Cold War and Taiwan

* Re “Bush Shakes Free From the State Dept. on Taiwan,” Commentary, April 27: Bruce Herschensohn seems to have forgotten that when John F. Kennedy made his remarks on Formosa (Taiwan), that island was governed by the legitimate government of China that had been forced to flee from the mainland by a terrorist political revolution.

What President Nixon did in 1972 was to “abandon” Taiwan--against the advice of a State Department that had engineered the post-World War II ascendance of the U.S. as the world’s superpower--to the geopolitical ideas of Henry Kissinger, a policy that had no concern for the political ambitions or economic welfare of the Chinese people or the social, economic or democratic principles of the U.S., but was more interested in preventing a powerful army under a tyrannical dictatorship from falling into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

JACK BRAMSON

Los Angeles