Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR 'COOL CATS' The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. One wonders whether Robert E. Fitch and the sources he...
...Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them—it knows itself sovereign...
...Convictions are prisons...
...Conversely: the need for faith, for some kind of unconditional Yes and No, is a need born of weakness...
...If money and charm be a fault, God help the rich...
...But the murder of the Jews was different and, as it emerges from FitzGibbon's piece more clearly than from most other descriptions, it was unique...
...but that he is an Eisenhower, that I utterly deny...
...It seems likely he would be contemptuous of such sorry abuses of sentiment as Richard Nixon indulged in when he gave his "Checkers speech" or conducted his smear campaigns...
...They were unique...
...James C. Dick AUSCHWITZ I was disturbed to read in Constantine Fitz-Gibbon's otherwise brilliant and important piece on Auschwitz (NL, June 6) that the concentration camps used by the British during the Boer War, which some Germans like to regard as the predecessor of their own concentration camps, were ". . . to be sure, not an incident of which the British have any right to be, or, so far as I know, are proud...
...Again, in the second installment (NL, June 13), FitzGibhon suggests that due to genocidal acts in the Soviet Union and later in China, the "Final Solution" of the Jewish question was not an unparalleled monstrosity...
...In the attempt to encompass Auschwitz and similar Nazi camps with one's mind and feelings it is necessary to start by realizing that absolutely nothing in history is in any way comparable to them...
...Conviction as a means...
...Walter R. Storey Senator John Kennedy has a reputation for candor and rationality in his discussion of public issues...
...The author thus commits the unpardonable sin of going along with the Germans in their comparison...
...The man of faith is necessarily a dependent man—one who cannot posit himself as an end . . . does not belong to himself, he can only be a means...
...Stalin did not murder the peasants for the same reasons or in the same fashion that Hitler murdered the Jews...
...Had they embraced his collectivization policy he would not have killed them...
...The charge is true when applied to Nixon, but there seems to be no evidence that this can be said of Kennedy...
...But all I am saying is that there is not and never has been an Auschwitz in the USSR or any where else...
...New York City Jay Kayess...
...What utter nonsense...
...His instinct is to give the highest honor to a morality of self-abnegation...
...If to be young and shrewd be a sin, then many a young man that I know is damned: if to be Catholic is to be hated, then Pharaoh's primitive kine are to be loved...
...Their only excuse is that they were fighting a war of aggression and such measures perhaps shortened the war's duration...
...There is nothing the neo-Nazis would like better than to make people believe it was not unique...
...One wonders whether Robert E. Fitch and the sources he quotes have a monopoly of the pipeline to the hearts and souls of Senator Kennedy or Vice President Nixon ("A Cool Cat for President," NL, June 6...
...banish Symington, banish Stevenson, banish Nixon...
...Of course, I do not say that they should have embraced it...
...he must be used up, he requires somebody to use him up...
...Certainly ambition and self-control, which Fitch claims to be characteristic of Nixon and Kennedy, are admirable virtues in themselves...
...I disagree that both "gradually acquired what are commonly called liberal principles...
...New York City Konrad Kellen KENNEDY That he is young, the more the pity, his lack of white hairs does witness it...
...His book, While England Slept, written when he was 23, showed that he was aware of the menace of Nazi totalitarianism and of the danger of the sloth and apathy of the democracies...
...The very fact of their non-comparability is the most basic feature of the camps (and therefore of the non-comparability of the crime committed and the guilt incurred...
...Reprehensible, yes, but not unique, they say...
...I merely want to point out that they had a choice and that their struggle had some political reality...
...Philadelphia, Pa...
...but for sweet Jack Kennedy, kind Jack Kennedy, true Jack Kennedy, valiant Jack Kennedy, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, young Jack Kennedy, banish not him the Presidency: banish not him the Presidency: banish young Jack and banish all the world...
...Considering such differences between Kennedy and Nixon, Robert Fitch's leveling of the two comes as a surprise...
...It is really impossible to say how sincere a man is...
...And the professional anti-Communists will also insist that it was not unique, and perhaps accuse me in their fervor of excusing Stalin's extermination of the peasants...
...But it was...
...In speculating about Fitch's own speculative comparison, some scattered words of Nietzsche may be found relevant...
...Kennedy seemed to be independent of his father's conservative views then, just as he seems to have a mind of his own vis-a-vis the Catholic Church and its role in secular affairs...
...Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength...
...Washington, D.C...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 31
