Letters

...We need a Washington Monthly, but not one that does not know its own identity...

...I really don’t know what you are trying to do lately...

...Sex: None of Our Business...

...When I was his executive secretary I was all for getting things done, like filling a judicial vacancy, and he’d stall, and several times things occurred that showed us that we would have been very embarrassed if we had appointed this guy or that...

...It is too bad that Shapiro didn’t talk to me about him...

...but there was none...

...For that is what you may be doing, and I think you are being very foolish...

...In your March issue, you had that Mary Tyler Moore/Edith Wharton thing [‘Taste, Class, and Mary Tyler Moore,’’ by Suzannah Lessard] . I kept reading it, thinking there must be a point...

...Figuring out why our political system works and doesn’t work is our sole mission...

...He also had a rule for his staff that would The editor replies: This is a political magazine...

...We commissioned the McMurtry and Lessard articles because experience has taught us that attitudes toward sex and social class have just as much to do with government decision-making as the more frequently perceived economic and political pressures...

...We only want one thing from The Washington Monthly, and that is politics...

...A very good guy...

...If we want sex, we can buy Playboy...

...If we want vague, erudite stuff, we can buy the Saturday Review...

...Now, in May, you have an asinine sex piece as your lead article [“From Mickey Spillane to Erica Jong,” by Larry McMurtry] ; with an even more asinine cover...

...But as early as our February 1970 issue we realized that the pursuit of our mission was taking us into surprising waters, that seeking the roots of the cowardice and paranoia that characterized so many government officials took us well beyond the realm of what was usually taught in political science courses...

...He wrote about Nelson’s being slow sometimeswell, that’s because of his axiom that you should always put off an unpleasant or serious decision if you don’t have to make it today because something might happen that would make it unnecessary to make a decision at all...

...NANCY BEY Redwood City, California I read with great interest your piece on Gaylord Nelson [“Gaylord Nelson and the Myth of the White Knight,” by Walter Shapiro, July/August] and I think it was very well done...

...He did some other things when he was governor of the same kind as the Mayaguez comment, took a lot of criticism, but always emerged stronger than he was...

...JOEL SEVERSON Pierre, South Dakota Gaylord Nelson have done Nixon a lot of good: Never put anything on paper that you would mind seeing on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal...

...I could have shed light on a couple of points...

...An easy example is our conviction that more wrong decisions about Vietnam can be explained by machoism than by the desire to exploit Asian markets that Marxists emphasize...

...This raises an interesting possibility, which I wish Weisman had explored: Nixon turns to his old buddy and counselor, John Mitchell (grand-daddy of the laws that made UDC’s kind of bonding possible) one day and says, “John, what can we do to screw Rockefeller...

...Mitchell thoughtfully puffs his pipe for a moment, then says, “Freeze 236,” knowing fully what impact that will have upon UDC’s house of cards, knowing also how many chips Rocky staked on UDC‘s success...

...EDWIN R. BAYLEY Berkeley, California Edwin Bayley worked with Gaylord Nelson for several years and is now Dean of the School of Journalism of the University of California...

...You’d be surprised how often that works out...

...As I read Steven Weisman’s excellent piece in your June issue about the undoing of New York’s Urban Development Corporation [“Nelson Rockefeller’s Pill: The UDC”] , the central blow that knocked out the underpinning was Nixon’s freeze of the Section 236 rental housing subsidy program...

...Are you trying to increase newsstand sales at the expense of subscriptions...