We have had a heavy mail during the past weeks, on just about everything we have published, from the fascinating “Assertive Disarmament” (read: maybe we should under certain circumstances bomb Red China’s nuclear facilities) to Max Geltman’s review of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer. But the big big mail concerned Garry Wills’ piece on Chicago (“Convention in the Streets,” Sept. 24). Phillip Abbot Luce, yesterday’s rebel who nowadays speaks to college students (he is himself still in his twenties), said of it that it “captured the essence of the Chicago confrontation” as nobody else’s did. Ruth Berenson Mühlen, our art critic, calls it “by far the best I’ve read anywhere.” Ditto from Peter Bird Martin, senior editor of Time, and from Alistair Cooke, who Xeroxed copies of it and sent them to English editors, that they too should know.
Some readers found it insufficiently ideologized. Many are against any piece that refers to Them as “the kids,” and I kind of see their point, though I don’t count because I was born with a prejudice against the word even when used to describe little girls and little boys dancing around a maypole. One correspondent was displeased because we didn’t hew hew hew to the conservative line in the piece, but it wasn’t of course that kind of piece. It sought mostly to give the reader an impression of what happened, and what was the spirit of the participants.
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