The Charlotte News
Tuesday, May 7, 1957
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that according to White House press secretary James Hagerty, the President was planning to go directly to the people in an effort to rally support for his bogged-down legislative program, but that no decision yet had been made on the manner and timing of that appeal. Mr. Hagerty said that the decision probably would be deferred until after the President conferred on Thursday with Congressional leaders on the Administration's foreign aid program. He said that he did not expect it to occur during the current week but was not ruling out the request for network time later.
The AFL-CIO ethical practices committee had turned this date from the Teamsters Union to the Bakers Union in a drive to eliminate corruption from the 15 million-member labor federation. The five-man committee called in rival factions of the 160,000-member Bakery and Confectionery Workers Union to answer charges of alleged misuse of union funds. The committee the previous day had presented the Teamsters Union and its president Dave Beck with a 22-page report listing charges against Mr. Beck and a number of other national and local officers of the Teamsters, which claimed 1.5 million members. Mr. Beck, despite his difficulties, had received a new vote of confidence from the union's board, unanimously expressing confidence in Mr. Beck the previous day, following a motion from vice-president Jimmy Hoffa of Detroit, head of the Central States Conference. The Teamsters had been given until May 24 to answer the charges or show that they recognized union misdeeds and intended to clean them up. The Bakery Workers union charges were less spectacular, accusing its secretary-treasurer and president of misuse of union finds, with the secretary-treasurer having made a similar accusation against a vice-president of the union, who had since resigned. Both men denied the charges and the union's board had suspended the secretary-treasurer. In a factional alignment which had followed, the president emeritus of the union had sided with the current president, James Cross. The secretary-treasurer had said the previous month that he understood that Mr. Cross was repaying to the union about $2,500 for personal telephone calls to a girlfriend and that he was also returning to the union "three embarrassing Cadillacs." Mr. Cross replied through a spokesman that although there had been nothing improper in his use of the telephone or in accepting an automobile as a gift, he was paying for the phone calls and returning the cars.
Relman Morin of the Associated Press, in the second in a series of articles on organized labor, indicates that Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Select Committee investigating labor and management practices, had described a "pendulum of extremes and excesses" in labor-management relations, recalling times when the unions had been young and weak. He recounts the morning of July 2, 1910, when New York newspapers had published a startling story, reporting that the ladies waist-makers union had won a 52-hour work week, sensational news for the time when a 60-hour week had been the average in the garment industry, and at peak times, demanding 11-hour days from the workers, who then carried sewing machines home so that they could continue at night. Many of the workers were teenage girls and children. Harper's magazine had printed at the time a picture of a spindle-legged little girl going home, bent double beneath a load of unfinished garments. Wages had averaged between three dollars and six dollars per week, with workers in some of the cities required to pay for the heat in the shops. In New York, the law called for one lavatory for every 25 employees, and inspectors had found shops where there was one for every 85. On a windy spring day, 154 people had died when a fire had broken out in a dress shop. A girl named Rosey Safran had said, "They had the doors locked all the time." About a third of the victims had jumped to their deaths from the eighth floor of the building. In other industries, death had also resulted from working conditions and the strife growing from demands to correct them. Men had been beaten and shot to death and there had been riots, martial law, and calls for troops during strikes. Gangs like the "Molly Maguires" of Pennsylvania had moved into the picture, with gangsters working both sides of the street in the organizing wars in the New York dress industry some 30 years earlier. The manufacturers had hired "Legs" Diamond to keep their shops from being unionized, and the unions lined up "Little Augie" Orgen for picket-line duty. Both men, it turned out, were employed by the same man.
Near Dayton, O., an explosion and fire, which had caused an estimated $35,000 to $40,000 in damage at the United Fireworks Co. just west of the city, had occurred the previous night, with the president of the company indicating this date that it had been deliberately caused by dynamite. He said that an inspection had shown that 8 to 10 sticks of dynamite had been placed on the outside of the building which exploded, with the two explosives having caused a brilliant display of fireworks soaring 500 feet into the air and leveling two storage sheds. A fireman who had suffered a minor leg injury was the only casualty. The company president said that a hole three feet deep in the ground outside one building had been made by the blast, which had blown the cement block base of the building away, indicating that dynamite exploded downward and out. He said he was calling in a demolitions expert to investigate and confirm his analysis. He did not name the person or persons he thought might be responsible for placing the dynamite near the building.
In Paragould, Ark., a woman and her five-year old son had died in their bed in a dynamite blast which had shattered an apartment house early during the morning, with police seeking her estranged husband for questioning. The son who had been killed was from a former marriage. The explosion had blasted a hole two feet deep into the ground and demolished the corner of the two-story house. The couple had been separated about six weeks earlier in a divorce suit which had been scheduled for hearing in July. A 13-year old daughter who had been sleeping in another bed was slightly injured in the explosion, but five other persons living in other apartments in the building had escaped injury. Police said the explosion had been triggered beneath the house, directly under the bed occupied by the deceased woman and her son. A three-year old daughter, who was the object of a custody suit between the husband and wife, was being held by the State Child Welfare Department, having not been in the house at the time of the explosion. An attorney for the woman in the divorce suit said that she had been frightened for her safety some six months earlier, being escorted home by police from a drive-in restaurant, an incident confirmed by the police. The couple had been married about five years earlier and the three-year old daughter was their only child.
In Fayetteville, N.C., two fires had mysteriously broken out and a false alarm sounded before dawn this date in a suburb of the city, which had been involved recently in annexation squabbles and a school strike. A corner of Planter's Warehouse had been discovered on fire shortly after midnight, and the flames had been extinguished with only minor damage. The fire chief said that his men had found rags and smelled an odor of chemicals at the point of apparent origin. The building was empty. A Planter's Warehouse at the same location had been destroyed in October, 1955 by fire of undetermined origin. Shortly before the fire had been discovered, a false alarm had dispatched several rural fire departments to a rural school in Cumberland County, only to find no fire at that location. About two hours after the warehouse fire, an alarm occurred from a high school, where it was discovered that a hole had been dug into the side of the brick veneer and a fire had spread upward in the wall of one classroom, that fire having been extinguished by the fire department before severe damage had occurred. That school had been the site of a recent student strike in protest against the school board's failure to renew the contract of the principal, with the strike having ended after the board had decided to reject the principal's resignation. An injunction aimed at nullifying the recent annexation of the community wherein the warehouse fire had occurred was presently under consideration in the Superior Court. An investigation was underway of both fires the previous night.
In Shelby, N.C., a special venire of 150 names had been drawn the previous day in preparation for the second murder trial of a man accused of murdering another man the prior September 10, during a holdup at the deceased's grill and service station near Shelby, the trial to start the following day. The defendant, a former truck driver, had been convicted of the murder by a Burke County jury and sentenced to death the previous November 30, but the State Supreme Court had granted him a new trial, holding that the judge had erred in his instructions to the jury.
Julian Scheer of The News tells of the Charlotte annexation bill having passed its second reading, its most crucial test, by a vote of 77 to 27 in the State House during the afternoon, following a heated floor debate, in which Representative Jack Love of Mecklenburg County, one of its foremost opponents, had attempted to amend the bill to provide separate elections in the city and perimeter areas being annexed, but had lost that vote by 52 to 46. As the State Senate had already approved the bill, House approval this date was virtually assured on the third reading the following day, which would result in its enactment, as the Governor had no veto power. Representative Jim Vogler of Mecklenburg had been the only speaker in favor of the bill, but spoke for the entire Mecklenburg delegation, except for Mr. Love. When approved, the bill would go before the voters of the county in June.
In New York, Mrs. Hazel Abel of Lincoln, Neb., a 63-year old teacher, construction company president, and former Senator, having been elected to a short-term in 1954 following the death of Senator Dwight Griswold, had been named American mother of 1957 this date. The announcement was made by the president of the American Mothers Committee, Inc., at the opening of the group's annual mothers conference. Mrs. Abel was a widow with five children, four daughters and a son, and had six grandsons. Mothers of the year from every state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico had competed for the national title, with a committee jury having chosen the winner. In announcing her selection, they said that her work had embraced many fields, church and religious organizations, education, civic and welfare groups, and above all, had included her work with youth. It said she had been awakening thousands everywhere to all of the known causes of juvenile delinquency and had been stimulating communities to study and put into effect modern ways of prevention, responsible in Nebraska for new interests in a statewide juvenile probation system, improved courts for children and re-codification of Nebraska's laws regarding children. She would be honored the following Friday, in advannce of Mother's Day on Sunday, at the annual awards luncheon of the Mothers Committee at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.
Her work, unfortunately, had not touched young Charles Starkweather of Lincoln, who would become known across the country for a short time the following January.
In Reading, Pa., a four-year old mutt was the richest dog in Reading and possibly one of the richest in the world, having been named the previous day as principal and nearly sole beneficiary of the estate of his late mistress, filed in probate with an estimated worth at $50,800, all of which had been left to care for the dog, which the deceased had picked up as a pup from the Humane Society. Well, aren't we something? Watch out for the strychnine in the caviar, mutt, you who eat better than many Americans.
On the editorial page, "Take UNC Trustees off Auction Block" finds shameful the spectacle of seats on the UNC board of trustees being placed on the political auction block by the General Assembly.
As with prior Legislatures, the present year's scramble for places on the board was taking place at a time when the state was examining the Consolidated University with fresh interest and admiration, with the installation ceremonies for the new president, 36-year old William Friday, to be held in Raleigh the following day.
It finds that amid the fight for board positions, a few good men and women invariably survived and became able and useful trustees. But the manner in which the membership was left to the haphazard outcome of political trading was no guarantee for excellence, and too often personal fitness was secondary when logrolling devices and political payoffs became major factors in the selection process.
It finds that the politicking was becoming worse with each session and that a reform of the system of naming trustees needed to be undertaken. It had often been suggested that members of the Assembly should be barred from membership on the board, but it finds that it was going too far as there was no good reason for disqualification of an able legislator from serving higher education merely because of service to the people of his or her county or district as a lawmaker.
It finds the problem to be whether or not the person was qualified for board membership by reason of personal integrity, ability and enlightened interest in education. The Assembly in recent years had demonstrated that it lacked impartiality to select individuals on its own and a new procedure was needed, with any new plan to include participation by the governor, a representative of all of the people of the state and one who was less subject to the political pressures of the legislative scene, suggesting that the new trustees be appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the Assembly.
"Foster Is Funnier Than He Thinks" tells of Secretary of State Dulles having been laughed at in the House when he began pleading for increased entertainment allowances for U.S. foreign service officers, and that when the laughter had subsided, the House had disallowed the increase and then cut the current allowance by 25 percent.
Mr. Dulles had reacted by saying that it was no laughing matter and put the matter to the Senate.
It finds that, in a way, he was correct, as U.S. diplomats had to dig into their own pockets for the entertainment of foreign officials and of members of Congress junketing on secret expense accounts. It finds unconvincing the traditional argument in Congress, that the richest nation in the world could not afford to pay for the upkeep of its embassies in such nations as Britain and France.
But it finds that Mr. Dulles, perhaps, ought to expect laughter when he was also offering to the Senate the nominations of Charles Bohlen, the State Department's top expert on Russian affairs, to be Ambassador to the Philippines, after Mr. Bohlen, according to the New York Times, had confessed general ignorance of the Orient and said that his only experience in the Philippines had been during a stopover there for a week in 1928 when he was a seaman on a merchant ship. Another such puzzling appointment was that of Scott McLeod, the State Department's security head, to be Ambassador to Ireland, after Mr. McLeod had testified that Secretary Dulles had almost fired him for breach of security, apparently the Secretary merely wanting to get him out of Washington. Another such appointment was that of Henry J. Taylor, writer and broadcaster, to be Ambassador to Switzerland, when Mr. Taylor was widely known for his belief in flying saucers and had no previous diplomatic experience. To make matters even more grimly hilarious, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had approved all three appointments.
It finds no excuse for the shortsighted view in Congress of the needs for an efficient, alert and experienced foreign service. "But judging by the appropriateness of some of his appointments, one must wonder if Mr. Dulles himself hasn't contributed to that view."
"Name Change" finds that when Mayor-elect Jim Smith had decided to be known henceforth as James Saxon Smith, it appeared that he was tossing away a natural resource in "Jim", beating his full name in crowd appeal.
It says that he may have picked up as many as 24 votes through his formalization of his name, as there were that many other Jim Smiths within the phone book and it lays odds that they were happy to be freed of the possibility of being called away from dinner to listen to complaints about traffic, stray dogs and annexation.
"Charlotte Needs Educational TV Study" urges that Charlotte seek hurriedly to become one of 15 cities in the country to be selected by the Fund for the Advancement of Education for experimental programs in educational television. The city had the interest, the civic energy, the local leadership and the promised cooperation of commercial television, as well as a modern, well-organized school plant with a faculty of enterprising teachers. It also had already been actively studying television's promise as an educational tool.
It finds that an experimental program under the direction of trained experts would undoubtedly help the community's tentative efforts to develop into genuine progress in the area, with teacher and building shortages making the need for educational television the more urgent, with not only more students to be educated but also more to be learned, and television promising to become an integral part of the regular instructional program.
It finds the challenge to be raising the quality of the content of education as well as the level of the learning process, and that there would be educational television in the future of Charlotte, with the time to plan for it being the present.
A piece from the New York Times, titled "The Shoulder Arm", indicates that Army veterans would remember, with varying attitudes, the mystique surrounding shoulder arms, including the strict rituals of inspection and drills, the terrible threats of what would befall a man who dropped his rifle, the instructions to recruits that a rifle was to be called a piece, not a gun, the infinite boredom of cleaning the piece after firing or after rain, and the endless repetition of breaking down a rifle and reassembling it. "A soldier got to know, if not to love, his rifle as well as he did his building blocks 15 or 20 years before."
If the veteran had trained with an
infantry outfit, there had been a strange ambivalence of the Regular
Army non-com, among whose jobs it was to sell the recruits on the
"wonderful M-1, that semi-automatic miracle of firepower."
But every now and then, he would say that if the soldier wanted to
hit something, he should obtain an "ole Springfield
"Now word has come that the
Army has chosen one rifle, the T-44, to replace these three shoulder
arms. There may or may not be nostalgia over the going of the M-1,
carbine
Drew Pearson indicates that Senator McCarthy had telephoned him "some days" before his death the prior Thursday, the first time they had conversed since the Senator had pinned his arms to his sides in the cloakroom of the Sulgrave Club in 1950, separated ultimately by the late then-Vice-President Alben Barkley. He says that when he picked up the telephone, he heard a cheery voice addressing him by his first name, as if nothing had ever happened, telling him that he had just placed his column in the Congressional Record, saying that though he had not always agreed with his column, on this occasion, he found it "completely accurate", informing him in advance so he "wouldn't faint". The column in question pertained to the double-cross of Israel regarding its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba.
A short time earlier, the Senator had led a Senate fight to prevent a filmed television report of Mr. Pearson on Israel from being shown in the Senate caucus room. "That was how perverse [Senator McCarthy] could be."
He supposes that no newspaperman had ever suffered more at the hands of the Senator than he, but he felt sorry for him in his latter years since his downfall after the December, 1954 censure, at the end, a lonely man. "He used to walk through the halls of Congress, a sheaf of handouts under his arm, offering them to newspapermen, offering to pose before TV cameras. But his press handouts hit the wastepaper baskets and his face didn't appear on TV anymore."
Now he walked alone. "That was what killed Joe."
"Fame is a cruel thing. It can lift you up to the mountain tops. It can forget you at the bottom. It can exhilarate you with seeing your name in headlines. It can leave you crushed and wondering why you were all alone.
"In Joe's case, he was forgotten by the alleged friends who saw the political importance of pinning the Communist label on a Democratic administration.
"Suppose he finds only one Communist in the State Department?" had asked the late Senator Robert Taft, who had never sought to stop Senator McCarthy's witch-hunting. "Joe never did find that one Communist in the State Department. He found some in other walks of life. But the one alleged Communist in the State Department, Val Lorwin, indicted for denying he was a Communist, was excused by none other than Attorney General [Herbert] Brownell, with an apology from the court."
Mr. Pearson indicates that Senator McCarthy could have enjoyed fame much longer had he not made the mistake of turning on President Eisenhower, losing newspaper support when he did so, such that the big publishers who had once provided him headlines suddenly "gave their hero no more headlines." He was attacking the President, his Army, his foreign policy, saying that he and Secretary of State Dulles were soft on Communism. Thus, he received the silent treatment from the Administration, "and that was what really killed him."
"The exhilarating stimulus of the crowds, of the headlines, of the Klieg lights ruined Joe's effectiveness in his earlier days. The exhilarating stimulus of alcohol ruined his effectiveness in recent days.
"These last three weeks, he had been on a literal whisky diet. He had been on it before and gone to the hospital—three times in nine months. Once he had kicked a hospital corpsman, had been kept 'in restraints,' had sometimes been out of his mind."
He speculates that he might have been haunted by the "Annie Lee Mosses, the Val Lorwins, the John Services, and John Carter Vincents", naming some of the people whose reputations he had ruined. "Perhaps he saw them as he lay on his hospital bed crying out in the night." He finds that they would have been justified had they come to haunt him. He, himself, knew something of "the ridicule, the abuse, the anonymous letters, the scathing phone calls, the falling away of sponsors that can come when a senator takes the privileged floor of the United States Senate to call you a Communist."
"But I for one am sorry Joe died when he did. Toward the end he had begun to revert to the McCarthy he was when he first came to Washington. Toward the end he also wrote me a letter retracting that I was ever pro-Communist.
"Most important of all, he had begun to make peace with his Maker.
"I'm afraid Joe wanted to die. He would not have stuck to his diet of whisky had he wanted to live. Had he lived, had he forgotten the heady wine of headlines, had he been content to be just another senator, he might have undone the harm he did and become a senator who truly deserved fame."
A letter writer says that his first reaction, upon hearing the news of the death of Senator McCarthy, had been to write a bitter letter about the "glee with which this event will be greeted by some people and the more hypocritical eulogies and condolences which may come from other sources." He had decided it would serve no purpose but wants to review "how the events involving him contributed to America's political education." He believes that "most experienced experts on communism" had "hailed him as one whose exposures of Communists in government was a service to this country." He also believes it important that there was a "glaring light focused on the duplicity of his so-called liberal opponents." He believes that the Senator and others had "laid bare the utter lack of principles and consistency which has characterized the behavior of professional liberals. In their passion to destroy him and other effective anti-Communists, they thumped their chests over the right to freely speak treason, but there was no such right of free speech for an anti-Communist to criticize a general. No implications were to be drawn from a Fifth Amendment plea by a Communist but isn't Dave Beck a scoundrel?" He says cynically that the use of informants was "deplorable unless they are hired by liberals to get a job with the McCarthy committee and furnish dirt on McCarthy. The Senate is a continuing body to consider matters against McCarthy from a previous session, but for civil rights questions it is not a continuing body." He finds those but samples of the "double standard behavior that have not gone unrecognized." He finds that the Senator "had the courage to stand almost alone on important questions", that he alone had exposed the facts that "our allies were shipping strategic material to Red China which could be used against America", at a time when the Eisenhower Administration was warning against the possibility of war in Indochina. He finds that he had been criticized for mentioning that the Government had abandoned over 400 American servicemen to the Chinese Communists, and finds that Army records had supported that contention. "He was condemned for exposing situation of the Greek shipping to the Communists while Bob Kennedy was called one of America's 10 outstanding young men for working on that same project." He says that there was much more but that only time would prove its value. He says that those who had opposed him in good faith had the satisfaction of having followed on their convictions based on available information, but as to those who had fought him blindly, even when they knew he was right, "because they could not stand the reflection on their kind whose follies and worse he brought to public notice", he hopes that someday there would be a calm pause and reappraisal of the Senator. He concludes: "In my opinion, Sen. Joe McCarthy was a patriotic American who loved and fought for his country. May God rest his soul."
The Greek shipping to the Communists to which he refers relates to a column of Drew Pearson from April 7, 1953, and is further fleshed out in this article from 1994. Just why the letter writer thought that young Robert F. Kennedy, whose only role was as a staff member for Senator McCarthy in early 1953 when the issue arose, should have been "criticized" to the same extent as the Senator directing the investigation, we can only surmise from the tone otherwise of the letter. It should also be noted, with respect to the Greek shipping, that Aristotle Onassis, along with others, had been indicted by the Government in October, 1953—just a month after, ironically, the marriage of Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy. The indictments had remained sealed until the following February. The indictments were eventually dismissed by the Justice Department in late 1955.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., also, not surprisingly, comments on the death of Senator McCarthy, specifically on the editorial, "The Tragedy of Joseph R. McCarthy", criticizing its "tone of pious self-righteousness and pity" which he finds "utterly nauseating". "Shed no unnatural tears for this man, Mr. Editor. He was too formidable an American to be groveled over in false pity by the liberal press. Neither McCarthy or [sic] his friends would find the practice anything but—as I said—utterly nauseating. The fact is you despised him and you know it! Consistently you labeled him demagogue and unscrupulous witch hunter. Therefore, it would have been far more charitable and honest to have simply said, 'the bogey man is dead and good riddance!'" He says that superficial thinkers like the newspaper and "the entire non-Communist liberal world" had ruthlessly tagged him "Political Enemy No. 1", and knowingly had joined ranks with the "treacherous Communist world who despised him with a passion no more fervent than the former." He says that if the Senator, as the editorial had said, bruised and distorted the moral image of America, then "the patriot fathers of this Republic did likewise. If fervent love of country is immoral, then Joe McCarthy is guilty. If it is immoral for a man to militantly alert his countrymen to the chaos and slavery of communism, then McCarthy is guilty on a second count. If it is immoral for a man to rise up in wrath against traitors, companions of traitors, and gullible fools holding public trust—and hang them out on the line for his countrymen to see and be aware of—then McCarthy is guilty on a third count. If it is immoral for a man to stand courageously firm in the face of the greatest campaign of vilification ever leveled by the liberal and Communist press against an elected American representative, then McCarthy is guilty on a fourth count." He challenges the newspaper to prove that the Senator was "forlorn and forsaken and deserted by many of the very people he once aroused so successfully," as the editorial had stated. "The fact is, he was possessed with serious organic illnesses much of the period subsequent to 1954 when he relinquished the chairmanship of his famous committee to Democratic Sen. McClellan. Illness did indeed dampen the Herculean spirit and slow down the pace of the illustrious anti-Communist crusader." He says that the censure by the Senate had been "but a mere 'tap on the wrist' at most." He finds it to have been "nothing more than a humorous vaudeville act—with Senators doing the acting and the jackal Communist and liberal press huddled in the gallery—gleefully licking their chops as would a small boy about to tear into a box of hot buttered popcorn." He believes that Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota had "said best what many think of him: 'His passing takes out of the American political arena a courageous fighter against communism and a stalwart advocate of our traditional political concepts.'" He wishes farewell to the Senator and offers "eternal gratitude of those of us who understood your great work. You did not live in vain for indeed you alerted an apathetic republic to international conspiracy and treason to a degree that none of your colleagues or predecessors were fortunate enough to achieve. With millions of your friends and constituents your name will always be synonymous with 'the Fight For America'—and there is no greater nor nobler fight. Would that I was but half the man you were, Joe McCarthy!"
At least Mr. Cherry did not suggest that all of those "enemies" of the "courageous" crusader murdered him in some grand conspiracy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He acknowledges that there was a serious "illness" at work, which Drew Pearson this date quite adequately explains as a "diet of whisky". Mr. Cherry may view that as an "illness", and, of course, chronic alcoholism is an illness, but to call a person who, in the throes of that illness, destroys the reputations of good people just to achieve political power, a "hero" and "moral" "crusader", is to beg the question as to how he ignores so conveniently the facts that Senator McCarthy was actually a latecomer to the notion of exposing Communists in the country, whether in the Government or otherwise, and that the Justice Department under President Truman had already done a very thorough job, some believing far too thorough by terminating or forcing resignations for mere hearsay allegations having nothing to do with disloyalty to the country, in the Administration's loyalty hearings, years before the Senator was ever assigned his little task by the RNC for a Lincoln Day dinner in February, 1950, to attack the Democrats for being "soft on Communism", a task which he took to heart and used for all it was worth, insisting that there were 205 "card-carrying Communists" within the State Department, and once stuck with that line, had to justify it by smearing people who were no more Communist than Joseph McCarthy, probably much less so, as the Senator helped Communist causes abroad by smearing and dividing the country to the delight of the forces behind the Iron Curtain.
He was no hero. He was simply a liar, who had an insatiable desire for fame and greatness, with his ultimate sights having been on the White House, dashed forever by his censure, in a time when such a censure actually influenced the opinions of loyal Americans, unlike now, when many ignore even two impeachments and felony convictions on 34 counts, plus indictments from three other grand juries, two of which are Federal, all of which have thus far been delayed successfully by the defendant and his attorneys, in the hope that justice will ultimately not be served, many intending to vote for the felon this coming November for another round of occupancy in the White House, notwithstanding the fact that for four years he did nothing but run the country down to the ground, ending with the worst pandemic in American history, insofar as the million-plus death toll, all of which could have been avoided had he simply followed the medical science laid before him by the experts rather than trying to supersede it and act as a cheerleader for "keeping the country open" and the economy humming along apace.
Had Senator McCarthy become President and encountered such a similar crisis, for instance, the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba, he likely would have acted so precipitously that we would not be here at present, would have long ago been obliterated from the face of the earth, along with Russia and Cuba, leaving the remaining nuclear desert to the insects and other beings hearty enough to survive the nuclear holocaust. If not that end immediately, he would have, undoubtedly, compromised the matter so that the U.S. would have given up its position in West Germany, leading to the dissolution of NATO, and, eventually, at the point of further nuclear threat, would have given away the candle to the Soviets, impressing his loyal retinue with his clever rationalization for it, that it had all inexorably come about because of the liberal Democrats under the Socialist-Commie Roosevelt-Truman Administrations.
For all of his and his supporters' boasts that he was the preeminent anti-Communist, at the end of the day, he was the best comrade the Communists had in the U.S.
Fortunately, there was an active press from the very beginning of Senator McCarthy's baseless charges, who challenged him with fact, despite which, thanks to labelers like Mr. Cherry and other spell-casting right-wingers, many millions of people in the hinterlands who were not too sharp and followed politics much the same way that the Trumpies follow it today, with a jaundiced viewpoint already in place and only wishing to hear echoes of their own whimsically woven thoughts, practically worshiped Senator McCarthy as a demigod, some of whom continued to regard him as such, or even more so, after he was publicly disgraced—just as Roger Stone and others still to this day believe Richard Nixon was a "hero", just as he and others still believe that Trump is a "hero", indeed, in the latter case, touting him as some reincarnation of a religious figure, as blasphemous as that is, yet a role which Trump readily embraces himself.
There is no hell too hot for these people who place their own beliefs and values far above the Constitution and the traditions of democracy and freedom in this country underlying it, just to seek fortune and political power, as is made evident increasingly every day and every time they open their mouths to gather flies—dripping with the honeyed words of interposition and nullification.
Yes, Mr. Cherry, "the bogey man" was dead, and good riddance. But, take solace in the notion that there will always come another bogey man, as we have now before us to curse the nation for the fact of the myriads of people who did not study their lessons too well in school, were too busy perhaps practicing their diet of whiskey, in conscious or unconscious emulation of Senator McCarthy, to be too much bothered with that stuff about history, science, art and social studies, not helping them to earn a living.
A letter writer says that the Voice of America was "State Department hogwash" and that the House Appropriations Committee which had cut more than 37 million dollars from appropriations for the United States Information Agency, which operated the Voice, should have cut the entire appropriation for "this useless, unnecessary and detrimental agency which is doing the United States no good whatever in its blatant misrepresentations to the outside world of what it calls American democracy." He finds it akin to "Roosevelt's leaf-raking venture that set a new low in extraneous activities which the New Deal President initiated, and which have now increased to an alarming degree." He thinks that such services ought be maintained in the U.S. to do the job of promoting Americanism and fighting Communism, "where the need is greater and the expense is less." "Instead of shooting them across the ocean to plead with the Slovenians, for instance, to reject indoctrination by Communists, why not turn them loose in our churches, universities and government agencies here at home to do a little missionary work in those far more strategic areas where the results, if any, might rebound [sic] to the benefit of the people of the United States." He thinks that it was not the Voice of America but rather the voice of the "Reds in the State Department", seeking to convince the people of the areas where it operated that the "only music Americans care for or know anything about is rock 'n' roll played by mixed jazz bands."
He
uses a lot of white space ultimately to make his point that he is
upset because the Voice of America
A letter writer wonders who the "Patriots of North Carolina, Inc." were, asking, "How patriotic can a prejudiced, uninformed organization be that wishes to sway the vote of the people against a minority group?" She says that the advertisement which had appeared in the newspaper on Friday against the bond issue for Memorial Hospital had been very un-American. She believes that the News had ceased being a real newspaper when it allowed such a "ridiculous, one-sided ad to be published." She says that the article which appeared in support of the bond issue had even been hard to find in the newspaper.
There was, however, a prominent and lengthy editorial the previous day, which the writer had obviously not seen before sending the letter, indicating the need for the expansion of Memorial Hospital.
The Patriots organization, incidentally, to which she makes reference, had been formed following the 1955 Brown v. Board of Education implementing decision, with I. Beverly Lake, while not one of its founding members, having encouraged its formation. Mr. Lake, who would subsequently serve on the North Carolina Supreme Court beginning in 1966, appointed by Governor Dan K. Moore, after being defeated for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1960 by Terry Sanford, had resigned as assistant State Attorney General, favoring formation of an exclusively private school system, after having argued in 1955 before the Supreme Court the North Carolina position, that immediate implementation of Brown would have led to violence and riots, would possibly end the public schools, and that it should be left to the individual states to implement it at their own pace. The organization primarily was organized to slow down the implementation of Brown. On that count, it, and other organizations like it across the South, were quite successful. But the price of that sloth was incalculable, not only to the black community but also to the white community through the next troublesome couple of decades.
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