LETTERS

...This makes rail passenger trains the only mode that theoretically has never used federal general funds...

...The federal government owes it to its citizens to provide a first-class rail passenger system...

...HARNEY B. PETERSON Denver, Colorado...

...P.S.—Sorry for the delay in responding to your article, but with my busy social schedule I just haven't had much time for correspondence...

...They extinguish productivity with autocratic terrorism...

...Some years ago Linda confessed to me that her lifetime ambition was to become secretary of state...

...That our democracy produces leaders as ignorant of the world as Ronald Reagan ought to be evidence enough that we have little of positive value to contribute to Third World politics, even if the moral basis of our intervention were not in question...

...Ignore Nicaragua Charles Lane's review of Shirley Christian's book on Nicaragua [July/August] represents a dangerous tendency in neoliberal thinking on foreign policy issues...

...I don't know if the Sandinistas are truly interested in expanding civil liberties for Nicaraguans, but I do know that it is really none of my business...

...Mid-western legislators have lately been defending farm subsidies with much the same logic...

...The federal government still owes rail passengers at least $7 billion...

...LETTERS Black and white in uniform Your recollection in "Tilting at Windmills" [July/ August] of black and white patients who became friends in an Army hospital reminded me of similar groups that I observed as a Red Cross worker in the 47th General Hospital in New Guinea during World War II...

...They went to the mess hall and movies together and sat together reading, writing letters, and talking during the day...

...They feed on inflation of inefficiency with their boutique-like ideas on executive workstyle...

...What then is the justification for Lane's approving use of Christian's maxim that "the United States should not allow itself to fall into the trap of having to accept, in an area closely tied to Central America, either a repressive right-wing dictatorship...

...WENDELL J. SHERK St...

...Rail passengers have paid for it...

...The problem, unfortunately, is larger than Rowe makes it...

...There is absolutely no threat to me or my family and friends deriving from Nicaragua, no "clear and present danger" to anyone or anything in America...

...Washington Monthly has contributed to this literature of character assassination with the title "Just One of the Guys: Linda Chavez Makes Good...

...You and your staff point out failure after failure in seemingly every government program on the books, yet you never come to the obvious conclusion that we should cut government down to the minimum and let capitalism do its thing...

...As a retired chemist, I know the importance of controls in experiments...

...When the ship finally arrived to take them home I wondered at what point on the long journey across the Pacific they would drift apart, whether they would introduce each other to any relatives that might be at the dock, or if they would ever see each other again...

...or a repressive left-wing dictatorship...

...What right, exactly, does the Monthly claim to make it better than those reporters who seem to get used in administration "turf wars...

...TERRY CHAMBERS Durham, North Carolina Between 1942 and 1962, there was a federal surtax on all interstate and rail passenger tickets...

...I'm sick and tired of the insidious slurs your and other enlightened journals heap upon successful women...

...That you took the former approach is your business since it's your magazine...

...NANCY A. CASEY Hadley, Massachusetts Three-martini executives Like many of my generation, I did basic training in the ascetic Washington "public interest" boot camps, and among my most vivid memories was my occasional trip to a fancy law firm on business when someone actually served me coffee...

...A Fortune editor, railing against liberals, once posited that Tip O'Neill was responsible for "exactly" 29.7 percent of everything wrong in America, and similarly, I believe that executive (business and government) egos are responsible for exactly 46.4 percent of everything wrong in America...

...On a quiet evening a white soldier casually played the piano in the lounge while I listened...

...To fit in, he taught himself how to behave in a way he believed they would understand and accept...

...Hundreds of years of oppression and intervention, like that which has occurred in Nicaragua, becomes an issue of appearing "soft on communism...

...As the dancing ceased he winked at me and leaned over to whisper in my ear: "It took me three years to learn how to do that ." During his tenure as a University of Maryland undergraduate, he was surrounded, it turns out, by white people...

...In "Tilting at Windmills" [June] you defend Amtrak subsidies by saying you wish "we only had to subsidize the defense budget instead of paying for the whole thing...

...JOE CARDOZA San Francisco, California Testing germ weapons Re: "Operation Bacterium: Catching Germs on the A Train" [Leonard A. Cole, July/August], I have a modest proposal...

...Are we, to borrow a line from Bobby Kennedy, "like the God of the Old Testament that we can decide which hamlet can be destroyed" by our CIA-backed paramilitary forces simply because a government's Marxist style offends our sense of decorum...

...If, on the other hand, the public woman (Jeane Kirkpatrick, Phyllis Schlafly, Linda Chavez) is ideologically impure, then the mud starts flying...

...Among the writhing bodies on the dance floor stood the figure of my corporate counterpart, moving in a way that assaulted my sense of human rhythmic capability...

...What prompts this letter is a far more egregious sin...

...With elbows bent, his arms spun in circles, one beat behind the beat of the tune...

...Thus, you can see why Jonathan Rowe's "How the Democrats Learned to Love the Three Martini Lunch" [June] hit a responsive chord...

...He had a New York accent, by the way...

...she is really a man in disguise...

...BARBARA COTTMAN-BECNEL Hacienda Heights, California I can understand how your impulse for damage control would necessitate a critical piece on Linda Chavez lest the administration take the moral high ground of tolerance...

...Business executives waste millions of dollars of stockholders' and taxpayers' money fighting battles they shouldn't, just to save face...

...ERIC R. ALTERMAN New York, New York Chavez for secretary of state...

...CHARLES C. SHEPHERD Washington, D.C...

...If a woman has the right politics, she is considered a feminist hero, her picture is suitable for taping on princess's bedroom wall...

...I replied that I had worked in hospitals and understood how friendships could develop, then walked away...

...I was more impressed by two men, black and white, in adjacent beds at the end of one ward, who seemed to be quietly companionable friends...

...Linda's public posturing suggests this would-be choreographer may in fact have a twin soul...

...For future experimental aerosol dispersion of bioagents, what is needed is a good-sized sample, a closely controlled level of agent, and a stable population which is not leaving or moving around the country...

...Jack Nelson is Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times...

...The white guy immediately turned to me, also white, and explained that they only knew each other from having been in the same hospital recently...

...Rail passenger service did not have either of these funds available (even though rail passengers were paying a "user charge") until 1971, when the government stepped in with token amounts to save a depleted system...

...The cumulative subtext is always the same...

...Linda and I worked for the same teachers' union some nine years ago...

...In other words, every penny ever spent on rail passenger service by the federal government came from user fees...

...So, upon comparing my memories of Linda with the article I have just read, I am dismayed though not surprised that she has fallen prey to a type of cultural buffoonery...

...I suggest the Pentagon...

...Yours is the magazine which most deeply covers just these things for a national readership...

...The men usually were laughing and joking and often seemed to me to be centered on the one black member of the group...

...If all of this revenue were put into an interest-bearing account and all federal funds spent on Amtrak were withdrawn from this account, at least $7 billion would still be in the account today...

...If this is still a cherished goal, for the sake of all of us I hope Linda Chavez learns before the advent of such a career objective, that solid accomplishment provides long-standing rewards, not the expedient adoption of her brand of "Step and Fetchit" behavioral extremes...

...At minimum, the federal government should fund Amtrak at existing levels...

...his torso twisted at regular intervals, though it, too, did not keep time with the music, nor was it in sync with his circling arms...

...The fallacy in these arguments is that transporting people by rail or providing food can be done satisfactorily in a market, but defense almost certainly cannot (neither can courts, police, roads, and a few other functions...

...I'll never know about them, but I did see my worst expectations realized a year or so later at the Linde Stadium Red Cross Center in Nurnberg, Germany...

...A subtler, less pretty path to the same end would have been to define her as a (near) paragon of neoliberalism and claim her as one of your own...

...A black soldier rushed up to him with a happy greeting and was brushed off so quickly that I barely had time to see his stricken expression as he left...

...A few years ago, while attending an all-white Christmas party (save myself and a male business partner—we are both black), I witnessed an incredible feat...

...In a million ways, rights-minded reporters suggest that she's not a real woman, her success has nothing to do with the women's movement, and she offers no role-modeling for the young...

...Over the years I have thought of so many other things I could have said...

...Vietnam should have taught us that whatever its virtues, our parochial style of politics does not produce politicians who are well-equipped to deal patiently and competently with the complexities of Third World revolution...

...JUDD MAGILNICK Santa Monica, California Who pays for Amtrack...

...All revenues from this tax went into the general fund—there was never a trust fund for passenger rail service...

...Louis, Missouri I found your article on "Reporters: The New Washington Elite" quite interesting to say the least, but a couple of errors should be corrected: I didn't say the Los Angeles Times put on a "good" Christmas party, I said it put on the "best...

...About twice a year, my organization had board meetings, and while they were not to be confused with Exxon board meetings, we had out-of-town trips and fancy meals...

...In defense of turf battles It is utterly fascinating to see a magazine that specializes in a "Who's Who" column (which does a wonderful job talking about "turf battles" and "grinding axes" in Washington) doing an expose on the reporter elites ["Reporters: The New Washington Elite," Charlotte Hays and Jonathan Rowe, July/August...

...Why not...

...Please don't complain about things you apparently endorse in your regular columns...

...The federal government built an outstanding highway and aviation network in the years following World War II with a combination of trust and general funds...

...After reading "Just One of the Guys" [Paul M. Barrett, June], I feel compelled to point out to my former associate, Linda Chavez, that there is a dicey difference between genuine transcendence of race and that of contrived assimilation...

...we have a 45-person bureau (33 reporters and editors), not a 32-person bureau...

...JACK NELSON Washington, D.C...

...I also have wondered how he would have behaved if I had not been there...