March 8, 1954 Dear Dr. von Mises: It was a pleasure to see you again the other day. I only wished I had been able to stay a little longer. You are so busy that I hate to inconvenience you with personal matters; but I certainly did not forget your saying that I ought to write things like the article on Acheson and be paid $5,000 to do the research at leisure. I thought that you must know of some leads. I do not seem to be successful in establishing the right contacts. As to teaching, I really and truly despise undergraduate work. I do not mind graduate work (my field is history and foreign affairs), especially if 1 don't have to mark papers. But by all odds, my real enjoyment is writing. I love the research but putting this just in the right way, that is my real pleasure. (I once hoped to become a musician, and 1 published a volume of short stories in Germany, in 1929, and I wrote plenty of poems which were bad enough to be published in papers over there, more than a quarter of a century ago.) I believe that I am on the black list of the NEA and have no chance to get an academic job. Thus, I'm leving a truly precanious existence, from hand to mouth, and often just "to mouth. A typical incident occurred not so long ago. Bill Peterson thought I should teach at Brooklyn Polytech. He suggested that I see Dr. Knudson. I told him that was fruitless, considering that Knudson has been a League of Nations and UN man all his life. But I went, mainly to prove to Bill what would happen. Here is the approximate conversation we had: Knudson: "Dr. Wittmer, it is of course very important for America to have extremists of your type, these days." W: "Dr. Knudson, isn't it correct to say that we have gone to the left so much that a middle-of-the-road man who stands by the Constitution is now an extremist? "