梠梥 West as a little Valentine r heart throb uited to our sentimentality. In fact, the war of the icons, or the eroding of the collective countenance of one's rivals, has long been under way. Ink and photo are supplanting soldiery and tanks. The pen daily becomes mightier than the sword. The French phrase "guerre des nerfs" of twenty-five years ago has since come to be referred to as "the cold war." It is really an electric battle of information and of images that goes far deeper and is more obsessional than the old hot wars of industrial hardware. The "hot" wars of the past used weapons that knocked off the enemy, one by one. Even ideological warfare in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proceeded by persuading individuals to adopt new points of view, one at a time. Electric persuasion by photo and movie and TV works, instead, by dunking entire populations in new imagery. Full awareness of this technological change had dawned on Madison Avenue ten years ago when it shifted its tactics from the promotion of the individual product to the collective involvement in the "corporate image," now altered to "corporate posture." Parallel to the new cold war of information exchange is the situation commented on by James Reston in a New York Times release from Washington: Politics has gone international. The British Labor Leader is here campaigning for Prime Minister of Britain, and fairly soon John F. Kennedy will be over in Italy and Germany campaigning for reelection. Everybody's now whistle-stopping through somebody else's country, usually ours. Washington has still not adjusted to this third-man role. It keeps forgetting that anything said here may be used by one side or another in some election campaign, and that it may, by accident, be the decisive element in the final vote. If the cold war in 1964 is being fought by informational tech-