The Charlotte News
Tuesday, January 22, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Waterbury, Conn., that George Matesky, 53, had told calmly this date of being New York's "mad bomber" for the previous 16 years. He said that for 25 years he had suffered, and the hatred had boiled up in him, having long earlier made a vow to go on planting bombs in New York until he either got caught or died. Charged initially with being a fugitive, he waived extradition from Connecticut to New York, from which warrants would arrive in the afternoon while he was, in the meantime, being held on a $100,000 bond in Waterbury. The deputy police commissioner of New York City said that they knew the man by his admissions and by a check of his handwriting. He had signed a written statement saying that he was the suspect who had been sought in the bombings, indicating as his motive a raw deal he had received from the company for which he had once worked, Consolidated Edison of New York, causing him to plant at least 32 bombs in public places in New York since 1941. He said he had contracted pulmonary tuberculosis after being gassed while working at the firm's Hell Gate plant in 1931, claiming that the company had refused to take care of him. Among the first bombs which had exploded were those on Consolidated Edison property. He had been placed on company compensation rolls in 1941. Some of the letters left after the explosions indicated that he had never been compensated for crippling injuries sustained on the job. The letters were always signed "F. P." which Mr. Matesky told police stood for "fair play". Several of the bombs had exploded, resulting in injuries to 15 persons, though none critically. The deputy police commissioner said that Mr. Matesky had indicated that he had never intended to kill anyone, that he had planted the bombs "whenever he felt like it". The New York Journal-American released a statement by police commissioner Stephen Kennedy, saying that the capture of the mad bomber had been the direct result of information furnished by the Journal-American. The newspaper had printed three open letters to the bomber on the front page, urging him to surrender. The 23,000-member New York City police force had been dedicated for weeks to the job of trying to find the bomber, the task having finally become so hopeless that the Department had reversed a longstanding rule in the case and taken a step seldom employed, appealing to the public for help, the move which had finally cracked the case. The Department released to newspapers and other news agencies practically every scrap of information obtained in the 16-year history of the investigation, resulting in the publication of the front-page appeals by the Journal-American. The newspaper had then begun to receive letters from the bomber containing fresh details of his grievance against Consolidated Edison. Although earlier letters and cards had made references to the company, police had combed the company's files without finding any clues. But with the new letters, they had returned to the trail and the previous day, as officers concentrated on files involving employees who had been injured, they had found one which had never before been examined, proving so promising that four detectives were sent to the Connecticut home of Mr. Matesky, a few hours after which, he had admitted being the bomber. For years, the police had refrained from giving out any more information on the case than necessary, as they feared they might provide too much and spoil the chances of catching the bomber, also believing that he thrived on publicity, as every time the bombs made headlines, it appeared to inspire the perpetrator to plant more bombs.
Mr. Matesky's two older sisters, with whom he lived, said this date that they believed that their brother was a sick man but that he was not the "mad bomber" of New York, one saying that he was "one of the best fellows you ever saw" and the other indicating that he would not "think of doing anything like that". They said that his illness had gotten him down and he had once stated that his name might as well be on a tombstone. They had cared for him after he had become ill with pulmonary tuberculosis. They said it had begun in 1931 during the Depression when he could not get a job in Waterbury, instead getting the job with Consolidated Edison. They indicated that he had to quit after a year because he had been gassed, and then after coming home, discovered that he had tuberculosis. He had then gotten a job at a Waterbury tool manufacturing firm, but had to quit that also. He had gone to a sanitarium and later to Waterbury Hospital, finally being told that he would have to move to Tucson for a healthier climate. The sisters and his parents had paid the bills for the three years he had spent in Tucson, until the money had run out and his parents had died, forcing Mr. Matesky to return home. He had then gone to Consolidated Edison for help but the sisters said that the firm had only strung him along. He got a lawyer and filed a lawsuit, but the sisters indicated that for some reason, it had never gotten to court. He had depended on the sisters for his support for the previous 25 years. They noted that recently, they believed that something had been preying on his mind.
Also in New York, a young airline mechanic's helper had penned a suicide letter declaring that he was "really nuts", and eight hours later, crashed a $100,000 airplane on Saturday night, dying in the crash. He had written that they would never be able to stop him once he got onto the runway. The two-page semiliterate letter had outlined in detail his suicide plan. It had been written on Saturday morning but had never been mailed to its intended recipient, his friend in the Air Force. A Civil Aeronautics Board official, who was investigating the crash at Idlewild Airport, had found the letter the previous day in the man's locker in the hangar of Pan American World Airways, his employer for 14 months. The 20-year old had told his 17-year old friend from Brooklyn, stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, that he should not feel too bad about his dying because he did not and he "wouldn't want to go with a crazy guy—and I am really nuts…" He went on to say that he had always wanted to fly and that he would get his chance that night, on his own at the controls, just like he had been alone always. He said that he had "brock off" with his girlfriend, but planned to see her just once more, because after work, he would not be coming home anymore. That night, he had boarded a twin-engine DC-3 owned by his employer used for training purposes, started down the runway, receiving clearance from the tower and had taken off. The plane had climbed to 200 feet before it crashed on a concrete runway at Idlewild, demolishing the plane and killing the young man. Two of his former girlfriends had attended his funeral the previous day, but neither bore the name contained in the letter. His friend had identified the 17-year old girl named in the letter, indicating that the two had intended to marry in August but that the deceased had broken it off. His friend said that he had prevented the young man from making a previous suicide flight about a month earlier, that his threat to go along on the ride with him had caused him to cancel the plan.
In Venice, Italy, a former Rome police chief, who was now a defendant in Italy's hottest postwar scandal trial, had testified this date that a girl who had died in April, 1953 on a beach had been "an honest girl" and a virgin. He said that a medical examination and police inquiries had proven both her virginity and honesty, denying that he had sought to hush up the findings of a preliminary inquiry, that they had never found anything which made them think that her death was the result of a crime. He said that he did not personally conduct a preliminary inquiry into the death but merely had signed the reports of his investigators, who had found that her death was the result of accidental drowning. But accusations subsequently arose that she had died after a high-society narcotics and sex orgy at a hunting lodge of a Roman playboy, fueling speculation, until finally the police chief and the playboy, along with ten others, were accused as defendants of having direct involvement or giving false testimony in the case. One of the defendants was a jazz pianist, the son of a former Italian foreign minister, who denied this date the charge that he had contributed to the 22-year old "party" girl's death by abandoning her at the edge of the sea, believing her already dead. He testified that he never met the girl and that he could not have been involved in her death as he had been vacationing 140 miles away, indicating that an actress and others could corroborate his alibi. Sounds like something dreamed up for the voracious paparazzi, who thrive on craparazzi.
In Eastbourne, England, the preliminary hearing continued of a London doctor, accused of murder by turning a rich widow into a drug addict so that he could then administer a fatal dose and profit from her will, with the testimony this date of a doctor who examined the list of narcotics which the defendant had prescribed for the woman in question. He said that he was unable to think of any possible alternative to the conclusion that such medication as either morphine or heroin, especially when taken together, would produce a serious degree of addiction to both drugs. The prosecution was also alleging that he had caused the deaths similarly of two other patients for the same reason, but was only prosecuting him for the death of the 81-year old widow. The three magistrates hearing the evidence would determine during the week whether there was sufficient probable cause to bind the defendant over for trial. The defendant's lawyer wanted the notebook of a Scotland Yard detective impounded to preserve the evidence, as four prescriptions and one check had already been lost in the case, and one of the three justices reserved judgment on the matter.
In Gans, Okla., it was reported that eight persons had been killed this date by an out-of-season tornado which had smashed into the small farm community of 600 near the Arkansas border before dawn. Four of the dead were from one family and three from another, and at least a dozen other persons had been injured. Two other twisters had struck in eastern Oklahoma, destroying some property but without injuries. The National Guard, the Highway Patrol and county officers had rushed to Gans, to provide aid and security.
On the editorial page, "The President Takes an Inspired Text" finds that the second inaugural of the President had not been an occasion, such as in 1933 when FDR had confronted the Great Depression with the echoing words, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," inviting shared responsibility to tremendous burdens to be faced in the coming four years. While there was crisis on the world stage, it had not translated itself into personal propositions, partly because of the prosperity in the nation at present and partly because sanity forbade obsession with the fact that "rarely has this earth known such a peril as today." Americans wanted to enjoy the plenty and had cultivated casual sophistication about the peril, wishing not so much to be led as to be left in peace for awhile, with tranquilizers selling well.
There was already confidence in the leader and a sense of unity, the one in large measure a gift from the other. The inaugural address of the previous day had been more expected than anticipated, more an occasion for celebration than for dedication.
But it was the President's duty to translate the world for America and America for the world, signifying the nation's intentions for the ensuing four years. It finds that he had done that in a "remarkable speech, full of clear images and metered with an idealism that bespoke the best of the U.S. and Dwight Eisenhower." It suggests that some of the small but articulate breed must have had a ghost-writing hand in the speech. But the important thing was that the President had taken it for his own.
It posits that if he could lead on
the same level on which he had spoken, Americans would discharge
"their own deep involvement in the destiny of men everywhere."
It finds that the speech was an inspired summing up of America's
responsibilities in a divided world. It quotes from the speech that,
"No nation can longer be a fortress, lone and strong and safe.
And any people, seeking such a shelter for themselves, can now build
only their prison." (Dumb Trumpies, take
It indicates that the President's job over the ensuing four years would not be to compress events into images, but to expand images into events, a more tortuous task than his address. But inaugural day was "the day for taking texts, and the President did well by himself and the nation."
"Charlotte: Teeny Town Wants a Favor" indicates that North Carolina was the only state in the nation which had no large city, according to Chapel Hill editor Phillips Russell, who had lived in large cities. It accepts it as a fact without the bewilderment expected from Charlotte by the Raleigh Times.
It indicates that the state did have some great cities, such as Chapel Hill, which Mr. Russell had helped to make great. Charlotte was also one, also with the help of former residents of large cities. Raleigh could make its own claims.
It indicates that Charlotte did not proclaim its own largeness, but rather it was done by the rural legislators who met every biennium in Raleigh, seeing "metropolitan monsters rising about them, threatening to seize the power which rests so snugly in their grip."
It suggests that Raleigh should be big and rejects the idea of Charlotte being so, rather indicating that it would be a great little town and be eternally thankful for any help they could provide in proving how small it was and how deserving it was of small favors, "like equal representation in the General Assembly."
"Is It True What They Say about Dixie?" indicates that the Richmond News Leader had stated that to say that a writer was a Southern writer usually meant that his work contained a certain distinct combination of values, "an old-fashioned flare for sounding rhetoric, a basic and non-utilitarian outlook, a belief in the old spiritual verities which often manifest itself in a shocked, outraged obsession with the cruelty of man to man, and above all a conception of human dignity that gave their characters, no matter how squalid and wretched, a stature and a strength that kept them from the automatons in a mechanized world."
The piece asks whether it was true what such writers had said about Dixie, indicating that perhaps it had been regarding the "late and unlamented briar patch South" but that things had changed as had Southern writers. The South still had style and individuality but was no longer "the captive of molasses-sodden philosophical cliches."A new intellectual atmosphere had set the region free and its younger writers were reflecting that new freedom. The magnolias-in-the-moonlight type of Southern fiction was mercifully a thing of the past, and the Tobacco Road substitute was fading from the scene satisfactorily, also.
With the new smokestacks on the landscape and modern cities rising from the cotton fields, Southern horizons had brightened, though many of the old problems and preoccupations remained, such as the problem with race, though being handled in fresh new ways and with new thoughtfulness. Thus, a Lucy Daniels—daughter of Raleigh News & Observer editor Jonathan Daniels—could emerge in Raleigh and a Robie Macauley, at Woman's College in Greensboro. A Welshman such as the late Dylan Thomas could wield more influence over some Southern writers during the mid-1950's than Mississippian William Faulkner.
The younger literary set had adapted for its own use Herman Melville's injunction that American writers should "set, not follow, precedents." The South was still a recognizable and unique state of mind in its fiction, but its better young authors did not render it from a "stereotyped bottled-in-bond philosophical viewpoint", and neither should they.
A piece from the Green Bay (Wisc.) Press-Gazette, titled "Add a Tot of Rum Perhaps", indicates that one of the main American complaints about England had been the "dish-rag flavor" of its coffee, which the English boiled almost to a crisp and then diluted it with hot milk, considered the primary reason that Britons drank seven cups of tea per day.
But now coffee was becoming a part of English life, especially in the cities, with the introduction by an Italian, Achille Gaggia, of an espresso coffee-making machine capable of making about 80 cups per pound.
It indicates that Americans who thought that French coffee tasted like thick motor oil may not be enthused much more about the Italian-British variety, but that with things such as coffee nerves cropping up and the inevitable coffee breaks appearing, the English were at last learning to speak the American language regarding coffee.
Once you have had quality espresso, there is no going back to Maxwell House or the like de rigueur coffees.
Drew Pearson indicates that politicians were already pondering the question regarding whom the President wanted to succeed him in 1960, with three obvious possibilities, Vice-President Nixon, Senator William Knowland, or former Governor Thomas Dewey, the latter insisting that he was not a candidate but who could probably be persuaded to become one. The man whom the President wanted to see nominated, however, was his old Army friend, General Alfred Gruenther.
To that end, a group of the President's closest friends in New York had already organized a quiet drive to groom General Gruenther for the presidency. They were the same men, sometimes called the "Wall Street kingmakers", who had helped to finance the Eisenhower campaign and build his private residence at Augusta, Ga., and had picked many of the key men of his Cabinet. They included General Lucius Clay, head of Continental Can, Sidney Weinberg, the big investment banker, and Bill Robinson, head of Coca-Cola. Through them, General Gruenther had been offered a $100,000 position with Olin-Mathieson industries, until it became known that the President wanted to appoint him to a position in the White House, at which point he was made head of the Red Cross, located just across the street from the White House, from which he could advise the President, play bridge with him and obtain the same build-up which Herbert Hoover had received in World War I as a humanitarian, ultimately leading to his nomination and election as President in 1928.
When Secretary Dulles would retire, it was anticipated that General Gruenther might replace him, though it was not certain, as it might be politically expedient for him to remain at the Red Cross.
Mr. Pearson notes that General Gruenther had made a great impression on European political leaders while supreme commander of NATO, despite their dislike of military men, liking General Gruenther's civilian approach in the efforts to build up NATO. His initial and perhaps greatest personal bond with the President was through the game of bridge. As an instructor at West Point, General Gruenther had been a crack bridge player, keeping a mattress in the back of his car to sleep on while his wife drove him from New York to West Point after bridge tournaments. He had been chief of staff to General Mark Clark during the Italian campaign of 1943-44 and was credited with organizing the Salerno landing so carefully that he played bridge below decks while the invasion had taken place.
Senator Kerr Scott of North Carolina was the greatest champion of tobacco in Congress. He regularly chewed tobacco and walked five miles each morning from his apartment to Capitol Hill, spitting tobacco as he jogged along, taking about two plugs to make the trip. The exercise made it easy for him to out-sit his fellow Senators during long committee sessions, indicating that by the time he walked to the Capitol, he felt like sitting and could "sit there as long as the best of them."
Three prominent Washingtonians were graduates of the same law class, Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming, Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico and Republican national chairman Leonard Hall, all of whom had graduated from Georgetown University in 1920.
De Witt Yeates, an attorney for several small airlines, had noticed that part of the proceedings of a Civil Aeronautics Board hearing had been missing from the official transcript, finding eventually that the stenographic tape had been cut and cellophane-taped together at the point of the missing testimony. Examiner Leslie Donahue, however, denied that he had ordered anything excised.
AFL-CIO labor chiefs were still dubious about where the Administration stood on minimum wage revisions, but found Vice-President Nixon more sympathetic than the President. Mr. Nixon had agreed that Congress should do something about the pressing problem of underpaid white-collar workers, promising to study a proposed boost in the minimum wage floor, presently at one dollar per hour, to $1.25.
Marquis Childs suggests that what would happen in the dispute in the U.N. regarding the Middle East crisis could determine for a long time to come the course of history, especially regarding the use of the peace-keeping force in Egypt. If the emergency troops presently policing the cease-fire in Egypt could be maintained and their task extended to patrolling the borders between Egypt and Israel, and perhaps even between Israel and its other Arab neighbors, then such a peace-keeping force on a permanent basis was a real possibility. If the force were to disintegrate, however, there would likely be a renewal of the old tensions, together with the proven futility of such a peace-keeping force of the U.N., such that when another war would break out, it would not be possible to improvise, as had been done following the British-French invasion of Egypt on November 1.
He ventures that the prospect of hope in that peace-keeping force made the so-called "Eisenhower doctrine" for the Middle East appear as a sterile and self-defeating doctrine. If there were a reversion to the old tensions, nothing in the doctrine thus far articulated could check the drift to war. (The doctrine thus far was the proposal by the President on January 5 in a special message to Congress that Congress provide the President authority to use the armed forces, including ground troops if necessary, to resist aggression in the Middle East by outside forces, though not yet made clear to the salons whether aggression included infiltration through other means than by military force, military and financial aid and promises of more being the favored avenue of incursion by the Communists in the region at present. The doctrine also included a request for authorization for the President to provide military and economic aid, up to a maximum amount as necessary, to the region.)
Lester Pearson, the minister of external affairs for Canada and head of its U.N. delegation, had put forward in early November a resolution before the U.N. calling for creation of an emergency force to stop the shooting in the Suez. When he handed it to U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, the latter said that he did not think it would work but that they would have to give it a try. In a night-long session, the General Assembly of the U.N. had approved the resolution, and then working around the clock, Mr. Hammarskjold and two of his chief assistants, Ralph Bunche and Andre Cordier, along with members of the U.N. Secretariat, had set forth the technical and administrative basis for the peace-keeping force. In the wee hours of the third day, a telephone call was placed to General E. L. M. Burns, commanding the U.N. truce-team on the Egyptian-Israeli border, telling him that he was now the commander of the U.N. Emergency Force, after which it was assembled from nations offering units, excluding the Big Five permanent members of the Security Council.
Mr. Pearson now said that the plan had worked and that for the first time such a force had been effective, that if it could be kept in being and its usefulness further demonstrated, he believed they had made a start. He said that the old concept had been of an army which would fight to put down an aggressor, but what they could foresee now was the creation of a constabulary to maintain the peace, made up of units pledged by individual nations and ready to answer the call of the Secretary-General upon the vote of the General Assembly. He believed that had such a force been available at the time of the Hungarian revolt on October 23, it could have been flown to Hungary and stationed on the borders to prevent the incursion by the Russian divisions, which had, in November, put down the Hungarian people's revolt. Mr. Pearson stated that, just as the London bobby did not need a gun to preserve order on his beat, doing so by his moral authority, such a peace-keeping force could preserve law and order by means of wearing U.N. uniforms, at which he believed the Russians would not shoot.
Although Mr. Pearson would not discuss it, he had played a leading role in seeking to unite the Western nations behind a compromise solution to the crisis in the Middle East. Israel would not be forced to retreat to its old boundaries without assurance that the UNEF would move into such disputed areas as the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba to maintain order. The UNEF troops might have to do patrol duty for a year or more to ensure the peace in the area, which would go a long way toward providing proof of the practicality of such a permanent U.N. constabulary.
Mr. Childs concludes that such a peace-keeping force might be the last hope of world order through free organization and also the fulcrum upon which the fate of the U.N. might ultimately rest.
Joseph Alsop, in Moscow, tells of the Soviet rulers having chosen a new approach to their economic problems of which Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey would thoroughly understand and approve. It was true that some of the most important targets of the current five-year plan in Russia would not be fully met during the current year, as they were not producing quite as much steel as they had planned. But that was far less important than the fact that they were adding to their production annually, such that now they had reached 49 million tons of steel.
The Soviet leaders now regarded the shocking housing situation in Russia as critical, and the ferment in Eastern Europe had also forced them to forgo projects they had once undertaken, as well to make commitments they could not have enjoyed making. For those and other reasons, they could believe reports of new gold sales in London on a scale considerably surpassing those of the time immediately following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.
But in global dimensions, the added burden imposed on the Soviet economy by the previous year's events could not greatly exceed one percent of the massive Soviet national product. Thus, the economic problem they were seeking to solve still appeared considerably less interesting than the way in which the Soviet leaders had chosen to solve it. At the December meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, it had dropped Maxim Saburov from the chairmanship of the Commission for Short-Term Economic Planning, replacing him with Mikhil Pervukhin. The Commission was actually the day-to-day high command for the whole Soviet economy, and Mr. Pervukhin had also been provided with a strong team to serve under him, largely composed of former deputy chairmen of the Soviet Ministerial Council.
Mr. Pervukhin was one of two or three leading industrial managers in the Soviet Union, at different times having run the entire electrical utilities industry, and four of his new deputies were men primarily trained as industrial managers. Only one of those, consumer-goods expert Alexei Kosygin—who, in 1964, would succeed Nikita Khrushchev as Premier, while Leonid Brezhnev would succeed Mr. Khrushchev as Secretary of the Communist Party, where actual power resided—was a member of the Politburo under Stalin. Otherwise, they were relatively fresh faces. The class or group to which they belonged, the industrial managers, was also relatively new in the Soviet Union, recruited, trained and formed primarily in the previous 25 years of rapid Soviet industrial growth. Their emergence as day-to-day controllers of the whole economy represented a vital change in internal relationships.
He indicates that in sum, the new industrial managers, however capable they were personally and however enormous the enterprises they headed, were clearly no more than bureaucrats under Premier Stalin. But even then, he posits, there must have been considerable underground friction between the practical men engaged in the practical task of managing and building Soviet industry and the theoretical planners and Communist Party-trained officials who predominated at the higher governmental levels. He suggests that some of that friction could be discerned at the 20th Party Congress, when the heads of both the coal and steel industries had grimly warned that the planning targets of the now-deposed Mr. Saburov could not possibly be attained unless promised capital for new investment was also forthcoming.
A letter writer says that she was fed up with juvenile delinquents being treated as if delinquency were a delightful diversion indulged in by all normal boys. She says she was trying to rear a boy to believe that decency and good character paid off. She finds that parents who still believed in discipline were fighting a losing battle as long as judges treated assault and vandalism as things to be expected from teenagers, and as long as high schools permitted boys who had brought disgrace on the whole student body by their conduct to continue in interscholastic sports. She wonders when judges and school authorities were going to help parents by making hoodlumism unpopular.
Framed Edition
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