Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR BARGAINING WITH RUSSIA The recent tragic events that have brougnt the Czechoslovak people to anguish for the third time in 30 years raise questions concerning what, if anything, the...
...Private Screenings...
...Although use of our leverage cannot be proclaimed as a sure answer to the problem, surely decency and common sense both demand an effort...
...He is wrong when he dismisses Griffith as "artistically and dramatically insufficient" in his book...
...Chicago...
...He is wrong about Godard...
...Yet we need him...
...Godard is our contemporary cinematic medication...
...It is an underrating of the Russians, who were capable of signing a pact with Hitler, to believe that such bai paining would force a final rupture or injure the prospects for ultimate mutual agreements...
...Simon is still to be commended, and continually read, if only because of his unceasing battle in favor of art?i.e., that which deals with reality—and in opposition to "escapist" entertainment?i.e., that which flees desperately from reality...
...When my arm is cut...
...The inaugural flights between New York and Moscow, the signing of the treaty to halt proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the bilateral cultural exchanges may have led the Soviet Union to intervene militarily.' an Eastern European diplomat said recently, "because the Kremlin calculated that the United States was not even morally conerned with Czechoslovakia.' " Although these actions were a factor that made invasion feasible rather than the cause of the invasion, the treaty on nuclear proliferation is of far more importance to the Soviet Union than to the United States, a fact not reflected in our bargaining style...
...Morton A. Kaplan Professor of Political Science University of Chicago SIMON John Simon is wrong more often than he is right...
...Godard merely reflects life, as only the highest art does...
...He is repulsive when life is repulsive...
...DEAR EDITOR BARGAINING WITH RUSSIA The recent tragic events that have brougnt the Czechoslovak people to anguish for the third time in 30 years raise questions concerning what, if anything, the United States might have done to forestall the invasion or lo mitigate the consequences after it occurred...
...As a matter of fact, this space epic is the most difficult, demanding and intellectually stimulating film since Bergman's Persona, about which, for once, Simon was right...
...The relevant paragraphs, which appeared toward the end of the dispatch and therefore may have been missed bv manv readers, deserve to be quoted in full: "Eastern Europeans find it difficult to understand why the Johnson Administration chose to negotiate a number of important deals with the Soviet Union during the height of the Czechoslovak crisis...
...He is wrong, too, in calling Kubrick's 2001 "a shaggy God story" (horrible pun, anyway...
...Simon is also mistaken in dismissing Carl Dreyer and his masterpiece Gerund as incompetent...
...Simon is as patently, irrationally anti-Godard as Richard Roud is patently, irrationally pro-Godard elsewhere...
...Dallas...
...Indeed the opposite may be the case...
...But for all his faults...
...The medication may not be pleasant, but I still must have it...
...And he is constantly being taken in by candy-colored fluff (Alfte...
...Likewise, one should not simply reject the one film maker in closest touch with things as they are today...
...Many Eastern Europeans feel that the United States is more interested in fostering its relations with the Soviet Union than in exerting influence in the area of Europe that since 1956 the United States has accepted as a Soviet sphere of influence...
...We did have genuine leverage that we refrained from using and that we might still use to influence the bargaining between the Russians and the Czechoslovaks, particularly given the great difficulty the Russians have found in establishing even a semi-respectable government in Czechoslovakia...
...In this respect, it may also be worth considering that Eastern European diplomats may have a perspective not entirely dissimilar to that of the Russians and that they may even have some direct inkling of how Russians reason about these matters...
...His films are a warning...
...whom one must simply accept as one accepts life: there is much at fault with contemporary living, but one does not therefore reject it...
...I must doctor it...
...At least we cannot dismiss the possibility that Eastern European diplomats may better understand Russian bargaining behavior than do some psychologists and social scientists who seem to have great vogue in certain circles in Washington...
...Texas Dan Bates...
...It is therefore particularly disheartening to find the Johnson Administration not merely refraining from using this leverage but going out of its way to make clear that it will not do so...
...Although intelligent students of international affairs have long known the answer to such questions, they have nowhere been better and more authoritatively expressed than in Jonathan Randal's dispatch, based on interviews with unnamed East European diplomats, in the New- York Times of August 22...
...The Collector, Marriage Italian Style) which is of no value to us in coping with contemporary reality...
Vol. 51 • September 1968 • No. 17
