THE MAIL

To the editors of the CRIMSON:

This is to protest...the deception by which Jerome Goodman, Harvard senior and CRIMSON editor, joined the American delegation to the World Peace Festival in East Berlin.

I am not a Communist. I have never considered the demonstrations for peace sponsored by the Communist Party very effective (in this country, anyhow) in preventing America's preparations for war. But I am made ashamed for Harvard and for America by the following incidents:

1. "There was a lot of food, he (Goodman) said, but it was mostly cold cuts, potatoes, and cheese. When he made remarks about it, one of his fellow delegates said. "We can't complain, you know'."

It cuts no ice with Goodman...that people are starving in the world. No one is asking Goodman to turn down heaping second helping, or the CRIMSON to lower its annual beer consumption; it is only once a year that a Food-for-Europe drive or its equivalent asks Harvard men for a fraction of their monthly allowances. But to complain when not only does one eat well personally, but the country one hails from lets food rot while other parts of the world go hungry: that is simply indecent.

2. "Goodman got into the festival after a half-hour interview with the titular chief of the American delegation, Joy Silver. Goodman told Miss Silver he was not a Communist but was in favor of peace.

'What have you done for peace?' she asked him.

'Nothing,' said Goodman, 'but I'm still young'."

In a country or on a campus with a shred of public morality this remark would be a scandal: Goodman might well be expelled from college, in any case he would be ostracized by many of his fellow-students. It is just accident that Americans live in the only major country of the world which has not, in the last fifty years, been a battlefield; but we think we can "beat" the war game, or "fix" it--like a basketball game, or a West Point examination--without taking any risks or really exerting ourselves.

Is is not somewhat inane to complain of Iron Curtain restrictions when we laughingly violate them in a way which can only make them more strict? To be sure, it was a good lark: but Americans, even Harvardians, are going to have to learn that they cannot be Men of Distinction and Lone Rangers at the same time. Staughton Lynd, 1G