TEENAGE WASTELAND
IN HIS REVIEW of the Nicholas Delbanco novel that treats the lives of boomers with moral seriousness, Barton Swaim doubts that the "greatest generation" was great since they produced the Boomers ("Debunking Delbanco," Dec. 25). Certainly those who fought on two fronts in World War II must be deemed comparatively great. Nevertheless, they went on to produce a generation of youngsters less mature than any before. A word had to be invented for them: It was in the 1950s that the adjective "teen-age" (Webster II) became a noun (Webster III). How men and women who braved war for so long could then quail before their own children, saying "Work it out on your own" as James Dean's dad does in Rebel Without a Cause-thus orphaning their own children-is truly perplexing. When, in the Republic, Socrates suggests kids under 10 should be taken from their parents, he was just kidding. In the 1950s, the parents weren't kidding.
MICHAEL PLATT
Fredericksburg, Tex.
ARABIAN MIGHT
REGARDING Stephen Schwartz's "Big Saudis on Campus" (Jan 1): As Saudi Arabia has been under continuous terrorist attack since 1996, we have been leading a campaign to squash it locally and globally, and our deeds speak for themselves. Our schools have been teaching the Islamic values of peace, compassion, and tolerance for all humanity. The Saudi king has allocated the biggest share of the Saudi national budget for a modern and tolerant education structure, and the king, with his open mind, has launched a mega-project to sponsor Saudi students at schools all around the world.
Additionally, Wahhabism is just like any Christian movement that calls for a "back to the basics" movement for a direct relationship between God and individuals. This movement has helped to unite the different tribes of the Arabian peninsula after centuries of bloody conflict to become the leader of both the Islamic and Arab worlds.
KHALID AL SAEED
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
STEPHEN SCHWARTZ RESPONDS: I quite agree that Saudi deeds speak for themselves: That 15 out of 19 of the terrorists on 9/11 were Saudi speaks more eloquently than just about anything.
MISREMEMBERING LIPSET
MICHAEL BARONE'S obituary of Seymour Martin Lipset ("Ex ceptional American," Jan. 15) misidentifies the subject of Lipset's Agrarian Socialism as the Social Credit movement in Saskatchewan. In fact, the book's subject was the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, an ideological adversary of Social Credit. Since Professor Lipset is justly famous as an expositor of the isolationist American psyche, this gaffe in his obituary is only appropriate.
DAVID KARY
Elkins Park, Penn.
CORRECTION
IN ROBERT ZARATE's article on the late Roberta Wohlstetter, we referred in passing to a RAND colleague of Wohlstetter's, Paul Baran, as a "Hungarian-born" engineer ("First Lady of Intelligence," Jan. 22). Baran, one of the inventors of the packet-switched network, was in fact born in what is now Belarus. He emails to clarify that "it was Poland" at the time of his birth. "My brother, my sister, and I were all born in the same house, but in three different countries: Germany, Russia, and Poland. Now it is Belarus." He adds: "I am flattered to be thought to have come from Hungary. I was 2 years old at the time I decided to come to America. Best damn decision I ever made."