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Letters: Nov. 8, 1968

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TIME

Teacher’s Pets

Sir: It appears that TIME has chosen to elect Albert Shanker as the villain in the New York City public-school dispute [Oct. 25]. The fact that Albert Shanker lives in Putnam County and earns an annual salary of $16,750 (which TIME stated) bears as much relevance to the cure of the city’s ills as the fact that Rhody McCoy lives in Roosevelt, L.I. and earns an annual salary of $30,000 (which TIME neglected to state). If you must elect a villain in this crisis, I suggest that we widen the range of candidates to include Bernard Donovan, the Board of Education of the City of New York, Rhody McCoy, the Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, and of course, Mayor lohn Lindsay.

NAOMI TAUBIN

Brooklyn

Sir: To your report that the son of Albert Shanker attends untroubled public schools in Putnam County with only six Negroes, we add that Mayor Lindsay’s children attend exclusive private schools. Mr. Shanker, however, is fighting for the rights of all children and all educators. Mr. Lindsay is not.

MRS. SABINO RODRIGUEZ JR.

Scarsdale, N.Y.

Sir: You say that the “Centr?! Labor Council threw its full support behind the teachers, poured 40,000 people into a demonstration at City Hall.” You had merely to be present at this demonstration (as I was) to know that the vast majority of those present were parents and teachers, with a very small number of union representatives. You fail to indicate that 4,000 supervisors are out because of extremely serious reasons. More than 30 principals have been forced out of their schools by militant groups. They have been threatened with physical violence, and threats have also been directed at their families.

AUDREY HASS

Elmhurst, N.Y.

Marriage Counselors

Sir: Jacqueline Kennedy! A name with poetry in it. Grace and greatness, culture, courage, beauty, bravery, femininity and family. We were proud of you, Jackie. We sorrowed with you, we wrote letters to you, we boasted about you. Every Indian home was your home. Now, for a handful of silver you left us. Why did you let us down? The tears are blinding me.

M. STANISLAUS

Madurai, South India

Sir: The idiocy of the American public, that lives under the constant romantic delusion that in order to be attractive a man must be young and handsome, has made it incapable of understanding Jackie Kennedy’s choice. Aristotle Onassis may not be Beau Brummel or Paul Newman, but he can offer a way of life that most of us only dream about and few men can offer any woman, no matter how beguiling or famous she might be.

MRS. KENNETH LA MELL

Westwood, N.J.

Sir: How welcome and moving was the warm humanity of Cardinal Cushing’s sympathy and understanding for Jackie in her many tragedies and the bitterness and condemnation she now faces. And how passionately and how readily the petty Roman bureaucrats cast the first stone.

JOSEPH T. SKEHAN

outh Orange, N.J.

Sir: Jacqueline Kennedy is an overachiever.

DAVID A. QUINLAN

Pittsfield, Mass.

Sir: Who are we to judge a woman who has lived through the private grief of two public deaths? Whom does one marry after one has been married to the President of the U.S.? Maybe Jackie married Mr. Onassis in order to flee from the parental eye of all Americans. Who can blame her?

ELLEN BLEYER

Rochester, N.Y.

Sir: I should have thought that Americans more than other nationalities would admire, not condemn, the “poor boy who made good”—and this particular boy made very good.

ROSEMARY KITCHIN

Mexico, D.F.

Sir: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gave, on an unforgettable day five years ago, such an example of courage, dignity and true love to a thunderstruck world that nothing, absolutely nothing can ever erase it from our hearts. So let her marry whomever she fancies, wear her skirts as high as she pleases, do any crazy, foolish thing she can think of. She has all the right in the world.

MARGARITA BERTRAN DE OLIVARES

Santander, Spain

Sir: Any widder woman at age 39 is perfectly justified in giving thought to her economic future. Particularly when she is down to her last 20 million bucks.

JAMES LOWRY

Dallas

Sir: How thrilling, how humane it would have been had Onassis announced that, as his gift to Jackie, henceforth no Greek child would go hungry.

M. FLEISHMAN

Glendale, Calif.

Sir: He marries a boney woman with a moon face whose voice was never a very good imitation of Marilyn Monroe’s. If she hadn’t married a President, she wouldn’t have rated a second look in Dubuque, Iowa.

JOHN CAHILL

Staten Island, N.Y.

Home Stretch

Sir: What this country does not need in the White House is a glib, loose-tongued quipster. Haven’t we had enough of loose spending, loose living, loose criminals, loose courts, loose sacrificing of lives in Viet Nam, loose erosion of our freedoms and loose toleration of obvious subversion?

On November 5th, let’s lose the Democrats!

MRS. DALE PHILLIPS

Silver Spring, Md.

Sir: All that Vice President Humphrey has to do to ensure his election is to make all his appearances jointly with Senator Muskie. The public reconsideration that this would evoke could cause a Democratic landslide.

DAVID L. PASSMAN

Chicago

Sir: With Mr. Nixon’s political demise on Nov. 5 we can, alas, welcome Spiroagnew as a permanent household expression. It will replace Achilles’ heel.

DAVID HARRIS

Madison, Wis.

Mock Hollandaise

Sir: I arrived in the U.S. from Holland more than 50 years ago, and I am fed up! I am fed up with foreigners (who presumably have never lived here) having mock U.S. elections [Oct. 25], as they are doing in Holland at the present time. “Meddling in their affairs,” indeed! Who has to snatch the chestnuts out of the fire for them? Who has to liberate them, feed them, clothe them, doctor them up, and put them back on their feet? Who lends them money, and more money (I don’t see any of them refusing it)?

Also, Hollanders, no more snarling about the treatment we are supposed to be giving the Negroes! Look to your own history—Holland first introduced slavery in this country in the 17th century. Look to your treatment of the natives in your lost colonies; my grandfather served seven years in the Dutch East Indies. I know. If I were in Holland, and listened to the invective spat at us, I would ask them, “Which is the fastest and shortest route to the American military cemeteries?”

(MRS.) CATHERINE HERRMANN

Baltimore

Chile Sauce

Sir: I quote from your article concerning the ouster of President Belaunde of Peru by the military [Oct. 11]. “Belaúnde’s fall once again raised the question of whether democracy can flourish in Latin America.” The fact that Peru, as well as some other Latin American republics, suffers from a chronic military-coup sickness does not entitle you to catalogue us all under the same opinion.

Please excuse a very irate Chilean for giving you a piece of his mind: Democracy has flourished in Chile, as you damn well know, for 138 years, during which we have had only one more civil war than you have—and certainly the motive was not slavery, since we abolished that 39 years before you did. During these 138 years we have elected our Presidents by the democratic process—and once elected, we have not once, I repeat not once, murdered them the way you so consistently do. We allow our other public figures this same courtesy. Before you go about making statements with respect to democracy and other countries, how about doing something so that it will again flourish in your own?

Luis C. AGUIRRE

Atlanta

Buying Black

Sir: I read with interest the article “The Birth Pangs of Black Capitalism” [Oct. 18]. A significant campaign called “Buy-Black” is currently spreading through major U.S. cities. White and black people are participating in a grass-roots effort to buy goods and services from black-owned businesses so that these may expand, hire other blacks and thus cause the entire black community to be uplifted economically. Black pride is an important factor in this campaign, as is the eagerness of many whites to act on the question of “What can I do?” It is not charity, involves no meetings, requires no investment of time and yet gets at the root of today’s black problem: economic deprivation.

PETER MEYERHOFF

Minneapolis

To Cope or Dope?

Sir: Re “Those Mean Little Kids” [Oct. 18]: heaven help us. If, as Dr. Daniel M. Martin suggests, we resort to doping rather than coping with our children, can Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World be far away? Ritalin now, Soma later.

(MRS.) ANN NASH

Olathe, Kans.

Sir: Only a small percentage of hyperkinetic children are helped by methylphenidate; another small percentage are helped by other drugs. Also, only a small percentage have any brain damage. A better description is dysfunction. Some of these children have superior intellects as part of their problem. Some are emotionally disturbed. Some have inherited specific disabilities. Therapy must fit the case: medications for a few, psychotherapy for some and several aids for many—medical, educational and psychological.

WILLIAM B. SCHAFER, M.D.

La Canada, Calif.

Progressive Indeed

Sir: Your review of Richard Hofstadter’s book [Oct. 25] gives a misleading impression of one of The Progressive Historians. I knew well and remember as a very great teacher Vernon Louis Parrington. From the review, one would judge that he never left the Middle West. In point of fact, he was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the last 20 or more years of his mere 58 were spent as a professor at the University of Washington.

Worse than these errors of omission is the characterization of him as “perfunctory” and “a prejudiced bore.” The young people who flocked to his courses from all fields of concentration did not consider “perfunctory” the compassionate man who, 50 years ago, fought for some of the same causes now motivating the student protests. I doubt that he ever had a boring class session in his life, and, like his master Socrates, whose method of teaching he emulated, his “prejudice” was for the pursuit of truth, wherever it might lead.

JEAN MCMORRAN DEMOS

Athens

Tracing Lee

Sir: Lee Tracy did make his “successful start” in newsman roles in The Front Page on Broadway in 1928 [Oct. 25]. His acting career actually began two years earlier, in the Jed Harris production of Broadway, playing the hoofer in that show and making an even bigger hit than he did as Hildy Johnson in the Hecht-MacArthur show. “Look at the personality I got” became a byword in the ’20s, and he was already a made man by the time the other show came in. Earlier, with Charlie Bickford, just before Broadway, he played a minor part in Glory Hallelujah, opening the show with the only line out of it anyone ever remembered: “Pack of Camels,” said Tracy—and what was memorable about that I can’t myself conjecture, but many people did remember it and still do.

JAMES M. CAIN

Hyattsville, Md.

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