According to Garrison Nelson in "Keeping Cool in New England" (October/November), John Kerry is imbued with the "Brahmin's sense of public duty and rectitude that manifests itself in [his] willingness to enter combat service in Vietnam and his subsequent career as a state prosecutor." What an insult to Boston Brahmins!

Kerry apparently authored his own citations for gallantry, filmed re-enactments of his dubious exploits, and accumulated enough shrapnel in his butt from his own ordnance to get sent home after four months.

Then he finagled an early out from his Reserve obligation, testified in uniform to the Senate about largely if not totally fictitious atrocities that he knew nothing about, threw what proved to be somebody else's medals over the White House fence, milked the radical left-wing Vietnam Veterans Against the War for all the publicity he could get, rushed back to Massachusetts to run for Congress, and married into money (later annulled so he could marry into even more money).

A Brahmin sense of public duty and rectitude? Give me a break.

John McClaughry, president
Ethan Allen Institute
Kirby, Vermont

I find myself in serious disagreement with Karina Rollins' assessment of the internment of the Japanese in her review of Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment (BOOKTALK, October/November).

I'm old enough to remember the matter, and even during the war I thought it was wrong. I do not doubt that there were sympathizers with Japan and probably some espionage agents among the large number of Japanese interned. My objection to it then and now was that there were far more Japanese as a share of population in Hawaii than on the West Coast.

Furthermore, Hawaii was a major naval base from which we operated our Pacific fleet. Pearl Harbor and the area where aircraft carriers were normally anchored were in plain view of the houses of many Hawaiian residents, including Japanese. If we were worried about spies or general disloyalty, Hawaii was a far better place from which to remove the Japanese population than from the West Coast. Since we didn't, I felt confident that it was local political problems in California, not serious espionage concerns, that led to the internment.

Gordon Tullock
University Professor of Law & Economics
George Mason University

As a schoolteacher for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I can say that Matthew Clavel ("How Republicans Can Save Education--and Win Votes," October/November) undermines his case by casting the matter in terms of partisan politics. The five-plank platform he urges has been tried before where neither Republicans nor Democrats held sway--and it failed.

In the early 1990s, New Zealand attempted to put Clavel's ideas into practice under a program called Tomorrow's Schools. Attendance zones were abolished, and students were allowed to apply to any school of their choice. Tuition followed students once they were accepted. Teacher unions were excluded from the educational policy council.

The best schools swiftly filled up and began turning away problem students. These were disproportionately minority students in the form of Maoris and Pacific Islanders, who lived overwhelmingly in inner cities. Forced to return to their original schools, they found themselves in classes significantly more polarized along ethnic and socio-economic lines than before. Realizing that its grand experiment was not working, New Zealand began to pull back. The U.S. disregards this lesson at its own peril.

Walt Gardner
Los Angeles, California

I disagree with Grover Norquist ("The Reagan Revolution Lives On," POLITICO, October/ November) about the GOP's commitment to limiting government. Whatever their rhetoric, all hard evidence points to the fact that the GOP favors larger government.

Rod Blum
Dubuque, Iowa

Correction: Because of an editorial mistake, Garrison Nelson's "Keeping Cool in New England" (October/November) incorrectly stated that Massachusetts Republican Ed Brooke became the first black man popularly elected to the Senate in 1972. Brooke was elected in 1966. TAE regrets the error.