The Charlotte News
Monday, December 30, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, a member of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, had said this date that a "chorus of destructionists" was creating unnecessary confusion about the nation's missile and satellite programs. In an interview, he referred to Democratic critics who had contended that Administration complacency had permitted the U.S. to lag behind Russia in missiles and satellites. He contended that despite all the "wild talk about how we are dropping behind Russia, we have a tremendous number of missiles. I am satisfied that we are making good progress in the missile field." His statement was consistent with a declaration during the weekend by White House press secretary James Hagerty that "stories that have been printed that indicate the United States is in a position of weakness at this time are not true." He had made the comment when asked about published reports that the Gaither report had found that U.S. defenses were comparatively weak vis-à-vis Russia and that the country was in danger. Mr. Hagerty said that while the report remained top-secret, it had made no such findings.
In Gettysburg, the President approved a billion dollar four-year program to bolster education, contemplating 10,000 Federal scholarships per year and 50-50 matching grants to the states. The plan had been released after Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Marion Folsom had conferred for an hour with the President, indicating that he had also talked about the program with members of Congress and felt that it would receive a favorable reception there. He said that the Federal program would seek to correct deficiencies in education "which if allowed to continue would seriously weaken our national security effort" and would be an answer to Russia's continuing build-up in science. In a press conference, Secretary Folsom made it clear that science and mathematics would not be the only areas of stress, that the scholarship program would aim also at bringing more students into colleges. The program would call for appropriation of 225 million dollars during the first year, with a four-year total of a billion. Of that sum, about 800 million was estimated as part of the matching grants-in-aid program for the states. A substantial increase in the appropriation for the National Science Foundation, presently with a budget of about 40 million dollars per year, was anticipated.
In Bonn, West Germany, the Defense Ministry this date denied British newspaper speculation that U.S. pressure had caused the Government to decide against purchasing Britain's latest rocket jet.
In Cairo, delegates to the African-Asian conference had put finishing touches this date on propaganda resolutions following the broad Soviet line.
In New York, the Transport Workers Union was going ahead with its plans to call a strike at midnight the following day, which would paralyze New York City's entire bus and subway systems. The 5,000 members of the union had roared unanimous approval of the walkout and voted against any delay unless an acceptable wage agreement could be reached before the deadline. Negotiations to try to work out an agreement had thus far failed between the autonomous Transit Authority and the TWU. The union was demanding a 65-cent hourly increase for one year and the Transit Authority had offered an increase of only 18 cents per hour over a two-year period, leaving the sides deadlocked. Present subway wages ranged from $1.79.5 per hour for porters to $2.37 for power maintainers. TWU president Michael Quill had announced that he would resist any anti-strike injunction and go to jail if necessary, making the statement before the cheering union members the previous day.
It was reported by the Government that deaths from influenza and pneumonia had numbered 566 in 108 large cities during the week ended December 21, a slight increase over the 535 during the preceding week, despite a continued drop in new cases of Asian flu.
In Sydney, Australia, rain had finally occurred after the worst drought since 1888, causing people to be so happy that they walked around without coats or umbrellas. The rain broke a heatwave which had produced temperatures well over 100 degrees.
In Auckland, New Zealand, Edmund Hillary's party was reported to be within about 150 miles of the South Pole this date in their overland hike through Antarctica.
In Jakarta, Indonesia, the Government was empowered this date to conscript Dutch technicians to remain in the country to help keep its troubled economic system working.
In Algiers, French forces claimed this date that they had killed 26 rebels and captured a large supply of arms during the weekend. The Arab Nationalists had struck back with attacks on farms, trains and road traffic.
In Lakeland, Fla., 100 Florida Southern College students had been notified by telephone that they might have come in contact with a sorority house pet dog which had died of rabies a week earlier. The entire student body of about 2,000 had been informed by letter that the dog had died. College officials said that the dog might have been slipped into a physical education class. The college had already telephoned 83 female students in two sororities and then reached the 17 members of the physical education class by telephone the previous day. The dog had been taken into a sorority house in violation of rules and kept as a mascot for several weeks, then was taken home for the Christmas holidays by a female student before it died.
In Wrens, Ga., a diabetic gunman, wanted for the slaying of two men and the maiming of a third, a blind piano player, in a Washington bar the previous week following a dispute over a whiskey tab, had died in a flaming crash of a stolen car the previous night. The other wanted man in the shooting had not been in the car and police believed they had separated somewhere between Jacksonville, Fla., and the site of the crash. The crash had occurred after State troopers had chased the man at speeds up to 110 mph. His car swerved and crashed head-on into another vehicle on U.S. 1 just north of the town. The driver of the second car, who had lived in High Point, N.C., had also been killed.
The News Man of the Year for 1957 would be announced the following day, to be elected by the 11 living Men of the Year of previous years.
The prior Saturday, Donald MacDonald of The News reported that the top local news story for the year was desegregation of the Charlotte schools, eclipsing the search of the skies for the Sputniks in October and November, coming in a distant seventh
The Christmas spirit still remained in Charlotte. The wife of a local attorney said this date that she wanted to contribute money to the families of the 11 coal miners who had lost their lives in the explosion the previous week in Virginia and was sending the newspaper a $15 check which she hoped would encourage others to help those families. The home of a black woman and her six small children had been destroyed by fire early this date and a Charlotte woman had called the newspaper to ask for help for that family, as they needed a place to live and clothing, but were without funds. The children had lost all of their gifts from Christmas and so a toy or two would also be appreciated along with clothing and blankets.
On the editorial page, "Secretary Dulles Has Stayed Too Long" finds that "blame it on Dulles" had become one of the enduring phrases of the Eisenhower years, as the Secretary of State, by all accounts, was almost unanimously disliked among U.S. allies, and received only faint praise at home. Yet he continued in his position, "racing the sun around the world, filling microphones and magazines with brilliant but tedious dissertations on the nature of foreign policy, preaching little sermons to friend and foe alike and ignoring totally the criticism heaped upon him." He pressed on because the President still supported him.
In Congress, there was a new surge of speculation that he might retire soon, but it appeared to be based on hope rather than solid indications. Recently, the President's continued reliance on the Secretary appeared to be suggested by their televised report on the NATO conference. Their roles during the presentation symbolized their relationship during the previous five years and perhaps the nearly universal unpopularity of Mr. Dulles. The Secretary had been the star performer, enunciating policy, and appeared as the spokesman for the nation, while the President seemed to be a mere master of ceremonies tacitly endorsing Mr. Dulles.
Yet, on those rare occasions such as at Geneva in mid-1955 and at the NATO conferences, the President had been the star performer, not using the language of Mr. Dulles. There was little doubt that the President's view of the nation was much more human and lovable than that of Mr. Dulles, more passionately desirous of peace and more flexible in its attitudes toward the world's peoples and problems. But, it finds, far too often, it had been the America of Mr. Dulles which had occupied the attention of the world. That America was inclined not only to carry a big stick, which it finds wise, but also to wave it, which sometimes was quite unwise. It was inclined to picture itself and its institutions as superior to those of the nations whose friendship it sought to woo. It had a tendency to regard friendly nations as in need of instruction in the verities of freedom and idealism, and was unpopular even where it was respected, while in too many places, lacking both popularity and respect.
There had been a time when a more prominent role for the President would forestall the unfortunate antagonisms which had grown up around the Secretary of State, and at those times, the Secretary's brilliance, dedication and acumen could have been counted as a clear asset. But that time had passed and the policy had to bear the considerable weight of the Secretary's unpopularity as long as he remained in the position, as he had become an issue himself.
It finds that new Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy was running the Defense Department with verve and decisiveness, winning the general admiration of Congress. Also, the ridicule and astonishment which had often greeted pronouncements of former Undersecretary Herbert Hoover, Jr., had been lessened by the succession to that post of the "competent and effective" Christian Herter.
"If in the coming of new policies to the State Department Mr. Dulles decides to enter upon a well-earned retirement, he will have in this course the general approbation of the nation and the world. His tenure has outlasted his usefulness."
"There's Still Hope for a Little Privacy" indicates that wiretapping had been expressly forbidden by section 605 of the Federal Communications Act, and the Supreme Court had subsequently stated that the plain words of that statute forbade anyone, unless authorized by the sender, to intercept a telephone message. It had interpreted the law to mean that evidence obtained from wiretapping by Federal agents was inadmissible in Federal courts and could not be used to obtain a Federal conviction.
Yet, in recent years, law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, had tapped telephones in flagrant defiance of the law. Now, the Supreme Court had again indicated that it took a dim view of that practice, stating in an unanimous opinion that evidence obtained by state officers was inadmissible in Federal prosecutions, even though the state officers had acted in accordance with state laws.
It indicates that wiretapping was indeed what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had said of it years earlier, "a dirty business". Privacy was still worth preserving even in the electronic age and it urges that the practice should be subject to the tightest Federal control, with heavy penalties exacted against any violators, including city cops, politicians, businessmen, witch hunters, divorce lawyers, private detectives, freebooters, blackmailers or anyone else. It indicates that wiretapping by the government was certainly inexcusable except in extreme circumstances.
Justice Louis Brandeis, it finds, had gotten to the heart of the matter some years earlier when he had written: "The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home."
It concludes that electronic eavesdropping was a harbinger of worse things still.
"He Can't Lose" indicates that the Washington pundits who had been writing confidently of the political advantage which Vice-President Nixon was reaping from his association with the image of the President were now saying that he had "benefited" by being absent from the Paris NATO conference, as he would not be held responsible for what the President had done there.
The piece finds that fine. "Now, his position apparently is that in foreign policy the Republicans are doing a wonderful job, for which Eisenhower is to blame."
A piece from the New York Times, titled "Shaw and the Alphabet", indicates that George Bernard Shaw had once asked, "How do you spell 'fish'?" giving his own answer: "Obviously it is g-h-o-t-i. The gh is as in enough. The o is as in women. The ti is as in nation. It spells fish." He had been making a serious attack upon some of the complexities of English orthography—which obviously ought be spelled "orthagraghi". When he died, he provided in his will that a substantial sum would be left to revise the English alphabet, to find a better way of writing, to bring in a new system with some 16 vowels which actually corresponded to the spoken language, and to get rid of a pattern which he felt was an anachronism and a monstrosity.
Many persons, including members of the institutions of learning to which he made his bequest, felt that he had his tongue in his cheek and his will was contested in the courts as being impractical, as it was contended that there was no way to use even a large sum of money to change the writing habits of millions of persons.
After years of argument, the British had come up with an excellent solution, that a limited amount of Mr. Shaw's estate, growing rather than diminishing because of royalties from his works, would be devoted to a special study and a special contest in the field of the alphabet under a recognized authority. While it was unlikely that the complex method of writing English would be changed or that Mr. Shaw's 16 vowels would be adopted to produce the actual sounds of speech, a careful study of the relation of how people wrote and spoke could do no harm and might do much good. It concludes that if there was irony in the situation, Mr. Shaw would have appreciated it.
Drew Pearson, at Wheelus Air Force Base in Tripoli, tells of jets roaring out of the base every dawn, heading over the Mediterranean in search of enemy planes. The pilots dozed or played cards above the planes until they were "scrambled", then slid down a pole, clamped on their helmets, were strapped into the cockpit and shot from the hangar in three minutes. As they went to sea, an Arab flute wailed plaintively in the distance, while a ukulele played sprightlier music from the barracks. "Men come, go, eat, proceed with the job of living, enjoying Christmas, being relatively happy in a little American oasis on the edge of the desert a long way from home." Part of it was practice and part of it was not, coming from a genuine fear of another Pearl Harbor in the Mediterranean. If such an attack would come, it would not be as in 1941, as such an attack of carrier planes across the sea was as out of date as trench warfare. Yet, the scrambles continued, as the men carried out their orders.
An arc across 800 miles from the Iron Curtain cut right across Wheelus, the biggest base outside the U.S. and if an arc was drawn from Albania, one of the Soviet satellite countries, Wheelus was 600 miles distant. It meant that it could be wiped out within a few minutes by an IRBM, which the Soviets now possessed, numbering several thousand, with a range of around 800 miles, up to 1,000 miles. If one of those missiles carried an hydrogen warhead, it could wipe out the base, and nothing which the Air Force pilots could do in scrambling their jets, could save it.
Time Magazine, "unfailing, unofficial spokesman for the Eisenhower Administration", recently had printed a map assuring the public that American airbases in Europe and the Mediterranean stood like a Rock of Gibraltar against an enemy attack, but the truth was that most of the bases comprised a "Maginot Line", which had not kept Hitler's troops out of France in 1940. And Russia's modern weapons would either leap-frog over the European-Mediterranean bases or would wipe them out in a single morning.
"So you lie in bed listening to the jets roaring out in the dawn, as hard-working boys, efficient boys, carry out orders—orders that haven't been changed by an administration which knew, but did not tell the public, that with two exceptions these bases had become another Maginot Line. And you wonder when the fumblers in Washington will cut out the bickering and start catching up."
Stewart Alsop finds that the mere existence of the Gaither report had created a dilemma for the Administration as it amounted to a damning indictment of its basic national security policies during the previous five years since the start of the Eisenhower Administration. Thus, if it refused to publish the report or at least the facts on which it was based, it would be accused of concealing essential facts. But if it did publish it or the facts on which it was based, it would, in effect, be confessing to its own past error in underestimating the need for defense in the missile and satellite areas.
The report examined in detail the basic theory on which the Administration's national security policies had been founded and labeled that theory nonsense. The chief architect of the theory had been former Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, who believed that high taxes and high spending were much more dangerous to the U.S. than soviet missiles or hydrogen bombs. The theory had it that the country could not afford to match the Soviet defense effort. Secretary Humphrey had sold the notion to the President and the dominant figures in the Administration in 1953, leading to the results that spending for defense, as a proportion of the total national economy, had dropped steadily throughout the Eisenhower Presidency and that the Administration, to justify that policy, had consistently given the country reassurance while presenting a false picture of the balance of military power.
For the most part, with certain exceptions such as Senators Stuart Symington and Henry Jackson, the Democrats had never seriously challenged the picture, reasoning that because of the President's military prestige, they could not obtain political traction on the defense issue.
Thus, while the country had enjoyed five years of prosperity and tax cuts, the real facts of defense were successfully hidden, coming as a profound shock then to such knowledgeable persons as the members of the Gaither committee, appointed by the President to assess the defense program. One of the members said he felt as though he was spending ten hours per day staring into hell, and at least two members had become physically ill as they saw a world which would be dominated in time militarily by the Soviets and the other Communist bloc countries.
They examined the fact that the Soviets spent a quarter of their national product on defense, while during the Eisenhower years, that percentage in the U.S. had dropped from about 13 percent to less than nine percent. The committee decided that the country could afford a defense competitive with the Soviets while maintaining an acceptable standard of living. It had been the unanimous opinion of practical businessmen such as Robert Lovett, John McCloy and William Foster.
Such former allies of Secretary Humphrey as White House chief of staff Sherman Adams and National Security Council secretary Robert Cutler were for maintaining the report secret. Vice-President Nixon, who never accepted the theory that the country could not afford the competitive defense system, was for publishing either the report in substance or the facts on which it was based, on the theory that candor would be good politics in the long run, even if admitting error—just as he would be all for the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 as President, being the solid advocate always of a transparent Presidency, which is why to this day, "Nixonian" is synonymous with openness and honesty, brooking no cover-ups. Full hang-out, all the way.
Many at the middle level in the Administration also favored at least limited release of the report, as did most who worked on it.
A policy of top secrecy and no comment on the report would mean no change in policy, continuing on the road to hell. A policy of candor would entail a basic change in policy, dispensing with the theory that competitive defense could not be afforded and getting down to the job of catching up.
Launch Checkers into space next week. Damn the torpedoes.
Robert C. Ruark, in Rome, says some day he intended to spend the holidays in Southport, N.C., where he had grown up, having visited there earlier in the year. He recounts some of his memories of Christmas spent as a youth and says he was tired of spending the season abroad, as he had spent the prior Christmas season in Kenya. He longs for old simplicities, says he likes the present less and the past more.
"That is, of course, if there is a next year, which in this pessimistic present seems not too likely."
A letter from the football coach of Myers Park High School in Charlotte says that on December 20, their cheerleaders, football and cross-country teams were honored at a banquet at which UNC football coach Jim Tatum had spoken. He expresses his appreciation to all who participated and especially to sportswriter for the newspaper Max Muhleman and the entire staff for the coverage given the football team.
A letter writer from Austin, Tex., indicates that about two years earlier, Oklahoma City had started the Enterprise Frontiers of Science Foundation with a fund of $400,000 raised by private subscriptions, a foundation inspired by the Chamber of Commerce. She suggests that it would be advantageous to the country's scientific progress to encourage more women to study engineering in colleges since statistics showed that in Russia one out of five engineers was a woman, whereas in 1954 in the U.S., out of 14,244 engineering students, only 67 were women.
A letter writer from Bladenboro indicates that after reading an account of a columnist's experiences with a newspaper carrier a few days earlier, she was reminded of the effort of all of the personnel connected with the printing and dissemination of the daily newspaper. She commends each of the personnel, especially her carrier for untiring efforts in delivery of the newspaper. The carrier placed on her desk each afternoon her paper at the proper time in her office and was always courteous, polite and had a smile. Even during the recent cold snap, the newspaper had been delivered promptly and in the same friendly manner.
A letter writer, a minister at St. Matthew's E&R Chapel, praises John Borchert, religion editor of The News, for his fine news story of December 26, finding it timely and thought-provoking, providing encouragement to religious leaders, church members and parents to give serious thought to encouraging their sons to enter the ministry or some other type of religious work. He indicates that when people put religious living before anything else in the world, they would begin talking to their children about religious work.
Sixth day of Christmas
Framed Edition
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