Correspondence

...Sihanouk told a French correspondent in the mid-1960s the same thing in another way: "If there is someone speaking Khmer in Southeast Asia a 100 years from now, I will have been a success...

...Although affiliated with the U.S...

...I am referring to the debate that raged among academics in the late 1960s and early 1970s over the origins of the Cold War...

...And right now what we are doing is distorting the case for doing it by hiding evidence...

...this charming figure is so sickeningly filled with sugar and spice that even the flowers are nauseated by his touch...

...FredD...

...4. What we have here, gentlemen, is a case of failure of communications...

...I should hate to live in fear of it...

...It is the same old presentation of so-called "hard intelligence" without any reference to history, geography, or the philosophical and psychological motivations of the players...

...It is explicitly business oriented and has not attempted to avail itself of tax-exempt status for contributions...

...Concerning a different and somewhat less important subject, "The Main Event'' between Peter Rodman and William Shawcross sounds like history repeating itself...

...What can one say...

...Alda who suffers the torture of the unconscious motive...

...Horowitz states that on the contrary he had been unable to accept such funding because of other commitments...

...Just so you know where I'm coming from, that's Mr., not Ms...

...The whole sequence of events in Indochina-in which the escalation came from the Communists, not from Saigon and Washington-is obscured by this...

...And as for his advice '' to head for the exit the next time you hear classical music emanating from the soundtrack of a Hollywood film"-to hell with it...

...He now suffers a more generalized anxiety-the profound fear of castration at the hands of that great progenitor of influential ideas, mass media...

...I read the article in question...

...The revisionists seemed to have a compulsive need to demonstrate that America was always wrong...

...The media is a ubiqui tous and powerful force in the life of the modern man...

...3. In fact, what happened was that Sihanouk saw the denouement of the U.S.-Communist Vietnam war coming in Vietnam as early as 1968 and his Congress of Indochinese Peoples -I was the only foreign correspondent there-was intended to get the Vietnamese out of his country before the war ended...

...Chamber of trade associations...

...Joseph Hertzlinger Jericho, New York...

...I did get the idea that the Soviet Union did not like the new policy and I regarded it as good news...

...It was the U.S...

...I wonder if they ever really catch up to the revisionists...

...For several years, at least, conservatives have been pointing out that x-percent of reporters are liberal or that y-percent of their articles are slanted left...

...In that article, Mr...

...Sorry In my August 1981 article on the Conservative Public Interest Law Firm, I wrote that Michael Horowitz, the author of a comprehensive study on such firms, had unsuccessfully sought funding for a public interest firm of his own...

...Baldwin's reference was entirely accurate: NCLC is the only national litigating firm which represents business interests exclusively...

...The point is clear...

...The Four Seasons, Alda's fair and accurate representation of human relationships in contemporary American society, seems to have aggravated Podhoretz's obviously unresolved castration complex...

...Given the state of his psyche, however, I am sure that Podhoretz is not a member of that odious group of individuals who pas sively "await the undressing...

...It is not Mr...

...2. While I would in general side with Rodman, his problem is that U.S...

...So it is with Shawcross and his ilk in connection with the Vietnam War...

...And the problem, after all, is more than 500 years old...

...No longer does he fear emasculation at the hands of his biological father, however...

...John T. Fennell Los Altos, California Crotch Checks This letter concerns John Podhoretz's "revealing" review of Alan Alda's movie The Four Seasons (August...

...That conference almost collapsed when Sihanouk was forced to withdraw a speech in which he demanded a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia-certainly indicating then that their occupation amounted to more than just border areas as Shawcross would have us believe-or find.his Vietnamese and Chinese delegates walking out...

...The "revisionists" attempted to justify Soviet duplicity, brutality, and aggression as a series of understandable reactions to historical circumstances and America's paranoia, economic imperialism, etc...

...Mark L. Siege/ Los Angeles, California The artist in question is Elliott Banfield...

...Deeply hurt by these accusations, Mr...

...Podhoretz does not feel up to facing them, but asks that you keep those cards and letters coming in...

...I did not read it with the same care that Bethell used...

...Finally, contrary to the intimation of the article, NCLC does not "function like a trade association.'' NCLC does not lobby the Congress, participate in notice and comment rule-making, engage in general business or industry promotion, or undertake the broad range of programs which characterize the activities of the U.S...

...policy-and therefore, documentation-was often aimed at obscuring the real situation...

...The same kind of intellectual sleight-of-hand, distortion, and questionable documentation is being employed...

...Rather, as stated earlier, NCLC's express purpose is to ensure that the business community is represented in significant public policy litigation by the use of its own staff of attorneys and through the judicious use of outside counsel...

...Indeed, I downed a porter while reading Douglas Bartholomew's excellent article in the July issue...

...To set the record straight, the organization to which Mr...

...Jill Counts Indianapolis, Indiana The article by film critic John Podhoretz is a good way to finish a subscription to your sheet...

...The critique of The Four Seasons was in fact a cheap shot at Alan Alda...

...Rodman obliquely refers to this in his reference to Sihanoukville and the arms traffic through it which helped make possible the 1968 Tet Offensive against South Vietnam...

...Writ ing and disrobing are similarly revelatory'activities...

...Per haps he's that artist who never waits for thanks, whose only reward is seeing to it that artistic justice is done...

...As early as 1958 when I visited Saigon at President Diem's invitation, and discussed with both him and former Prime Minister Son Ngoc Than of Cambodia-he headed the Japanese-sponsored government, you know-it was plain that events in South Vietnam (then the Republic of Vietnam) could not be separated from what went on in neighboring Cambodia...

...The underlying philosophy of NCLC is that the public interest can only be properly and fairly determined if the viewpoint of business is an effective part of the public policy decision-making process...

...Baldwin Carlisle, Pennsylvania We Represent Business The purpose of this letter is to take exception to certain statements contained in the article "Rising Above Principle: The Conservative Public Interest Law Firm" by Fred D. Baldwin, which appears in the August 1981 American Spectator...

...What concerns me chiefly is not Alda's attempt to undermine the masculinity of the male multitudes, but instead the profound insecurity of the writer who seriously considered Alda to be a threat...

...aid program that built Sihanoukville into a port and the connecting highway to Phnom Penh, another irony of this history...

...I pity him...

...Those long, tapered, manicured fingers...

...The evidence provided by last November's elections is that the average reader of Time, Newsweek, the New YorkTimes, or the Boston Globe pays no attention...

...it is Pod-horetz...

...My one regret is that your cover artist did not even bother to autograph his work, giving me no chance to compliment him personally...

...Chamber of Commerce, NCLC is funded exclusively by membership dues and contributions which it receives from more than 1,000 members of the business community...

...NCLC did testify on one occasion before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee concerning changes to the FOIA, as a result of NCLC's litigation experience under the Act...

...Baldwin referred is the National Chamber Litigation Center, Inc...

...Stanley T. Kaleczyc Director of Litigation, NCLC Washington, D. C. Kudos Congratulations on Robert Skidel-sky's article on Keynes (August 1981) -informative, and very free of the only-just-submerged hysteria that sometimes informs writing on serious topics, even in your excellent magazine...

...There is one point on which Mr...

...Already it was obvious that their infrastructure far overwhelmed the Cambodian governing structure...

...But, as you observed in an essay on fine brews six or seven years ago, "On my death bed give me Guinness," or words to that effect...

...I would appreciate it if conservatives would stop criticizing the media and start governing...

...Sol W. Sanders New York, New York I think of myself as a rather rare individual for at least two reasons: 1. I read The American Spectator and 2. I drink New Albion beer...

...But someday we may have to...

...NCLC...

...Podhoretz obviously cannot stomach Mr...

...NCLC is a separately incorporated, public policy law firm whose purpose is to represent business interests in adversary proceedings before the courts and regulatory agencies...

...I remember a comment from a young foreign service officer in the early 1960s-he has gone on to finer things with an oil company, and alas, doesn't even remember making the remark to me-which went like this: "I am not in favor of our going into Cambodia...

...Ed...

...Podhoretz should perhaps conduct a crotch check if he feels lacking...

...No drawing (or photograph, for that matter) has succeeded so well in capturing the true essence of its human subject...

...See my stories in U.S...

...Podhoretz's diagnosis of the situation is startlingly incorrect...

...God help us if we are now to have 30 years of trendy conservatives playing the same sort of game that the liberals (who gave us econometric explanations of our economy, content analysis of the communications media, and computerized documentation for socio-anthropological studies) have perpetrated, which led to the catastrophic disasters in Indochina- not in Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia separately...

...News & World Report reporting the entry of regular North Vietnamese troops into the southern fighting in the summer of 1964 which the Johnson administration sought to camouflage until early 1965...

...and I did not get a sense of distaste for Reagan's foreign policy...

...To our knowledge, NCLC was the first litigation firm to be so classified" by the IRS...

...As someone who over a period of more than two decades watched and reported on events in that country for American and foreign media, could I make the following points: 1. Cambodia was always an intimate part of the Indochina conflict known first as the French War, then the U.S...

...The fact that his head is swelled up to twice the size of any of his other bodily features...

...Bye, bye, American Spectator...

...Alda's avowed feminism...

...Rodman about events in Cambodia and the measure of culpability is that it becomes an argument of scriptural interpretation rather than an examination of the historical events that occurred in that country...

...All of that is irrelevant unless someone pays attention...

...And am I mistaken or do I detect the growth of mammary glands protruding from the upper part of his trunk...

...Contributions and dues paid to NCLC are deductible as a business expense...

...Scholars like Rodman are left scur-ring in their wake, an academic version of the political truth squad, attempting to set the record straight...

...Lynn Scharbow Alice, North Dakota P.S...

...Son Ngoc Than once said to me, justifying his policy of collaboration with a Saigon government rather than Sihanouk's attempt to use, first the French, and then the Chinese, to out-maneuver the Vietnamese: "In the long run, we must establish a relationship with the Vietnamese...

...The way the slanting of the eyes, the upturned corners of the mouth, and the jowls on the face combine to give Alda his characteristic self-indulgent smirk...

...To appreciate this, one needs to go back to the fact that during the French occupation of Indochina, the administration of Cambodia and Cochin China as protectorates was closely linked as were communications, etc., etc...

...Alan Alda, Cover Boy Of all the artistic works I have ever gazed at, the classic work has to be the cover drawing of Alan Alda in your August 1981 issue...

...You must pardon me if I 'wax Freudian,' but in this game of amateur psychoanalysis all is fair...

...Baldwin wrote...

...I have now read the article many times and I am finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the frightening (albeit unintentional) message Pod-horetz has managed to convey...

...Those delicate, slender, effeminate limbs...

...For example, if you examine the communiques of the war between France and the Vietminh forces from 1947 to 1954, you will find that almost all the engagements which took place in the South-that is, in old Cochin China, the southern part of the country before the partition in 1954-took place in Cambodia...

...NCLC is exempt from the payment of federal income tax pursuant to §501 (c) (6) of the Internal Revenue Code, which is applicable to business leagues...

...Yes, the picture as a whole gives the reader a wonderful perspective of its subject...

...Horowitz...

...they both make it impossible to conceal dismember ment...

...I regret the error and apologize to Mr...

...Donald Kahn Miami, Florida Pay No Mind I must disagree with Tom Bethell on the effectiveness of Leslie Gelb's attempts to propagate his opinions (September...

...the [United States] Chamber of Commerce maintains a litigating arm, but it is more like a trade association...

...Best of all, of course, are the flowers in the drawing which provide the same effect, say, as Oliphant's little birdie, furnishing the ever-so-slight, ever-so-subtle addition that packs such a devastating wallop...

...Everything was always our fault...