Message from a Star" [April 9] concerning possible communications from beyond the solar system.

I would like D.A. Lunan to know that in 1920 Guglielmo Marconi told my father, Admiral Count Millo, that he was sure he had intercepted intelligent signals from out of space on the radio station of his yacht Electra.

At that time there were no other radio stations on earth, except the ones Marconi had started in England and North America and the one on his yacht.

(MRS.) MATILDE MILLO DI SUVERO

Mill Valley, Calif.

It Won't Work

Sir / Reader Beatrice Neal is right, of course, in her assertion that God is the key stone to the understanding of the universe without whom everything is essentially meaningless [April 30], for it is precisely to fill this vacuum that man devised the concept of God in the first place. But try to cajole a group of disillusioned children into believing in Santa Claus again; it won't work, and I suggest we search elsewhere to cure the mass hysteria already enveloping the world as man slowly awakens from a cherished fairy tale.

EMIL R. PERNSTEINER

San Francisco

The Greatest Game

Sir / You ask why baseball survives [April 30]. Is it because baseball does not require overt violence or repeated scoring to keep the true fan alert? Is it because hitting a baseball -- a 100-m.p.h. fastball with a "hop," a curve that drops 2 ft., or a knuckleball that defies description-- is the single most difficult feat required in all sports?

More likely some grand combination of these and others. But it doesn't matter. The game survives simply because there are fans worthy of it.

Confined to watching rugby, soccer and cricket, I find that the Greatest Game is the piece of Americana I miss most.

LUTHER R. LEWIS

Peace Corps Volunteer .

Mandeville, Jamaica

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