Margaux and the New Beauties

To the Editors:

So you've seen fit to honor International Women's Year with a lengthy cover story about "The New Beauties," [June 16] a group of young women whose only discernible asset is a pretty face. Now how about giving equal space to "The New Handsomes," about the equally vapid, pea-brained, nonsense-spouting but gorgeous young men of the world? I can hardly wait!

Judy Klemesrud New York City

With the entrance of the jet plane in 1962, marvelous girls from all over the world started to appear on our shores --all of them great sports (water skiing, snow skiing, bikinis) with great long legs and long necks. Many were rich, many just models starting out. All lived well, never got tired, had a glorious time, stimulated and were stimulating.

Hollywood beauties very often did not have much of a social sense and were not amusing company, however good they may have been as actresses or photogenic beauties.

As they say, "Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugliness goes all the way." It would be very hard to find an ugly girl today; it's not features but the whole "en-plus"--energy plus joie devivre--that the girl projects that is essential and irresistible in the girl of today.

Diana Vreeland New York City

The writer is a former editor in chief of Vogue magazine.

In a year when women are trying valiantly to assert themselves as intelligent leaders of society, political thinkers, educational reformers, etc., I find it disheartening to discover once more a TIME cover depicting the beautifully brainless. Why don't you put Miss America on your next cover and install Bert Parks on your board of directors? Okeydoke, artichoke?

Susan Altfilish Paris

There is always a place for beauty, and America can use it now more than ever. I sometimes hear criticisms that the contestants at the Miss America Pageant are beautiful only on the surface, but I don't accept that. Besides, seeing beautiful girls in a kind of Cinderella setting is something we can and should enjoy without having to ask if it proves anything. We are trying to prove ourselves to death.

Bert Parks Greenwich, Conn.

I think I'm in love.

William Eckert Long Beach, Calif.

Can it be true that a family begins its decline with the third generation? Just think--we've gone from A Farewell to Arms to "okeydoke, artichoke." Wow!

Marti Couling Mound, Minn.

I've never seen a wild flower as pretty as Margaux. Mirrored in her eyes I imagined I saw beautiful bluebonnets waving gently in a soft Texas spring breeze.

Rudolph Dvorak Fort Worth

How New York Went Broke

In all my visits to New York [June 23] I have been perplexed. How can it all work? Now I can relax. It doesn't.

George L. Disborough Kalamazoo, Mich.

At least you have touched upon, but seem unwilling to recognize the largest single cause of my city's downfall: its payments for indolence (welfare). By your watered-down proposal merely to ferret out cheaters, you join in Mayor Beame's profligate unwillingness to accept the fact that this city has become a magnet for the nation's poor, which we are somehow expected to deal with from our dwindling city resources. This, of course, is also a key factor in crime, "antisocial behavior" and white flight.

Edward R. Dorney Brooklyn

In regard to the "solutions" to New York City's financial problems: the working class is asked to take pay cuts, work longer hours and receive less pension. The situation of New York City is a good example of our present economic system. When hard times come, the working class, which created this great country, will once again pay through the nose to sustain a system under which it seldom wins.

Phillip N. Page St. Louis

No Sale

I would like to correct a serious error made in TIME'S June 16 report on "MailOrder Presidents," which appeared in the Nation section. TIME says that Washington Senator Henry Jackson, in order to conduct a mail campaign for funds, "has acquired no fewer than 66 lists, including subscribers to Newsweek." A footnote to this points out that TIME does not sell its subscriber lists to political candidates, which implies that Newsweek does.

Actually, Newsweek has never sold, rented or given its subscriber lists to Senator Jackson's campaign committee or any other political organization.

Robert D. Campbell, Publisher

Newsweek

New York City

TIME regrets the error, which was based on misinformation supplied to us by the Jackson headquarters.

Home on an Asteroid

For those people who question the need for space communities [June 16], I might point out that they could construct, almost entirely from lunar materials, satellite solar-power stations for the supply of energy to the earth. The market for power stations is more than sufficient to pay back the construction cost of the communities.

As noted by Carl Sagan, even the first space communities may provide a new frontier for creative, individualistic people. The likelihood of later, large-scale migration into space is a topic only for speculation. If migration to better living conditions and greater freedom of choice does eventually occur, the materials of a few large asteroids, now unused, will be quite sufficient for construction of space communities with a total land area several thousand times that of the earth.

Gerard O'Neill Princeton, N.J.

Physicist O'Neill is the leading proponent of colonizing space [May 26]

Who Strangles Ideas?

I'm delighted that my friend Hugh Sidey is suddenly so impressed with the "larger notion" that he finds "swimming up" in the White House office of Domestic Council Director Jim Cannon [June 9]: "the bumbling, insensitive, suffocating Federal Government has become too often an adversary of the people and not a help and is unnecessarily diminishing individual freedom, competition and the quality of American life."

I'd be more delighted, however, if he hadn't coupled this with a cheap shot unworthy of so distinguished a commentator: Cannon's office is "the same one where John Ehrlichman used to strangle ideas." Far from being an idea strangler, Ehrlichman was a skilled idea gatherer and idea expediter.

What makes it an exceptionally cheap shot is that one of the central ideas that we in the Nixon White House --conspicuously including John Ehrlichman--tried for years to get across to the public was precisely the one that Mr. Sidey finds refreshing. Our biggest obstacle was that these ideas kept getting strangled in the news media.

Raymond K. Price Jr.

Washington, D.C.

Mr. Price was special consultant to President Nixon and was the former President's chief speechwriter.

Father of Reform

In your cover story on President Sadat [June 9], you were most unfair to Sayed Marei, Speaker of the People's Assembly of the Arab Republic of Egypt. You refer to him as a wealthy landowner and upper-class conservative; yet you fail to mention that Sayed Marei was the father of Egyptian agrarian reform and the man who implemented the vast land-reform program in Egypt. You imply that his election to the presidency of the Assembly was due to the fact that his son is married to President Sadat's daughter; yet you fail to mention his brilliant record as a parliamentarian for more than three decades.

Nor should you forget his outstanding performance as President of the United Nations World Food Congress and his successful work in marshaling funds for famine-stricken areas.

Gamal el Oteify

Deputy Speaker of the People's Assembly

Arab Republic of Egypt, Cairo

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