Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR SPIVACK I share Robert G. Spivack's annoyance with the pundits who could only quibble and find fault with President Eisenhower at Little Rock ("Better Late Than Never," NL, October 7)....
...Brooklyn, N. V. Theodore N. Lewis...
...Like Russia and Italy, Germany was ruined by revolution and subversion, not through the workings of the democratic process...
...New York City Murray N. Rothbard EHRENBURG James Critchlow's piece on Ilya Ehrenburg (NL, September 16) is rather puzzling...
...It is quite certain that, should Khrushchev demand the same servility which Stalin did, Ehrenburg will be among the first to accommodate him...
...My regret is that he did not also say what he undoubtedly thinks of those "liberal" politicians who failed to rally to Eisenhower's side...
...This, he reasons, cannot be correct because "Hitler came to power under a democratic multi-party system in which he had managed to attract a larger bloc of voters than any other single party...
...Unfortunately, too many relevant facts were perverted or forgotten in the 12 years of exclusive Nazi propaganda...
...He will then see quite clearly why it is that Mr...
...Why should liberals continue to hit the President when, at long last, he does the right thing...
...When I first read his comments, I wondered if Spivack was not being a little too hard on his colleagues...
...Besides, the trend counts...
...The truth, I hope, will emerge some day...
...But they carry a proud and beautiful message...
...Hicks suffered, why he found it necessary to attack Atlas Shrugged with such unreasoning fury, and why some readers will receive the book not with misery but with joy...
...If "attracting u larger bloc of voters than any other single party'- in a multi-party system were sufficient to doom a democratic constitution, neither France nor Italy, among other nations, could have escaped a Communist dictatorship after World War II...
...Falls Church, Va...
...While the first Communist regime came about as the result of a successful violent revolution, Lichtblau continues, Hitler "first became Chancellor and then made the revolution...
...We know Spivack down here as a hard-headed, relentless, digging reporter...
...How Simug some of our "pundits" can be...
...In the final phase of the Weimar Republic, the cooperation of the two anti-democratic forces on the right and left, Nazism and Communism, was essential to bringing down the democratic forces...
...This view of the democratic Weimar Republic being ended by "legal" means threatens to become so generally accepted as to wipe out the reality of Hitler's struggle for power...
...No account of Hitler's beginnings can explain what really happened unless it clearly shows that, in the last free elections less than three months before Hitler's Chancellorship, his party went down to ignominous defeat and financial bankruptcy with i loss of more than two million votes (11 per cent of the previous high...
...I am happy that Spivack was able to put so much feeling into what he had to say...
...Only the editors of the Louisville Courier-Journal seemed able to rise above partisanship and put the whole story in its complete perspective...
...Along with his other fine qualities, I am happy to note his sense of fair play...
...New York City Torn Stolper HICKS I am sure that many of your readers were puzzled by Granville Hieks's October 7 column dismissing Ayn Rand's new novel, Atlas Shrugged, as "excruciatingly bad" without even attempting to tell us why...
...In short, Hitler's methods were carefully copied from both the Russians and Italians...
...Washington, D. C. Daniel Feldmann HITLER In his review of C. J. Friedrich and Z. K. Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (NL, September 2), John H. Lichtblau opposes the book's contention that "Fascist and Communist dictatorships are basically alike...
...Multi-party democracy, controversial though it may be as a system, had a definite chance of winning out in Germany in 1932 and 1933, when the world economic crisis showed the first signs of relenting...
...Any reader interested in solving this mystery is invited to read the book for himself...
...Is it just compulsive, or what...
...Then I picked up this week's issue of Time and there, in the press section, was the whole documented story...
...No matter what this famous or, more correctly, infamous Russian writer may say or write in the future, the fact that he was one of the staunchest defenders of Stalin and Stalinism brands him eternally as a literary prostitute...
...Particularly shameful and cowardly was his signing at the behest of Stalin, together with other prominent Russian Jews, of a denunciation of the distinguished Soviet Jewish physicians whom Stalin accused of "counter-revolution," and who escaped execution by a hair's breadth...
...J. W. Finney As a long-time and often unhappy reader of The New Leader, my faith in American liberals was restored by Robert G. Spivack's article on Ike and the South...
...He tells us only that he "suffered misery" from reading it, without saying what it was that made him suffer...
...The gleaming bayonets," wrote the Courier-Journal's editors, "are ugly and the cause of their presence is enough to grieve the heart of the nation...
...For Hitler came to power at the end of a long, violent civil war, which included organized infiltration by Nazi cells of the Army, police, judiciary, local governments, etc...
...They say what too long was unsaid before, that ours is a government of law that edicts of the court are not to be flouted...
...Hitler's party never succeeded in collecting substantially more votes than did the Communists in France and Italy after 1945— that is, around one third of the total...
...Apparently, your reviewer was unconsciously influenced by what Hitler and his historiographers wanted people to believe...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 42
