The Charlotte News
Friday, October 10, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from the U.N. in New York that the U.S. had warned this date that any Soviet nuclear tests conducted after October 31 would nullify the President's offer to withhold further testing for a one-year period. The warning had come from U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., as part of a major disarmament speech before the 81-nation Political Committee. Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Valerian Zorin was expected to state the Soviet views during the opening round of debate. Ambassador Lodge expressed regret that the Soviets had resumed testing nuclear weapons on the eve of the October 31 talks in Geneva, which would consider a permanent suspension of testing, indicating that Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had cast doubt on his Government's willingness to cease testing. He referred to Mr. Gromyko's statement that the Soviet Union might match the Western tests blast for blast. Ambassador Lodge said that the U.S. offer to suspend testing for one year had been made to facilitate the Geneva talks "and it would be regrettable indeed if the Soviet Union took steps which had the opposite effect." He declared that the resumption of the Soviet testing had raised a question as to whether the U.S. offer still held, and he said that he was authorized to assure the U.N., on behalf of the U.S. Government, that, as the President had announced, the U.S. would withhold further testing for a year from the date the negotiations in Geneva began, unless the Soviets conducted further testing before that date, October 31. Trick or treat…
In Las Vegas, it was reported that the fourth nuclear detonation in the current ten-shot test series at Yucca Flat at the Nevada Test Site had occurred this date.
At Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, it was reported this date by the Military Air Transport Service that the first nonstop Pacific crossing by the Air Force's four-engined C-133 Cargomaster had occurred.
In Seoul, South Korea, it was reported by the U.S. Army this date that five Koreans had entered an off-limits American artillery area near Seoul and were killed by an explosion.
In Paris, it was reported that the French Government had decided this date that rebellious Algeria would have 66 seats in the new French National Assembly, two-thirds of those seats to be for Moslem members.
In Taipei, Formosa, U.S. Navy headquarters announced an American rescue this date of 131 Chinese passengers from a ship which had run aground on a voyage from Communist China's port of Swatow.
The Government announced this date that unemployment had dropped to 588,000 in September, marking what the Government called a significant improvement in the job situation.
The Government joined in the effort of the NAACP in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to make permanent the temporary restraining order preventing private operation of Little Rock public high schools, set to be heard by the Court October 15.
In Raleigh, it was reported that State Attorney General Malcolm Seawall, addressing the Shelby Kiwanis Club the previous day, said that it would be up to local school boards in the state to carry out provisions of state law barring public school enrollment of children whose parents or guardian lived in another state. He said that to avoid the law "would becloud and render suspicious the good faith motives" of the state's legal plans for dealing with school segregation issues. Some children from schools closed by integration in Arkansas and Virginia had entered North Carolina schools, most of whom were living with relatives in the state to continue their education. He said that while he was sympathetic with those children, they had to abide by the law and that a ruling by the Attorney General's office in 1956, before he had entered the office, had said clearly that only children of bona fide residents of the state were eligible to enter public schools. In that instance, a Caswell County girl, whose parents had moved to another state, wished to remain behind to continue her schooling, but was not permitted to do so. Mr. Seawall, who was the son of a former State Attorney General and State Supreme Court Justice, had spoken out strongly in defense of the state's moderate stand on school segregation issues, under which three cities, Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, had begun limited desegregation. Dr. Charles Carroll, the state superintendent of public instruction, said that the power of assigning children to schools was in local hands and that he believed Mr. Seawall's interpretation of the law "would be of primary value to county and city boards of education." Mr. Seawall said that the state could not afford to become an asylum state for those school pupils residing in states which were presently having "extreme and complicated school problems", that to do so "would complicate the school plan North Carolina now has in force and would be a departure from the middle-of-the-road direction in education matters which the state is now pursuing."
In North Hollywood, Calif., Maverick, whose defiance of authority, contempt for conformity and rejection of security, had made him a hero, as he had raised himself from when he was very small and for four years had remained one step ahead of the law, which could not outsmart him, and so had finally overpowered him the previous week after showing up with a tranquilizer gun. It was law enforcement who had tagged him with the name "Maverick" because they had been trying to catch him for four years, chasing him by car and on foot, but never coming close. They had baited traps with meat in which capsules of tranquilizing drugs had been concealed, but Maverick ate the meat and spit out the drugs. They finally realized the type of adversary they were up against when they put a female boxer in a cage with a one-way door, and Maverick had ripped the back of the cage open and taken the lady into the hills with him. At the same time he was outwitting the authorities, Maverick was rebuffing all efforts by friendly residents to domesticate him, accepting their food, raiding their garbage cans, but lighting out when they spoke of him settling down. Maverick had been placed under a death sentence in the city jail unless someone would adopt him. Newspaper readers learned of his exploits and flooded the city with 1,000 requests for the animal—one for each dollar which Maverick kept tucked inside his jacket for a rainy day, per the instructions of his pappy. But the previous day, the authorities had auctioned off Maverick and a woman from Van Nuys had paid $130 for him. She said that she felt he had supported himself for four years and deserved a good home, and escorted him away to her 2.5 acre estate in her sleek red convertible. City jail officials, not anxious to match wits again with the crafty Maverick, had a parting word of advice for the woman who had paid his bail: "Please keep him tied up." The question now for the next episode on Sunday is whether Maverick will stick around or again fly the coop. Stay tuned…
On the editorial page, Walter Lippmann finds that the seven-day cease-fire of the bombardment of Quemoy by the Communist Chinese was a reminder that the game at Quemoy was primarily political and that the Communist Chinese Government, which held the high cards in the offshore islands, knew how to play them skillfully—just like Maverick. Since they held the military initiative at Quemoy, they could turn on the bombardment or turn it off, as a water tap, and by turning it off without waiting to negotiate a cease-fire, had put Chiang Kai-shek in a position where he could hardly refuse to supply the garrison and civilians on Quemoy and yet had to do that only as a favor granted to him by the Communist Chinese. Mr. Lippmann finds the cease-fire to have been intended as a dramatic way of demonstrating to the Chinese on Formosa that Communist China was militarily predominant in the area of the offshore islands.
The Communist gambit, he suggests, had become possible when Secretary of State Dulles had acknowledged publicly that the U.S. would not carry the war to the mainland to raise the artillery blockade of Quemoy. The real issue was not always well understood within the U.S., with all the talk of "defending" Quemoy and not "retreating" having contained much naïveté in view of the real attitude taken by the Administration. What was causing disturbance was the decision to defend the island against invasion, when there were no indications that the Communist Chinese had intended to invade. The U.S. declarations and defiance had never meant, however, that it would defend Quemoy against the bombardment itself or that it would authorize Chiang to lead the U.S. into an aerial strike against the artillery positions on the mainland.
The President and Secretary Dulles had been willing to accept the bombardment of Quemoy and to answer it only by measures involving running the blockade through convoys of the supply ships. Their decision not to make war against the mainland had given the Communist Chinese the initiative at Quemoy, which the Communist Chinese Government was now exploiting politically with the cease-fire. The political objective of the Communists was to convince the Chinese in Formosa that their future lay with the mainland and not in continuing to be a client of the U.S. The cease-fire had been accompanied by an offer to negotiate with Chiang about a settlement of the offshore islands, and it was probably implied in the statement that the Communist Chinese wished to negotiate with the U.S. at the Warsaw diplomatic meeting regarding the Chinese-American issues.
The offer to Chiang followed closely on what had been said by the President and Secretary Dulles at their press conferences during the previous week, having eliminated the idea that Chiang would return to the mainland and in doing so, had destroyed the fiction that he was in truth the legitimate government of China. The Communist Chinese had been quick to point out to Chiang and to the Chinese on Formosa that their choice was between exile in Formosa and a deal with the mainland, though it did not mean that there would be a deal between the two Chinese factions anytime soon. There would be maneuvering both publicly and privately, but it did mean that the ground had been prepared and the seeds had been planted for a Chinese deal.
It was not a surprise as it had long been probable that as the U.S. was playing a game with Chiang, the end would be a deal in which the U.S. would be left on the outside. Mr. Lippmann finds that the fatal error of U.S. policy had been the refusal to see that the military threat to Formosa was negligible, given indisputable command of the sea by the U.S., but that Formosa could not be saved from absorption by the mainland if the U.S. staked everything on aging Chiang. Without a policy disengaged from Chiang and designed to maintain some form of autonomy in Formosa after he departed, there was no tenable U.S. policy. It was tied to Chiang and what happened to U.S. interests would be determined by Chiang or his successors.
The misleading preoccupation by the U.S. with the military defense of Formosa was a grave handicap to lucid thinking in that field. He indicates that the President, for example, had no legal authority to use U.S. power at Quemoy except as he could say with a good conscience that what happened at Quemoy was related to the military defense of Formosa, per the 1955 treaty. Secretary Dulles tried for awhile to construct a legal position for the President, who was to say that although Chiang had "foolishly" garrisoned so many troops on Quemoy, he would be lost if the troops surrendered and thus the U.S. had to prove its courage and resolution, no matter how negligible and foolish the reason giving rise to it.
Mr. Lippmann suggests that what the U.S. would do about Quemoy was a test of the courage of the U.S. only if it announced to the world that it regarded it as a test of its courage. The world was aware that the U.S. had fought three big wars during the previous 50 years and the world, friendly, hostile and neutral, would have no doubt about the courage of the country. Otherwise, the problem of Quemoy was a practical one which could and should be treated not as if the U.S. stood at Armageddon, but coolly, calmly, and with common sense. Quemoy was not like Berlin any more than it was like London, Paris or Washington, and evacuating Quemoy would not be tantamount to the appeasement in 1938 at Munich. In that latter instance, Czechoslovakia had been an independent nation which was set up by treaty and guaranteed by the Allies, whereas Quemoy was an island of no political significance within a harbor on the Chinese mainland. Czechoslovakia had been a country which contained the strategic bastion of Central and Eastern Europe, whereas, strategically, Quemoy was negligible for the defense of Formosa, for the defense of the mainland, and presented merely a minor nuisance.
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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