The Charlotte News
Saturday, November 15, 1958
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from West Berlin that the U.S. Army was expected soon to move another truck convoy in a test of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's intentions concerning his demands for the West to quit Berlin. Russian soldiers on Friday had blocked the routine three-truck Army convoy seeking to cross Communist East Germany to West Germany and had held it for 8.5 hours. The Army said that the Russians had broken established procedures by making unacceptable demands to inspect the trucks. Normal heavy civilian highway traffic was moving west this date without hindrance and rail and air traffic also were normal. The U.S., British and French military garrisons in Berlin got most of their supplies by rail, making little use of the 110-mile autobahn through the Soviet zone. Premier Khrushchev had demanded the previous Monday in Moscow that military forces be withdrawn from Berlin, which the puppet East German regime claimed as its capital. The Western allies said that they were there by right of World War II conquest and would use force, if necessary, to remain in West Berlin. Mr. Khrushchev had said on Friday night that the Soviet Union had never declared that it would fight the West over Berlin. The convoy incident was the first harassment of Western forces in Berlin since Mr. Khrushchev had begun the campaign on Monday. But the Soviet demand to inspect U.S. Army trucks crossing East Germany was an old issue. The allies claimed that the Russians were entitled only to examine the manifest papers carried by the trucks. The inspected Army vehicles had been released and returned to Berlin by American military personnel after a representative of the U.S. Army commander in Berlin had visited the Communist Army headquarters in East Berlin and asked that the U.S. vehicles be immediately released. A spokesman said that the Army commander's representative had protested the Russian refusal to allow the trucks to pass, and informed them that American soldiers had standing orders not to permit inspection. There had been speculation that the Russians might block allied communications to the West or turn control points over to the East Germans. The allies had refused to deal with the Communist regime in East Germany because they did not want to recognize it, as they believed it was not a representative government elected by the people.
In Moscow, Premier Khrushchev said that he did not intend to fight the West for Berlin and was preparing formal proposals on the future status of the city.
In Geneva, it was reported that the East-West technical conference on prevention of surprise attack had held its sixth meeting this date without reaching any accord on an agenda.
In London, it was reported that Russia had unveiled this date a five-point plan for ending nuclear testing and setting up control posts.
In New York, it was reported by the New York Times this date that the Chinese Communist Government had purged a number of top officials in its northern province of Shantung. The governor, vice-governor and possibly as many as 40,000 local officials had been dismissed.
In Taipei, Formosa, it was reported that the Chinese Communists had opened the 85th day of the offshore artillery war with a light shelling of the Quemoys this date. The Chinese Nationalist Defense Ministry said that the Communists had fired 113 shells.
In Athens, it was reported that a cheering crowd had observed Archbishop Makarios and Foreign Minister Evanghelos Averoff-Tossizza depart by plane this date to present Greece's case for Cyprus to the U.N. General Assembly.
In Buenos Aires, Argentinian Vice-President Alejandro Gomez had held onto his office this date despite an angry mob having attacked his office, prompting the Government to set machinery in motion to declare martial law. Sr. Gomez had appealed by telegram to El Presidente Arturo Frondizi, whom he was accused of trying to unseat, for police protection for himself and his family on Friday night after a crowd of about 100 young men and girls had broken into his office shouting, "Resign, traitor." He had been in an inner office at the time making a recording for radio broadcast, but friends had kept the attackers at bay until he could escape into another room. The mob had smashed into the outer office with clubs and stormed about for 30 minutes, wrecking furniture, breaking windows and destroying papers before some Senators persuaded them to leave. (That sounds like child's play compared to what those idiots did on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, the same idiots whom El Presidente, the lead insurrectionist, earlier this year pardoned wholesale. The only legitimate possible ground for pardon was mass insanity created by His Highness in conjunction with Fox Propaganda, whose propagandists actually belonged in prison.) Sr. Gomez had been told, after he sought police protection, to seek help from the Interior Ministry which supervised the police. Later, the police had thrown a guard around his home and announced that extra police would be on duty at the Senate this date to prevent any further trouble. Military guards with machine guns had been increased at Government House and at strategic points. The War Ministry said that it would put the nation under martial law if the situation worsened. El Presidente Frondizi already had proclaimed a state of siege and rounded up hundreds of alleged Peronistas, Communists and Nationalists to cope with a threatened nationwide strike by oil workers. Many of those arrested had been released, but about 70 had been sent to a Navy prison. Pressure on Sr. Gomez to resign had mounted in the wake of charges by Interior Minister Alfredo Vitolo the previous Wednesday that the Vice-President had reported to him that there was a plot for a military coup and had proposed that El Presidente resign, suggesting that he had military support for formation of a new coalition government. El Presidente, of the same Radical party as Sr. Gomez, issued a statement reaffirming the Interior Minister's version, saying that when he had confronted the Vice-President with the story, the latter had confirmed it. Sr. Gomez, however, said that he had only revealed the plot to the Government, as told to him by a tipster. Leaders of the Radical party in Congress had demanded the resignation of the Vice-President. A group of provisional governors, members of the party, had journeyed to Buenos Aires and appealed to him to step down. But he stuck to his guns, declaring that he had done nothing wrong and demanding an impeachment trial if the party wanted to get rid of him, calling an impeachment attempt to be a "laugh".
In Madrid, it was reported that actor Tyrone Power had died this date of a heart attack at age 45, stricken on the movie set of "Solomon and Sheba", in which he was playing Solomon opposite Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida. Mr. Power had complained, as he had for several days, of pain in his left arm and abdomen. He had been rushed to a hospital and died an hour later. Ted Richmond, the producer of the film, was at his bedside at the time. His wife of less than a year had been expecting a baby in February. He had previously been married to French actress Annabella and to Linda Christian, both marriages having concluded in divorce. Shooting of the film was halted by the director, King Vidor, until further notice. Extras and bit players, all of Spain, had dispersed quietly. All had been stunned when they were told that the star had died. Mr. Richmond had driven from the hospital, weeping, to break the news to Mr. Power's young wife. Mr. Power had been filming a dueling scene with George Sanders at the time when he was stricken. The character being played by Mr. Sanders, Solomon's older brother, was to be killed in the duel. Mr. Power's father, also named Tyrone, had also been fatally stricken on the set of a motion picture, "The Miracle Man", and had died a few hours later in the arms of his son. Mr. Power had continued a theatrical dynasty begun by his grandfather, Tyrone, on the Dublin stage in 1827, having been a celebrated comedian whose baptismal name had come from County Tyrone in Ireland. The former Marine pilot had returned to the stage in 1952 in the family tradition after winning fame and fortune as a movie actor, returning to Hollywood only for an occasional movie. He maintained a home in Hollywood, but spent a great deal of time in the Eastern U.S., Europe and Latin America. He had been asked why he was quitting the more profitable movies for the stage and had replied, "You don't always do everything for loot, do you?" While having played a derring-do hero with pistol and rifle, he had conceded, "I couldn't hit a pig in the back with a bass fiddle." When he had enlisted as a private in the Marines during World War II, a friend had asked him why he had not tried for a commission, and he had replied: "Why should I ask for a commission? What do I know about being an officer?" But after boot camp, he did go through officers' training and took flight training at Corpus Christi, Tex., logging 3,500 flight hours as a Marine transport pilot, being discharged in 1945 as a captain. Following his discharge, he had kept up his commission in the Marine Reserves and had been promoted from captain to major in 1957. He had been born in Cincinnati and had taken his first stage part at age 7, attending schools in Cincinnati and Dayton, electing to study Shakespearean drama under his father, who had been a Shakespearean actor, rather than go to college.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the wild West
Not on the front page this date, in Lincoln, Neb., the defense presentation in the first-degree murder trial of Caril Ann Fugate, 15, charged as an aider and abettor to Charles Starkweather, 19, in the murder of 17-year old Robert Jensen, Mr. Starkweather having been convicted of the murder of Mr. Jensen the prior May and sentenced to death, continued on Thursday and Friday.
On the editorial page, Walter Lippmann, continuing with the third of four reports based on his recent visit to Moscow, after relating in the first two of his interview of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, provides his conclusions from his visit, indicating that in almost all of the talks he had in Moscow, not only with "Mr. K." but also with other officials and with Soviet editors, he had been asked what could be done to bring about better relations between the U.S. and Russia. He says that it was a hard question to answer, for the basic issue between the two countries arose from the fact that the Soviet Union, and alongside it Communist China, were well on their way to achieving leadership of Asia and Africa. He finds that at the root of the abiding suspicion which each country held for the other was that bid for leadership and its challenge to the Western position and influence.
He finds that there was no reason to think that the suspicion which divided the two countries and made even modest and partial solutions difficult could easily be talked out of existence. He believes that to keep the rivalry below the boiling point would require a lot more than mutual expressions of good will. The cause of the bad relations was suspicion felt on each side of the Iron Curtain that the other intended to commit aggression. It arose from the belief that, in the long run, neither side could tolerate the other. The Soviet Union was presently entering the climactic years, the ensuing seven to ten years, in which it meant to surpass the U.S., not in material comforts of ordinary life, but in per capita productivity. The Communist leaders were certain that as they achieved that aim, the great mass of the poor and underdeveloped peoples would rally to them. They would inevitably promote that rally by propaganda, infiltration and subversion.
He suggests that Americans deluded themselves if they did not realize that the main power of the Communist states lay not in their clandestine activity but in the force of their example, in the demonstration of what they had achieved in 40 years since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and of what Communist China had achieved in about ten years.
"The inner moving force of Soviet suspicion is the belief that the United States and the governments of the non-communist countries will, unless compelled to do so, never allow Russia and China to consummate the revolution which they are leading in Asia and in Africa." He suggests that inevitably Russia and China did not believe the U.S. when it insisted that the rearming of Germany and of Turkey and the maintenance of a ring of airbases were defensive measures against military aggression on the Soviets' part. For they were certain in their own minds that they would win the primacy of Asia and Africa not by going to war but by avoiding a war which would ruin their economic achievements. They could not believe that the U.S. really thought that they would commit military aggression when they, themselves, were so sure that they had to avoid a war. Thus, when the U.S. talked of defensive armaments, they thought they were being deceived, that U.S. military policy was to surround them in preparation for an attack to halt their revolutionary rise to world leadership.
He feels reasonably certain that it was the way they saw the military issue between the two countries, that which Vladimir Lenin had prophesied; and in the Soviet Union, the authority of Lenin, as interpreted by the current powers, was treated as infallible and more than human. The U.S. policy of military containment with its forward positions on Russia's borders was in their minds conclusive proof that Lenin had been right. They suspected the U.S., which was why they were reluctant to negotiate any concession which would give the U.S. even a slight tactical, much less a strategic, advantage in case of war.
In that resistance to agreement, they were helped by many provocative and bellicose things which had been said at one time or another by the talkative brass in the Pentagon. They were hardened also in their convictions by the propensity of Secretary of State Dulles, and, to a lesser degree, of the President to treat the conflict not as one of empires and great states but as a religious war in which the contending positions were absolute. That confirmed their view that the U.S. was bracing itself for an ideological or religious war and that the war would take place unless they made themselves so powerful that it could not take place.
The corresponding suspicion on the U.S. side came from the belief that insofar as the Soviet Union and Communist China gained in military power, they were bound to use it as an instrument of policy to complete their domination of Asia and Africa, a suspicion which Mr. Lippmann regards as well-founded and as being a conclusive reason for making sure that the U.S. did not lose the armaments race. The U.S. problem was not whether it could afford to keep up the race or had an irreparable technological inferiority, but rather was a political and psychological problem of how to keep the American and West European democracies ready and willing to support armaments without their becoming so obsessed with weapons that they had neither the means, the understanding nor the will to meet the real Soviet challenge in Asia.
The Soviet oligarchy could spend on armaments what it wanted and no questions would be asked, whereas in the U.S., the necessary appropriations could not be had, or so the political leaders thought, without a great scare campaign. But such offended and alienated the pacifists and the neutralists who were the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world.
No one could doubt that the Soviet challenge was very formidable. Even to a casual visitor, it was evident that the only safe assumption was that the Russians had mastered modern technology and that their bureaucracy, directed by a powerful government and working on an obedient population, was capable of achieving what they had set out to do. While there was no doubt private discontent, cheating, fixing and black marketing, the Soviet system was a going concern and it would be rash to underestimate its power or to count on any radical change of direction, much less on a counter-revolution.
Mr. Lippmann says that he had returned home convinced that the issue was the Russian and Chinese challenge for the leadership of Asia and Africa, and that if America was to meet it with reasonable success, it had to abandon the notion that the Russian and Chinese revolutions could be reversed or that the spread of Communism in the surrounding countries could be contained by giving armaments to the local military commanders and by establishing U.S. bases. What was needed was an agonizing reappraisal of U.S. habits and notions. "We must learn to keep ourselves armed without working ourselves up into a frenzy of threats and of fear. This is not easy for a democracy to do, but it is necessary and, once the reason for it is understood by the leaders of American opinion, it can be done."
He suggests that the country also had to learn to win friends without asking them to be military allies, to be done only by encouraging them to follow the neutral course which their instinct told them to do. The policy of military pacts to contain and push back the Communist revolution was not only incapable of success, but its effect was to antagonize the masses of the people and so to assist the expansion of Communism. There was needed a reappraisal and review of the policy of foreign aid. As it was presently practiced, it was a program of subsidies to governments which were threatened with the rise of Communism among their people. Without meaning to say that all or even some of those subsidies ought be discontinued, he suggests that the U.S. would not meet the Soviet challenge unless it stopped looking at the underdeveloped nations as military bulwarks and bastions and instead adopted a new and different objective in the uncommitted world.
The Communists were expanding in Asia because they were demonstrating a way of raising quickly the power and standard of living of a backward people. He finds that the only convincing answer to that had to be a demonstration by the non-Communist nations that there was another and more humane way of overcoming the immemorial poverty and weakness of the Asian peoples. He finds that the demonstration could best be made in India, that if the U.S. and its Western allies could underwrite and assure the success of Indian development, it would make a great difference, which might prove decisive in turning the tide. It would put an end to the enervating feeling of futility and of inevitability, to the sense that Communism was the only wave of the future, that there was only one way of internal salvation and that the West was impotent and too lazy to do anything except to let the future go by default.
India was a very big country known to all of Asia as a land of deep poverty and to make a showplace of a small island like Formosa or Puerto Rico was a good thing, but was not convincing, for the Communists were proving their case in big countries such as Russia and China, and the U.S. would have to prove its case also in a big country, that material progress could be made with preservation of civil liberty. India also had the necessary structure, including a civil service with a good tradition, which did not always exist in equal measures elsewhere in Asia, except in Japan. Mr. Lippmann finds that the clinching reason for making the demonstration in India was that the spiritual heritage of which Mahatma Gandhi had been the great teacher was the most radically different ideology from that of Lenin. Yet, though it was different, it was, like Communism, addressed to the suffering masses of the people.
He indicates that there was a notion among many Americans that the Indians were more than halfway along the road to being Communists, a notion based in part on the fact that the Indians meant to become a social democratic state. The belief that they were half-Communist was based on the fact that on many issues of foreign policy, the Indian Government differed from that of the U.S. and made great efforts to keep on good terms with the Soviet Union and Communist China. Nevertheless, the Indians who were indoctrinated in the Gandhi tradition were acutely aware of the gulf between the Soviet system and their own. They were not totalitarian, were not materialistic determinists.
He finds that if there was any other way of meeting the Communist challenge in Asia, he had not heard of it. The tide was running in favor of Communism almost by default. Russia and China were making a demonstration to which the West was offering no alternative. He did not know where else a non-Communist alternative could presently be demonstrated, given the fact that only in India, outside of the Communist orbit, could a successful demonstration carry conviction to the great masses of the people who were looking for a better way of life.
The concluding article in the four-part series would appear on Monday.
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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