The Charlotte News
Monday, January 13, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Congressional fiscal leaders had said this date that they would do what they could to cut the record peacetime budget of the President, which he had submitted to Congress this date. Government sources disclosed the previous week that the budget would call for spending of more than 73.8 billion dollars and the President had said in his State of the Union message the prior Thursday that it would "roughly balance", with the sources indicating that the balance was precarious, with a deficit now expected for the current year. Even before the formal submission of the budget, key House members had indicated that they were more hopeful of assuring a bigger balance than they were of avoiding an increase in the national debt limit, currently set at 275 billion dollars. Representative Clarence Cannon of Missouri, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, where spending bills originated, said that most of the 16 subcommittees handling the overall budget in piecemeal form would start hearings almost immediately. He expressed regret that the budget for the coming fiscal year would provide for a surplus of less than a billion dollars if revenues were maintained at current expectations. He said that there was some feeling that since the Pentagon had about 8 billion dollars in unexpended funding which would not be spent for several years, they could dip into that reserve instead of using new finds. He indicated that since defense needs accounted for more than half of the new budget, they would cut much deeper than usually into non-defense items. Representative John Taber of New York, the ranking Republican on the Committee, agreed with Mr. Cannon that the 1959 fiscal budget had to be kept in balance if at all possible, saying he had never seen a budget which could not be cut, that it would be difficult but that they would give it a try. The 1959 budget would provide the highest Government spending since World War II and would be only slightly below the 74.3 billion dollars in fiscal 1953, when the Korean War was at its peak.
The President held open the door to an East-West summit conference this date, sending a message to Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin that he was ready to meet on two conditions, that initially the issues in negotiations would be aired among diplomats and foreign ministers and that those negotiations had to show "good hope of advancing the cause of peace and justice in the world" by agreements at a summit. He rejected the invitation of the Premier to have such a meeting within three months. He also rejected or discounted about eight proposals which had been put forward by the Premier in his invitation of December 10, including those for an East-West nonaggression pact and a German-Polish-Czech zone free of nuclear weapons. He accused Russia of a great error in failing to reunify Germany as agreed at the Geneva summit conference of mid-1955, blamed the cold war on the "expansionist policy" of Soviet Communism, and pledged that the U.S. would never engage in aggression, expressing the hope that "the Soviet Union will feel a similar aversion to any kind of aggression." The President's proposals covered nine basic points, including the stopping of production of such weapons which would use, or misuse, outer space, dedicating outer space to peaceful uses by mankind, that the U.S. would be prepared to "stop the testing of nuclear weapons, not just for two or three years, but indefinitely," that steps ought be taken to cut back conventional weapons and military manpower, that measures to rule out surprise attack ought also to be taken.
Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy reported this date to House investigators on the Armed Services Committee regarding the reasons for the apparent lag in U.S. missile development. The Committee had indicated that its probe would not merely duplicate the continuing hearings by the Senate Preparedness subcommittee, but would cover more ground, including Defense Department organization. The Committee was expected to approve this date legislation to authorize more than half a billion dollars in emergency spending for defense, having approved the measure on Saturday but having held up final action for technical changes. The bill would authorize nearly half of the 1.26 billion in additional defense funding requested by the President for the current fiscal year. The chairman of the Committee, Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, and the ranking Republican, Representative Leslie Arends of Illinois, and their key Committee members, had reaffirmed within the previous week their opposition to the idea of an overall staff or single chief of staff over the Joint Chiefs. The principal opponent of that central command was the Navy, though joined in opposition by the other service leaders.
Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee said this date that the Congress ought try to resolve the "difficult and vexatious problem" of how to determine whether a President was unable to carry out his duties of office.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this date proposed 3 billion dollars in tax reductions to "reestablish incentives for productivity and investment for all income groups and minimize hardship for the lowest income group."
A top astronomer predicted that men would reach the moon by the year 2000 and establish a major settlement which would lead to a new civilization.
In Vienna, it was reported that Radio Bucharest in Rumania had said this date that Russia had perfected a "jet plane earth satellite" which would go into production shortly.
Industrialist David Sarnoff this date urged more unified military leadership, and increased effort to build antimissile weapons and whatever spending was necessary to counter the mounting Soviet threat. The context of his remarks was not reported.
In Chateauroux, France, Maj. Howard Curran this date sought "peace and quiet" with his three young, motherless children after 19 days as a prisoner in Communist Albania. He had been flown out of Albania on Saturday after disappearing on December 23 on a flight from Chateauroux to Naples, being given up for lost until the Albanian authorities had announced on January 9 that he was there. He had reported being out of fuel and had to land in Albania after losing his way in bad weather over northern Italy. His three young children had greeted him happily on his arrival aboard an Air Force transport late on Saturday night. His wife had died two years earlier. He said he and his children had planned a belated Christmas celebration, but were putting it off until Friday when one of his children would have her ninth birthday. He said that the Albanian authorities had questioned him for about five hours per day for the first five days he was detained, asking military questions which he had explained he felt he was not qualified to answer. His plane had blown a tire on landing and he was unable to fly it out, although the Albanians had given him permission to do so. The future disposition of the plane, a T-33 jet trainer, had not yet been determined, according to the Air Force.
In Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, it was reported that four Portuguese scientists had been rescued the previous day after 56 hours adrift in a launch off the coast of Mozambique, surrounded by sharks and without food, water or covering from the sun and rain.
In Detroit, it was reported that the UAW was set this date to declare 1958 contract demands for its 1.5 million members in the automobile industry. The present three-year contracts would expire at the end of May, with formal bargaining on a new contract beginning 60 days before that date. In recent months, UAW president Walter Reuther had mentioned a shorter work week as a top objective. The UAW had also spoken of improved worker pensions and an increase in supplemental unemployment compensation as well as higher hourly pay.
In New York, settlement this date of the nationwide strike of 22,000 millinery workers on a pattern similar to a Massachusetts agreement was predicted by the union.
In Denver, a vacationing police officer, father of six, had been shot and killed as his wife looked on the previous night when he attempted to capture a bandit who had robbed a north Denver service station of $80. The 27-year old officer had been shot in the heart by the lone gunman, who had escaped. His wife told police that she and her husband had been out for a drive and had stopped at the service station while the holdup was in progress, that her husband had become suspicious when a man walked away from the station and so had followed him, eventually flagging him down, at which point the officer exited the car and his wife had gotten out on her side, heard her husband order the man to take his hands out of his pockets, followed by a shot. The man had then stood over her husband, pointing the weapon at her. She had asked him not to shoot, indicating that she had six children. The attendant of the station said that he was alone when the bandit had entered and had been forced into a restroom while the man fled. The young officer had joined the force almost exactly three years earlier.
In Chicago, a young off-duty policeman was shot and killed this date as he was driving his female companion to her home. Four days earlier, he had been cited for his part in capturing a man who had furnished narcotics to a 15-year old.
In Rockingham, N.C., the defense attorney for defendant Frank Wetzel, who had been convicted of first-degree murder the prior Friday of Highway Patrolman Wister Reece and given by the jury a life sentence instead of the death penalty, said that he would decide after studying a transcript of the trial whether to appeal to the State Supreme Court. The attorney said that he felt that the State had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that his client was guilty. The jury foreman told newsmen that the jury had recommended mercy because the ten men and two women felt that the State had not proved its case conclusively, that the case against Mr. Wetzel had been circumstantial, with no witness presented who had actually seen him shoot the patrolman, that the hitchhiker who had jumped from the car at the scene of the shooting, testifying that he heard a single shot, after which Mr. Wetzel had fled in the car, leaving behind the dead officer, had not actually seen the shooting. The defendant was also accused of murdering Highway Patrolman J. T. Brown less than an hour later in a separate location, for which he would be tried separately, as there was no eyewitness to that shooting. The prosecution, as in the instant case, would also seek the death penalty in that case, having occurred in a different county.
In Los Angeles, in the first undertaking of its kind, the University of California was inaugurating a 17-week course in space technology, with classes to be held simultaneously in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Lancaster, beginning this night. According to the head of the University's Engineering Extension Division, the course was designed to provide "a sound yet imaginative exposition of fundamental principles of very long-range ballistic vehicles." He said that they would avoid the sensational and space cadet type of material. (Norton will be sorely displeased.) The Los Angeles series had attracted 1,800 students and the San Francisco and San Diego courses, more than 400 each, with the Lancaster course having been a last-minute addition to accommodate more than 500 military and civilian personnel at Edwards Air Force Base, where the nation's new jet and rocket planes were being tested. Each student paid an admission fee of $35. About half the students held college degrees and were taking the course for credits, leading to higher degrees, while the others were from private industry and academic fields. The University and its co-sponsor, Ramo-Wooldridge, which handled the technical end of the ballistic missiles program for the Air Force Research and Development Command, had assembled an impressive array of experts to deliver the lectures. As long as Captain Video is present, everything will be swell.
On the editorial page, "The Task of a Legislative Strong Man" indicates that the image of "Johnson for President" banners loomed large in the crystal balls of several political seers at present. It finds that the Senator had, consciously or not, helped to surround himself with speculation on those ambitions.
His address to the Democratic caucus as Congress had opened was, in effect, his own state of the union message, preceding that of the President, and had garnered in some areas of the nation as much newspaper coverage, if not as much attention. The bid for public recognition of the decisive role of the Senate Majority Leader was promising, serving as a reminder of the fact that the President did not solely determine the destiny of the nation. While it was true that the nation could not proceed forward without a strong President, it was also true that without wise Congressional leadership, the nation could not advance with a strong President. Senator Johnson, it finds, had, in effect, become a competitor of the President in his leadership role.
The Senator could not afford, however, to place his judgment over that of the President without risking the taint of partisan ambition, and the President, likewise, was dependent in large measure for passage of his program on the support of Senator Johnson in the Congress. Both would likely suffer if they could not produce Congressional approval of a strong response to the cold war offensive of the Soviets. Approval of spending on arms would not be enough.
The President could obtain billions for missiles on his own, but the efforts of Senator Johnson were indispensable to the passage of much of the remainder of the Administration's program. The Senator's emphasis on his role as the strong man in Congress was accurate, and it would make it easier for the public to judge any claims he might have in 1960 for the presidency.
"An Agenda for an Idle Commission" indicates that the Civil Rights Commission, still having trouble getting started, should consult with Illinois Senator Paul Douglas. It needed a staff director now that it had a chairman, but could not find one. Senator Douglas, in a new civil rights bill, was about to start a new national debate on civil rights, and it suggests that if the Commission and the Senator could get together and discuss his bill, the desire of both to do something might be satisfied.
It suggests that a suitable discussion might be the question of the effectiveness of civil rights legislation, which tended to satisfy consciences but often was not effective when passed in periods of animosity and unrest, suggesting that timing was important to the success of any legislation and particularly to social legislation.
The aftermath of the Little Rock crisis, as the Congress and the Justice Department had appeared to agree, had been no time to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, pouring salt into the fresh wounds in the South.
Agnes Meyer, wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, had complained in the current Atlantic Monthly of the New York Board of Education's plan to make every school contain one-third whites, one-third blacks and one-third Puerto Ricans. She had said: "Ill-considered, hasty attempts at integration, especially when carried out in impoverished and overcrowded schools, instead of furthering the education of the Negro, will surely result in the retardation of all students, white and Negro, and increase rather than alleviate racial tensions. Before our emotions became overwrought, we were committed to the expansion and improvement of our public schools as educational institutions where the young can learn to live together not as blacks and whites but as American citizens. This is still our first objective. The education of the white child must not be sacrificed for the Negro, nor that of the Negro for the white, or both races will lose and the future of our nation will be imperiled… Whether in the North or the South, we must not allow the process of desegregation to wreck our public school system."
It suggests that Mrs. Meyer had seen clearly that action in volatile areas of social affairs was not always preferable nor even more conscientious than inaction. It concludes that when the Civil Rights Commission found a staff director, it would be looking for witnesses and testimony, suggests that Mrs. Meyer be called as a witness.
Just because a handful of idiots from the outside had stirred up controversy in Little Rock, as well as trying to do the same in Winston-Salem, Greensboro and Charlotte when there was limited desegregation in some of the schools in those locales the prior fall, does not mean that there was general rejection of desegregation, indeed meant quite the opposite, that generally, where desegregation had occurred, it had taken place peacefully, and to suggest that because of the actions of a few crazy rednecks, it ought be delayed further was pure poppycock, giving exalted power to the self-exalted ones in their pointy hats.
"U.S. Can Use Gavin in Civilian Dress" indicates that Army General James Gavin must have tasted some personal satisfaction in his prolonged and dramatic resignation culminating the previous week. During four days he had told off his superiors and garnered the sympathy of Congress, provoked the offer of a four-star generalship, had refused it and gone away with praise ringing in his ears, no mean feat for a former private.
But there had been no lasting satisfaction for the General, the Army or the public. The Army had lost, in addition to some of its dignity, a valuable and brilliant officer whose talents had seemed attuned to the missile age. As head of Army research and development since 1955, he had won a reputation for dedication to his work and for daring and creative thinking, making him popular in the Army even with some of the officers rattled by his tendency toward blunt talk.
Those same attributes had now seemed to make his exit inevitable, and it suggests that it was just as well, as the Army could hardly remain in the position of bargaining in public for a generalship put up as a prize. It finds, however, that if the Government really valued General Gavin's abilities, it ought be able to use them in some capacity, as ultimately, the state of readiness of the defenses would be decided by civilians.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Who Killed the Rover Boys?" indicates that the boy who used to come around after school to rake the leaves or to sell Grit, etc., was no longer available to do such chores, forcing homeowners to mow their own lawns or split wood.
In earlier times, such jobs had to be performed to help the family income and to prepare the individual for adult jobs. It suggests that it would be foolish to contend that such had been panaceas for so-called juvenile delinquency, but the mortality rates had been negligible, the labor had hardened few arteries and a lot of dead leaves were burned properly.
"The boy who delivers papers today will not wind up as governor just because he does this, but the chances are his safe deposit box will contain very few wooden nutmegs, and the man who sands his sugar will be slicker than an eel with a cum laude degree from a carnival."
Drew Pearson indicates that it had been House Speaker Sam Rayburn's 76th birthday the previous week and either during the current week or the next one, he and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson were preparing a birthday present for American housewives. The Speaker was quietly maneuvering to pass the long-delayed natural gas bill, thereby increasing the cost of gas to consumers by about 800 million dollars per year, a bill which would overrule the Supreme Court and exempt the transmission of natural gas from Federal regulation. After the Speaker had slipped the bill through the House, Senator Johnson planned to slip it through the Senate as quietly as possible. The plan was to operate with little advance publicity, with the gas lobby not wanting consumer groups to have a chance to reach their Congressmen and mobilize public opinion against the bill.
The previous year, several mayors of large cities, including Robert Wagner of New York, Richardson Dilworth of Philadelphia and Anthony Celebrezze of Cleveland, had urged Congress not to pass the bill, pointing out that it would seriously upset city budgets and place a burden on housewives, benefiting only the big gas and oil companies.
Finally, Congressmen Torbert MacDonald of Boston, John Dingell of Detroit, Ray Madden of Gary, Ind., Charles Vanik of Cleveland and James Delaney of Brooklyn had waged such an effective battle that the Speaker kept the gas bill from coming to a vote, which he would have lost. But now the bill had cleared the committee hurdles and awaited only a signal from the Speaker, which he could give when the big-city members of the House were taking weekends off in Manhattan, Brooklyn or Philadelphia. He was not taking any chances this time and the gas moguls and the Speaker had worked out a deal to win the votes of the members of the coal-producing states, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, who previously had voted against the bill. This time an amendment would be added to the bill whereby the gas industry would not dump cheap gas into coal areas during the summer.
Mr. Pearson notes that to see how the deal worked between the gas-producing states and the coal states, the votes should be watched of the Congressmen from the coal areas of West Virginia, which included future Senator Robert Byrd, and Pennsylvania. He also notes that Senator Johnson's boosters had been beating the publicity for him do be elected President in 1960, that whenever they had done so in the past, the Senator usually had placed Texas ahead of the other states and was about to repeat that at present.
Stewart Alsop indicates that when former Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had been asked whether he considered a defense budget of 40 billion dollars too high, he had replied: "I wouldn't think so. That would hardly cover the increased cost of inflation." Mr. Alsop finds that his words were worth bearing in mind in attempting to judge the reality which lay beneath the words of the President's State of the Union message. Budgets were boring, at least to most people, but the defense budget did provide a fairly accurate measurement of the national response to the Soviet challenge.
The President's supplemental request for the current fiscal year would raise the current defense budget about 1.3 billion dollars above the previous level, to about 40 billion. Current Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy had said that the defense budget for the ensuing fiscal year would also be close to 40 billion. But the amount of increase in the level of defense afforded by that increase was negligible, only amounting to a shift in emphasis. The projected 1959 defense budget would include about 700 million dollars more for personnel pay but would provide for no new weaponry. Thus, the real increase in expenditures for actual hardware over the level which Mr. Wilson had approved was less than a billion dollars for fiscal 1959.
As Mr. Wilson had tactlessly stated, it would "hardly cover the increased cost of inflation."
As an example of the change in emphasis, the Air Force share of the new budget would be about 19 billion, a proportion established by tradition. Included in that share were big increases for such Air Force missiles as Atlas and Thor, but those increases would be counterbalanced by sharp cutbacks in spending for manned aircraft, notably the B-54 strategic bomber, the basic weapon of the Strategic Air Command. An arbitrary upper limit of about 600 planes had been established for the SAC's B-52's, meaning that further purchases of that aircraft would end in the ensuing fiscal year.
The increased missile effort would also be financed out of the already depleted conventional forces, and yet another cut of 100,000 in military personnel was contemplated. As in the past, the cut would likely be largely at the expense of the Army ground forces, which partly explained the despair of such Army men as General James Gavin, as it would reduce the country's ability to fight limited wars at a time when Soviet nuclear-missile power was beginning to make unlimited nuclear war suicidal.
Even the increased emphasis on missiles did not really represent an all-out effort. For example, Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas had predicted that the country would be producing operational Atlas missiles before 1960. His forecast may have been optimistic, but was perfectly serious, as the schedule called for test-firing of an Atlas over its full 5,000-mile range during the current year. Such a missile was of little use unless it was supported by an enormously complex base system which would take years to build. Each base would cost around 100 million dollars and because the prospects for Atlas were thought so good, it was proposed by the Air Force that it start work immediately on six additional bases. For economy reasons, however, serious work was to be started on only one base and so the chances were that in the near future the country would be producing many more ICBM's than there would be bases for them, which Mr. Alsop suggests was an odd sort of economy.
In that and other ways, the effort in the missile field was far less than total. While 40 billion dollars was a lot of money to expend on defense, power was a relative matter and the only realistic way to measure the defense effort was in terms of the power of the potential enemy. The Rockefeller Fund panel, which had produced a report on the nation's defenses in those terms, had asked for an immediate increase of about 3 billion dollars in defense spending. The Gaither group, which had performed a similar task, reached a similar conclusion, asking for graduated increases up to 8 billion dollars over the current level. Both groups had also urged a major effort to ensure the country's ability to fight limited wars.
Mr. Alsop concludes that perhaps it was too early to judge, now that defense had become what it would have been had it not been for the timidity of most Democrats years earlier. But as of the present, the "new, bold" defense program looked neither very bold nor very new, looking essentially the same as the old product, just somewhat redesigned and put in a bright new package.
Well, what did you expect from Mr. Wilson, the former head of General Motors? Shiny new skins, with the same old innards underneath was his stock in trade.
Doris Fleeson indicates that overall, the President's State of the Union message had been his best speech to Congress thus far. She posits that it needed to be and was. The President had rarely spoken in such detail about Administration responsibilities or made such concrete pledges of performance. He placed on Secretary of State Dulles the duty of launching an affirmative peace program, to increase person-to-person contacts with all nations, including the Soviet Union, and to challenge the Soviets to match the U.S. in human welfare projects.
He had similarly placed on the shoulders of new Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy the duty of cleaning up the mess at the Pentagon and to get on with the defense job.
A change of pace was evident when the President moved into the legislative arena, being more inclusive than usual in outlining his program on such controversial issues as foreign aid and world trade, making it in terms less of an invitation to Congress and more as a challenge than in the recent past.
The follow-through would be as important as the initial drive and she suggests that it ought be soon that an assessment could be made as to how much energy the White House would devote in fulfilling the promises. But the President had shouldered the burden with humility and accepted its political risks, making his message successful.
She suggests that it might be true, as some critics had indicated, that the President should reserve his strength for creative thinking and planning about his problems, but he was a man of action and not a creative politician, and in his determination to provide his message personally to Congress, was making the contribution which he felt best able to do.
When he had walked up the aisle of the House to deliver the message to the joint session, the whole Congress had broken into a sporting cheer. The membership might not follow him as in the past, with their comments after this speech showing that many would not, but for its 45-minute duration, they had not let him down. When he coughed, they cheered so that he could catch his breath. They allowed him breathing space repeatedly with outbursts of applause as they followed him through an exercise. He had even interjected the word "felicitous" into his opening remarks, a word not always easy for speakers who had exerienced a vascular spasm with attendant trouble over some phrases. He had also spoken with vigor, clearly designed to be reassuring, though he lagged somewhat as he neared the end.
She concludes that it was a "very fine hour" and whatever it might mean politically, if anything, it spoke well for the country.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that the last abortive Venezuelan revolution had to be bringing up at least a few chuckles to about 15 newspapermen, a press agent or so, the odd military attaché and a couple of stewardesses, stating that as a band, they were known as the "S.O.V.S." or Sons of the Venezuelan Revolution.
He relates that it had occurred 10 or 11 years earlier when a nice guy on a press junket to publicize the Venezuelan airline he was representing, gave a free ride to another press agent who had stolen the account, and taken 15 newspapermen on a junket to Caracas and Maracay to witness some presentation of medals at the military academy, which had turned out to be a mistake.
The outside party was planning to shoot up all the attending military in a coup and seize the country. But it was difficult to shoot up the brass when the brass were interwoven within the United Press, the Associated Press, the International News Service, Time, Newsweek, United Features, King Features, and a few other friends. So the plans changed and the coup had not occurred, delayed until that night.
A social was then held at which most of the brass were in attendance. But because there was so much liquor being consumed, the conspirators had gotten drunk, as had the press, and the coup did not occur then either.
He says that all he remembered of the trip was a series of roadblocks during which some barefooted Indian with a nervous trigger finger had always seemed to point his musket at the representative of King Features, making the man somewhat nervous, and they had stopped at an inn and had a pleasant lunch and sang many revolutionary-type songs. When they arrived in Caracas, greeted by cables asking for hot copy, they could not oblige, but made up some amazing stuff.
He had told a fabulous story about an 18-year old daughter of a barber who supposedly was shot in the foot, making the front page of the New York Times. As the bar bill mounted, so had the fictional content of the file. Eventually they left, sad at having to depart such a pleasant revolution but happy to have prevented any bloodshed.
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