The Charlotte News
Tuesday, November 11, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that Federal agents had surprised nearly two dozen Cuban rebel sympathizers in the act of loading munitions aboard a plane and charged 22 persons with violating the neutrality law. Two women had been among the group seized with an arms-laden B-18 bomber on abandoned Prospect Air Field the previous night. Border Patrol agents had blasted out a fleeing automobile's tire with machine gun fire, preventing the getaway of five of the prisoners. The airplane pilot, a 41-year old who lived in Miami, had vanished in a truck but was arrested later at a Fort Lauderdale bus station. Agents said that a big assortment of rifles, machine guns, ammunition, medical supplies, boots and field equipment had been placed aboard the plane as they watched from a concealed location. Some of the material was in packages marked "Fidel", presumably for rebel leader Fidel Castro's army, dominating much of Cuba's Oriente Province. There was no immediate word on where the plane had come from or who owned it. Agents said that the last owner of available record was the Bank of Anchorage in Alaska. The two-engine plane had landed at around dusk on the former airfield which was being developed as an industrial site by Fort Lauderdale. Residents of nearby homes had telephoned Broward County authorities about the plane being loaded.
In Havana, the Cuban Army said that a 72-hour battle near Santiago had caused more rebel deaths than any single engagement since Fidel Castro had launched his revolt almost two years earlier. Government troops had reportedly killed 244 rebels and possibly more while suffering six killed and "various wounded".
In San Antonio, Tex., it was reported that a space scientist this date said that Russia was developing an intercontinental rocket glider with a range of up to 12,500 miles.
In Welch, W. Va., Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker had said this date that the aim of Russia's build-up in capability for limited war was blackmail.
In Amman, it was reported that Jordan was expected to complain to the U.N. about what King Hussein had called an attempt to kill or capture him in a flight over Syria. The Jordan Parliament had been called into an emergency session to hear the retaliatory steps promised by the King. He had raced home on Monday with United Arab Republic jet fighters in pursuit two hours after he had taken off for a vacation in Europe, co-piloting the plane himself. While the UAR was inclined to play down the incident, the King had emerged as a hero in the eyes of many of his people, as they mixed wild celebrations of joy with bitter demonstrations against the UAR. Relations between the King and Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser's Republic, comprised of Egypt and Syria, had worsened just when there were indications that the two Arab leaders had been about to patch up their feud. Some officials in Jordan reportedly viewed the incident as an attempt to kidnap the 23-year old King and force him to sign his abdication papers, but there was no confirmation of that theory. UAR officials in Cairo denied the charges by the King that the jets had sought to force his plane down, saying that the King's plane had lacked proper clearance to fly over the Syrian Province of the UAR. Premier Nasser was reported to be convinced that Syrian authorities had acted properly but also to be upset about the incident, which had worsened UAR-Jordanian relations after recent improvement. A national holiday had been declared throughout Jordan to celebrate the escape of the King. Crowds surged through the narrow streets of Amman on Monday night, firing off Roman candles and rifles.
In Tokyo, it was reported by Japan's Maritime Safety Board this date that two Japanese fishing boats, with 24 men aboard, had been seized the previous day by Communist patrol boats about 100 miles southeast of the Communist Chinese port of Tsingtao.
In Buenos Aires, it was reported that El Presidente Arturo Frondizi had declared a state of siege in Argentina this date in a drastic bid to quell an oil workers' strike which he had branded as a Communist-inspired insurrection.
In Accra, Ghana, the Government had accused 43 persons of plotting to kill Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and two of his ministers, resulting in the arrest of 20 persons as police hunted for the other 23 this date.
Key Congressional Democrats were weighing a serious drive in the new Congress to plug long-standing tax loopholes in an expected effort to obtain added revenue. Faced with new Government spending prospects and a massive budget deficit, tax experts regarded the move as the only feasible alternative to a general tax increase. No boost in either personal or business income tax rates was now contemplated. Retiring Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks had renewed on Monday a suggestion for a uniform manufacturers' sales tax, saying that it would permit some cuts in both corporate and individual income tax rates and still increase revenue. But key House members saw such a move as at best a last-ditch device. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, in a post-election statement the previous week, had called attention to tax law revision hearings to be undertaken by the House Ways & Means Committee, when the new Congress would convene in January. Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, the chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, had noted in a forecast of possible tax legislation published the previous September that "tax differentials and preferences now existing … cut our tax base by billions of dollars." He had suggested that areas of possible tax revision included the favorable tax treatment presently afforded those who converted ordinary income to capital gains, the allowances for depletion of natural resources such as oil and coal, the special rules favoring income of insurance companies, and other groups afforded favorable tax treatment, including farmers.
A counter-proposal by Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire had taken some of the fire out of a growing revolt by the Senate's Republican liberals this date, demanding a greater voice in Republican affairs. Senator Bridges proposed to expand the Republican leadership jobs to three and include a liberal in one of the posts. In a telephone interview, he said that he would the following month discuss his proposal with the President and Vice-President. As head of the Republican policy committee, he announced also that he would support a move to give Republican newcomers, as well as holdover liberals, at least one important committee assignment each. In the past, new Republican Senators had been relegated to membership on minor committees, with assignments made on the basis of strict seniority. Under the leadership of Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Majority Leader, Democrats had modified the seniority system to put each new member on at least one top committee. If the proposal of Senator Bridges was adopted for the Republicans, it would give each new Republican Senator, such as Kenneth Keating of New York and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, important posts at the beginning of their Senate careers. It would also move up to more important committee jobs members such as Senator Jacob Javits of New York and Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky, who had been elected two years earlier. The possibility of obtaining choice committee assignments seemed likely to ease some of the other complaints of liberal Republicans against the solidly conservative Republican Senate leadership. Apparently lacking the votes to keep Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois from succeeding Senator William Knowland as Republican Minority Leader, the liberals had been working quietly to pick off second place in the lineup, their goal being to place one of their number in the group which conferred weekly with the President on legislative matters. Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas, one of the liberal group, said that he thought that was needed "to get broader programs that will appeal to a wider range of people." In proposing an expansion of the leadership, Senator Bridges said that he would suggest that an assistant leader be placed above the party whip. It was evident that Senator Bridges would prefer to have another conservative as assistant leader.
In Little Rock, Ark., five of the six members of the School Board had discussed resigning en masse to escape their integration "hot seat", a report confirmed the previous day by a member of the Board who declined to be identified. The Board president said that the group would meet officially this date, ostensibly to discuss the latest order of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, handed down the previous day, that integration proceed at once in Little Rock's public schools and that the practice of conducting segregated classes in public school buildings, leased under contract to a private corporation, cease at once. If the Board were to resign, there would be no one left to do routine tasks such as issuing paychecks or to attempt to carry out the order of the Court of Appeals. But if they remained in their jobs, they wondered how they would integrate schools which were not operating. Governor Orval Faubus had closed the four high schools in Little Rock to avoid integration and had shown no inclination to reopen them. A county supervisor had said that he was not sure who could appoint a new Board. When a single vacancy occurred, the Board itself made the selection, but when the number of members was reduced below a quorum, it became a different matter. At one time, it would rest with a county judge, but the supervisor believed that the appointment power had been provided to the County Board of Education by a pact of 1942. A recent legislative act had authorized the recall of Board members provided that vacancies would be filled by a county judge until the next school election. The supervisor said that the law did not cover, however, resignation en masse. If the present Board were to quit, Little Rock voters would have the opportunity of installing a new slate of members at the regular school election on December 6. Normally, only three of the six members would be up for re-election. Thus far, only one candidate had announced for a Board position, a Little Rock clothier who was a friend of the Governor. It could be an indication that not too many people were willing to assume the Board's responsibility in the integration dispute. Both the Board and the school superintendent, Virgil Blossom, had been under heavy segregationist fire since the outbreak of the crisis the previous year. Mr. Blossom was recognized as the architect of the city's gradual integration plan, which had first been formulated in 1956 and was implemented the previous fall. A majority of the Board had never wavered in backing the superintendent. Only Dr. Dale Alford, who had the previous week defeated Representative Brooks Hays, a racial moderate, in the Congressional election, had disagreed with the Board majority. There was speculation that the Board, before its possible resignation, would buy out Mr. Blossom's contract, which still had 19 months left at $1,100 per month.
John Kilgo of The News reports that two Charlotte teenagers had been slashed by a knife-welding youth early on Saturday morning outside Fireman's Hall while a rock 'n' roll dance was in progress inside the building. One of the boys had to have 200 stitches in his head and the left side of his face and had to remain in the hospital until Sunday. The other boy had been cut on the arm between his shoulder and elbow and had received 150 stitches in his arm. Police had picked up three boys for questioning in connection with the gangland-style incident but had released them on Saturday morning because the injured boys could not positively identify the individual who had cut them. The Acting Police Chief, E. C. Selvey, who had not known about the incident until informed of it by reporters, had reopened the case this date and said that police intended to get to the bottom of the fight. One of the injured boys had talked with a reporter about the incident the previous night, continued on another page.
While there is not one of the eight
million stories from the Naked City
On the editorial page, Walter Lippmann, who had recently returned from a two-week visit in the Soviet Union, most of it spent with his wife in Moscow, offers a summary of a two-hour interview with Premier Nikita Khrushchev. He had begun the interview by indicating that relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had deteriorated since the summit meeting in Geneva in 1955, seeking the Premier's comment. He had said that relations had not become worse or better, that they had been bad in 1955 and remained bad. He found the question to be whether relations were to be frozen where they were at present or would become better or worse. Mr. Lippmann had reminded him that at the time of Geneva there had been hopes of much better relations, and Mr. Khrushchev had responded that it was so but that in the West, those hopes had been based on a false premise, that Secretary of State Dulles and "that old wolf Churchill", as he had called him, had hoped that after Stalin's death there would be a change in the internal policy of the Soviet Union and that the country would turn away from the strengthening of its "socialist achievements". But when they had seen that the successors of Stalin were not going to liquidate the Communist system but that the successors did wish to relax the tension on the basis of the status quo, the West had reverted to the tactics of the Cold War, that they had hoped to win the Soviets over but that the latter would never be diverted from the path of socialism.
Mr. Lippmann says that he had then asked "Mr. K." to tell him what he understood by the "status quo", and the simpler part of his conception appeared to be that there should be no change of frontiers by military force, illustrating that point by saying that in the cases of China and Vietnam, the issues between the two parts of the country were internal and "civilian" and therefore were not to be treated as international questions. In the case of the two Germanys and the two Koreas, changes of frontier, presumably meaning the union of the two parts, were to take place only by "mutual consent".
In Mr. K's mind, the "status quo" appeared as the social and economic revolution presently in progress in Russia, China, and elsewhere in Asia and Africa. He wanted the West to recognize it as such and that opposition to the revolution was an attempt to change the status quo. Whereas the West thought of the status quo as the situation as it presently existed, he believed it was the process of revolutionary change which was in progress, and wanted the West to recognize the revolution not only as it was but as it was going to be.
Another important component of his conception of the status quo had to do with the balance of military power. Judging by what he had said, and what was implied by what he had said, Mr. Lippmann believes that his view of the existing military balance of power rested on his confidence that the Soviet Union had mastered the intermediate and short-range missiles to a point where it could dominate with them Germany and Western Europe, Turkey and Iran. Mr. Lippmann says he did not know whether Mr. K's confidence in those missiles was justified, but that there was no doubt that he assumed their existence and that they had now become a principal instrument of Soviet foreign policy.
On the other hand, nothing which Mr. K had said implied that he thought that the Soviet Union had long-range missiles which had broken, or were about to break, the existing military stalemate with the U.S. His conception of his military position in relation to the U.S. was that neither country could defeat the other in a direct conflict, but that the American forward positions, particularly in West Germany and Turkey, could, because of the development of the rocket, no longer be defended. He felt, therefore, that U.S. policy rested on an obsolete estimate of the existing balance of power.
After he had talked about the status quo, no changes of frontiers by force, and about the need of mutual consent in the German question, Mr. Lippmann had asked him whether he would agree to free negotiation between the two Germanys and whether, as one of the four occupying powers, he would accept an agreement negotiated by the two Germanys themselves. He had replied that he would agree to that and that it would be best if the troops of the occupying powers were withdrawn before the negotiations were concluded, bringing about "a more normal condition."
Mr. Lippmann was not convinced that he had meant what he said and so he had asked him whether he really meant that the occupying powers would accept unconditionally the result of negotiations between the two German governments, to which he had replied that the occupying powers would abide by the Potsdam Agreement, which stated that Germany ought never again be in a position to disturb the peace. He had left Mr. Lippmann with the reasonable certainty that if the Western powers proposed a free negotiation by the two Germanys, the Soviet Government would not be willing to accept it.
His mention of the Potsdam Agreement had brought him quickly to his complaint that the U.S. was violating the agreement by contributing to the re-militarization of Germany. That carried with it the implication that there could be no reunification of the two Germanys as long as West Germany was to be once again a military power. That had led deeper into the German question, which he discussed at length and with more passion than on any other subject. Out of it had come the disclosure of how his mind worked on the German question, to be understood in the context of his military assumption that the Soviet Union had presently mastered the intermediate-range missiles.
He had said that Americans did not appear to realize the danger which their present policy of rearming West Germany might bring down upon them, that being that Germany might once again turn to the East against the West because if West Germany engaged in a war against the East, the Soviet Union could quickly destroy West Germany, with its missiles, but that if the Soviet Union encouraged Germany to turn against the West, the Germans alone would be much stronger than England, France and Spain combined. That had led him to say that the situation was much as it had been on the eve of World War II, indicating that much had been said in the West about Munich but that the Western peoples did not understand Munich, having thought that Czechoslovakia had been sacrificed at Munich to appease Hitler and keep him from going to war, whereas in fact, Munich had been arranged by the British and French conservatives who wanted Hitler to attack Russia, and to induce him to do that, had given him Czechoslovakia, which was "an arrow aimed at the heart of Russia." He said that the Soviet Union had been ready in 1938 to join in the defense of Czechoslovakia against Hitler and had actually alerted its Army. After Munich, Stalin had realized the danger to the Soviet Union as a result of the Western action, and Hitler also had seen what the action meant to the Russians and, believing that he could finish off Britain and France if the Soviet Union were induced to remain neutral, had offered to make a deal with Stalin, all the while intending to attack Russia when he had finished with the West. But Stalin had seen a chance to weaken Hitler before the coming attack on Russia by encouraging him to make war in the West.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that the point of Mr. K's historical explanation, which he had volunteered without being asked questions about it, was that another German-Soviet pact was at least as possible at present as it had been in August, 1939, indeed was more probable since a German attack on the Soviet Union had now become "suicidal".
The next installment in the series would appear on Thursday.
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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