To the Editor:

I write to correct a mistake in the opening paragraph of Leslie Cockburn’s fascinating and moving review of two books on wartime photojournalists (Book Review, Aug. 2). When I was wounded some time in late December 1936 in Spain, there was nobody around to administer Scotch whisky, and I would have had no use for it if there had been, since I was lying flat on my back with blood pumping out of a hole in my neck. I did enjoy her father-in-law Claud Cockburn’s whisky, but it was some three or four weeks later, toward the end of my convalescence in the Brigade hospital in Madrid. I was invited to his apartment to meet the English scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who had been called in to advise the Madrid command on what to do in case Franco used poison gas, and the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, a pioneer in the use of blood plasma on the battlefield. A good time was had by all.

Bernard Knox, Darnestown, Md.

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To the Editor:

Reading Gar Alperovitz (Book Review, Aug. 9) about Harry Truman’s remorse (replete with stories of Truman gulping down double shots of bourbon), I am reminded how Alperovitz’s Atom Bomb Thesis (in “Atomic Diplomacy,” 1965) was demolished utterly by Robert Maddox (in “The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War,” 1973) 25 years ago. I am reminded, too, of a passage in “The Reminiscences of the Geisha Mikiko”:

“One night, as I was massaging the waist of Admiral Yamamoto while strumming the sanisan, Admiral-san sat up and requested a double infusion of green tea. He said: ‘Sorry that Tenno ordered me to bomb Pearl Harbor. Sorry, when I was in the midst of perfecting my chrysanthemum arrangement.’ To which the Geisha Sadiko added: ‘Thus spake the Admiral-san.’ Only he requested not green tea but a double shot of sake. Neat.’ ”

John Lukacs, Phoenixville, Penn.