The Charlotte News

Saturday, November 1, 1958

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the battle for control of Congress had gone into the final weekend this date with the Republican campaigners armed with fresh economic ammunition in the form of another big reduction in unemployment. The President had provided the news of a decline of 300,000 in joblessness during October in a coast-to-coast television address from Baltimore broadcast Friday night—appearing as rather poor timing on a Friday trick-or-treat night when both children and parents would be scarce from the tv set. As the President assailed the Democrats on issues ranging from civil rights to missiles, he came under renewed fire from Democratic campaigners. Concluding his role in the campaign, the President told his cheering Republican audience that in the previous three months, unemployment had dropped by 1.5 million, adding: "That's Republican progress, not just talk of leaf-raking schemes, not Federal handouts, just sensible leadership." In Casper, Wyo., Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson challenged the President to list any "radical Democratic" legislation he would ask a Republican Congress to repeal. Addressing a Democratic rally, the Senator scoffed at the "left-wing Socialism" campaign theme which he said had been blueprinted by RNC chairman Meade Alcorn. Senator George Smathers of Florida, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial committee, said that the President and Vice-President had failed to win over independent and Democratic votes. He stated: "Ike has won no votes. The people realize that he is sadly miscast—or sadly misinformed—when he mouths hobgoblin charges about the 'harebrained' Democratic Party." He went on to predict a Democratic gain of at least 12 Senate seats in the midterm elections. En route to a weekend of campaigning in Alaska, Vice-President Nixon told an airport crowd at Billings, Mt.: "The wage earners have it better today than in any of the 20 years of the New Deal—and they've got peace to boot." He described the current year as a good one economically and said, "This year will be the best year in our history," provided the voters would elect a Republican Congress. (He also probably told them he had a bridge he wished to interest them in.) In his attack on Democratic economic policies, the President coined a new epithet, "Gloomdoggler", without naming anyone. He said: "One gloomdoggler, a Senator, actually said that the recession was—and I am quoting exactly—'planned, premeditated and predesigned by this Administration'... No true Republican ever has been and never will be guilty of the crime of preplanning, premeditating or predesigning the misery of Americans." They were provoking him when he done it.

In London, it was reported that the Soviet news agency Tass had said this date that novelist Boris Pasternak had been cleared to leave Russia to accept his Nobel Prize for his novel, Doctor Zhivago. A statement said that Mr. Pasternak had written a letter to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stressing his ties with Russia and acknowledging that he may have committed errors. The statement said: "In connection with the letter of Pasternak to Khrushchev, Tass is authorized to state that no obstacles will be placed by the Soviet authorities if Pasternak expressed his wish to go abroad to receive the prize awarded to him. The reports spread by the bourgeois press to the effect that Pasternak was allegedly refused the right to go abroad are a crude fabrication. As became known, Pasternak has up to now not applied to any Soviet state authority with the request for a visa to travel abroad and on the part of these organs there were and will be no objection against granting him such an exit visa. If Pasternak wishes to leave altogether the Soviet Union and the social order and people which he slanders in his anti-Soviet composition, 'Doctor Zhivago', the official authorities will not hinder him in that respect in any way. He will be given the chance of departing beyond the frontiers of the USSR and of experiencing personally all the 'delights of the capitalist paradise'." The text of a Tass report broadcast in Russian stated: "On 31 October Boris Pasternak addressed a letter to N. S. Khrushchev, to the Central committee of the Soviet Communist party and to the Soviet government in which he says that he has informed the Swedish Academy of his voluntary refusal to accept the Nobel prize. Pasternak says that he is bound to Russia by his birth, his life and work and he cannot visualize his fate apart from her. 'Whatever my mistakes and errors may have been,' the letter says, 'I could not imagine that I would find myself in the midst of such a political campaign which has been fanned around my name in the West.'" The letter had followed a frenzied campaign waged against Mr. Pasternak by the Soviet press and radio since he had accepted and later refused the Nobel Prize for Literature. Newspaper and Communist organizations throughout the Soviet Union had demanded that he be stripped of his citizenship, which could have involved expulsion from his mother country. He had been awarded the prize after Doctor Zhivago had been banned in Russia but published in the West, telling of the turmoil brought into ordinary people's lives by the Russian Revolution of 1917. Earlier, the Soviet Communist organ Pravda had carried an editorial denouncing "renegades" betraying Communism for Western money. The Literary Gazette carried denunciations of the author drummed up by Communist cells across the country. Pravda accused the West of paying "all sorts of renegades" to betray Communism, hinting at trouble ahead for other Communist bloc writers. The only known support which Mr. Pasternak had received inside the Communist bloc after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize came from the Polish Writers Union, which had sent him a telegram of congratulations. The U.S. would probably offer him asylum to live in the U.S., according to Government officials in Washington. But they said that it was more likely that he would want to live in a nation neutral to the East-West struggle. The State Department, meanwhile, had declined to comment on any possibility that the U.S. would offer Mr. Pasternak residence. The reluctance of the State Department to seek to make propaganda out of the Soviet suppression of Doctor Zhivago and the attacks against the author by Communist officials was thought to stem from the uncertainty over whether Russia would go so far as to oust him from the country and, if so, whether the 67-year old writer would want to live in the U.S., as well as concern that any official U.S. expression on the subject might further jeopardize the safety and well-being of the author.

Also in Moscow, it was reported that the Soviet Union this date had accused Iran of preparing to sign a new military treaty with the U.S. "which directly endangers" Russia's southern border.

In Athens, Greece, Defense Secretary Neil McElroy had arrived by plane this date for a four-day visit with Greek Government and American officials.

In Amman, Jordan, air, road and telephone communications between Jordan and the United Arab Republic had been restored this date after an interruption of over three months during which British paratroopers had been deployed in Jordan in the wake of the coup in Iraq.

In Rabat, the Moroccan Government this date announced that it was opening diplomatic relations with Communist China.

In Cairo, a weekly newspaper this date said that the U.S. was considering participation in Egypt's Aswan high dam project.

In Jakarta, Indonesia, it was reported by an Indonesian legislator that Communist China had offered capital and technicians to build a steel factory in the country.

In Leuchars, Scotland, Prince Philip had arrived by Comet jetliner this date after his three-day visit to Canada. He drove off to meet Queen Elizabeth at Meigle, a Perthshire village.

A photograph shows a local Charlotte man running wild in a mask the previous night at the Coliseum in a combination of ice hockey, Halloween and politics, carrying a banner which said, "Vote Democratic". (Didn't they later make a first-run drive-in movie series out of that combination? We do not know as we skipped it all.) He was the campaign manager for Dave Clark, who was the Democratic candidate for the Tenth District House seat currently occupied by Charles Jonas, the only Republican member of the North Carolina Congressional delegation. He somehow seems to have stepped right out of the following night's "Maverick" episode, in which there would be depicted among the masks donkeys and elephants, and, in one instance, a head-mask resemblant perhaps to a cross between Richard Nixon and Thomas Dewey, though mayhaps we see things not intended by the script. For how can either gentleman have been in San Miguel, Mexico, some 75 years earlier? It could not have been. In any event, perhaps the campaign manager for Mr. Clark had been reading TV Guide and decided to get the jump on things to convince voters that he was not a "gloomdoggler" but rather a soothsayer.

Were her defense attorneys up to the task?

As we have fallen behind there will be no further notes on either the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.

Framed Edition

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