Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, bat letters should not exceed 300 words. CENSORSHIP Just when John Simon had amazed and delighted his readers...
...Is this an adequate response to current reality...
...It's not that simple...
...But, above all...
...Avoca, N.Y...
...But zealous pursuit of a goal b\ the political method can also result in harm...
...The patient must have seme abiHty to defend his interests when he finds himself dealing with organized forces not greatly concerned with him...
...He set it in a historical context, capturing the essence of it in his review title: "Jakov Lind's Double Vision...
...But, as President Johnson has recently pointed out, attention must be diverted to medical practice, the actual provision of service to the public...
...After five years of reviewing and more years of reading criticism than I care to admit to, I haven't managed to nail down that useful-sounding yardstick...
...Wilkinson points to $94 a day costs for hospital care, and $80,000 a year derived from Medicaid by one physician...
...CENSORSHIP Just when John Simon had amazed and delighted his readers by expressing an affinity for the pectoral (per his review of 'The Stranger," NL, January 29), another of your employes frustrated my prurient interest by pasting my mail label across the cleavage of Sophia Loren, displayed on the back cover of your April 8 issue...
...one cannot substitute inchoate feelings of benevolence for the hard reasoning required to make proper choices...
...Asher Brynes VIETNAM Gus Tyler writes of "the war in Vietnam, to which two previous Presidents had committed the U.S...
...forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965—implicit also in a White House statement as early as October 2, 1963—had been revised...
...Is it enough to evoke strong emotional forces, pass enabling legislation, appropriate public funds, watch them increase from year to year, and then sit back in a glow of satisfaction at having fought the good fight...
...F. L. Alt Gus Tyler replies: In 1962, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, interviewed at the Saigon airport, ex-Cominued on next page DEAR EDITOR ^¦¦¦H^^^^M^^I^^HB^^^^^^^^^H Continued plained the United States' role in the war: "We are going to win in Vietnam...
...In recent years, the Federal government has provided increasing sums of money, now over $1 billion a year, for medical research, a laudable undertaking...
...Bermel is extra-ordinary...
...When a British correspondent pointed out that "American boys are dying out here" and asked whether America approved, RFK answered: "I think the American people understand and approve of what is going on...
...The essential ingredient in medical practice is a human characteristic concern of a person for the welfare of another...
...most of them were reported in the daily press...
...after compounding the principal foreign aid recipe book of the present decade, he was called to the White House to become a chief assistant to the President...
...Hugh Hefner will hear about this...
...All of these facts are public knowledge...
...the second fimire given should have been 230,000...
...Perhaps it adds up to the same thing...
...What does not require speculation is the need to determine in a hurry who will control what in the evolving struggle for power...
...a few years ago the Mayor of Hiroshima said 23.000 would be a more accurate figure...
...Refuse further aid unless they change their ways...
...This caveat should not be legislated away...
...I have rarely read a critique that caught so well the pulse of a drama...
...especially this one, which was so baffling/fascinating/boring/ electrifying—a mass of "contradictions and staggering paralogisms, delivered by pairs of outcast angels...
...In conclusion, and this is still the World Bank talking, recent experience has proved mistaken the idea that government would be more far-sighted and cognizant of economic development "than the individual with his natural preference for present consumption...
...March 25...
...And if we do that, what is to prevent Gilder and the other well-meaners like him from crying that we are hard on the world's poor folk, and don't care whether they fall into the clutches of the Communists...
...AH I've discovered is that plays come in assorted shapes and sizes...
...on December 3, 1963, as ordered...
...The revolutionary changes gathering momentum in all aspects of medical care can be guided in a rational manner, or turned into a backward system of solidly entrenched interests standing in the way of a responsible medical system...
...This is a manifest misstatement...
...The pressures on underdeveloped governments to spend have been irresistible, even if often quite understandable...
...Staten Island, N.Y...
...Let's get one thing straight: India and the others are not nations of economic delinquents whom we can bribe to stay away from Communism, as we now talk of keeping the Negroes in cur large cities away from resort to fire bombs and other forms of violence...
...When asked the difference, he said: "It is a legal difference...
...Yet apparently little attention is paid to this proposition...
...March 11 ). Permit me to point out two typographical errors...
...Then those who actually expected him to be anything but a shrewd and ambitious politician will discover who that politician considers most expendable...
...The view held by many foreign aid experts that the poor countries can achieve their development goals principally through more effective taxation of their own people and more valuta or aid credits from the developed countries like ourselves, is erroneous...
...It is important avoid creating circumstances that tend to diminish this concern, which like a flower can be easily wilted...
...advisers" in Vietnam to a small number.—well below 1,000...
...India, for instance, raised its internal tax revenues so rapidly that it collected 9 billion rupees more than before—but all of this except 5 per cent was spent on consumer subsidies, salary raises for public officials, "as well as the more obvious forms of wasteful prestige expenditure...
...But if I also "created the impression [of] dealing with a work whose complexity is so enormous that we cannot judge it by the usual critical yardstick," the review did what I meant it to do —with one reservation...
...Bobby also doesn't want to let down Mayor Daley, the old-line machine boss in Chicago, and has been calling him regularly, according to the Evans and Novak column...
...was involved in a "war," RFK answered that "we are involved in a struggle...
...KENNEDY I notice in Roger Kingsbury's article that Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...So what are we to do in such cases, which are all too common in the aided countries...
...Finally, my respect for Bermel's acumen is increased because I had some first-hand experience (as Research Consultant with the Public Theater) in watching director Gerald Freedman and his performers labor to bring this unusual theater piece to life...
...gold or other valuta in place of aid credits now made available to India and the other clients of the aid agency—can't fix it...
...to war...
...Bermel is more than a critic—he has credentials as an excellent playwright, and he knows whereof he criticizes...
...The Kennedy Gamble,'' NL...
...The first contingent of 220 men actually left Vietnam for the U.S...
...Obviously, some sort of balance between production and consumption is inevitable...
...They should not be left unmentioned, regardless of political expediency...
...It was recently announced that a computer project has been completed which indicates a mechanical ability to diagnose disease, perhaps as satisfactorily as that of the average physician...
...His position, usually called liberal, can be seen to be an outgrowth of our religious prophetic tradition...
...The West Europeans have a prior ciaim on all the gold we have...
...Actually, change is occurring at such a rapid rate that it is important to maintain the ability to alter plans—not an outstanding governmental characteristic...
...Obviously, the $80,000 figure is a rare exception, but even if the average were $8,000...
...BERMEL I never thought I'd be writing a letter of this sort since it seems to me that most theater critics are, willy-nilly, thermometers in the public rectum...
...It is war fought not by massive divisions but secretly by terror, assassination, ambush and infiltration...
...But in a matter of weeks the trend was reversed...
...For example, in order to consume goods or services, including medical, it is first necessary to produce them...
...says Bobby Kennedy "doesn't want to let down the youth of the country who believe in him...
...We will remain here until we do...
...New York City Eugene Williams ERRATA Thank you for publishing John Corry's review of my book...
...paper dollars our allies hold in their central banks...
...The above facts "should not be left un-mentioned, regardless of political expediency...
...New York City Albert Bermel MEDICAID Tom Wilkinson deplores the reduced Medicaid coverage recently legislated by New York State ("Doctoring Up Medicaid" NL, April 8...
...and by December 21 President Johnson had reassured Saigon leaders that Kennedy's plan to recall most U.S...
...The New York Times (February 19, 1962) reported that the Kennedy statement had been cleared with the State Department...
...When asked whether the U.S...
...This is a distinction all of them cherish fiercely...
...Is good being done by massive appropriations for medical research...
...Indeed, Kennedy was assassinated at the time when he had ordered the withdrawal of the first \ ,000 men and announced the plan to recall the remainder within two years...
...What does Emerson mean by "the usual critical yardstick...
...Other factors are also involved here...
...Pressure their democratically elected leaders...
...indeed, we haven't enough of it to cover the U.S...
...Corry's quotation of a sentence from the book, printed as a statement that Eatherly is "a guilt hero," should have been printed to say: "He is a guilty hero to be received in sadness as one receives one's own impurity and lonely confusion...
...What did he expect from this program...
...Undoubtedly some...
...And President Kennedy, though increasing their number far beyond this limit, consistently rejected the recommendations of the "hawks" in his Administration to change the status of the "advisers" to that of combat troops, thus leaving himself the option to withdraw them without loss of face...
...In his prepared full statement, he said: 'This is a new kind of war, but war it is in a very real sense of the word...
...What this might do to the practice of medicine is a fascinating subject for speculation...
...If one pours money into the demand side of the supply-demand equation, and if supply is not rapidly increased, prices must go up...
...And in the barely two years since then he has molted his foreign aid feathers, and emerged as the chief war hawk of that bristling bird cage...
...Presidential Power 1968," NL, April 8...
...they have their own customs, flags, laws and lawyers, and they insist on running economic development programs in their own ways...
...Harold Koretz, M.D...
...Behold the fate of the dean of our development economists, Walt Whitman Rostow...
...It seems to me that Kennedy doesn't want to let down anybody until after the election...
...In Peru, public revenues have risen to 20 per cent of the gross national product, compared to 15.5 per cent in 1960...
...But I feel unabashed in praising your drama critic Albert Bermel's discussion of Jakov Lind's Ergo in the March 25 issue...
...The citizens of the aided countries can have similar claims, but only against their own leadership...
...Neither President Eisenhower nor Kennedy ever committed the U.S...
...He evinces strong concern for the medical needs of the underprivileged, and decries the inherent selfishness of the opposition...
...would not the question of what was being paid for inevitably arise...
...Eisenhower promised money, supplies, arms, but not combat troops, and he carefully kept U.S...
...Dark Star (NL...
...Highland Park, 111...
...But current expenditure has risen even faster than revenues, so that public saving has declined from 4 per cent to 2 per cent of the gnp...
...The latter are citizens of our country, with a direct claim on the rest of us for equal treatment...
...A point of view is required that assesses the available medical resources, analyzes their methods of operation, plots desirable change, and then uses rational methods to accomplish these...
...New York City Mrs...
...New York City Alfred Levinson Assistant Professor of Theater New York University I plead guilty to John Emerson's charge ("Dear Editor," NL, April 22) that I got "entangled in the confusion of the play [Ergo\, trying to justify it" and ended up "confused as the play itself...
...If a physician now charges for a service formerly rendered gratis, does this represent human perversity, or the natural course of events, also called economics...
...I admire not only that Bermel obviously did some homework, reading Lind's novel from which the play was spawned, but that he approached Ergo as a work of ideas as well as of theatrical effect...
...In the sentence about the casualties at Hiroshima, "The very earliest estimate was that 75,000 persons died because of that bomb...
...The appropriation resulted in the deflection of scarce trained manpower from teaching and practice to research, creating a diminution of the supply factor in the situation...
...D. W. Schimmel FOREIGN AID MYTHS In "A Republican View" (NL, April 8) George F. Gilder is wrought up over our mismanagement of foreign aid...
...It seems Kennedy also doesn't want to let down the big solid middle-class: The latest news is that he's gong to shave off that hair mop he's been sporting for the young...
...What's wanted in the underdeveloped countries is institutional change, the whole societal ball of wax, not economic model building...
...Many of them challenge a critic (if he tries to be honest with readers) to invent new measuring implements, each of which has its own calibration...
...Let me cite a few examples of whai I mean from a World Bank report of last year that reached similar conclusions...
...There is no point in pretending that all people are equally endowed with this attitude, yet legislated systems must assume they are...
...It is a baffling problem, but crying for more "real transfers of funds"—by which I take it he means more U.S...
...As I watched the rehearsals I wondered what the ordinary critics would come up with as reactions...
Vol. 51 • May 1968 • No. 10
