Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. MAILER Richard M. Levine pinpoints in a way no other critic has done...
...One-half never eat fruit, and only one-third eat eggs regularly...
...has not won the war in Vietnam because victory is not the goal...
...has not won the war there in the "classic" military sense because that has not been the goal, and Vice President Humphrey, who told Chicago Daily News columnist Carl Rowan, "Our goal [in Vietnam] has never been military victory...
...New York City Richard Grant...
...38 per cent of children suffer from sores and scabs...
...Perhaps Learner was right in believing that "there had been many others who had borne me no special grudge...
...As a matter of fact, his statement is incredible...
...do not eat fresh meat...
...The escape from self and one's own experience characterizes not only Mailer's work, but that of such diverse writers as James Baldwin (after Go Tell It On the Mountain) and Hemingway in his later work...
...If one recalls the behavior of Negro students just a few years back: shy withdrawal, diffidence, the desire to be more "white" than white students in morals and attitudes, the apologetic manner, I think one can better comprehend what is taking place and put it in proper perspective...
...We can't condone it either, but rather understand the underlying reasons and seek to change them...
...BLACK ANGER Laurence Learner's interesting account of his encounters with Negro students at Tus-kegee ("Traveling in Wallace Country...
...John D. Lofton Jr...
...MAILER Richard M. Levine pinpoints in a way no other critic has done what has gone awry with Norman Mailer: his inability to confront himself in his work ("When Sam and Sergius Meet," NL, July 8...
...Salt Lake City, Utah Johnathan Wood NIEBUHR Reinhold Niebuhr's article...
...Keeping in mind these factors, we can't condemn the fury of these students...
...involvement in Vietnam affairs, Niebuhr seems to create the impression that the Eisenhower Administration struck the initial note of intervention by offering financial aid to South Vietnam...
...had already spent a sum in the neighborhood of three-quarter of a billion dollars in the context of the Korean War in support of the French operations against the Vietminh...
...Washington, D.C...
...Part of the reason, I think, lies in the relaxation of critical standards toward established writers...
...Under Truman the U.S...
...Top officials in the Johnson-Humphrey Administration have repeatedly stated that the U.S...
...A review of historical events further reveals that the inauguration of the Truman Doctrine of containment of Communism in 1947, in Western Europe, elicited an immediate demand for the support of a similar program for Asia from the adherents of Kuomintang China...
...I have noticed that historians particularly loyal to the foreign policy decisions of Democratic administrations tend to place the blame for specific aspects of policies they deplore on the shoulders of the Republican Administration under President Eisenhower...
...another quarter eat meat only once a week...
...but his hopeful comment is less convincing than his vivid evocation of the hateful diatribes of the students against him...
...Bridge, Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) the great novels have come out of the writer's deepest experiences and feelings...
...The result is that no major novel has been published in several years in the United States...
...This line has been reiterated again and again by such individuals as General William Westmoreland, who said in his farewell speech in Saigon that the U.S...
...It seems evident that these two enormous commitments—rightly or wrongly—resulted in the massive intervention in Asia by this country...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...In suggesting the genesis of U.S...
...But even while one recoils from any behavior that is cruel and stupid, whether it issues from white bodies or black bodies, it is helpful to see the psychological reasons for it...
...It doesn't make it any easier to take—I for one find it obnoxious and think it is stupid to cater to it, as the young white radicals do when they allow themselves to be used as sheaths of respectability for the Panthers in the Peace and Freedom Party...
...As an independent in politics, I feel it in order to protest this as a disingenuous approach to history...
...It also helps to keep in mind the most obvious physical reasons for it, as Learner does: the shocking conditions of the Alabama Negro farmers of whom "nearly a quarter...
...Fighting an Intractable Dwarf" (NL, August 5), raises several basic questions in my mind...
...From Carson McCullers" The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter to Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (and it would be almost a crime not to mention Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Evan CennelKs Mrs...
...how often it is forgotten in the glare of publicity and fame...
...August 5) jibes with my own experience...
...Writers feel a greater need to be constantly in the public eye than to do their best work...
...The very size of this expenditure conditioned the demand for continued massive financial outlays to protect the money initially spent...
...Austair Beard Merrail Reinhold Niebuhr's statement that "it seems incredible that the United States, with its vast resources for technological warfare, cannot win the Vietnam war," is a most maladroit analysis of our objectives in Southeast Asia...
...A careful re-examination of events reveals, in fact, a quite different series of acts, taken under the Truman Administration, which clearly led to our Vietnamese posture...
...This is the first lesson of the most elementary creative writing class...
...Negro hostility mixed with resentment and envy has become the order of the day...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 16
