Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Autograph letter signed : Bangkok, to "Alicia," [1967 Feb. 23].

BIB_ID
323145
Accession number
MA 2581.43
Creator
Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.
Display Date
[1967 Feb. 23].
Credit line
Gift of John Steinbeck, 1967.
Description
1 item (3 p.) ; 31.1 cm
Notes
Date of writing from the publication details of this letter in "John Steinbeck and Newsday" by Robert B. Harmon; see publication details below.
Part of a collection of letters from John Steinbeck to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, written during his travels in Vietnam in 1967. Alicia Patterson Guggenheim was the editor and publisher of Newsday from 1940 until her death in 1963 and Steinbeck addressed his letter "not....to someone who is dead, but rather to a living mind and a huge curiosity" (see MA 2519.39). Steinbeck wrote the letters in this series as a weekly column for Newsday. Letters in the collection have been cataloged individually; see collection-level record for more information.
Written on yellow legal pad paper.
Provenance
Gift of John Steinbeck in 1967.
Summary
Discussing the relations between Cambodia and Thailand in light of a recent train bombing; discussing the recent bombing in Hanoi which targeted residential areas and which the North Vietnamese said was inflicted by the U.S.; commenting on articles by Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times and William C. Baggs of the Miami Daily News denigrating the American military for their actions; questioning whether, from the photographs he has seen in the newspapers, the damage might not have been from bombs but rather from dynamite; saying "This is only an open question because I would like to know for the reason that the pictures do not look like bomb damage to me. They look like dynamite. Look closely at the pictures and see what I mean. A powder man would. And it would be a small price to pay for propaganda to change and harden world opinion."