The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 12, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Budapest that the Communist-supported Government had cracked down anew this date to frustrate the possibility that renewed labor and student unrest might renew the open rebellion of the prior October and November. The regime of Premier Janos Kadar apparently feared that workers' demonstrations, which had swept Budapest the previous day, might lead to new fighting. One Government-controlled newspaper had stated: "Fear reigns in Hungary… Nobody knows if tomorrow might not bring another bloody revolution." A student rally had been postponed after eight of its anti-Communist leaders had been reported arrested by the Communist police. Students had sparked the October 23 anti-Communist revolution and had planned to rally the previous day to demand again that Russian troops withdraw from Hungary and that free elections be held. The Communist radio and newspapers told the Hungarian people about the strikes and demonstrations, indicating that police had finally been forced to open fire on the workers "in self-defense". Hungarian informants had told Western reporters that between one and five persons had been killed by bullets of Communist militia at the Csepel industrial complex on a Danube River island south of Budapest. Some 5,000 of the 38,000 workers at that facility had struck in protest against mass layoffs decreed by the Kadar Government. The official version of the Communist press, however, said that only one worker had been killed, but accounts varied on the number of wounded. Police also fired into the air to break up another demonstration by 2,000 workers at the Ganz Railway Car Works in southwest Budapest, according to the papers. The trade union organ said that the railway car workers had been justified in their strike because "the wrong wage list was posted" at the factory. No injuries were reported at Ganz.
In London, new Prime Minister Harold Macmillan continued his efforts this date to construct his new government, predicting his task would be completed during the weekend. Queen Elizabeth was interrupting her holiday to be at Buckingham Palace the following day, presumably to receive and provide formal approval to the list of the new ministers. Winston Churchill had wished good luck the previous night to Mr. Macmillan and following a three hour dinner session with the former Prime Minister, the new Prime Minister said that he had "supped at the fount of all wisdom." There were predictions that the new Prime Minister would make many changes in the Cabinet which he had inherited from retired Prime Minister Anthony Eden. All of the previous day, the Prime Minister had interviewed key ministers of the old Eden Government, telling some that they were being promoted and others that they were being demoted or dismissed entirely. The Labor Party had raised the possibility that the Queen's having been forced to choose between Mr. Macmillan and R. A. Butler might have involved her innocently in a political controversy. Mr. Macmillan, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, was regarded as a member of the Conservative right wing, while Mr. Butler, Lord Privy Seal, was considered within the more liberal faction of the Conservative Party. The "shadow cabinet", the policy-making committee of the Labor Party in Parliament, said that it was "examining the constitutional implications" of the way Mr. Macmillan had been selected. Party leaders had made a polite demand for a new decision, not made by the Queen, on who should run the government. To avoid any criticism of the Queen, the party leaders, however, announced that they were calling a new meeting of policy planners to discuss the method of selection. Deputy Labor Party leader James Griffith said that they believed it was important that the parties, themselves, decide on their leaders and that the Crown should not be placed in the embarrassing position of having to make a choice between rival claimants from the same party. He said that the party's planners would consider the possibility of a motion of censure to be introduced when Parliament convened on January 22.
Representative Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said this date that he had heard that three or four Congressmen had been given copies of a document which the Army said had been leaked to "unauthorized persons", dealing with limits placed on the Army's development and use of new missiles. He said that he had heard that all of the members were from Alabama and that a colonel had given the document to them on his own volition. The Army had announced on January 7 that Colonel John Nickerson, Jr., had been one of several officers being questioned, after a document which "apparently contained secret information" had been found "in the hands of unauthorized persons." The colonel was chief of the field coordinating office at the Army's ballistic missiles center, Redstone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Ala.
The Pentagon announced this date that the Navy was developing its own intermediate range ballistic missile, meaning that the Navy was severing its collaboration with the Army on that project. Lockheed Aircraft Co. of Van Nuys, Calif., was the major contractor in developing the "Polaris", the name assigned to the new weapon. The announcement said that the missile joined the U.S. family of ballistic missiles. Others being developed or produced at present included the 200-mile range Redstone missile of the Army, such intermediate range missiles as the Army's Jupiter and the Air Force's Thor, each of which had a designed range of about 1,500 miles, and the two intercontinental ballistic missiles of the Air Force, the Atlas and the Titan. (The Redstone and Atlas rockets would be used as the boosters for the Project Mercury initial manned flights into outer space and the Titans would be used for the subsequent two-manned Gemini flights. By then obsolete land-based Jupiter missiles located in Turkey in 1962 would be used, initially secretly, as a means of barter by the Kennedy Administration with the Soviet Union to dismantle and remove the missiles and launchers discovered in Cuba in mid-October, to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
In Colorado Springs, Colo., Nike guided missiles, according to Lt. General Stanley Mickelson, chief of the Army anti-aircraft command, would assure the country that it could not be knocked out by an air attack, that any enemy was aware that the Nike missile system could destroy its bombers, as those bombers could be prevented from reaching vital targets, causing enemies to be aware that destroying America was beyond their capabilities.
In Dallas, Tex., a special officer for the Southern Pacific Railroad had been shot to death during the morning after he had shot at two Dallas police officers giving him a ticket for speeding. Police Captain Will Fritz—who would, on November 22, 1963, lead the initial investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit—said that the special officer had shot the two police officers at about 1:20 a.m. after they had chased him for speeding, catching him when he pulled into a driveway near his home. One of the officers had been shot in the chest and was in surgery for about two hours, while the other had been shot in the hip and hand, with both officers expected to live. Captain Fritz said that the officers had chased the man during the evening and had lost him in traffic, then subsequently, while writing a ticket for a 15-year old who had faulty lights on his car, had spotted the offending car and gave chase with the 15-year old still in their car. The boy had sat in the backseat of the police car and witnessed the shooting, and in a signed statement to the captain, said that the officers had told the man that they could see he had been drinking but that he was not drunk enough to be placed in jail, that they were going to give him a speeding ticket, the boy then quoting the man as saying that they were not going to give him a ticket, and about that time, pulled back his coat, grabbed his pistol and shot both officers. One or both of the officers had returned the fire, but it had not been determined which officer had fired the fatal bullet, with Captain Fritz estimating that about half a dozen shots had been fired. (It is to be noted that Doris Fleeson this date relates on the editorial page of the effort by Senator Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader to go beyond the seniority rule and bypass Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee in favor of Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts for a spot on the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, with the effort, she indicates, signaling the groundwork for a possible Johnson-Kennedy ticket for the Democrats in 1960, begun at the 1956 convention, in which Senator Kennedy had narrowly missed becoming the running mate for Adlai Stevenson in an open vote by the convention, narrowly selecting Senator Kefauver.)
In Atlanta, about 60 Southern black leaders representing nine Southern states, concluding their two-day meeting, were continuing their integration fight with appeals telegraphed the previous day to the President, the Vice-President, and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, seeking their assistance. They urged the President to come to the South immediately to make a major speech in a major Southern city, urging all Southerners to abide by Brown v. Board of Education. They urged Mr. Brownell at the earliest possible time to meet with them in conference, indicating that "the confused state requires that we talk with you in order to secure a clarification from the highest legal authority of the land…" They urged Vice-President Nixon to tour the South and report to the President on "economic boycotts, and reprisals, and bombing and violence directed against persons and homes of Negroes who assert their rights under the constitution." Attorneys said that they were considering a request to Federal District Court in Atlanta to declare the local bus segregated seating laws to be unconstitutional, in line with the recent ruling by the Supreme Court, summarily affirming the unconstitutionality of the Alabama State statute and the Montgomery City ordinance requiring segregated seating, as held unconstitutional the prior June by the U.S. District Court in Alabama.
In Raleigh, the State Supreme Court the previous day affirmed a decision of Wake County Superior Court Judge Hamilton Hobgood that the NAACP's complaint for declaratory judgment that it was not subject to a State law requiring registration of groups seeking to influence public opinion or a law requiring registration of foreign corporations doing business in the state, had been improperly joined in a single suit, as one involved a criminal penalty and the other, a civil penalty.
In Winston-Salem, Governor Luther
Hodges this date called on the state's trucking industry to support
proposed changes in the state tax structure, even though truckers
might find some of them objectionable. He said that he knew of no
group within the state which stood to gain more from the industrial
and commercial expansion of the state than the motor carriers. The
recommendations would be made to the 1957 Legislature, to approve
making it possible for every municipality to impose a special tax of
$10 on motor vehicles, with the limitation presently being one
dollar. The recommendations also would make it possible for
communities to tax workers by as much as $10 per person for the
privilege of working within a city's limits. The Governor had made
his remarks during an address prepared for the dedication of the home
office of the Pilot Freight Carriers, Inc. We know that depot. It is
where we picked up our first color television set shipped from Rich's
in Atlanta in 1966 just prior to Christmas. That was the fall when everything was
suddenly "in color
In Canon City, Colo., John Graham, the convicted murderer of his mother and 43 other men, women and children aboard a November 1, 1955 United Air Lines flight, which had been blown to bits by a bomb which Mr. Graham had been convicted of placing in his mother's luggage for the sake of obtaining life insurance proceeds, was executed the previous night in the gas chamber. The 24-year old father of two children had gulped the cyanide fumes and passed into unconsciousness within seconds, and was pronounced dead in 12 minutes. Although he had never disclosed a motive for planting the device in his mother's luggage, he had named himself as beneficiary in a $37,500 flight insurance policy which he had taken out on his mother's life. He had never alluded to the crime during his time in prison awaiting his fate, but had accepted his death sentence stoically when it came. The deputy warden, who had witnessed 26 executions in Colorado's gas chamber, said that Mr. Graham had been the calmest person he had ever seen executed.
Julian Scheer of The News provides "some short stuff to tide you over a dull political week", including the fact that state Democrats were talking about holding the big Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in March in 1957, whereas normally it was held in Raleigh in late January or early February, but was probably to be delayed because February would be a big month with the General Assembly opening and the President's second inaugural upcoming on Monday, January 21. After going through some local and state politics, he reports that the State had made a good deal during the week for mental institutions, as it would spend about $100,000 for one of the two tranquilizing drugs which were presently being used extensively in the state's mental institutions, having worked out a deal whereby it would purchase $25,000 worth of Thorazine every 90 days and obtain a 10 percent discount, while smaller institutions which did not purchase enough to obtain that discount could take advantage of the lower rate made available through State centralized purchases. Thorazine and Reserpine were the two most widely used drugs of that type in State institutions. We might note that we can think of some good uses for Thorazine for certain members of the Republican caucus in the House at present in 2024; but for the sake of discretion, we refrain from naming names. You know who they are.
In Detroit, a police detective reported that for two months, a thief had been helping himself to part of the city's $60,000 per month parking meter haul by virtue of having a key to some 2,000 of the city's 7,200 meters.
An odd photograph appears on the page, showing four brothers of North Adams, Mass., along with their dogs, Spot and Smokey, exhibiting their catch of 125 raccoons, the pelts of which had once fetched $15 each but now only brought in three dollars per.
On the editorial page, "Wrap Annexation with Bright Ribbons" indicates that State Senator Jack Blythe had stated to the City Council that the annexation plan had not been sold to the county delegation to the General Assembly, set to convene its 1957 session in February.
There had been protests from the public in the perimeter areas and no groundswell of support within the city. Annexation had been an idea without legs, without salesmanship, without vigorous leadership and now, was without support.
It indicates that it would take above-average leadership by the Mayor, the City Council and the legislators to put annexation across to the voters, to promise a better future for the whole community. But as long as the only visible dimensions of annexation were tax increases for some perimeter residents, there would be little prospect of building the popular support required for any annexation plan. It asks whether the Mayor, the Council and the legislators, knowing that fact, would do anything about it.
"N.C. Assignment Law Need Not Fall" indicates that North Carolina's pupil assignment law, passed by the 1955 General Assembly, would not necessarily be declared unconstitutional because of the ruling in the U.S. District Court in Virginia the previous day, holding Virginia's assignment law unconstitutional.
It views the ruling, however, as a warning to those who would manipulate placement machinery in any state such that it would defy openly the principles of Brown v. Board of Education, as the court had found the Virginia law to do. The Virginia law had been part of an elaborately interrelated scheme to block any degree of desegregation by denying State funds to any white school which admitted a black student. By contrast, under the North Carolina system, some integration was theoretically possible.
William Joyner, vice-chairman of the North Carolina Advisory Committee on Schools and a principal architect of the Pearsall Plan—amending the State Constitution to permit payment of public funds as vouchers for entry to private schools for students not wishing to attend integrated schools and also permitting local school districts to vote to close their public schools when the situation became intolerable, approved in a referendum by the voters the prior September—, had said a few months earlier that he believed that some mixing in some schools was inevitable and had to occur, that the result of free choice and of honest assignment according to the best interests of the pupils would be separations so substantially complete as to be tolerable to the people, that the admission of less than 1 percent of the black children to schools which were formerly all-white was a small price to pay for the ability to keep mixing within the bounds of "reasonable control".
Virginia had a system in which they were trying to justify the non-admission of black students to white schools when there were no integrated schools within the state. North Carolina had placed pupil assignment in the hands of local school boards, whereas Virginia had created a three-member pupil placement board, appointed by the governor, to take over from local boards the full authority of assignment of pupils. If there was integration in any Virginia public school, the school was automatically closed and removed from the public school system, denied public funding. The governor then took over and by the re-assignment of pupils or the reorganization of the school, attempted to make it possible to reopen the school on a segregated basis. If the school could not be reopened and if the pupils could not be reassigned to segregated schools, tuition grants could be a made available to the children so that they could continue their education in nonsectarian private schools. Factors taken into consideration under the Virginia law had included "the sociological, psychological and like intangible social-scientific factors as will prevent, as nearly as possible, a condition of socioeconomic class consciousness among the pupils." It also considered "such other relevant matters as may be pertinent to the efficient operation of the schools or indicate a clear and present danger to the school's peace and tranquility affecting the safety or welfare of the citizens." The only "safety valve" in the plan to withstand a court challenge had been the theoretical possibility that a particular locality, under certain conditions, could operate a desegregated school without State aid.
By comparison, North Carolina's plan, it finds, was much sturdier, but its survival would depend on the honesty and intelligence with which it was implemented.
"A Half-Completed Job Is Half Enough" indicates that the president of the Southern Railway System had stated at City Hall the previous day that it was essential to the welfare of Charlotte for the westside tracks to be raised. In response, Mayor Philip Van Every had said that the opening of the crossline was only a first step in the grade separation program.
It indicates that the eastside was at last rid of the nuisance of regular Columbia Division trains blocking 17 separate crossings, but that the main line remained to haunt the city. It finds gratifying that the Mayor and the president of the Southern Railway were fully aware of the continuing challenge, but wants to see that awareness translated into an effective campaign to obtain the necessary matching funds from the appropriate State and Federal agencies, as the opening of the crossline, while representing progress, was only half enough.
Charlotte had better get rid of the main line so that the tracks won't show, when the conductor checks the ticket.
A piece from the Manchester Guardian, titled "Passing Mixture", indicates that England ought be grateful to Sir Vincent Tewson for an example of the mixing of metaphors.
He had said recently: "People come to us to save their bacon when the baby has already gone down with the bath water." (Somebody must have said something of the kind during the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973, but we shall have to check that.)
It suggests that usually, when a modern speaker made a statement such as that, he hastened to add: "If I may be allowed to mix my metaphors." It says that it misses such English as: "Meanwhile the bureaucracy is spread eagled on the horns of a dilemma, rushing hither, thither and whither, and leaving no stone unturned in a desperate effort to find green pastures in the valley of the moon." It suggests that no one at present had the courage, or the simplicity, to imitate such a statement. (That one sounds like something Ron Ziegler might have said in defense of his boss when confronting his boss's enemies.)
Drew Pearson indicates that it was more than just a burst of temper which had caused the walkout of Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio from the closed-door hearings being conducted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee with Secretary of State Dulles. The committee chairman, Thomas Gordon of Chicago, was new at the job and not skilled in holding important hearings. He had excellent intentions, spoke English with a Polish accent, and had seldom made a speech, having been on the Foreign Affairs Committee for several years, and through seniority, had finally become its chairman. Affable but insecure, he was arbitrary to give the appearance of being strong—whatever that means.
Committee members did not get full rein to cross-examine Secretary Dulles, despite the fact that a commitment to threaten war was at stake. They were given five minutes each during the morning session and five minutes in the afternoon, and the Secretary, being an astute lawyer and former Senator for a partial term, was able to filibuster, answering questions at some length so that before he had finished one or two questions, the chairman interrupted to say that the Senator's time had expired. Mr. Dulles had also read a long statement which hit the newspapers the first day, in consequence of which, the reporters had written little about his cross-examination. On the second day, he had requested a closed-doors session and Mr. Gordon had agreed, at which point Mr. Hays had walked out in protest.
The latter had recently visited Hungary and had asked Mr. Dulles earlier about Hungary's plea for U.S. aid, Mr. Hays comparing it to the request for aid which might come from the Middle East under the proposed plan of the Administration, the so-called "Eisenhower doctrine".
Mr. Pearson provides the unpublished exchange between Mr. Hays and Mr. Dulles.
Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky had a sense of humor which sometimes got the better of his discretion. When he was talking to a friend about his recent election from Kentucky and was telling him of a political supporter having come down from the Kentucky mountains to see him during the campaign, he said that they were praying more for Mr. Morton, which he said he had indicated he appreciated but asked them to do more stealing.
Former Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas of California, presently a concert singer and actress, had returned to Washington the previous week while her husband, actor Melvyn Douglas, was playing the lead role of Clarence Darrow in "Inherit the Wind", the story of the 1925 John Thomas Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching evolution in the local school, ending the career of William Jennings Bryan, who had conducted the primary prosecution. Mrs. Douglas had visited with old friends, but had not gone to Congress where she had once fought hard for slum clearance and against inflation, before being defeated for the Senate in 1950 by Richard Nixon in a bitter campaign which had first launched the technique known as McCarthyism—though he is a little off on his time line as Senator McCarthy had actually begun his effort at charging the varying number of State Department employees with being "card-carrying Communists" as part of his Lincoln Day assignment in February, 1950, probably thinking of Mr. Nixon's HUAC days in 1948, leading ultimately to the prosecution and conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury, as well as his 1946 campaign for Congress against the incumbent, Jerry Voorhis. Congressman Albert Thomas of Texas, meeting Mrs. Douglas at dinner, had not recognized her, saying that she looked so much younger and beautiful, prompting her host, George Vournas, to remark, "She isn't black and blue anymore from the low blows of Mr. Nixon."
Walter Lippmann indicates that as Anthony Eden retired, he could take with him the knowledge that his friends constituted a multitude on both sides of the ocean, built up during the world war era. For them, the last word had not been spoken regarding the disaster at Suez, and the time had not yet come for final judgment.
It had been his fate to do what Prime Minister Churchill had once vowed, in November, 1942 at the outset of the North African campaign, he would never do, presiding over the liquidation of the British imperial position in the Middle East. Mr. Lippmann suggests that if everyone had been much wiser and more reasonable, there might have been a happy transition from empire to a new order between East and West, but that there had not been that wisdom in the West, in France, Britain, or the U.S., to use what remained of their declining power to put forth a new order to replace the old. In the East, there had been violence and hatred, resentment and fanaticism to discourage and frustrate statesmanship.
The intervention by France and Britain at the Suez Canal appeared to have been a last desperate gamble to recover power and influence which had already been very nearly lost. What little power and influence remained had been wagered and lost in that disaster.
He indicates that there was no denying that the Anglo-American partnership in world affairs had been impacted, that partnership having begun with Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt during World War II, starting with the Atlantic Charter of September, 1941. The essence of that relationship had been consultation and agreement at the highest levels in advance of any significant decision in foreign affairs. There had always been, for more than a century, a British-American connection, in the case of war, causing both countries to be allied. But the partnership formed between Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt had established a comparatively new form of British-American relations.
Now, that partnership, if not dissolved, was at very least suspended in the Suez crisis. The official American view had been that it could never again trust Prime Minister Eden after his failure to consult with the U.S. in October before agreeing with the French to invade the Suez. The corresponding view in Britain had been that after its experience in negotiating with Secretary of State Dulles regarding Suez, it could never again trust him. Thus, Washington was relieved that Mr. Eden had retired and London would be relieved when Mr. Dulles would retire.
Mr. Dulles would die as Secretary in 1959.
Marquis Childs indicates that while the Administration was entering its second term with the same old faces in the Cabinet, there were changes ahead which would present the President with perhaps the most critical decision of his second term. One of those changes was unavoidable, as Joint Chiefs chairman, Admiral Arthur Radford, would complete in August his second term as chairman, and under the defense unification act, no chairman could serve more than two terms, with Congress unlikely to alter that law for Admiral Radford, who had been less than popular in Congress, where he played a prominent role in promulgating and promoting the Eisenhower programs. He had been appearing before committees with Secretary of State Dulles to explain the new Middle East proposal.
At about the same time Admiral Radford would leave, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson was also expected to resign. By that point, the latter would have gotten through Congress the 1958 military budget, calling for expanded defense spending of 3 billion dollars or more. It would be, nevertheless, as with all other budgets in recent years, a compromise, distributing extras to several services, but not coming to grips with the dilemma of the old and new weaponry and the mounting cost of sustaining both the old and the new. The new rockets were rapidly moving from the experimental stage to testing far more rapidly than had been thought possible a year earlier. The anti-missile missile would be ready for testing within 3 to 4 months and with the advent of offensive missiles with a range of 5,000 miles and proven defensive missiles, the piloted aircraft could become obsolete within a relatively few years. The next secretary of defense and the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs would confront those developments and would be unable for long to escape the necessity of altering the balance of the services to fit the new look in weaponry.
The Bureau of the Budget believed that the major decisions could not be postponed beyond the budget to be prepared two years hence for fiscal year 1960. The President had to find two men of stature capable of standing up to the most terrific pressure. Rumored for the successor as secretary of defense was General Alfred Gruenther, who had retired recently as commander of NATO to become head of the national Red Cross. He was rated as one of the ablest minds ever in the military service and had turned down lucrative offers from private industry to take the $30,000 per year job with the Red Cross. The President was also said to be keeping him in reserve for a special post within the National Security Council.
Admiral Radford had been chosen as chairman when he had sold himself to General Eisenhower shortly after the 1952 election and to Mr. Wilson, while they were making a tour of Korea. The Admiral had come to the position with strong policy convictions, particularly on Asia and Communist China, telling several groups that he felt that the U.S. should maintain a status of war, either hot or cold, against China for the ensuing 50 years, if necessary, to bring down the Communist regime. His departure, along with that of Senator William Knowland of California, one of the most ardent advocates of returning Chiang Kai-shek to the mainland, could mean a gradual alteration of U.S. policy toward China and Formosa. Senator Knowland had announced that he would not seek re-election the following year to the Senate.
Twice, the President had overruled Admiral Radford on major policy decisions which might have involved the U.S. in war. One occurred during the crisis regarding the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, when Admiral Radford wanted to send U.S. planes with atomic weapons from American aircraft carriers against the Communist attackers of Dien Bien Phu, and the other involved U.S. air operations in 1955 in defense of the offshore Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu, when Admiral Radford wanted to attack, but was overruled by the President.
Mr. Childs indicates that it was not impossible that before Admiral Radford's term ended, another critical decision would come before him, as reports persisted that Chiang intended to test his strength against the Communists and thus involve the U.S., by virtue of the two nations' mutual defense pact. The other Joint Chiefs had suspected that Admiral Radford wanted to usurp sole authority in view of his close relationship with Secretary Wilson. The previous September, he had put forward a directive which the three service chiefs charged would have bypassed them and given the chairman sole authority over all of the armed forces, a charge previously made by both Republican and Democratic Senators. The Admiral had later withdrawn the directive because of what he said was premature publicity.
Doris Fleeson indicates that the relations of Northern and Western Democrats in Congress with their Southern leadership had been further embittered by the new committee assignments in both houses. An outstanding example of the bold use by Southerners of their powers was the nomination of Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. To achieve that end, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had ruthlessly exercised his personal prerogatives, scuttled normal operations of seniority and openly insulted his fellow but more liberal Southerner, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who had four more years of seniority than Senator Kennedy.
The Democratic cloakrooms had described the maneuver of Senator Johnson as the opening salvo of an effort to put across a Johnson-Kennedy ticket at the Democratic national convention in 1960. That had emerged clearly in the 1956 convention, and its progress would be political news for the ensuing four years. But it was still only a sidebar to the big story, the struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.
The Northern and Western liberals had it rubbed in the previous November as to what it meant at present to carry on their shoulders a Congressional record flavored by the Southerners, whose share of Democratic victories nationally consisted of control of the major Congressional committees. The liberal rebellion had taken shape in the refusal of the new Democratic Advisory Committee to drop dead because of the Congressional leaders having refused to join. The Southerners had now had their time, and now the big city Democrats, in whom the Southerners discerned potential allies, were getting the better of committee assignments. The liberals, who could be counted on to fight until the end, got no such consideration.
In addition to the committee assignment for Senator Kennedy, freshman Senator Frank Lausche, a conservative from Ohio, received two major committee assignments, while Senator John Carroll of Colorado, who had prior House experience, was refused assignment to the Judiciary Committee and received only an assignment to the Interior Committee, important to Senator Carroll, but only a regional assignment.
In the House, Western members received no plum assignments, though some had been elected from districts which had never before elected a Democrat to the House.
Washington was always conscious of precedents, and the nomination of Senator Kennedy, which had defied the seniority system, had been much debated. The Johnson camp had come forth with the argument that it achieved "regional representation" on the Foreign Relations Committee. Western Senators would be the last to dispute the justice of that theory, but they had no expectation that it would be used to elevate them, as it had not.
Some of them were ready to discuss whether they wanted to go on waging their election battles every two or six years against Republicans only to establish Congressional rule by Southern Senators. One Senator had said that Southerners always got the top committee posts and major offices, that they were told that it was seniority that counted, but when they wanted to throw seniority out, as in the case of Senator Kefauver versus Senator Kennedy, they did so, that particular unnamed Senator having said that perhaps they needed three parties.
Framed Edition
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