Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2002/03/01/letters_to_the_editor.php
Friday, March 1, 2002
Sex Ed
To the Editor:
Please provide me complete information and detail data to have complete sex.
James Berkley
The Editor Responds: Check out www.dartmouth.edu/~wrc/ for details on complete sex.
'Comedian' Responds
To the Editor:
This is from the comedian you refer to as foul-mouthed. I have appeared on NBC television three times (you can't swear on TV, nimrod), and my act is about my four kids, golfing, Olympic sports, driving (toll collectors, signs, automatic seat belts, etc.) and new products such as light-block milk. What in the [expletive] are you talking about? My only guess is you are confusing me with the student who went on before us. He did very well but he talked about gays, oral sex, etc. Get your facts straight before you go ripping people with talent, you feckless pinhead.
Paul Nardizzi
Wrong Address?
To the Editor:
Founding school fathers I'm sure would not approve of your liberal policies.
Regards From The Grand Canyon State,
John T. & Mary Sidoroff
Open Letter
Dear President Wright:
I'm making this an open letter, with appropriate media and Internet distribution, for reasons that will become apparent as you read on.
In 1989 I wrote President Freedman and requested that the S. Pinkney Tuck 1913 Memorial Fund be renamed for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I received a reply from a Mr. Thomas W. Soybel of the Legal Affairs and External Relations Department in which my request was denied. Unfortunately, intense pressure of work has made it impossible for me to pursue the matter further for some time. But now I find myself free to do so.
In his letter, Mr. Soybel made a reference to Pinkney Tuck's 'distinguished' career. I believe it's time that you, the Dartmouth community, and the general public, should have some accurate information about that career. As follows:
1) Pinkney Tuck was serving as American consul in Geneva at the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. When Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, in 1927, there were massive demonstrations outside the Consulate. In the wake of these, Tuck issued a statement to the press that he had gone out, mingled with the rioters, and at one point shouted: 'Give us the head of the American consul!' The story appeared in the New York Times and Time magazine, resulting in considerable favorable publicity for Tuck.
For the following reasons, there is absolutely no way that this could ever have happened. First, Tuck didn't speak good enough French to pass for a native Genevese. Second, Geneva in 1927 was a fairly small community and the American consul was a high profile figure. Somebody in the crowd would have recognized him. Third—and nobody can blame him for this—he never would have been so foolhardy as to go out into a hostile crowd and face a situation where he risked serious injury and perhaps even death. Fourth, he was never able to produce one single corroborative witness to this alleged feat of daring. What actually happened seems obvious. Tuck slipped away for an hour or so (he could have been hiding in the lavatory) and then came back and announced that he had gone out into the crowd and shouted the imprecation that sounds like something lifted from a Walter Scott novel. Conclusion: Pinkney Tuck exploited the judicial murder of two innocent men for the sake of a cheap, fraudulent and self-serving publicity stunt.
2) While serving at the Geneva post, Tuck was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct and vandalism, in the French designation being tapage nocturne. In the company of two local playboys, both Swiss nationals, Tuck participated in a drunken rampage in which property was destroyed and neighborhood residents annoyed by having their garbage cans knocked over. Tuck's companions in this escapade were a native Swiss named Horace de PourtalÀs and a naturalized Swiss of U.S. origin named Frederick Bates. I believe this is the sole case on record of an American consul being arrested by police of his host country for engaging in behavior at the juvenile delinquent level. The only thing that saved Tuck's career was the fact that his father-in-law, my grandfather James M. Beck, had been solicitor general under Harding and Coolidge and therefore had a measure of influence in Republican political circles. Shortly after the incident, Tuck was quietly transferred to Czechoslovakia.
3) Tuck definitely had ties with organized crime. His contact—or, perhaps more accurately, 'control'—was a mob figure named Blinky Palermo, the latter not to be confused with the German avant garde painter who appropriated his name. Blinky Palermo and a colleague, Frankie Carbo, exercised a strong influence in boxing during the 1940s and 1950s and Palermo would continually lavish on Tuck batches of prime tickets, 10 to 15 at a time, to championship fights and other major sporting events. Tuck never made any great secret of the relationship. On the contrary, he seemed proud to have a connection, however tenuous, with such a dangerously influential segment of our society. Whenever the tickets came through, I recall that he would wave them around in a sort of feverish triumph. I asked Tuck several times what he had done to merit these benefactions but his response was always supercilious and dismissive, typically: 'It's nothing a parlor liberal like you would understand.' Though I have no concrete proof, I suspect the service he rendered was money laundering. Tuck lived in Paris during fall and winter and in Geneva during spring and summer. This would put him in close proximity to two of Europe's leading financial centers. Another possibility is that he was acting as a liaison between American organized crime and that bloc of corrupt French deputies traditionally controlled by the Corsican Mafia. Tuck had many friendships of this nature — some going back to the days when he was stationed at Vichy and palling around with the Laval-de Chambrun clique. (Tuck's curious passivity in dealing with the notorious Franco-American collaborator Charles Bedaux is noted on p. 208 of Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy.)
Looking back on this distasteful episode, I can't help but feeling a grudging admiration for the masterful psychology displayed by Pinkney Tuck's organized crime manipulators. In selecting Blinky Palermo as his control, in making sure he always received 10 to 15 tickets rather than a smaller number, they made it possible for Tuck to fulfill his dearest wish and invite (as he always did) some of those Racquet Club-Brook Club types on whom he fawned so obsequiously. Then off they'd go to their ringside seats at the Joe Louis fight, the Rocky Graziano fight, the Jake La Motta fight. With his pliant servility to the Racquet Club-Brook Club WASP elitists, and his pliant servility to the elites of Hollywood and organized crime (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Blinky Palermo), Tuck puts me in mind of that repellent historical figure defined by Camille Paglia as the court hermaphrodite.
4) I recommend an investigation to determine if there was any connection between Pinkney Tuck's very sudden 'resignation' as ambassador to Egypt in 1948 and an attack on him in Drew Pearson's column which preceded that
'resignation.' Though I never saw the column, I frequently heard Tuck raging about it. Apparently Pearson had charged that Tuck, ? la Jonathan Pollard, was more interested with serving the interests of a foreign government (in this case Britain) than those of his own country. If so, such behavior would be completely consistent with an exaggerated and sycophantic anglophilia that was one of Tuck's defining characteristics and which he carried to the extent of affecting a British accent—though he was born on Staten Island. (One derives wry amusement from imagining conversations between Blinky Palermo and a prancing pseudo-English-accented poseur like Pinkney Tuck.) I also find it significant that Tuck's 'resignation' from the Cairo post was almost immediately followed by his being appointed a director of the Suez Canal Company. The Suez board was then completely controlled by the British and French and this plum could well have been a reward for services rendered.
I rest my case. Whatever my feelings about this individual, the fact remains that I am legally his closest surviving relative. So I feel that my wishes in this matter should be respected. I therefore once again direct that the name of the 'S. Pinkney Tuck 1913 Memorial Fund' be changed to the "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Fund."
Like Martin, President Wright, I have a dream. It is a dream of a memorial fund at Dartmouth, a fund named after a man of the moral grandeur of Dr. King and no longer tainted by the name of Blinky Palermo's errand boy—a figure whose character was so conspicuously lacking in content.
Very truly yours,
Jim Tuck
Plug
Howdy:
Can't say enough good about your paper so I won't. Unfortunately, the Police State atmosphere on campuses across America is serving a valuable function: to prepare young people for the ever-growing government police state after college life is over. The 'weekly safety and security walk-thrus' in your fraternity system mirror the 9/11 Patriot Act 'sneak and peak' provision which effectively destroys fourth amendment protection.
Unfortunately, liberty-minded people are not usually the activist type, we are far more private by nature. However, unless we begin to actively defy and challenge the police state with various forms of civil-disobedience it's only going to get worse.
I am a charter member of Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States: CCOPS.ORG Please check out our website, a great resource for intelligent and challenging free presses like yours.
In Liberty,
Tom Moor
Boston, MA
Burmese Days Coming
To the Editor:
With the references to Tier 1 or Tier 2 offenses, etc., it can only be a matter of time until the administration decides how many students can major in any particular field. Welcome to Orwell's '1984' and the 'desired outcome'—so much for the college experience. Isn't it nice to have someone else do your thinking? Good luck in the real world.
Tim Pfister
Billings, Montana
Luau No More
Hi Review:
While soft-shoeing my way through the Web this morning, I stumbled on the 'racist' luau scandal appearing in TDR, 16 Aug '99.
Of course this is old hat, or at least this luau instance is—I've not looked for a follow up, nor do I have sufficient interest to do so. But I would like to share with you an observation: AXA and the Tri Delts, displayed no courage in rushing to appease this hand-wringing—if not completely paranoid—Omar Rashid character, who probably was on full scholarship for playing moral policeman. Knowing that accidents happen, and that too many assholes such as Rashid would occasionally appear among well-meaning people, surely was the inspiration which led to His creation of the sphincter!
Stephen
University of California—Berkeley