The Charlotte News
Monday, January 6, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Lt. General James Gavin had spurred demands this date for a shakeup in the military high command. As chief of the Army's research and development program, he had told a reporter he was sticking by his announced intention to retire from the Army on March 21, at which point he would be 51, with 30 years of service. He said he would not compromise his principles and would not go along with the Pentagon system. Some members of Congress had expressed concern at the General's move, and a Senate subcommittee was set to explore the matter promptly. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee said that the General's stand emphasized what he called a need for Congress to consider overhauling the present military setup. Senator John Stennis of Mississippi voiced the hope this date that General Gavin would change his mind and decide not to retire. The Senator, a member of the Senate Preparedness subcommittee investigating satellite and missile programs, said that he would seek to learn whether anyone had "coerced" the General into resigning, indicating his hope that they could develop fully the complete story of his retirement. The General said that he had not been able to get much done, with the system being what it was, and that he was "not doing any good" inside the Army and so would retire. He said that as a civilian he would be freer to "recommend to apply creative thinking to national defense." Testifying before the Senate Preparedness subcommittee the previous month, the General had said that the Joint Chiefs system ought be abolished for its present purposes of planning overall military programs, suggesting that it be replaced by a planning group not specifically representing the different armed services.
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson said this date that the Senate Preparedness subcommittee, which he chaired, was exploring thoroughly the potential threat to the U.S. of missile-firing nuclear submarines. He said that progress being made by the U.S. in nuclear submarines would be studied with Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, who developed the type of nuclear submarine which the Navy presently had in operation. The Admiral had been called to testify before the subcommittee this date. Previously, the group was reported to have been told by CIA director Allen Dulles that the Russians had submarines which could fire missiles on American coastal cities.
Senator Henry Jackson of Washington called for a special Navy program, headed by an official with power to act, to speed the country's missile-firing submarine program, renewing his call for at least 100 such submarines per year. The Senator was a member of the parent Armed Services Committee, but not of the Preparedness subcommittee, indicating in a statement that "sooner than most of us think", Russia would have "large numbers of nuclear submarines armed with 1,500-mile missiles (MRBM's)." He stated that by comparison, present plans of the U.S. called for only one hunter-killer submarine to be operational in 1960. He said that the Navy's intermediate missile, the Polaris, was near final testing stage but would not be a real weapon until it was mated to its launching platform, a nuclear submarine. The debate over the nation's defenses had echoed elsewhere among officials and members of Congress returning from the start of the new session.
The President returned to the White House during morning rush-hour traffic this date to meet with the National Security Council regarding the problems of East-West relations. He had remained at his Gettysburg farm until just about two hours before he was due at the White House meeting with his top advisers at 9:00 a.m. He made the 85-mile drive through the morning commuter traffic of downtown Washington in a little less than two hours and arrived at 9:02.
In Yokosuka, Japan, an 18-year old U.S. sailor this date accused a Marine guard of beating him up for saying a prayer in the brig at Sasebo Naval Base. The accused guard, a sergeant, denied the charge before a general court-martial on 29 counts of cruelty and maltreatment of prisoners. Eight Marine guards at the brig had been convicted previously and six had been acquitted on similar charges. The sergeant had, according to the sailor, always been hitting him. The sailor had spent seven days in the brig following his conviction for insubordination to a petty officer. He told the eight-man tribunal that the sergeant and other brig wardens had made him hold a ruler with his hands stretched out and that he was so weakened by previous beatings that he had closed his eyes and started praying, at which point the sergeant had called him a "religious S.O.B." and struck him with his fist in the stomach, whereupon he almost passed out.
In Atlanta, a partial walkout of the Chevrolet assembly plant had disrupted production this date, with the company spokesman stating that the interruption came about from "a difference of opinion over whether the plant was too cold." He said that plant employees numbered about 2,000 and an estimated 1,000 worked the day shift. The president of the local of the UAW could not be reached for comment. A worker in the local office, who declined to be quoted, said that he understood that the men considered the assembly building too cold to work and had just gone home without dropping by the office of the local. The company said that not all of the workers on the first shift had taken part in the walkout, but added that the number involved was sufficient to stop all work on the shift.
In Washington, the trial of a suit by 13 rank-and-file Teamsters Union members from New York seeking to void the election of Jimmy Hoffa as president of the union for it having occurred through rigged delegations at the national convention in Miami Beach the prior October, resumed this date in U.S. District Court, the trial having been in recess since December 20. A preliminary injunction had barred Mr. Hoffa from assuming the presidency pending the outcome of the trial.
In New York, the retrial of Mr. Hoffa and two others on wiretap conspiracy charges was scheduled to begin this date, after the first trial had ended in a hung jury on December 20.
In Washington, it was reported that clerks in a number of Montgomery Ward retail stores had gone on strike this date across the nation.
In Memphis, Tenn., a suit seeking desegregation of public transportation in Tennessee began this date before three Federal judges.
In Manila, 45 Chinese crew members of a freighter which had sunk on Sunday, had been brought to San Fernando in northern Luzon this date aboard a Japanese rescue ship. Two of the crew members were injured.
In Auckland, New Zealand, it was reported that four British airmen had made history this date by flying across Antarctica to the South Pole in a small, slow, single-engine plane.
In Hong Kong, it was reported that three American mothers had crossed into Communist China this date to visit their imprisoned sons, almost three years after the Communists had first invited them to come.
In Dallas, Tex., it was reported that continuing rains brought new threats of floods to the southern part of the state, where 1,800 persons had been evacuated.
In Rockingham, N.C., Frank Wetzel would likely go on trial for the murder of Highway Patrolman Wister Reece during the session of Richmond County Superior Court which had convened this morning. There had been wide speculation that his court-appointed attorney would seek a postponement of the trial, but an informed source, who declined to be quoted by name, had said that the attorney probably would not ask for the postponement, and that if he had requested it, it likely would not have been granted. The grand jury was expected to receive and act on a bill of indictment in the case during the afternoon. The morning session of court had been taken up with the selection of the grand jury and the charge to the jury by the judge. Crowds of spectators had begun gathering even before the opening of the session, despite the fact that the trial would probably not start until the following day. The State would contend that Mr. Wetzel was the driver of a 1957 Oldsmobile which had been stopped by the patrolman on the evening of November 5. The driver of the car had stepped out and fired a pistol shot into the patrolman's stomach. An eyewitness to the shooting, who had been hitching a ride with the driver who fired the shots, had identified Mr. Wetzel as the shooter. About an hour later, as other patrolmen sped toward the scene, Patrolman J. T. Brown pulled up behind a speeding car near Sanford, declined help from other patrolmen, believing that he was stopping an ordinary speeder. Shortly afterward, he reported over his radio that he was shot and died a few minutes later. The prosecution had elected to proceed first on the charge involving the murder of Patrolman Reece because of the eyewitness in that case. The defendant had a lengthy criminal history and was wanted in New York for a parole violation, facing a life sentence as a four-time convicted felon. He had spent 15 of his 36 years in prison and had escaped from a mental institution in New York the prior October 15 after being committed for observation.
It was also reported from Rockingham that the defendant's attorney was a former FBI agent who liked to tackle challenging legal questions. He had sought to challenge the State's authority to keep the defendant in Raleigh's Central Prison prior to the trial, but had failed in that attempt, nevertheless believing it might provide grounds for postponing the trial. There was irony in the fact that Mr. Wetzel had been captured in Bakersfield, Calif., picked up on a vagrancy charge, primarily through the efforts of the FBI tracing a series of stolen cars back to the suspect. The attorney had begun his first stint with the Bureau a year after graduation from law school at Wake Forest in 1949, then returned to private practice two years later, and in 1954 began another year of service with the Bureau. Since 1955, he had been practicing in his native Rockingham with his father. He had previously represented defendants in two murder cases, in one as a court-appointed attorney of a man accused with two others of killing a woman more than a year earlier, entering a guilty plea for the defendant after the trial started, resulting in the defendant receiving a life sentence. He was also appointed to defend Mr. Wetzel and had stated that he would definitely not enter a plea of guilty for him.
John Borchert of The News indicates that Judge Edwin Stanley, the new U.S. District Court judge for the Middle District of North Carolina at Greensboro, had sat on the bench in Charlotte as a part of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, as it opened its three-week session this date. As a visiting judge, he joined the permanent members of the Court in hearing cases through January 24. The permanent members were Chief Judge John J. Parker of Charlotte, Simon Sobeloff of Baltimore, and Clement Haynesworth of Greenville, S.C. The latter, eventually appointed by President Nixon to the Supreme Court in 1969, but having his nomination defeated because of controversial decisions he had made regarding integration and labor, was new to the Court, having been sworn in the prior spring after Judge Morris Soper of Baltimore had taken a voluntary retirement. It indicates that Judge Stanley had spent 23 years as a trial lawyer before becoming in 1954 U.S. Attorney for the Middle District, and was appointed to the District Court by the President on October 23, 1957.
Near Charlotte, three prisoners convicted of misdemeanors, each with a previous record of an escape, had jumped the fence at the Huntersville Prison Camp and fled unharmed this date. A prison official said that the three men had been returning to their cell blocks from the prison's mess hall when they jumped the fence, and guards were not permitted to shoot when misdemeanants made a break. Bloodhounds were called out in an attempt to track them and the Mecklenburg County Police had broadcast an alarm.
John Jamison of The News reports that the County commissioners this date had taken their most significant step yet in expanding courthouse facilities by purchasing two lots on the southeast corner of courthouse square.
In Chicago, a man had contracted chickenpox at age 74, his attending physician indicating that it was the oldest case he had ever seen, adding that the man's condition was not serious.
Their tv's had become bent
On the editorial page, "Will the Somber Warnings Be Erased?" finds the quiet around the White House starting to become disquieting to those who persisted in wondering what response the U.S. would make to a changed world situation. The President had not held a press conference during the previous two months. He had been ill during that time, had gone to Paris for the NATO conference, and been engaged in readying for Congress his State of the Union and budget messages. But the lack of a press conference was regrettable in light of the fact that the Gaither Report on U.S. defenses had been "leaked" and the President had received a study report urging that the Joint Chiefs be subordinated to an overall service chief.
During the time, the Soviets had staged a new and apparently successful propaganda campaign within the Middle Eastern and Asian nations. The Administration's program for stimulating the training of scientists and mathematicians was already the subject of discordant haggling.
The U.S. had been without an effective voice for either domestic or foreign listeners, with statements of the President's subordinates, such as those of White House press secretary James Hagerty, having been designed to distract rather than inform, with some of them accomplishing that purpose. During the quiet, the somber warnings issued to the nation from its scientists, educators and military men, which appeared to reflect reality in light of the launch of the Sputniks, were beginning to seem like parts of a nightmare which could and ought be forgotten.
It hopes that it was not the intent of the Administration and that the President soon would be able to submit to questions in a press conference.
"The Fearmongers Will Fail in the End" indicates that after exhaustive studies by the AMA's council on drugs and council on nutrition, the AMA had reaffirmed in stronger language its previous position that fluoridation of public water supplies was a safe method of reducing tooth decay among children.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune reported that in Evanston, Ill., where fluoridated water had been used for a decade, the incidence of tooth decay among children 6 to 8 years old had dropped by 64 percent. In the previous 12 years, 1,432 U.S. communities had approved of adding fluorides to the public water supplies, and more than 30 million Americans presently drank fluoridated water, with another 3 million drinking water containing natural fluorides, as they had been for many years.
But by charging that fluorides were "poison" or part of a "Communist conspiracy", the anti-fluoridation interests had continued to campaign against their use. Almost all of the major scientific organizations in the nation were recommending or sanctioning fluoridation, including, in addition to the AMA, the American Dental Association, the U.S. Public Health Service, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Pharmaceutical Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Water Works Association, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the State and Territorial Health Officers Association and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
It concludes that scientific evidence was overwhelming on the matter and that fluoridation would ultimately be used everywhere. "Educated Americans cannot be stampeded by fear forever."
The average Trumpy these days, not believing in science, would simply dismiss all of those organizations as Communist fronts and claim that fluoridation was turning the frogs gay.
"Let's Leave Fish & Apostrophes Alone" finds a Scottish schoolmaster's plea to eliminate the apostrophe from the English language to be one of the holiday season's silliest incidents. He had found the apostrophe to be "utterly useless". He also opposed the teaching of long division, saying that teachers "still make a child's life a misery by trying to teach something which the child is never going to use."
It indicates that the late George Bernard Shaw had been correct in saying that fish could be spelled g-h-o-t-i, but it was not the way English-speaking people spelled it, despite the fact that Mr. Shaw had bequeathed most of his $800,000 estate to the invention and propagation of a new alphabet which would spell words phonetically. A court had reduced the amount which could be spent on the new alphabet to $23,240.
It indicates that its impatience with the schoolmaster's scheme, as well as with that of Mr. Shaw, was based on the fact that millions of people had mastered the art of the use of the English language and millions more were trying to do so. To change the rules at the present time would reduce their triumphs to a verbal rubble and could revive the confusion of Babel. "Besides, without the use of the ' on top of a . how would a typist ever be able to make an ! mark again?"
"Mr. Dulle Defends a Plain Mail Box" indicates that in St. Louis, a man name Alphonse Dulle had a plain mailbox with black lettering, but it was not good enough for 27 of his neighbors who got together and decided they wanted their boxes to be black with white lettering. Mr. Dulle resisted the change, and his neighbors took offense, sought the assistance of a court to force him to change the lettering and color of his mailbox to conform to their standard, and also to get rid of his "unsightly, unfinished post" and put the box on a rack. They also sought damages for $2,000 for the anguish he had caused them.
The piece indicates that in its neighborhood there were all sorts of mailboxes with varying types of lettering and in different colors, and with different types of posts. No one had complained about the individual preference.
It hopes that the judge would throw out the case and that then Mr. Dulle would paint his box with wide, alternating stripes of green and purple, splotched with red polka dots. "We think puce, or maybe burnt umbre, would be a nice color for the lettering." It also hopes that he would take time to thumb his nose at each and every one of the "nice, neat, conforming black and white mailboxes sitting cozily on their racks."
A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "There's Still Hope for the Republic", indicates that it had seen a copy of the current Publishers' Weekly recently which had proved an antidote to the cold drizzle outside. An item from Boston said that more than 3,000 persons had sought to crowd into Jordan Hall to hear a poetry reading by Robert Frost, and when he had arrived, he found a line of poetry lovers, four abreast, stretching a block in front of the theater.
Another item, in the Wall Street Journal, had surveyed readers and found that nearly half of them spent $50 or more per year on books.
Another item from a New York television station reported that since September 23, when it had launched a half-hour program on good books at seven in the morning, more than 10,000 letters and inquiries about the program had poured in from viewers and an estimated 120,000 persons viewed the program every morning each weekday. A second series of programs would begin January 27, featuring lectures on Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, while in succeeding weeks they would cover novels by Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and others of comparable rank.
Another item stated that the Houghton Mifflin publishing company had come up with a teenaged author, 18, Lynn Doyle, who had written a novel which was dirty.
It indicates that the latter bit of news, in itself, "was enough to brighten a gray day. Sometimes we conclude there may yet be hope for the republic."
Drew Pearson indicates that when former Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had complained that someone was trying to make of him a "goat" for the missile snafu, he likely learned what the column had published on November 25, that the Administration was planning to make Mr. Wilson the fall guy.
Whether he deserved the fault was interesting and important. A review of the official statements by both Mr. Wilson and the President, plus scrutiny of backstage developments, indicated that Mr. Wilson was not really the protesting martyr he made himself out to be, and was more to blame than the President. He had, as he claimed, urged the previous summer a larger defense appropriation than the President had wanted, and it was also true that while the armed services budget was under consideration by the joint conference committee for reconciliation the previous summer, Mr. Wilson had sent a confidential letter to Senate Republican leader William Knowland that the Defense Department would accept the House budget cut of 2.2 billion dollars. That letter, though it was signed by Mr. Wilson, had been sent at the direction of the President, even though on May 14, the President had gone on national radio and television to warn of the "terrible consequences" of cutting the defense budget, that it would be "taking a fearful gamble" and that the U.S. must not go down "that foolhardy road again." Thus, the President was officially for heavy defense spending while unofficially was for the 2.2 billion dollar defense cut.
Some observers had called the statements of Mr. Wilson and the President "smugniks". He provides some evidence that such was the case. Trevor Gardner, missile executive of the Air Force, who had resigned from the Administration in protest over the missile lag, had warned: "I felt that we were not making enough progress relative to our possible enemies, and further I felt that the level of support for air power and missiles was not adequate." Following the resignation, at a press conference on February 8, 1956, the President had said, in a "smugnik": "I think overall we have no reason to believe that we are not doing everything that human science and brains and resources can do to keep our position in proper posture."
MIT president James Killian, whom the President had now made his missile "czar", had warned Congress in 1955: "Only seven percent of the government's research and development funds are allocated to basic research." Mr. Wilson, in opposing defense research in 1955 had stated, in another "smugnik": "I am not much interested as a military project in why white potatoes turn brown when they are fried."
The President, as another "smugnik", had stated in his budget message of January 21, 1954: "With the shift in emphasis to the full exploitation of air power and modern weapons, we are in a position to support strong national security programs over an indefinite period with less of a drain on our manpower, material and financial resources." Mr. Wilson had stated on October 17, 1955, after visiting with the President in Colorado, that the country was getting "more bang for a buck" in the "new look" defense policy, indicating that the Administration was cutting down on military numerical strength by putting more emphasis on technological warfare.
The President had stated in his State of the Union message of January 6, 1956: "We have improved the effectiveness and combat readiness of our forces by developing and making operational new weapons and by integrating the latest scientific developments into our military plans. We continue to push the production of the most modern military aircraft. The development of the long-range missiles has been on an accelerated basis for some time."
After the Russians had launched the first Sputnik on October 4, a barrage of reassuring "smugniks" had issued from Administration leaders. Former Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey had stated on October 17: "The real danger of the Sputnik is that some too-eager people may now demand hasty and sensational action, regardless of cost and relative merit, in an attempt to surpass what they have done." He added that Americans "must never lose our sense of balance and proportion."
Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona had stated on October 17: "We are ten years away from a truly intercontinental ballistics missile, and I'm sure we will have it before the Russians do."
White House chief of staff Sherman Adams had stated on October 16 in San Francisco: "The Administration is not interested in a high score in an outer space basketball game." (That was several years before the Houston Astrodome and the Houston, formerly San Diego, Rockets.)
Stewart Alsop indicates that among the decisions facing the President was one which was far more important than it appeared on the surface, that being his approval or not of a proposal before the National Security Council to have a new mechanism for measuring at all times where the country stood vis-à-vis the Communist bloc in the cold war and the arms race.
The most dramatic and significant moment in the hearings before the Johnson Preparedness subcommittee had occurred when CIA director Allen Dulles was briefing the subcommittee members on the U.S. status vis-à-vis the Soviets. He testified that the Soviets had been testing ballistic missiles since 1952-53, that they had stockpiled hundreds of operational IRBM's, that the U.S. forward missile bases of the Strategic Air Force, except perhaps for the Spanish and Moroccan bases, were already subject to attack from operational Soviet IRBM sites, that the coastal areas of the country were also subject to submarine-based missile attack, and that the Soviets would likely have operational ICBM's and ICBM bases in the near future.
Senator Stuart Symington began asking obvious questions of Mr. Dulles, as to how long the CIA had the intelligence, to which Mr. Dulles had replied that it had "hard" intelligence on Soviet missile progress since about 1952. He was then asked whether the intelligence had been made available to the NSC, which he said it had, and then was asked why the U.S. missile effort therefore had actually been cut back, to which he replied frankly that the CIA had "not been able to impress the NSC with the impact of the intelligence". The reason, he explained, was that the CIA was only a foreign intelligence-gathering agency and was prevented from concerning itself with the defense situation.
Mr. Alsop indicates that it was not the only reason that the NSC had not been impressed with the impact of the CIA intelligence, that the basic reason was that the men who dominated the Council, such as Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey and Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson, had not wanted to be impressed, for if they had been, they could not have defended the policy of defense cutbacks central to the whole Administration program. The fact that the CIA was limited to foreign intelligence, however, made it easier for Secretaries Humphrey and Wilson to avoid being impressed by the intelligence.
There was within the Government no single body whose continuing day-to-day function was to examine objectively where the country stood in the cold war and the arms race and so the CIA intelligence tended to be considered within a vacuum. During the pre-Sputnik era, prior to the previous October, leading Administration spokesmen had repeated their belief that the country had never been stronger. In a literal sense, gauging by its firepower available to U.S. armed forces, that was undoubtedly true. But in a comparative sense with the Soviet Union, it was untrue.
It was easy for the highest officials to believe their own complacent reassurances because no one had the job of constantly comparing Soviet and U.S. power in meaningful terms. Theoretically, that was the job of the NSC, but the members of it were also the chief Government policymakers and it was foolish to expect policymakers to sit in judgment of their own policies.
Under the present system, there were only occasional and sporadic efforts to arrive at a balanced judgment of where the country really stood vis-à-vis the Soviets, one such effort having been the report of the Gaither Committee, appointed by the President to assess the country's standing in the missile and satellite fields. No intelligence had been made available to that committee which was not also available to the NSC. But because the committee had no special interest in defending established policies, its members had been impressed by the CIA intelligence. The proposal now before the President amounted to establishment of a kind of continuing Gaither Committee.
Harry Golden writes of Carl Sandburg, celebrating his 80th birthday this date, quoting him as having said: "In the beginning was an untouched land in America with promises…." One of the promises was that the son of an immigrant would be "the voice of America singing", as Mr. Sandburg had put it. An immigrant father who could not sign his name could have a son in America who would write a million words or more and give to America a literary monument to the human greatness of Abraham Lincoln, whose mother could not sign her name.
He recounts that on January 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Ill., a Swedish announcement had come that the Sandburg family had a boy, Mr. Sandburg having said that he was a "welcome man-child".
He had said of the plains and the rolling prairies: "The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart."
He had said of Chicago: "Hog Butcher for the world. Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat."
Then he had come to live in the mountains of North Carolina at Flat Rock, which Mr. Golden regards as having been proper, as the mountains in North Carolina represented People and North Carolina as a whole represented People instead of Things, and Mr. Sandburg knew People.
Of them he had said: "The People? A weaver of steel-and-concrete floors and walls 50 floors up, a blueprint designer, and expert calculator and accountant, a carpenter with an eye for joists and elbows, a bricklayer with an ear for the piling of a trowel, a pile-driver crew pounding down the pier joists."
There had been a plateau near Flat Rock at one time, a "heartland" of millions of years earlier, and the geologists had said it might have been the very first mountains which had erupted from the earth. It was right for him to be in the North Carolina mountains because they were Forever and he was Forever; "and Forever greets him on this, his 80th birthday; and in North Carolina it is closer to Flat Rock, and this, too, is very good."
The editors note that Mr. Golden, editor of the Carolina Israelite, and an old friend of Mr. Sandburg, had appended a note to the article which read: "Of course I have copied the style of Sandburg in writing this, which was the idea used in the 18th century whenever a great writer was honored. The editorialists made an attempt to use his style as further evidence of their esteem." They also note that the quotations used in the article were from Mr. Sandburg's This America, Collected Poems, Always the Young Strangers, and Remembrance Rock.
A letter writer from Cheraw, S.C., urges people to inform their state and Congressional delegations that they demanded that the Congress retain its rightful place as representatives of the people's wishes and curb the actions of the courts which were taking away the rights of the states. "We should put the welfare of our nation above politics. Jobs for our people must be provided before it's too late and we have the relief rolls again and the WPA and the CCC." He indicates that people who drew pensions needed an increase to meet the high cost of living, especially among the elderly and those who were ill. He asserts that a person presently at age 50 could hardly find work of any kind and were told they were too old to hire. He urges that aid provided to people would be used to purchase goods from the markets and so everyone in the country would benefit.
The Epiphany for 1958 and 2025: Neither begin with any propitious augury about them.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.