Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. NIXON AND JOHNSON As a new reader (I saw your New York Times ad), I...
...Berkeley, Calif...
...Those of us who are Jewish feel we have an obligation to this wonderful country and its people, to utilize our talents to preserve, not destroy...
...It is sadly true that few of my fellow Republicans "have ever objected to Nixon on principle...
...He particularly singles out Elaine's mother...
...and very convincingly so...
...Doesn't he realize that they are being seen through Charlie's disillusioned vision...
...Huntington Station, NY...
...Now I am not a psychiatrist, so don't ask me why this phenomenon is so common...
...He can do nothing but make his disgust with life less painful by watching it on a television screen...
...His sexual shyness with Mrs...
...I assume that Katzner is not so naive as to propound the theory that the only logical alternative to Vietnam escalation in 1965 would have been withdrawal: or that no matier what policy LBJ followed he would have been placed in a politically untenable position...
...I found her perfect for the part, especially when she hastily stops eating her kipper to jazz up poor old Charlie with a little sex...
...I suppose, to the well-made, good clean fun of the complacent middle class in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner...
...Simon goes on to pat Delaney and Finney on the head for their "nice touches...
...Ben "fumbles" within an insane environment...
...George Kopp Elliott Abrams writes that Jewish young people on the New Left see "the cult of the dollar" as a "characteristic Jewish trait...
...And that is precisely why we need a President of genuine conviction and administrative ability, who has proven that he has these qualities in action...
...I'll refrain from the obvious, and just ask him to do b?tter next time...
...In one sense...
...Nixon and Johnson try to scent the trends in advance to determine what the middle ground will be, and then they take their stands designed to satisfy the greatest number...
...These people shudder at the idea of Jews seeking their own protection and safety...
...move their mouths, and receive money...
...At the Goldwater convention, Rockefeller stood for fully five minutes while being booed and hissed and the object of the most ugly vituperation in recent memory...
...This is both hilarious and moving...
...Congratulations...
...Ben comments, "Did he really say that...
...Without referring to content i'nd purpose, it must he admitted that the "story" is well written...
...Whether such tactics do work or don't work, they are no way to run a country in a dangerous time such as this...
...There is nothing inchoate...
...I don't know how else to explain his equation of the two young lovers of the film, Ben and Elaine, with Bonnie and Clyde, two young murderers...
...New York City Saul Cohen VIEW FROM THE CAMPUS After 15 years of writing letters in my mind, I have set one down on paper...
...the non-stop fumbler," is suddenly transformed into a virile, determined young man by his love for Elaine, and that the film "naively and sentimentally" assumes that "love makes men out of boys overnight...
...Robinson doesn't sleep with his wife: he has a rather natural hatred for Ben...
...Robinson: "a bundle of Hark or inchoate hints...
...He gets a perverted kick out of watching the antics of this parody of himself...
...January 29...
...China, Russia, Cuba, write you poems about Che...
...But, I could be wrong...
...The film does not happen to say this: Simon sees it that way because he gets Ben wrong...
...Robinson, who has had an affair with Ben...
...As to Miss Minnelli's acting ability...
...He is mistaken to do so...
...Those with whom he comes in contact are mere lumps of tlesh who eat...
...Jews today as a group are less concerned with the dollar than they are with the problems in their communities...
...Look about you, Mr...
...Robinson, who carries on with Ben as she presumably has with many others, nevertheless is so demonically possessive about him that she will go to satantic lengths to prevent him from a happy marriage with her daughter...
...Like other young men out of college, not knowing what they want to do, alone, Ben drifts until he finds a girl he loves...
...If the youth today chooses to forget, you as a writer should be in the forefront reminding them...
...Ben wins Elaine because he is the young man who manages to stay alive and capable of loving, as opposed to her fiance, who tells her that "we'll make a good team...
...By what right, except sheer gall, can Abrams write that "Jews . . . are increasingly accepting the cult of the dollar...
...Instead, these young people will talk to you glowingly about Egypt...
...And there is no more explicit example of the death wish than the behavior of Jewish New Leftists who have no interest in Israel, a democratic country formed out of centuries of oppression, pogroms, and concentration camps, so that Jews would finally have a homeland again to which they could go...
...Simon adopts in this review the characteristic (for him) tone of the mildle-aged man, shocked at the goings-ons of the young...
...Kitman is fresh and amusing, again even though his subject was the familiar Jackie Susann...
...However, since there are, and have been, an enormous number of proposals other than escalation and short of withdrawal, which are far more practical from the standpoint of current Administration policy assumptions, the appropriateness of the piece escapes mc...
...Vcu York City David Scmfr SIMON In his review of Charlie Bubbles...
...Abrams shrugs this off as a momentary lapse, | Continued on next page DEAR EDITOR BMH^I^B^^^H^^^^^^^IM Continued or foolishness on the part of the New Left...
...to uplift, not demean...
...Abrams' piece is the usual mishmash of false rhetoric...
...And this criticism is being leveled by Jews...
...nevertheless, it is galling to think that your readers may miss out on the best film of the year because Simon decided to be sullen on this occasion...
...Roberts actually shed new light on the Wallace campaign, though it's been beaten to death in the mass media...
...What is even more confusing, the preceding article in the same issue by Robert Sandoz ("When a Great Ship Cuts Through the Sea . . .") is quite pointed and suggestive...
...Thus, if respect for the author's intelligence forbids these two possibilities then why was the piece written...
...to respect, not dishonor our government, its institutions, and its leaders...
...Barry W. Strejcek...
...Simon accuses The Graduate of "oversimplification, over-elaboration, inconsistency . . . pretentiousness . . . sketchiness...
...Presuming to speak for his generation instead of himself, much of his writing is thus reduced to the Jewish self-hate that is prevalent among Leftist writers of the Hebrew faith...
...who has enjoyed both his wife and daughter...
...Abrams, the United States fought at a great and terrible cost, two wars to preserve the right to criticize of the young of the world...
...he can't conceal the fact he is a man of manufactured ideals and half-baked convictions...
...Simon: "Minor inconsistencies abound...
...the obtuse airman and gutsy wife...
...Instead they give a beautiful account of a sensitive human being unable to communicate with other human beings...
...as good, better than Salinger...
...Your article on Khesanh was frightening and moving...
...Doesn't he notice how lovingly the camera dwells on their sprung faces, how preoccupied they are with food...
...The New Leader is really impressive...
...The fiance is a walking dead man, like Elaine's parents, who are...
...Now it doesn't matter to me that these tactics are no longer working for Johnson, while they do seem to be working for Dick Nixon...
...I am afraid Simon, by using the most shocking and unlikely equation, is trying to make the kind of flashy getaway that Bonnie and Clyde used when escaping from those Midwestern towns in their jalopy, shooting in all directions...
...Bonnie and Clyde are impotent, sadistic, destructive...
...is not at all surprising...
...Nixon may shave three times a day, take numerous tranquilizers, hire the best image makers and speechwriters around...
...At the end of the film when Ben and Elaine run off together...
...John Corry's book review about Claude Eatherly was reasoned and objective about a subject often treated with hysteria...
...It must be to illuminate the inherent problems within some isolated recommendations made early in the Vietnam war which suggested immediate and unilateral withdrawal...
...The final absence in Charlie Bubbles which Simon bemoans is the lack of preltiness in Liza Minnelli...
...Charlie Bubbles is increasingly unable to see the world except in terms of the trivial and sordid...
...Simon says that Finney does not have enough oomph left after directing this film to give a moving performance in it...
...It is difficult to criticize a fairy tale, so "respond" seems a more accurate term...
...New York City Harley Thompson KUDOS As one who responded to your Times ad, I don't have to wait for four issues to decide that you can keep my fin...
...Since The Graduate is delighting vast audiences around the country alreadv, his review may not seem important...
...Elliott Abrams' article ("The Sky Is Falling," NL, February 12) finally raised the hackles to warrant this...
...1 must use my own reaction...
...Not being a regular reader I may be at a disadvantage, but 1 am given no help in discovering this purpose...
...Delaney and Finney do not seek to portray the hang-ups of an author-made-good with a Rolls, artichokes for lunch, and proletarian accent—a kind of arty Roi>m at the Tup...
...Abrams, if he would allow a few moments from his academic schedule to peer at the Jew in any community in the United States, would certainly lose some of his glib self-assurance...
...The most recent examples of this fluctuation are his judicious review of Cool Hand Luke ("On Screen...
...This is a confusing concept for young leftists to understand because there are many Jews in left-wing movements...
...1 hoped in vain for an insight into some of thj crucial issues involved...
...I need not quarrel with the content: that point hinges on divining the purpose...
...Simon also misreads Mr...
...Abrams should look them over carefully and then find better friend...
...The criticism of Jewish materialism is the same kind of criticism that is leveled at Israel for its victory over Egyptian aggression...
...John Simon seems like a highly intelligent critic—at least he agrees with my estimate of that bomb, Charlie Bubbles...
...Abrams, at the number of Jews in teaching, science and engineering, politics, social services and the arts, all of which are areas of endeavor not generally known for their huge financial rewards...
...Washington, D.C...
...Again the affronted adult, Simon objects to the portrayals of the older people in che film and says that "many of the scenes are carried to the level of grotesquerie"—as opposed...
...You look skinny, but you move fast...
...Perhaps Katzner's article is only a clumsy defense of the present course, in which case my opinion of The New Leader would be considerably lowered...
...Jewish youth in our colleges appear to have forgotten 300 years of Jewish existence in America, 300 years without pogroms, 300 years of freedom of worship, freedom to live where we wish and to live as Jews...
...to praise, not ridicule...
...Reading The New Leader since my separation from the Armed Forces in 1953 has broadened my outlook on life considerably...
...sing you songs about Malcolm X. write rhapsodic passages about the sunlit dawn in Hanoi (see Jewish novelist Norman Fruchter's five-page epistle in the February 22 Village Voice) and about the coming destruction of the United States (see Fruchter again...
...While all this was going on, Nixon was carefully wooing these very same elements, and has been doing so ever since 1964, building up the support he now commands...
...Simon's other centra...
...But they are not running toward Eden...
...In time these young people will perhaps see what kind of Jews these are: Jews who subordinate the fate of other Jews to the fate of Marxist ideology, subordinate the fate of Israel to the fate of "progressive" Egypt, and generally value the lives of everyone else over the lives of other Jews...
...New York City Abigail Collins John Simon is practically the only intelligent film critic around, so it is particularly annoying that he is erratic and irresponsible in his judgments...
...as Simon observes, "ludicrous, corrupt, mean...
...I don't want to vote again for a Republican Lyndon Johnson...
...A gorgeous chick around the house would only depress Charlie further...
...Similarly, Charlie's sense of himself recedes...
...Charlie is emotionally dead, not chewing up the scenery to make himself feel better as did Olivier in The Entertainer...
...March I I ) John Simon seems to have misinterpreted the purpose of this excellent and original film...
...NIXON AND JOHNSON As a new reader (I saw your New York Times ad), I found your March 11 issue contained a surprising number of good, solid articles...
...they are just getting married...
...He maintains that Ben...
...Simon worries about their financial state, and about the fact that their in-laws disapprove...
...Jews are asked to be better than other people so that other people may accordingly trample over Jews as they did for centuries...
...Criticizing Miss Delaney for failing to understand the life of a successful writer is like criticizing Jane Austen for failing to understand the economic consequences of the Napoleonic Wars on England...
...Ordinarily one would not have to explain to Simon about the cruelty of bored, banal people, or about the fact that much of modern life is grotesque...
...He is headstrong, emotional, image-conscious, hawkish, and unresponsive to more imaginative attempts at problem solving, such as the recent report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders...
...Rockefeller has held to his convictions so staunchly that only a miracle will put him across as the Republican candidate against the opposition of the conservative wing of the party...
...Ben stands by the closet holding a clothes hanger and asks her, trembling: "Wood or metal...
...Bui it exists, as does the death wish...
...criticism of The Graduate is, once more, taken from the stance of a cynical older man...
...But Simon sweats to make them into cliches...
...On Screen...
...The history of the Left, beginning with the anti-Semitism of Karl Marx, has usually involved for its Jewish participants a self-denial of their own identity and culture...
...NL, lanuary 29) and his strained, inept attempt to criticize The Graduate in the February 26 issue...
...Was he afraid he'd be lost in the crowd of applauding critics...
...Lewis Weissman VIETNAM I wish to respond to the article by Kenneth Katzner ("Vietnam Through the Looking Glass...
...Nixon, like Johnson, relies on the well-oiled party machinery in each state to help him deliver the votes, but the party regulars represent the old recognized ways, rather than the new approaches desperately needed to avoid further racial clashes in the cities and continued stalemate in Vietnam...
...both Kingsbury and Sandoz are exceptionally smooth political writers...
...And yet Nixon possesses many of the same characteristics that make Lyndon Johnson an inadequate President...
...Robinson, the shyness of a virginal young man with a callous, bored woman in her late 40s...
...Mrs...
...I particularly want to comment on Robert Sandoz's piece ("Nixon's Moderate Opposition...
...In the hotel room on their first night together...
...Simon clucks: "Without perceptible resources or qualifications, though, and with familial ire pursuing them, it is an exiguous Eden they can look forward to...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
