The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 18, 1958
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Maxton, N.C., that with the most publicized Klan rally in many years only a few hours away, to take place in nearby Pembroke, the Rev. James Cole, the Klan spokesman, had suggested that Federal troops ought protect the Klan, that they ought receive the same protection, if there was violence, as black students had received in Little Rock. Since two Klan cross-burnings near Indian homes in the area on Monday, the local Indian population had been thinking about going on the warpath when the Klan would gather this night somewhere between "Pembroke Junior College and Hayes Pond", as it had been set forth in their flyers being posted around Robeson County in the preceding days. Mr. Cole had said that "if Ike had the right to call out troops for nine burly-heads, I see no reason why he can't do the same for us at Maxton. He said the law was made for every man." The minister, who claimed that he had congregations in both North and South Carolina, told The News that "the Klan definitely is not on the warpath against Indians or anyone else." He said that the cross-burnings had no connection with Indians, that the "Indian issue" was the fault of Bruce Roberts, the editor of Maxton's weekly Scottish Chief and Post, and the other newspapers. He said that a cross burned at nearby St. Pauls was burned in the yard of a woman because she was having an affair with a married man, indicating, "It wouldn't have mattered if she were Chinese or any other race." He said that a cross burned in east Lumberton was more than a city block away from the home of an Indian who had moved into a white neighborhood, indicating, "It had nothing to do with [Indians]," suggesting that it had to do with something else in the neighborhood, but declined to elaborate. Both the Indians and the Klan said they would not start trouble. Mr. Cole said, "If there is trouble, it will be instigated by someone else and not by members of the Klan." Mayor J. C. Oxendine, in Pembroke, a town almost completely populated by Indians, said, "There will be no trouble unless the other side starts it."
Julian Scheer of The News reports that a distinguished American statesman the previous night, Undersecretary of State Christian Herter, had stated in Charlotte that the "waging of peace" was a "continuing struggle, engaging our best military, economic, technological and educational efforts; a struggle in which the fortitude and lasting power of the American people are going to be tested to the limit." He had appeared before more than 1,000 people at the Chamber of Commerce dinner at the Park Center. The former Massachusetts Governor said that no summit conference of world powers would be successful unless the groundwork were properly laid for it. While a summit conference might be the answer to easing of world tensions, he found that it could result in greater tensions if it were to fail, recalling that the mid-1955 Geneva conference had the latter effect. He said that if it would be "disillusioning, it might result in the cold war becoming so intensive that it would break out in a hot war." He asserted that the U.S. was finding stiffer competition at every turn from Russia. Earlier the previous day, at a press conference at Douglas Municipal Airport in Charlotte, he had said that the turmoil in the South had produced a negative effect on diplomatic relations in some areas of the world, indicating that the Middle East was the most critical area at present. James Richards, a former Congressman from South Carolina and an ambassador, had introduced Mr. Herter, both having served on a special Congressional committee which had helped lay the groundwork for the Marshall Plan. Mr. Herter had praised the success of the Plan and called aid to foreign nations still a strong part of waging the cold war.
Emery Wister of The News reports of Thomas L. Robinson, publisher of the newspaper, having taken office as president of the Chamber of Commerce, succeeding retiring president Paul Younts. Mr. Robinson congratulated the latter for his inspiring leadership, indicating that the Chamber had taken some giant strides during the previous year, opening the door to greater opportunity, making plans for 1958 to be another progressive year for the Chamber as an instrument of Charlotte's progress. Mr. Younts, in his outgoing address, said that the important projects which had to be undertaken and accomplished in the coming year were providing necessary public utilities for the perimeter area, intensifying the industrial activity through a fuller use of the Industrial Development Council, maintaining efforts to keep the Naval Depot intact for future industrial development, cooperating fully in the needed urban renewal program, placing greater emphasis on the 15 county community development programs, pursuing with all possible speed the consolidation of the schools and grouping of local government activities, continuing support for Charlotte and Carver Colleges, and securing even better highway and air facilities for the Charlotte area, the marketplace of the Carolinas. He also said that they would continue their efforts to expedite the early construction and completion of the Canton, O., to Charlotte limited access highway, which the Federal Bureau of Roads had added to the national system of highways, regarding that as being the greatest improvement which had been made for the benefit of Charlotte and the industrial Piedmont section of North Carolina during the previous quarter-century.
Senator Matthew Neely of West Virginia had died this date at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., at age 83.
In Naha, Okinawa, a four-engine Navy transport plane had crashed and burned moments after takeoff this date, but all 31 persons aboard had survived.
In Madrid, the Spanish Government announced this date the arrest of 44 persons, many of whom were university students, on charges of trying to reconstitute the Communist Party.
In Havana, Dr. Santiago Rey, minister of the Cuban Government, announced that 17 rebels led by Fidel Castro had been killed in the prior Thursday's attack on Veguitas, 20 miles east of Manzanillo, indicating that there had been no casualties among Government forces.
In Yokosuka, Japan, a Marine brig guard sergeant, accused of striking prisoners, had denied the charges this date except for an occasional "slap here and there."
In Wiesbaden, West Germany, three U.S. airmen accused of beating up a Roman Catholic priest had been sentenced to hard labor, according to an Air Force announcement this date.
In Galesburg, Ill., the Marine Corps "Drill Instructor of the Year" in 1957 was in jail, having been wanted by his wife and the FBI after he had left home without notice more than two weeks earlier. The 28-year old sergeant was now charged with breaking into a service station to obtain gas for the car which he admitted stealing at Texarkana, Ark. He had gone on a wide-ranging, cross-country tour, leaving his San Diego Marine base without permission on January 2, leaving behind his wife and three children, ranging between the ages of two and six. He said that he was depressed and wanted to get away from San Diego, had begun by hitchhiking, spending an aimless few days in Las Vegas, and then meandered over half the country. He said he was not too worried about his wife and kids as they had a freezer full of food. The local sheriff said that he appeared "down in the dumps" following his arrest at the service station the previous day, but had cheered up considerably after a telephone call from his wife, who had been notified of his arrest. She told him that she was behind him and still loved him. The sergeant said he planned to return if and when he was able to get out of his current predicament, but was through with the Marine Corps. He was a decorated veteran of the Korean War, said that he had intended to make a career out of the Marines but had changed his mind as he got a bum rap. He said that in addition to being AWOL, he had been accused of other crimes at the San Diego base, when he had not been involved in anything. The sheriff said that the Marines wanted him for questioning in connection with a $65 theft from the base non-commissioned officers' quarters. The FBI wanted to question him about the theft and regarding interstate transportation of a stolen automobile. The piece indicates that it might be some time before he was able to return home.
Elizabeth Prince of The News reports that a "little epidemic" of "influenza-like disease" had hit Charlotte, according to the City-County health officer, Dr. M. B. Bethel, who said it was apparently a different illness from that which had prevailed earlier, but was still being referred to as "influenza-like". It was not as heavily spread, however, as the widespread Asian flu which had hit Mecklenburg County in mid-fall. At the height of that epidemic in early November, there had been 12,000 cases of flu reported in a spot check undertaken by the City-County Health Department of the City and County schools, four businesses, seven physicians' offices and the infirmaries of Queens and Davidson Colleges. Two weeks earlier, there had been 184 cases of the new "influenza-like disease" reported in their weekly spot check, a relatively low figure for wintertime. But one week earlier, the figure had risen to 866 and during the current week, it was 1,465. Dr. Bethel said that the epidemic was characterized by vomiting and was frequently described as intestinal flu, whereas the earlier epidemic was characterized by respiratory symptoms. Health officials and physicians across the country were wary of the possibility of a second wave of epidemic Asian flu, but those in authority said there was no way of knowing whether the second wave of a worldwide pandemic would hit the country. U.S. Surgeon General Leroy Burney had said that Japan "appears to be experiencing a second wave…" In previous experience, true pandemics had been characterized by three waves of illness.
In Charlotte, fire had done slight damage to Eastover School, the fire having been referred to the City Police Department's Youth Bureau for investigation, as the inspector for the Fire Prevention Bureau believed it had been deliberately set. A janitor told investigators that he had left the building with all doors locked late on Thursday night, and when he returned for duty the following morning, he found charred papers in the school's east wing. It was believed that the papers were from the school's health clinic. On the night of January 8, 1957, an estimated $20,000 to $30,000 in damage had been done from a fire at the same school, and classes had to be canceled for a day, though all rooms except six could be used. That fire had been confined to the principal's office, the office of the secretary and two small sections of a corridor outside those two offices.
In Spring Canyon, Utah, workers had dug deeper into a coal mine shaft this date, searching for two miners whom they said had no chance of being found alive. An underground earth tremor had caught four men 5,000 feet inside the Spring Canyon Coal Co. mine early the previous day, with the bodies of two of the men already having been found.
In Perry, Ark., the driver of a school bus loaded with 35 male and female basketball players had made a split-second choice at a rail crossing the previous night and sent the bus hurtling down a 16-foot embankment instead of hitting a speeding train. Only five of the youngsters and the coach had been injured, none seriously. The bus driver told officers that his lights had picked out the shapes of freight cars moving across the highway while the bus was still some distance away from the crossing. He tried to slow down and stop, but his brakes had failed. He then swung the steering wheel and the bus plunged off the highway down the embankment, striking the stanchions of a railroad trestle, but not overturning.
In Richmond, Va., workers this date had located a sixth body in the debris of the blast-damaged Merchants Ice and Coal Storage Co. building.
In Benson, N.C., law enforcement
officers had resorted to teargas the previous night to get a
37-year old man to surrender after he allegedly had run his parents
from their home and fired several shots at officers who sought to
arrest him. The man was in the Johnston County jail and would be
charged with resisting arrest and assault with a deadly weapon,
having already faced charges of disorderly conduct and assaulting his
father. He had surrendered after officers fired three shots of
teargas into the home. Earlier in the night, his father, a Primitive
Baptist minister, and his mother had sworn out a warrant at the
police station, charging the son with assault and disorderly conduct.
The deputy said that the couple was "scared and nervous"
and had left home after their son had fired three shots at his
father. The officers had then gone to the home to arrest him, had
gone through the downstairs and then out the rear of the house, there finding the son armed with an automatic pistol, firing it
at them. They exchanged shots with the son, and a deputy was
slightly wounded when struck on the finger by a bullet. A radio call
for help brought members of the Highway Patrol and other officers to
the scene, and the son was then subdued. It was fortuitous that they were able to draw him down from the trees with teargas before he accomplished his patricidal mission, perhaps dreamed up from having read a synopsis
In Parchman, Miss., William Wetzel, New York gunman who had spent the previous years of his life in the State Prison, had died in the gas chamber after his conviction for murder. He was the brother of Frank Wetzel, recently convicted in Rockingham, N.C., for the murder of a North Carolina Highway Patrolman and sentenced to life imprisonment, facing another murder charge for another Highway Patrolman killed the same night in another county of the state. The brother had gone to his death still protesting his innocence in the fatal throat-slashing of a fellow inmate in 1953.
On the editorial page, "Two Custodians of Dixie's Conscience", an editorial book review of An Epitaph for Dixie by Harry Ashmore, finds that woven through its contents "like some ghostly thread was the spirit of W. J. Cash, whose brilliant The Mind of the South jostled the region's consciousness in 1941." Both Hodding Carter and Ralph McGill had found striking similarities between the two books in the approach to the South's past, present and future. Mr. McGill had said in the Atlanta Constitution that Epitaph did "for the rising generation what W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South did for the previous one... Harry Ashmore's penetrating appraisal of the new South is the definitive work." Others had spoken ardently of a "blood-brother kinship of the spirit."
It indicates that to say that such comparisons were unfair was not to detract from efforts of either author, as both had set out "to distill truth from a polluted bog of folklore and fancies", both having "accomplished miracles with grace and rare perception", with similar intellectual attitudes. But their methods and results were as different as the men themselves.
Both had worked at one point in Charlotte for The News, both having been associate editors, Mr. Ashmore having risen to editor at the start of 1947, about six months before his departure for Little Rock where he became editor of the Arkansas Gazette, a position he still held and would later in the year win a Pulitzer Prize for his editorialization on the Little Rock school integration crisis of the prior fall.
Jack Cash had died on July 2, 1941, actually July 1, in Mexico City, while working on a novel under a Guggenheim Fellowship. He had been "an introverted genius, mild-mannered but capable of deep passions and a dark, angry eloquence in his writing. He was not the most dependable craftsman of his day but when his mind was free of the cobwebs of an evening's intemperance he was capable of prose that fairly sang with feeling and erudition."
"The Mind of the South was the product of these moments of magnificent perception. It was a large, rambling, subjective epic, full of fire and truth and historical perspective. As a critic said later, his approach was literary and imaginative rather than formally sociological and psychological."
It finds that Mr. Ashmore, by contrast, was "the complete extrovert, both personally and professionally. His writing was of a different sort, full of brisk and occasionally sardonic brilliance and a kind of self-taught sophistication. He was the perfect newsman, equipped with all of the proper reflexes and a storehouse of knowledge. He was an inexhaustible raconteur in person and he wrote with a style that was tightly controlled and journalistic."
It finds Mr. Ashmore and Mr. Cash to have been as different as night and day and yet both, in their own personal ways, had contributed something fine and important to the nation's understanding of the South, cutting through the sham and the legends, the lies and the façade of angry words, to the region as it really existed at the start of a new era. It finds Mr. Ashmore's book to be "brisk and brightly personal, laced with just enough history and sociology to give it form and perspective", as he wrote of social crisis with wit and wisdom. The traces of anguish and guilt which the reader occasionally sensed with Cash were nowhere present in Mr. Ashmore's work. The latter was a confessed optimist who had his doubts about the New South as he was preparing an epitaph for the Old South, but even his doubts had a hopeful gloss.
In the book, he had asked: "Will the New South be a better place than the Old? Materially, almost certainly. Spiritually, perhaps. Behind the façade of harsh words and extremist laws there is already emerging the pattern in which the South will finally accommodate its dwindling Negro population as it moves from second- to first-class citizenship: it will be imperfect but reasonably effective, and in the end it will be far easier to achieve than the accommodation produced by trial and error in the bloodshot aftermath of Reconstruction. But the transition can be accomplished only at the expense of the qualities that made the South distinctive, and cast it in the remarkable role it has played in the history of the republic. Perhaps, a generation from now when the last shovelful of dirt is patted down on the grave, we shall be able to see the vanishing age more clearly, to examine its virtues without being distracted by its faults. There will be, I think, other than sentimental reasons for mourning its passing."
It finds that Mr. Ashmore, with the polished craftsmanship of an expert reporter, had examined the South as it was and as it presently existed, finding that there was not one South but many. He stated: "Behind the front the South is far from solid. In the nature of the distribution of population, and the local political situation, a man is likely to be more excited in Louisiana than in Tennessee, in Alabama than in North Carolina. Out on the fringes the new southern cause has generated considerable passion: in the rural places the hot-eyed orators once again holler nigger and conjure up their evil visions. But the cold atavistic wind of fear has produced more bewilderment than anger. The prevailing mood is escapist: actuality is not yet at hand, and most southerners still hope somehow it will go away."
Yet, Mr. Ashmore had indicated that actuality was at hand and the wheels of history were relentlessly turning, that for better or worse, the South had now to find its future in the national pattern, his lesson, which many Southerners had not yet learned. He had concluded the work by indicating: "No, history does not run backward and it buries its own dead. I can only hope that in the new time the triumph of the thin-lipped man is not absolute—that somehow we in the South can carry over traces of the old qualities of humor and grace that once distinguished most of us, proud or humble, black or white. If so, Dixie's epitaph can read simply: R. I. P."
It concludes that even if An Epitaph for Dixie lacked the "subjective splendor" of The Mind of the South, it remained as an "exciting guidebook to years of social crisis."
Should the above link to the book ever disappear, it was serialized in nine installments, printed in the St. Petersburg Times beginning on Sunday, February 9 and the eight subsequent Sundays, one chapter per week, except that Chapter 8 was only summarized along with Chapter 9. The third chapter and the fifth chapter had mentioned Cash's work. The others were Chapters 2, 4, 6, 7, 8 (summarized), 9, and 10.
For another take on the book, here is a review of Hodding Carter's New York Times review of the book, by the always irrepressible Westbrook Pegler, the liberal's liberal conservative stuck in the middle, who doth protest
James Kilpatrick of The Richmond News Leader, whom Mr. Pegler contrasts with both Mr. Ashmore and Mr. Carter as being in a different league of writer, found the comparison of Mr. Ashmore to Mr. Cash by Mr. McGill to have been "absurd", that Mr. Cash was a scholar and thinker who died prematurely, while Mr. Ashmore had not provided a serious literary work, rather a "fine after-dinner speech." Mr. Kilpatrick, it is to be remembered, resurrected the notion of nullification and interposition from the 19th Century and sought to transpose the concept to the mid-Twentieth Century to sidestep Brown v. Board of Education, as attempted eventually by the Virginia Legislature. Had Mr. Cash lived, it is quite questionable how he would have received Mr. Kilpatrick's respectful compliment for his intellectuality, albeit tempered with reservation on some of the substance of the book. Though a gentleman and not given to public rebuke of others, privately, Mr. Cash might have thought it at least rather strange and ironic—especially as time would move on into the era of the Nixon Presidency—Mr. Cash's mother having deplored the very image of Mr. Nixon as Vice-President when he appeared on television in Shelby, while his sister also expressed little regard for him later in his run for the Presidency and subsequently as President, at least, so we have it on good authority—, and Mr. Kilpatrick would gain a national reputation for his outspoken two or three-minute mini-debates
That all of this should arise on the weekend preceding the icy inauguration here in 2025 of what's his name, the Princeling of Oligarchy tending the rest of us toward Pauperdom, may be perceived as purely accidental, or not. What do you think?
As we have suggested before, there are ghosts in circulation here around The News.
While on the subject, if we may be permitted a prediction, we suggest that before the year is out, there will be in the country, and perhaps across the world, a great wave of nostalgia for the relative order achieved during the Biden Administration from the preceding four years of uninterrupted chaos. In any event, we are glad that the Government of Israel could reach a peaceful end to the fighting, at least for the present, with Hamas and have a resolution at hand of the wretched war in Gaza. As to who may take the credit for the agreement is really beside the point. The important thing is that the senseless fighting and loss of life end, as only fitting in the immediate aftermath of the death of President Carter at age 100, who made peace between Egypt and Israel a centerpiece of his Administration.
"The Klan Needs a Good Solid Tickling" finds that if the Klan could take a joke, it long earlier would have dissolved itself in laughter at its own puerile pretensions. But, unfortunately, it could only make jokes, most of which were so grotesque that no one else could enjoy them.
It finds in that category its warning to Robeson County Indians against race-mixing. It finds the logic and intelligence of it to have been matched only by that of the man who, having murdered his parents, had pleaded for mercy from the court on the grounds that he was an orphan.
Once upon a time, the Robeson County Indians had inhabited Europe. The natives of America were divided into the various tribes, such as Scotch, Irish, German, Dutch, Italian, etc. Being persecuted in Europe, or for a variety of other reasons being afflicted with wanderlust, the Indians had decided to sail across the water to America, making their first permanent settlement at Plymouth, Mass., where, after the first harvest, they set aside a day presently celebrated as Thanksgiving. In the course of time, the Indians had done a number of astonishing things, including purchasing of Manhattan from a white tribe for next to nothing and seizing the possessions of most of the other tribes. In the course of time, there was some mixing of races for which the Indians, as the conquerors of America, were responsible.
Everyone except members of the Klan knew it had not happened that way. But the Indians, nevertheless, understandably resented the meddling of the Klan minority and there had been reports that they might go on the warpath against any further intrusions by Klansmen. It concludes that if they did, it hopes that the Indians would tie the Klansmen to stakes and tickle them with feathers until they could laugh at their own folly.
A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Market Bulletin", indicates that it was glad to hear about what was happening to the Jivaro Indians' market for shrunken heads in Ecuador, nearly the last refuge of head-hunting. The Jivaro had turned surprisingly peaceful and so it could be seen in a glance what had occurred to the South American Indian market for shrunken heads.
Drew Pearson indicates that it had been four years since Douglas McKay, former Secretary of Interior, had provided 400 acres of the Rogue River National Forest to the Al Sarena Mining Co. at the behest of his crony, Republican Congressman Harris Ellsworth of Oregon. The Secretary's excuse for letting the Douglas fir acreage get out of the hands of the nation had been an old mining law and that the company in question was planning to mine gold. Various people, including Mr. Pearson, Congressman Charles Porter of Oregon, and Senator Richard Neuberger of that state had claimed that the excuse was phony and that no gold ore would ever be mined.
Recently, Senator Neuberger had received a letter from the U.S. Forest Service, stating that no mining activity to any extent had occurred on the acreage since 1955. Earlier, at Senate hearings, a forest ranger had testified that he had observed no mining in 13 years of service in the Rogue National Forest. Mr. Pearson had exhibited pictures of the Al Sarena company's mining shacks showing that they were falling apart and that no human had disturbed the cobwebs for years. Nevertheless, Secretary McKay, only after Mr. Ellsworth had repeatedly badgered him, had handed over the 400 acres to the private company after his subordinates had ruled against him on the matter and after his Cabinet colleague, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, had recommended against doing so.
The company had now logged commercially nearly three million board feet of valuable fir and pine, receiving the timber for nothing, previously belonging to the people. Congressman Ellsworth had now been rewarded by the President after being defeated for re-election when Oregon voters revolted against the giveaway, making Mr. Ellsworth chairman of the Civil Service Commission, charged with the responsibility of promoting clean government.
The House Armed Services Committee had never been under tighter secrecy than it was at present as it considered the critical arms race with Russia. Behind closed doors recently, the Committee had been discussing the defense potential of a ballistic missile with a 1,250-mile range. Someone had asked whether that was not a fairly short range for a missile, to which Representative George Miller of California had said that it was about as far as the distance from Washington to Omaha. A colleague observed that the missile would not be pointed in that direction. Representative Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, a segregationist, had said that they were probably reserving it for Little Rock.
Senator John McClellan of Arkansas had a special guard outside his office during part of his probe of the Teamsters. He had also quit driving his car, as police feared that a bomb might be placed underneath it.
When the beautiful wife of the Belgian ambassador had asked Margaret Truman Daniel for pictures of her new baby, Ms. Daniel had replied: "I don't carry pictures of the baby." Subsequently, however, she produced several.
Actor Marlon Brando had affected a
thick Southern accent for his new picture, "Sayonara"
While the Air Force was so hard up for cash it almost had to curtail planes for the Weather Bureau's hurricane research, Col. Harry Shoup of Colorado Springs and two fellow colonels had flown a DC-3 to Hastings, Neb., where they spent the weekend hunting with a former Air Force buddy, Charles Youngson.
Stewart Alsop discusses the appointment of yet another committee to consider again the reorganization of the Defense Department, a way of sweeping the entire matter temporarily under the rug. He finds it not to be the "decisive central direction" to "end interservice disputes" which the President had promised it would be in his State of the Union message. It could, however, prove impossible to keep the problem under the rug.
Senator Stuart Symington, for example, was determined to make defense reorganization a major issue in the current Congressional session. The issue was one which involved not only billions of dollars but possible victory or defeat in war. It was not, however, the sort of issue most people understood or cared very much about and thus he believes it worth trying to examine the issue in simple, human terms.
As a member of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of staff of one of the services had an insoluble conflict of loyalties, attending the weekly Joint Chiefs meeting as one of three voting members, with the Joint Chiefs collectively assigned to advise the President on a whole range of strategic planning, being, therefore, an immensely powerful body charged with national responsibility transcending service interests. But except for the few hours the chief of staff spent weekly at that meeting, he spent the rest of his time as operational commander and head of one of the services. His natural inclination, therefore, was to do everything possible to obtain a larger share of allocations for the armed services, more men, more money, more missions. His subordinates, or "Indians", as they were called in the Pentagon, devoted their most earnest efforts to preparing the chief of staff to do battle for that and at the Joint Chiefs meetings. Both as a professional soldier devoted to his service and as a human being aware that his name and his own service would otherwise be mud, a chief of staff inevitably entered most of those meetings in the mood of a knight entering the lists against two formidable opponents.
Thus, the Joint Chiefs had never really functioned as the national strategic planning board it was designed to be, rather, depending on the amount of money available, either as a "sort of polite bear pit, or as a mutual backscratching society." The problem was complicated by the new weapons which could not be made to fit into the old air, ground and sea categories. Thus, at present, the three chiefs of staff entered the lists prepared to do battle for such things as anti-missile missiles, reconnaissance satellites and manned space platforms.
Under the present system, there was no way to achieve real, national-minded strategic planning. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs had no vote and was thus hardly more than a referee of the endless service rivalries. The civilian secretaries of each service tended to become more royalist than the king, and the Secretary of Defense had severely limited powers, could not know where all the bodies were buried. Congress could not perform the function of strategic planning and the President had other things with which to deal.
The results of the system were plain. The Joint Chiefs had failed to do its strategic planning job in any rational way. At present, there was not even a firmly agreed national war plan. Those best able to judge were convinced that should a major war erupt, the result would be chaos, with each service fighting its own private war. The country was simply not receiving a fair return on its investment in either military manpower or money and could not possibly receive a fair return under the present system.
Almost everyone who had examined the problem objectively, from former Army chief of staff Eisenhower on down, had agreed that something had to be done, with all kinds of solutions having been offered.
The basic elements of solution were obvious. The Joint Chiefs had to be divorced from their services and there could be no question of any one of the chiefs returning to his service. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs had to be given real power, subject to review by the President and the Secretary of Defense. The latter's power had also to be increased and clearly defined. A chain of command needed to be divorced from selfish service interests and devoted exclusively instead to national defense.
While it seemed obvious, the vested interests in the present system were enormously powerful, the reason why the whole problem had again been shoved under the rug.
Walter Lippmann indicates that the President's program, as set forth in his budget message, was not likely to win for him the kind of popular support which he would need in the present Congress. While his delivery of the message had done much to quiet the apprehension regarding his health, the substance of his proposals would likely produce a sense of disappointment and frustration.
The country had been expecting and was ready for a large expansion of national effort and that which the President had proposed was a narrow concentration on specialized strategic weapons accompanied by contraction in almost every other field of national activity. The program indicated, in effect, that if only the nation could catch up with the Russians in missiles, all would be well and it could retreat almost everywhere else.
But based on experience, the President would likely find that the country could not be rallied successfully to that type of program, as it expected a program of national revival while being offered a program of contraction. The country could be rallied more readily to a big, bold program such as, for example, the Marshall Plan of 1947, than by a small, timid program, such as one which regarded the country as being too poor to build schoolhouses or to develop new water resources in the arid lands of the West. A small, timid program provoked the various interests which were hurt by it without interesting and rallying the great masses who would respond to a national call.
There was the prospect that leadership, as a result, would come not from the President but from the Democrats in the Congress, organized around Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. Thus, the program was an invitation to disaster for the Republicans running in the midterm elections. As a result, the President would receive little, if any, ardent support from his own party. It was a political bonanza, however, for the Democrats, enabling them to seize the initiative not only in welfare measures, which were their standbys, but also in national defense.
Mr. Lippmann posits that it need not have occurred had the President's advisers understood the nature of the challenge and risen to respond to it. Once it was certain that there would be no opposition to obtaining more money for missiles, a crucial point was the response of the nation to education and research, where the country was most deeply challenged and where it had to demonstrate to itself and the world its capacity to respond to that challenge.
But the educational proposals were quite inadequate and the abandonment by the Administration of the school construction bill had been an inexcusable retreat from responsibility.
The Russian Sputniks had been treated as a challenge to the country's missile program which had to be met and the new money for missiles and satellites had been covered by the President's acceptance of the views of those in his inner circle who wanted to cut back and, in principle, to dismantle the welfare measures which had come from the New Deal. Mr. Lippmann suggests that there was room for cutting back on some of the subsidies and grants-in-aid, but the basic concept of the program was a curious one in light of the times, wherein the nation was challenged as never before in its history, while being asked to reduce and contract its national responsibility for internal development and the welfare of the nation.
A letter writer indicates that a prior letter writer had been upset by the jury having given only a life sentence to Frank Wetzel, convicted of killing a State Highway Patrolman, indicating that the prior letter writer wanted him to suffer the death penalty. (That letter apparently had appeared in either the Charlotte Observer or in some other edition, as it was not in the editions of The News which we receive.) He says that while murder was a hideous act, there were thousands of murderers in the highest societies who went unpunished, and that loose in every town, there were persons "whose tongues accomplish injury worse than the act of pulling a trigger to destroy their victims; the tongue gives breath to lies, aids scandal, ruins reputations, blackens character, creates a spirit of revenge and murder, and many times, helps to drive a soul into hell."
A letter writer from Great Falls, S.C., indicates that he would have expounded on his suggestion that Bernard Baruch or Frank Porter Graham be used to negotiate with the Russians, by listing their qualifications, had he not been aware of the value of space in the newspaper and had he been aware that J. R. Cherry, Jr., would take issue with him on the comment. He indicates that neither Mr. Baruch nor Mr. Graham needed him to come to their defense as their own records spoke for themselves. He states that Mr. Graham had been called before HUAC simply because of the tactics of that Committee, that it should not have been surprising, as the Committee had done much damage to innocent people and damage to the country. He says that as to his joining the New York Times, the Washington Post and the News in criticizing Secretary of State Dulles, if Mr. Cherry had carefully read the newspapers, he would have been aware that long before the newspapers had challenged Mr. Dulles, the letter writer had written numerous times that he had been detrimental to the country and that no previous Secretary had so badly bungled foreign affairs or caused the country to lose face in the world. He reiterates that unless Mr. Dulles were replaced, there would be no change for the better in foreign relations regardless of how much money was spent.
A letter writer from Morganton indicates that the friends of Representative Charles Jonas were glad that he would seek another term in Congress, as he was the only man who could carry the Tenth District and be a helpful friend of the common people like her.
Framed Edition
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