Dear Editor
Dear Editor EXCHANGE The mind boggles at the Thomas A. Billings-Bayard Rustin-Daniel P. Moynihan exchange in your December 22 issue. What could have persuaded you to print such stuff? Was it a...
...Indeed, Krickus himself refers to Wallace at one point as "the Alabama Populist," but fails to follow through on this idea...
...Is that all, except for the (psuedo) diagnosis of what is supposed to ail the while middle class, or Anglo-Saxons, or whatever the current label is...
...And that is unfortunate...
...In short, liberals can appeal to the Wallace people if they, unlike Krickus, stop seeing these people as conservatives and start viewing them as discontented populists...
...He cites the findings of the Survey Research Center that the Wallace voter was a young, anti-Establishment voter, but neglects an equally important conclusion -that the Wallace voter was more "liberal" than the Nixon voter on an ideological scale...
...Sure, things are bad, people are getting stepped on . . . but what else is new...
...How could he have treated seriously that nonsensical mishmash of Billings...
...The point is that Billings really said nothing...
...But Moynihan...
...Billings' Maritain-like dis-quistion on basic philosophical questions was mostly tautological nonsense...
...Why glorify Billings with public replies, especially when neither reply hits the nail on the head...
...I am happy that he went to a let of detective work to tell us when Billings left...
...And that is about all, unless you wish to say that the letter was histrionically boring...
...I am sure that Rustin has done some reading...
...What is supposed to be made of that in reply to Billings...
...J.M.B...
...Ok, ok...
...Allen Taylor I think it is unfortunate that the Rustin-Billings-Moynihan correspondence was published...
...It would be cruel to criticize Billings, who believes what he believes and expresses it with all the moral fervor, noble sentiment and accumulated wisdom of an evangelizing sophomore who has just discovered The Word...
...Moynihan's public reply, for the most part, was simply a lot of rhetoric...
...Chevy Chase, Md...
...Outrageous charge," "intolerable injury," "intimidation by government of a private citizen," "thought control in a totalitarian state...
...What there was evidence of was this: that neither Billings nor Rustin addressed each other...
...Moynihan is open to the same charge if he seriously believes that Bayard Rustin could be intimidated by Thomas Billings...
...It was no doubt wrong of Billings to circulate his views in his official capacity, but to conceive that his expression of them constituted intimidation or thought control or was evidence of totalitarianism is to take leave of common sense...
...Rustin's response was splendid...
...Why this constant, old-womanish cult of personality and bonus points...
...So, in that respect, Billings' letter was untimely, perhaps even rude...
...If they make inroads into this bloc, they can help to persuade President Nixon that a Southern strategy based on conservative policies is unlikely to be effective...
...There was little evidence that any intolerable harm was done to Rustin by Billings...
...To use such language about Billings' effusions is to exhibit a lack of judgment frightening in one so highly placed...
...Certainly, Rustin is a "good" man, he has suffered, he hates injustice . . . but so what...
...As for Moynihan, his letter is a joke...
...The private citizen replied with wisdom and dignity, and both letters were circulated to interested parties within the government...
...Can his reputation ever recover fully from this revelation of how his mind works, at least when he is tired or depressed or otherwise abstracted, as he surely must have been to write that unfortunate missive...
...In other words, the Wallace-ites' fondness for William Buckley (a fondness unrequited) is about as politically sensible as their support for Eugene McCarthy...
...We agree that Daniel Moynihan has the underprivileged at heart, that he likes the President and the Federal government, but what has that to do with the letters in question...
...again, that is not the point...
...Eschewing both indignation and sarcasm, it simply ignored the pretentious farrago of pseudophilo-sophizing and moralistic preaching to which he was subjected, and said with economy and accuracy what needed to be said...
...Furthermore, the study showed that the base of the Wallace vote was socioeconomically quite different from that of the Goldwater vote in 1964...
...The Wallace voter can only be understood if we stop thinking of the movement as a thrust toward the Right...
...Was it a plot against Moynihan, who comes off sounding like the village idiot...
...But Rustin's reply suffered much the same...
...Howard L. Reiter Research Director, The Ripon Society...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...Why didn't he simply say that Billings wrote a lot of air, tell him he missed the point, and then let it go...
...Seattle, Wash...
...It was black man's credo, and, to tell the truth, a little tiring...
...Rustin is clearly a man of considerable parts, and I salute him...
...It was neither philosophical, informative, nor important...
...What happened was that a minor government official expressed some remarkably silly personal opinions to a private citizen about a subject on which they disagreed...
...His feelings do him credit, but it does give one pause to consider that a man who does not appear to have matured mentally beyond the level of adolescence was for several years in charge of disbursing taxpayers' money on a project of grave importance to a significant portion of the population...
...Crawford LIBERAL REACTION Richard J. Krickus' depiction of the Wallace movement ("Revolution Without the Masses," NL, December 22) resorts to the kind of simplistic ideological stereotyping that has led liberals to be, in Krickus' own words, "positively caustic in their treatment of the common man...
...He has puffed up a lot of air, and then blown it out...
...Rustin rightly accused Billings of patronizing Negroes...
Vol. 53 • January 1970 • No. 2
