Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR KENNEDY: PRO AND CON May I say that George E. Herman's article, "Kennedy and the Arithmetic of Congress" (NL, August 6), was indeed well timed? Most of the press is now down on...
...Douglas Ireland...
...They are concerned not with which military strategy is best, but which disarmament strategy is best...
...In his review of recent books on disarmament by Amitai Etzioni, Seymour Melman and Arthur Waskow ("Disarming the Disarmers," NL, July 9), Morton H. Halperin states that "These three books demonstrate that the disarmer has far to go before he can make a serious contribution to important policy debates on military strategy...
...Tucker goes deeper: He posits the psychological 'set' of the mythic mind to explain the transition...
...Minneapolis, Minn...
...According to Feuer, "there was no 'logical' reason which compelled them [the young Hegelians...
...Indeed, he practically apologizes for finding it so "stimulating...
...Plymouth, Mass...
...Mount Vernon, N.Y...
...Tucker's thesis is indeed an important contribution to the study of Marx and the ramifications of Marxism...
...to move from historical idealism to historical materialism," and he suggests that the motive force in Marx's case was his ability as an exceptionally perceptive empirical social scientist...
...Judith Hollander THE DISARMERS I, for one, agree with President Kennedy that the risks inherent in disarmament pale into insignificance when compared with the risks of a continued arms race...
...Cleveland, Ohio Ira Lippman MARX'S MYTH-MAKING It is an interesting commentary on the traditionalism of academic thought patterns that Lewis S. Feuer views Robert Tucker's book, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx ("Marx as a Myth-Maker, NL, June 11), as an intellectual oddity...
...When someone with an unorthodox approach tries to broaden the point of vantage, in fear of encroachment upon their own privately holy territory they accuse him of the cardinal sin, falsifying the source...
...This indicates that Halperin has entirely missed the point of the books...
...Empirical observation explains nothing...
...The traditional historian works on the surface of events and ideas...
...And one of the criteria upon which we rate our chief executives is the extent to which they can overcome the intractability of Congress and get through the legislation they deem most vital...
...Most of the press is now down on President Kennedy for so-called lack of leadership, though few people—Herman is the exception —have bothered to recall that he is working with an intractable and basically conservative Congress...
...Feuer misconstrues Tucker's method as textual analysis...
...it is just that this reality is perceived in the terms of the overpowering myth of his conception of history...
...Congress and the President, as any schoolboy knows, are constantly at odds...
...After his first year and a half in office, one wonders if he is much of either...
...In fact, it is Feuer who is restricted by textual concerns and Tucker who delves for their underlying basis...
...Lawrence Phillips President Kennedy's problems with Congressional arithmetic, as described by George E. Herman in the August 6 issue of The New Leader, are lamentable, but they hardly furnish an excuse for the general fuzziness of policy, lack of executive leadership, and hollow rhetoric on the part of the current Administration...
...Regarding specific sources on myth theory, Tucker did make several specific acknowledgements...
...Halperin accuses the authors of assuming "that disarmament is the only alternative to a nuclear holocaust...
...President Kennedy's record has been one of shabby and disappointing failure...
...This holds true regarding his evaluation of Marx as well as his empirical experiences, just as history is more than a sum of the empirical observations of an historian...
...there have been 1,656 arms races, only 16 of which have not ended in war...
...Feuer is a good example of a social scientist taking the pretensions of social science to be an empirical science too seriously...
...Herman's arithmetic, rightly considering the Southern Democrats as an entity apart from the regular Democratic party, gives an accurate picture of what the President has been up against in his first 18 months in office...
...But to understand the intimate relations between mind and matter, the student of history should make use of the various concepts and techniques made available to him by the different disciplines...
...The Canadian Army Journal for Fall 1960 states that "since 650 b.c...
...Finally, in answer to Feuer's own last point, by now Freudian theories are so much a part of the intellectual equipment of this generation (especially to a professor of philosophy and social science...
...Elsewhere it has been said that John F. Kennedy lacks the qualities of the statesman, and that his talents are more those of the politician...
...On this count...
...that that debt hardly requires explicitness...
...What is wrong with that...
...What makes Halperin think that a nuclear arms race will end in anything other than the extermination of most of the human race...
...The trouble with most scholars is that they tend to adhere so closely to the accepted field of vision that they never see very far...
...It is not that social strife is irrelevant to Marx's development...
...No one would deny Marx's role as a social scientist, but what Tucker seeks to do is to examine phenomena from a particular perspective, to place the meaning of the unique in the context of the recurring universal...
Vol. 45 • August 1962 • No. 17
