The Charlotte News
Saturday, October 18, 1958
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a rash of bomb threats had plagued Jewish temples and synagogues, a school, a store, an agency and a hospital on Friday between Boston and Little Rock, Ark., but no bombs had been found by police. The threats and other anti-Semitic actions had also taken place in New York City and Jersey City and Elizabeth, N.J. Someone had also phoned the United Arab Republic consulate in New York and said that a bomb would explode in that building. In Little Rock, police had rushed to B'Nai Israel and Agudath Achim Synagogues in the heart of the city, following threats, via letters mailed to the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette, that the structures would be bombed. Police had stood guard on Friday night while services were held in B'Nai Israel Temple, but no services were being conducted on Friday night at the other threatened synagogue. A telephone caller had told Boston police that Beth Israel Hospital would be bombed, with Beth Israel being a constituent agency of the Associated Jewish Philanthropies of Boston. In New York, a caller had told an operator at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan that "your synagogue will be next." A lower East Side factory which made matzos, that is unleavened bread, received a similar call. In the Bronx, an effigy of a male figure had been found hanging from an electrical light pole in front of the Emanuel Synagogue Youth Center, the headless figure, stuffed with old clothes, bearing no sign. A social worker at the New York Guild for the Jewish blind had been told via telephone, "There's a bomb there," then hung up. In Newark, police had guarded Temple B'Nai Abraham where 20 windows had been broken. The rabbi said, "The whole thing was probably nothing more than boys who may have thrown some rocks." A meeting had been canceled the previous night in B'nai Sholem Synagogue in Bristol, Va., based on a threat telephoned to a Protestant church worker, the caller stating, "You'd better warn the Jews we're going to blow up the temple on King Street," prompting police to place a guard at that temple. In Atlanta on Friday night, Rabbi Jacob Rothschild held the first Sabbath service since the Temple had been bombed the previous Sunday, stating that the bombing had its benefits: "Together with an aroused humanity, we shall rear from the rubble of devastation a city and a land in which all men are truly brothers—and none shall make them afraid."
At the Atomic Test Site in Yucca Flat, Nev., the ninth nuclear test of the current series had been fired this date from a wooden tower 75 feet above the desert floor. The Atomic Energy Commission said that the device detonated was in the sub-kiloton range, less powerful than 1,000 tons of TNT.
In Washington, former President Truman this date accused Vice-President Nixon of carrying on a political campaign of character assassination.
In Abilene, Kans., the President concluded an overnight stay in his boyhood home city this date, accompanied by Mrs. Eisenhower. They had left for Colorado for a quiet weekend visit with the ailing mother of Mrs. Eisenhower.
Meanwhile, the FBI and Secret Service agents joined city police in Wichita, Kans., investigating an incident in which a man had blown himself up in the Wichita air terminal the previous day, after initially setting a package on a rental car counter and then, when the clerk went to pick it up, pushed her hand away, grabbed the package, walked about 40 feet, at which point the bomb inside had detonated, killing him. Police speculated as to why, if he had intended suicide, he would use a bomb. In a briefcase he had also been carrying, not blown up by the blast, had been a .32-caliber automatic pistol, a more conventional means of suicide. The man had also taken out a $25,000 flight insurance policy, though the company which issued the policy said it would have been worthless in the case of suicide. The FBI and Secret Service had investigated the possibility that his aim involved the President and his trip later in the day to Abilene and Salina, about 90 miles to the north of Wichita. But the agents found no evidence of any link between the bombing and the President's visit. Federal court records in Oklahoma City showed that he had been convicted the previous June 24 of four counts of income tax evasion and was placed on three years of probation. His widow in Tulsa said that he had been out of a job for about a month and had gone to Wichita to seek employment. His father was quoted as telling neighbors that his son also was losing his eyesight and had heart trouble. The man had been an aircraft worker and police said that they were informed he was also an "inventor and tinkerer". Neighbors described him as a quiet man who stayed pretty much in his own yard. Well, he fit the type. All such people are to be suspected of being potential bombers, assassins, or God only knows what. Don't go near them. Whatever they have could be catching. Besides, if you try to ingratiate them to society, then they no longer fit the bill as "loners", and they could become really dangerous. Keep them all under regular surveillance.
Bob Slough of The News reports that the previous night, evangelist Billy Graham had preached on the two roads of life, the broad and the narrow, as outlined by Christ's Sermon on the Mount. He spoke to 10,750 people in the Charlotte Coliseum, saying, "You may be the only one going the narrow road but Jesus demanded that we enter the narrow gate." The previous night's crowd had been the smallest since the evangelist had begun his crusade four weeks earlier, bringing the total attendance for the crusade to 333,000. "Inquirers", responding to the evangelist's called to join Christ, had numbered 352 the previous night, bringing the total for the crusade to 12,000.
During the course of his sermon he told of how he had been guided into a landing by ground personnel over a field at Tokyo shrouded in fog, with zero visibility—seemingly making him possibly the model for the 1957 film "Zero Hour!".
On the editorial page, Drew Pearson provides the inside reason why both the President and Secretary of State Dulles had announced that they would not seek to force Chiang Kai-shek to remove his forces from Quemoy. Chiang had threatened to remove to Japan and leave Formosa to its fate, doing so following Secretary Dulles's press conference crack that Nationalist occupation of the offshore islands was "foolish" and that Chiang was not likely to rule the Chinese mainland again. To the proud Chiang, that amounted to calling him a fool. He thus had a tantrum and then lapsed into brooding, indicating that he would seek exile in Japan and even selected a particular hot springs spot on the east coast of Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island.
The threat to abandon Formosa had alarmed Secretary Dulles, who had no desire to let Formosa slip behind the "bamboo curtain". If Chiang were to leave under protest over U.S. policy, the whole Nationalist structure might collapse, with one intelligence estimate warning that a third of Chiang's forces would go over to the Communist side in case of a breakdown on Formosa.
To soothe Chiang, Mr. Dulles had called another press conference and endeavored to eat his former words, saying that the disposition of Nationalist troops was "entirely a military matter" and that the U.S. had "no plans whatsoever to urge Chiang to reduce his forces on the offshore islands."
That, however, was the opposite of what he had been urging in secret talks with Nationalist leaders, that having been that in return for partial withdrawal from Quemoy and Matsu, an offer to increase Chiang's forces on Formosa with supersonic jet planes, anti-aircraft rockets, and other modern weaponry, and to station U.S. Marines on Formosa as evidence of U.S. determination to defend the main island to the last ditch.
Chiang, on the other hand, was negotiating for things which Mr. Dulles had politely let him know could not be granted. He had also demanded that Mr. Dulles call off the Warsaw diplomatic talks with the Chinese Communists, while Mr. Dulles had been seeking to walk a diplomatic tightrope which would appease the Nationalists without provoking the Communists.
Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy had been conducting military negotiations directly with Chiang in Taipei, but Mr. Dulles had also talked with Chinese Ambassador George Yeh in Washington. During the latter secret talks, the Secretary had agreed with the Ambassador that the Communist cease-fire was only a temporary tactic and that the Communists could be expected to stir up trouble again, if not in the Formosa Strait, then somewhere else, and that renewed pressure on Korea was likely.
Walter Lippmann, who would be gone for three weeks on a trip to the Soviet Union, reminds that, in defense of Secretary of State Dulles, he was doing something which had never been done before, conducting a difficult tripartite negotiation between the two Chinese governments and the principal European allies of the U.S., while also conducting a series of press conferences, which had been varied in their statements. In the latter, he had been concerned not so much with the disclosure of the facts as with saving face for Formosa, the U.S., Vice-President Nixon, and for the critics at home and abroad. It required much twisting and turning, and insistence that there be no public demand for a straightforward statement of the U.S. position.
The problem lay in the attempt to continue to conduct secret negotiations with a continual output of public pronouncements, with it evident that for there to be any understanding with the Communist Chinese, there could be nothing agreed to in principle though concessions would be made in fact, while it was also evident that if concessions were made, Mr. Dulles would have to make them without forcing Chiang Kai-shek to admit that he had made them.
Granting that all of that was necessary, it was not necessary to accompany the negotiations with so many contradictory public statements, for while most people had short memories, there were a large number of responsible people in the capitals of the world who could remember what was said from one week to the next. The latter group would rather be told honestly that the negotiations were delicate and had to be secret than to be told so many different things at press conferences. For then they would not believe any of them.
Mr. Dulles was concerned with saving Chiang's face and concerned, rightly, that Communist China should not think that he was running away, saving face for the U.S. He was also concerned, perhaps excessively so, with avoiding a compromise which would be called appeasement. But he ought also to be concerned that the word of the Secretary of State was believed and trusted, and Mr. Lippmann opines that on that point he had not been enough concerned.
He suggests that it would be a great relief and would enhance the prestige of the U.S. if the Secretary announced that the situation had reached a point where the issues were too delicate and critical to be discussed publicly. Most people would believe him and would accept his decision, thus saving much of the embarrassment caused by the twisting and turning, for it was one of those occasions when good diplomacy could not be combined with honest publicity.
A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which Is Revealed One Of Life's Greatest Treasures:
