WINSOME, LOSE SOME

LETTERS

The Camelot maneuver; when will we learn?; defending Chula Vista; regarding Margaret Thatcher; Murdoch's shelf life; and Kesey does it

Bravo to Christopher Hitchens, in "Widow of Opportunity" [December], for kicking a hole in Jacqueline Kennedy's fagade of pearl necklaces, fake smiles, and staged interviews with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. When my husband died, in 2007, I was devastated. As a young widow with an infant to raise on my own, it took every ounce of energy for me to get through those first few months. At his funeral, I recall, I was particularly disgusted when a woman compared my grace and elegance to those of a grieving Jackie Kennedy. I lost it! While I'm sure this woman was trying to be nice, there were no grounds for the comparison. My marriage, though short, was honest, fun, and free of any political aspirations or image modifications.

GEORGIANA ALAVANJA Schererville, Indiana

I HAD NO QUARREL with Christopher Hitchens's assessment of Zhdk-leen—to borrow Jackie's own pronunciation—Kennedy as an opportunistic and manipulative engineer of J.F.K.'s legacy. But then, I never thought that "Black Jack" Bouvier's daughter was "high-class" just because she spoke French, wore gloves, and appreciated Pablo Casals, or that the children of a multi-millionaire Irish bootlegger were "the American aristocracy." Neither did I believe that the wives of oldmoney robber barons in opera pearls and Chanel were "highbrow," nor that movie stars who read books and spoke in complete sentences were "intellectuals."

To my mind, sniffing petulantly at the kitsch of Camelot as a framework for Jack Kennedy's mythos would make sense only in a country where Lady Gaga was not the reigning queen. Truth be told, in America our collective brow has always been lower than our aspirations. Jackie Kennedy, a fundamentally American girl, despite her finishing-school upbringing, had her finger on the pulse.

BRANDY FRENCH Los Angeles, California

MIGHTY HOWITZER

THE VERY STRUCTURE of Mark Bowden's "Echoes from a Distant Battlefield" [December] reveals the progressive folly of our Afghan involvement.

A young man heads to coordinates of the globe that present no reason for United States forces to be there. Any father tells son going out at night, "If you don't have to be there and trouble is likely, don't go there." But here were American guys— who should have been home mowing the lawn, getting married, playing basketball, or studying chemistry—carrying weapons which, for all their stirring nomenclature (howitzers, M240 machine guns, grenade launchers), are devices to tear up bone and flesh so life becomes impossible. And, tragically, it is the American guys who get killed by the other side's R.P.G.'s.

The conclusions should be made here. But like the soldiers' limbs and organs that flew across the hard Afghan soil, this story of the investigation into J. P Brostrom's death— the reports, falsehoods, betrayals—goes in so many directions that the central fact is obscured. Yes, the intricacies absorb the reader, but they also make it difficult to keep in front of us that the kid simply should not have died. And not because different decisions or logistics by the military would have saved him. No, J. P Brostrom should not have died because he and his companions should not have been there to begin with.

PAUL EHRMANN Austin, Texas

OUR TOWN

DECEMBER VANITY FAIR'S ARTICLE "The Code of the Winklevii," by Dana Vachon, includes an unwarranted attack on a city that recently celebrated 100 years of growing into one of the largest and safest in San Diego County. The author's reference to Chula Vista as a "California border town" and "a sputtering neon error of beauty academies and pawnshops" is false, and his characterization of the nation's 77th-largest city is both inappropriate and offensive.

CHERYL COX Mayor

Chula Vista, California

MORE FROM THE V.F. MAILBAG

Need I say more?" wonders Birgitte Hahn, of Copenhagen, having just gone on to her third single-spaced page in the course of "a critique" of Peter Biskind's profile of Scarlett Johansson ("A Study in Scarlett," December). "I have on many occasions enjoyed your celebrity interviews," she writes at the outset, and you pretty much know . what's coming: "I have found myself gesturing at the pages in frustration ... rather awful utterly inane and lazy ... completely irrelevant ... what's the point? ... trivial nonsense ... a whole new level of ridiculousness ... long-winded ... pseudo-profound commentary." What was your question, again? Oh, right. Well (as Thelonious Monk had it), you needn't.

Some shorter critiques: Athia Hardt, of Phoenix, thinks that "Christopher Hitchens is too tough on Mrs. Kennedy and not tough enough on the times in which she lived." And there's anger in Chula Vista, California, over the town's portrayal in Dana Vachon's "The Code of the Winklevii." "I have yet to come across all those beauty schools, pawnshops, and homicidal Tijuana drug gangs dissolving bodies in our streets," notes Mallorie Barker. Finally, Joe Parnell, of Haines, Alaska, writes, "The best [concert] I ever saw was Meat Loaf. At one point, he stalled at one end of the stage, ran a bit, and rolled to the other end." An image we will leave you with, because, really, need a Mailbag say more?

"THE CODE of the Winklevii" ... engaging title. I take it after reading the not flattering report in your December issue that Dana Vachon has as strong an agenda as the twins he profiled.

Citing Larry Summers's expletive hurled at the logical attempt by the brothers to gain a public forum for their take on what Zuckerberg was terming and setting forth as fair settlement does not really validate either Summers or the philosophy woven into the article by your correspondent. Vachon breezily seems to take an Ayn Rand-style stance, believing that Facebook, with its robustly capitalized team, is sure to prevail no matter what the claimant and attorneys may take away from ongoing proceedings.

My only note is that no fat lady has yet sung. Cameron and Tyler may have left the field, but briefly and only in order to regroup. Your article is but a logical volley cast onto the court of public opinion, but still it carries the weight of such a fine periodical. Let's keep in mind that our society maintains the jurisprudence rubric that allows for strategized appeals and a formal withholding of unkind judgments until all extenuating events conclude.

DAVID ESTEBAN PAEZ-RAMIREZ San Diego, California

A PERFECT NO. 10

CHARLES MOORE'S FINE ARTICLE "The Invincible Mrs. Thatcher" [December] confirmed for me that Margaret Thatcher was indeed the greatest British prime minister since Churchill. And no one underestimates Thatcher's ability to fight her way out of a tight corner. "If you look at the lion family," one political analyst told me admiringly about the first woman to be Britain's prime minister, "it's the female of the species that's the killer."

EVAN DALE SANTOS Adelanto, California

THE TWO ARTICLES in your December issue that dealt with war were thoughtprovoking. On the one hand, the story of the exhaustive attempts to rationalize the battle at Wanat ["Echoes from a Distant Battlefield"], and on the other, the article about Margaret Thatcher, which includes a vignette of Sir Denis Thatcher gently reminding the Iron Lady, as she wept over British casualties in the Falklands War, "That is what war is like, love. It is bloody. I know. I've been in one."

The Falklands War was fought over sovereignty; the last time the U.S. fought as a result of an attack on its territory was in World War II. Two different kinds of wars. Two different perspectives. One looks for whom to blame, or vindicate, as the case may be. The other features people who accept that in military actions people die.

CATHERINE CONSTABLE West Quaco, New Brunswick, Canada

GAME OF THRONES

SARAH ELLISON'S EXCLUSIVE on the Murdoch family ["The Rules of Succession," December] confirmed what everyone thinks: the News of the World crumbled internally because the aging Rupert was distracted by a new and much younger wife, his third. That's what happens when a caesar ignores two cardinal rules: Empires have a certain shelf life. And long-term success requires constant scrutiny and a pack of loyal ferrets.

SEVERN DAY Moorpark, California

ONE FLEW OYER HIS NEST

I ENJOYED JAMES WOLCOTT'S article on Ken Kesey's book One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest ["Still Cuckoo After All These Years," December], As a baby-boomer of the 1960s who read every Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, and Carlos Castaneda book ever released, I certainly appreciated all of Kesey's works and their view of our society. However, I thought Wolcott was remiss in not including one of Kesey's best-written books—albeit one with a different style and setting from his usual genre. Sometimes a Great Notion, published in 1964, is a poignant study of an American family in transition, much like the United States at that time. I remember reading the novel and remarking on the depth of its characters and all that they represented.

CURT DAVIS Johnstown, Pennsylvania

EDITOR'S NOTE: Wolcott's original manuscript does in fact reference Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion. The mention was cut due to space constraints.

Letters to the editor should be sent electronically with the writer's name, address, and daytime phone number to letters@vf.com. All requests for back issues should be sent to subscriptions® vf.com. All other queries should be sent to vfmail@vf.com. The magazine reserves the right to edit submissions, which may be published or otherwise used in any medium. All submissions become the property of Vanity Fair.

THE VF.COM LETTER BOX

It may be frigid outside, but climes are iciest between the 12 floors that separate the offices of VF.com and Gentlemen's Quarterly. Hostilities can be traced back to the end of A.D. 2011, when VF Daily publicly mocked GQ's proclamation that Brooklyn is the "coolest city." Tensions escalated when GQ later published a list of the world's "least influential people"—a ranking thematically identical to a VF Daily post from a year and a half earlier. Your valiant VF then one-upped GQ by publishing, in November 2011, next year's list: the least influential people of 2012. "The GQ staffer assigned to write this exact listicle in 12 months" ranked sixth, narrowly beating out "adjunct Yale lecturer Tim Geithner."

Adam Clark Estes, a blogger for the Atlantic Wire, fanned the flames of intra-4 Times Square strife by writing on Twitter: "I feel like casting GQ magazine as VF Daily's arch-rival is being awfully generous to the Gentlemen's Quarterly folks." Meanwhile, the gentlehearted Lucky'.s impassioned cries for detente—"Why can't you guys just play nice?"—fell on deaf, well-accessorized ears.

The unlikely common grounds between VF and GQ: one, literal common ground (we share a building), and, two, Tina Brown, the Newsweek editrix who appeared on all three least-influential lists. The 1983 British import was also the subject of deputy editor Bruce Handy's November 18 statc-of-ALmyiivrA: treatise on VF Daily. "[Each] issue begins with a miles-long slog of columns by A-list writers eager to champion the incontrovertible and rehash the already thoroughly hashed," Handy observed. Tom McGeveran, the former New York Observer managing editor, agreed with Handy's assessment on CapitalNewYork .com: "Of course that's true. But that doesn't mean it can't sell, or that it can't articulate something that has some power to it." Or no power to it, according to three recent well-received listicles.

Tweet your questions and comments for the Letter Box to @VanityFair using the PDearGraydon hashtag, and we may respond in a future issue or on Twitter.