Letters: Sep. 2, 1966

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Unhappy Similarities

Sir: After I had read your perceptive story on South Africa [Aug. 26], an ugly question kept bothering me: how many white Americans from Cicero to Selma would welcome apartheid policies here? As a newcomer to this country, I am struck by too many unhappy similarities in attitude between white South Africans and Americans. I hope that with the aid of enlightened governmental legislation within the next generation, I shall never again hear statements similar to the one made by a four-year-old neighborhood child to the effect that she is glad not to be colored because "Negroes aren't people." FREDI HÜBLER Old Tappan, N.J.

Sir: Your story focuses quite rightly on the Afrikaner, for it is he who holds the key to the solution of that country's problems.

Yet, the Afrikaner frightens me. As a Jewish South African, I realize that, were it not for his preoccupation with the Bantu, he would still be openly and violently antiSemitic. He frightens me because, ostrichlike, he refuses to see that apartheid can never work. He frightens me because he cannot stand criticism, and because in his mad efforts to eliminate opposition he creates the very conditions (ripe for revolution) that he seeks to destroy.

The Afrikaner is a prisoner both of circumstances and of his rigid fascist ideology. Fear dominates him. Hatred churns in his stomach. One can only hope, like Abram Fischer, that the integrity of man will ultimately win through and justice prevail. That seems to be South Africa's only hope. It is a slender thread.

MICHAEL HALBERSTADT Waltham, Mass.

Sir: Even your slanted story failed to conceal the obvious solution to the problems that plague the U.S.: we need a President who has the courage, intelligence, capabilities and qualities for leadership of Hendrik Verwoerd.

A. BRAVELLI San Francisco

Herd & Halo

Sir: Your Wall Street cover story [Aug. 19] was comprehensive, informative, readable 1966 journalism at its best.

As financial editor of the Dallas Morning News in the 1920s and 1930s—and later—I watched Merrill Lynch grow from a few docile dogies and mavericks in the small corral and then saw them emerge as the thundering herd. They are today a great aggregation and well deserve the spread TIME gave them.

J. S. FRENCH El Campo, Texas

Sir: Your description of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith as "part of American folklore" is more apt than you probably intended. Apparently even TIME has fallen for the myth that Merrill Lynch pays salesmen salaries rather than commissions (not true—compensation is directly related to production) and that it doesn't sell mutual funds because of a possible conflict for research ideas between mutual funds and individual customers (reality: customers' balances diverted into mutual funds are no longer available to salesmen).