Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR NIXON The nastiness of Joel Sargent's letter ("Dear Editor," NL, April 8) is typical of the never-say-die-attitude of liberals toward Richard Nixon. Here we are at a crucial moment...
...Any organization that calls itself "warmth" is bound to fade away no matter what the season is...
...On Stage," NL, March 25...
...Esther Rawlins Roger Draper sounds a little like J.D...
...I have every sympathy with young people, and realize it isn't as easy to straighten up and fly right as it is to be a parent on the sidelines who has already been through it...
...They have the urgency of youth...
...Does he want to retire to an island in the South Pacific with a native girl...
...We should know from the '30s that words are no substitute for deeds...
...Now everyone is interested in staying young, and ashamed of aging...
...there isn't more at fault with Drapers attitude than there is with the world...
...But I fail to understand why there is so much emphasis on the hopelessness of things when each day presents so many opportunities to change one's situation...
...New York City Boris Polonsky...
...After seeing Ergo, a not unusual instance of a major novelist failing as a playwright, I looked forward to reading Bermel's usual lucid criticism...
...Programmers may have underestimated . . . just how many Democrats and Republicans like McCarthy because he was strong on Communism...
...As a boy, I looked up to older people, not simply because they were older, but because of their greater knowledge and understanding...
...And Sander Vanocur, reporting Robert Kennedy's campaign in lower California, was so enamored by Kennedy's reception that he missed some of the catcalls...
...This is followed by information in parentheses that a re-run of the "historic Army-McCarthy hearings will be televised by abc on April 5—too late to effect the Wisconsin primary, but in plenty of time for South Dakota, Oregon and California...
...Salinger, and for that reason 1 find his article both charming and somewhat removed from my own concerns...
...i wonder if at bottom The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Discovering My Bourgeois Self," NL, April 8.) As a parent of three, I recognized many of the attitudes and opinions and believe they are very common today...
...Surely one can see that the experimentation going on provides no answers...
...We are critical of the reporting on Vietnam, having some intimate knowledge of Southeast Asia since 1958, and we didn't write off President Johnson before his March 31 speech...
...I think that the sense of humor with which Draper writes indicates he knows he is in a predicament: While he finds everything about growing up disagreeable, he is not certain if the problem is not partially related to himself...
...Still, age often carried with it great charm and wisdom...
...Or does he want to do something constructive to better his society so that it will be more to his liking...
...Kansas City, Mo...
...Incidentally, we missed John Chamberlain in our last evenings with Huntley-Brinkley...
...Who is he, anyway...
...On the contrary, I find him a welcome relief from the new drifts in the air...
...But it is...
...Kennedy is pussyfooting around with the New Left, McCarthy is calling for a new isolationism, Rockefeller is keeping mum on holding the line in Vietnam...
...Kitman was merely suggesting that computers might easily miscalculate election results by not considering the prejudices, illogic and wrong information that often guide voters, such as confusing the two McCarthy's...
...I hope he is soon able to apply his principles to the Huntley-Brinkley program...
...He's the best reporter of them all, on any network...
...Surely some people "relate to one another" in New York...
...My wife and I (both graduates of daily printed journalism) have followed Huntley-Brinkley for years, but we recently decided to switch to cbs' Walter Cronkite and company at the same hour...
...he is staunch, upright, unashamed of our commitments and our achievements...
...This couldn't be...
...Ernest T. Clough HUNTLEY-BRINKLEY Reuven Frank of nbc News makes a telling defense of reporting all the news on television ("The Case for TV Journalism," NL, March 25...
...Although pained at having his tongue pulled from his cheek, Marvin Kit-man hopes that more readers feel his words deserve five readings.—Ed...
...Doesn't Kitman know that this is Eugene McCarthy running for nomination, and that the McCarthy of the "historic hearings" (which were his undoing, anyway) is long and blissfully in his grave...
...Instead I found him entangled in the confusion of the play, trying to justify it, confused as the play itself...
...His argument leads inevitably to a policy of American isolationism...
...It seems that young people nowadays find discouragement everywhere...
...I grew up in a world in which it was not a shameful thing to grow old...
...And what were The New Leader editors doing when this magnificent piece of journalism was sent to press...
...Why should we value the ephemeral so much...
...Morgan Trahey NIEBUHR The implication of Reinhold Niebuhr's article ("A Threat to All Mankind," NL, March 25) is that the United States must allow Soviet brinkmanship full sway in the world because a military response by this country, in the interest of preserving the principles of the UN Charter, would constitute "a threat to all mankind...
...It brings back memories of college attitudes: the sense of the ridiculousness of the adult world, of the stupidity of material values, of the rush toward security and death...
...Geiers problem is his substitution of "may" for Kitman's "might" in the sentence that should read ''Programmers might have underestimated...
...Dick Nixon is the only candidate who has maintained a strong, moderate anti-Communism, and i for one really wonder what the "vastly new and strange quantity" is that Sargent finds in him...
...The frantic noise and music of bored young people, the wild dress and frantic efforts to enjoy sex, do not repel me...
...New York City Robert Gibbons KITMAN I was rather startled to read in your issue of April 8 a most astonishing statement by your television commentator, Marvin Kitman...
...By weighing down his review with obscure pro-and-con statements, Bermel deliberately creates the impression that we are dealing here with a work whose complexity is so enormous that we cannot judge it by the usual critical yardstick...
...In the New Hampshire-Wisconsin political contests and follow-ups, the Huntley-Brinkley contingent seemed more interested in being king-makers than in presenting the news and then keeping quiet...
...Then he goes on to drop a few names: Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Buchner, Strindberg, Kafka, Picasso, Raimund, Nestroy, Giinter Grass—by the time the list is completed, the reader, even if he has not understood the review, is convinced the play must be of some importance...
...I think that underlying these clever observations and comments, the self-deprecatory humor of the author is pointing at something else...
...The main failure of the Huntley-Brinkley program is in its idea of what constitutes news...
...ENVYING THE YOUNG "The irresistible victory of immaturity everywhere" that Leopold Tyrmand writes of in his review of the work of Witold Gombrowicz ("Huck Finn in Poland," NL, April 8) puzzles me greatly...
...Kitman presumes to analyze the New Hampshire primaries, the results of which he was "thrilled" to explain to his son...
...Many old people were fools, but so were many young people...
...Three or four weeks ago Douglas Kiker, who apparently was given bureaucratic precedence, pontificated from Tokyo while nbc's man in Saigon, who obviously had some news to report, was kept waiting...
...Taking steps to alter your own predicaments is another...
...Marblehead, Mass...
...New York City John Emerson VIEW FROM THE CAMPUS I greatly enjoyed Roger Draper's article and his delightfully wry way of presenting himself...
...Have we learned nothing during the last 35 years...
...Evansville, Ind...
...i saw Ergo, and it certainly is an "unplay...
...Resigning oneself is one choice you can make...
...It was one of the worst plays I've ever seen...
...People continue to search for a regenerative force outside themselves, and 1 suppose in this the young and the old are equally foolish...
...On some level he finds his own resignation amusing...
...There is a remnant of this feeling in Draper's article, a clinging to attitudes that don't quite apply any longer as you grow older but which are hard to abandon...
...Draper does not like school because of the emphasis on grades, and he certainly will not feel at home in the business community...
...If 40 per cent of all Columbia boys don't date, that doesn't mean he is required to also abstain...
...Unless reason has been totally abandoned, I trust his graying hair and adult attitudes will be perferred to a mop of hair over one eye and an adolescent rhetoric...
...If 60 percent of America classifies itself as "hawks," Draper does not necessarily have to run away in disgust from all political activity...
...I would say, however, that we tolerate half-done reporting more easily than we do comment that is ill-informed or "talky-talky...
...Here we are at a crucial moment in history, with desperate need of a firm, mature leader to call the shots...
...New York City R. Geier Part of Mr...
...But why should those who are older envy them so profoundly...
...I reread the paragraph five times, thinking that I must, I surely must be mistaken...
...The youth were not worshipped...
...If Draper finds one set of attitudes amusing, perhaps he will choose another...
...Combined with this criticism of the adult society was the precious sense of one'., own superiority and uniqueness...
...Yellow Springs, Ohio Paul Bixlek BERMEL Albert Bermel, in a burst of uncharacteristic obfuscation, writes of Jakov Lind's Ergo: "a non-play, an unplay, an antiplay?call it what you will because in the end it is what you will it to be, that or something different...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 9
