The Charlotte News
Tuesday, February 4, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that strong winds had put an apparent damper on any new U.S. satellite launch for this date, as scientists came up with more details on Explorer I, the Army satellite which had been orbiting the earth every 115 minutes since its launch the prior Friday night. Planning, however, continued, for a subsequent launch. Army scientists were reported to be proposing that an elaborate satellite, loaded with instruments and weighing up to 700 pounds, would be launched before the end of the year to gather data for building a space station. The Navy was said to be hoping to place a 20-inch satellite into orbit on schedule the following month, despite delays in preliminary tests. The Navy was still awaiting the launch of its first six-inch satellite when weather would permit. A slim, 72-foot tall Vanguard rocket, vehicle for the Navy satellite, remained on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida throughout the previous day. But high winds whipping eastward over the Cape for the third straight day apparently had frustrated any attempt to launch. Army scientists, buoyed by their success with the Explorer, planned to launch sometime between the present and April a second Explorer. They were also planning to launch a third satellite, weighing 300 pounds and equipped with television for reconnaissance. That would be followed by the 700-pound Explorer IV as the forerunner of a space station. It was learned that Dr. Wernher Von Braun, Maj. General John Medaris and others instrumental in developing Explorer I, had asked the Army for permission to start building the huge satellite. They contended that they could do the job with the basic Redstone rocket model which had launched Explorer I into orbit. The big satellite could carry cameras and television recording equipment such as that planned for Explorer III, plus elaborate electronic and photographic equipment to provide data needed for building a space station. Scientists had announced new information on Explorer I, with the senior scientists at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Cambridge, Mass., having supported earlier estimates that the satellite might last in orbit as long as a decade.
In Pasadena, Calif., evidence that men could live in a satellite was being radioed back continually to the men monitoring Explorer, with temperatures inside the satellite well within the range which human beings could tolerate, and, thus far, being without damage from meteorites. Scientists said that the satellite's instruments also had confirmed the longstanding belief that cosmic radiation in space usually was well within the safe exposure limits for humans. The scientists who developed Explorer had told a press conference that temperatures within the satellite were somewhere between 50 and 86 degrees, about room temperature. Dr. A. R. Hibbs, section chief of the satellite research program at the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that the satellite was designed primarily to test instruments in space, but that much of the information being radioed back to earth would have value when a manned satellite would be launched. He said that they would control the heat even more closely and build an even harder shell for protection against meteorites. He said he could not comment on when a manned satellite might be launched. The satellite's inner heat was determined by controlling the amount of solar radiation allowed to penetrate the shell, accomplished by striping the satellite with zirconium oxide, a white reflective paint. Messages from the satellite indicated that the temperatures on the outer skin ranged between 212 degrees below 0 and 572 above.
The President had ordered his scientific adviser to come up with recommendations on whether the U.S. space program ought be left in the Pentagon or turned over to a new agency of the Government.
Better proof of Russian good intentions had been sought by the White House this date as a condition for an East-West summit conference.
John Doerfer, chairman of the FCC, had told House investigators this date that he had repaid two weeks earlier $165.12 received in 1954 from an Oklahoma television station.
Raymond Saulnier, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, was expecting the nation's economic growth to pick up around the middle of the year, according to his testimony on employment trends and economic conditions provided to a House Appropriations subcommittee on January 16 and made public this date by that subcommittee. He had said: "Economic growth ought to be resumed during 1958. It is, I think, unlikely that we could expect that to happen in the first quarter of the year. I would certainly expect it to be underway before the fourth quarter of the year. And so, it becomes a question whether to expect it in the second or the third quarter. My guess is that it will occur around the middle of the year." He said that a decline in expenditures of business concerns on new plant and equipment would probably continue through the early part of the year, but ought not extend long into the year.
In Memphis, Tenn., Senator Albert Gore planned to propose that Congress set up a national public works program to create jobs.
In New York, a mayor's committee of top city and school officials had gone to work at City Hall the previous night to develop a program to cope with crime in the city schools. The group had been appointed by Mayor Robert Wagner the previous day after he had met for two hours with school officials at his official residence. The calling of the meeting was his first direct intervention in the crisis which had increased in recent weeks, as teenage violence had flared anew in Brooklyn schools. Thus far in the current week, the violence had subsided. The violence had ignited a controversy between the Board of Education and a Brooklyn grand jury over methods of fighting juvenile crime. The Board accused the jury of "harassing" school officials and making a threatening statement to a Brooklyn school principal who had committed suicide the previous week, apparently in response to a high level of violence at his school, including the reported rape of a 13-year old girl by a 15-year old boy inside a stairway of the school during a nighttime recreational meeting. At another Brooklyn school, a boy had reportedly raped a girl the previous Tuesday night. The jury foreman had accused the Board of telling "deliberate lies" and said that the charges were an attempt to divert the jury from its course. The Mayor's committee included the Mayor's executive secretary, the superintendent of schools, the deputy mayor, who would succeed the superintendent the following September, the former police commissioner, presently a member of the Board of Education, the secretary to the president of the Board of Education and the legal secretary of the Board. The Mayor's executive secretary was asked whether racial integration had been discussed at the committee session and he replied that he could not give details. One of the two reported rapes had been of a white girl by a black boy, while the other rape had involved a black boy allegedly raping a black girl. There had been continuing efforts to provide racial mixture at the schools. The previous day, 13 black and white ministers with parishes in and around the predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, where the incidence of teenage crime had been high, had sent a telegram to the Mayor in which they deplored what they termed "headline-seeking adventurers who would disrupt our school—and who by innuendo are attempting to place a racial connotation on recent unfortunate events in our borough." The ministers said that children of various races and nationalities had been both victims and perpetrators of crimes in the area and that there was not the slightest evidence that the events had been connected with racial tensions. The principal who had committed suicide had blamed his school's troubles on a "transitory community". That school had a student body composition of 45 percent black and 10 percent Puerto Rican.
In Washington, a seven-year old boy had been accused of starting fires in a Fairfax County, Va., school, which had caused $100 of damage the previous day.
In Paducah, Ky., police intensified a house-to-house search for an armed kidnaper this date and warned curiosity seekers to leave the area where a young woman had been accidentally shot to death at a roadblock set up to catch the bandit the previous day. A captain of the Kentucky State Police said that officers would expand their search of all buildings in the Melber area in a remote part of McCracken County, where the 24-year old bandit was last seen on Sunday night. The man was heavily armed and had left a farmhouse on foot after he and another man, 33, had held a Missouri State Trooper and a farm couple prisoner for a day. The second man had attempted to commit suicide and was captured. The fatal shooting of the 24-year old woman of Paducah had occurred when her brother had inadvertently driven through a roadblock between Paducah and the Melber community where two civilians had joined a Missouri State trooper. The civilian had fired the trooper's carbine at the automobile and the trooper had used a shotgun. The civilian had stopped to talk with the trooper and said that he did not know whose shot had hit the young woman in the back. Officials indicated that no charges would be filed pending an inquest. An autopsy had been performed this night but no report was expected until later. At Frankfort, the state capital, the State Attorney General said that the civilian's legal status would depend on whether he acted as a private citizen or whether he had been deputized as an officer of the law, declining further comment on the matter.
In St. Louis, Quebec, six young brothers and sisters had perished this date in an early morning fire which had destroyed their two-story frame house. The victims included children between the ages of 18 months and 15. The parents were taken to a hospital with burns, and their 13-year old daughter and a nephew, 23, had also been treated for burns. All had been asleep when the fire had started.
In St. Paul, Minn., residents this date were reading the first issue of the Pioneer Press since December 17, after the weekend settlement of a strike by members of three unions.
In Colfax, Calif., it was reported that a Greyhound bus and an empty tank truck had sideswiped one another the previous night in the Sierras near Donner Summit, killing two persons and injuring at least 22.
In Brussels, Prince Frederic de Merode, president of the Belgian Red Cross, had died early this date at age 47.
In Raleigh, the trial of 14 defendants on liquor charges in U.S. District Court had ended in a mistrial this date when the jury announced that it was unable to agree on a verdict. The trial had begun on January 27, and the case had gone to the jury the previous afternoon.
The heaviest snow in several years had hit the western part of the state this date, with high winds piling snow to drifts of 15 feet deep in the Max Patch section of Haywood County, where there had been a 37-inch snowfall. Below 20-degree temperatures prevailed from Boone to Murphy and the mercury was expected to hit zero in some spots this night. Secondary roads in many counties were impassable and main roads from Asheville to Tennessee were passable only with chains. Mt. Mitchell reported 20 inches of snow and some parts of northern Madison County had 24 inches. Watauga County had 15 inches the previous night with the snow still falling, with drifts of between four and five feet reported in Boone.
Radio station WMIT, atop Mt. Mitchell, continued to suffer in silence this date after temperatures dropped to three below zero the previous night. Two of the four-man crew snowbound at the FM station had put on snowshoes and tramped into the heavy snow to read the thermometer. A power failure caused by heavy ice on wires knocked the station off the air again the previous morning after a similar outage the prior week, thus depriving the state of the station's Muzak supply. Those riding silent elevators across the state were said to be miffed, unaccustomed to the sound of air.
John Kilgo of The News reports that the two caught jail escapees out of five who had escaped from the Mecklenburg County jail on Sunday night, said that it had been a "stupid stunt". The two, ages 19 and 17, were bound over to Superior Court under a $10,000 bond each during the morning on charges of larceny of an automobile. They had been arrested the previous day in Columbia, S.C., when a Columbia garage operator helped police stop them. They had been awaiting trial for some 20 storebreaking and larceny cases. The three other escapees were still at large.
In Naugatuck, Conn., at the weekly session of Police Court, the session had to be stopped after a judge was punched in the eye, requiring medical attention. The judge said that he was only kidding around with his 18-month old son when he hauled off and socked him. That kid needs help.
On the editorial page, "Toward a Union of Hopes and Dreams" finds that the attempted union of Egypt and Syria to form a united Arab state in the Middle East was no laughing matter, despite U.S. diplomats treating it so. The gap between a formal proclamation of a union and its full implementation was great, but the fact that a federation was being seriously attempted was meaningful. Certainly there was no laughter in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Amman, Ankara, Baghdad and the vicinity.
Western diplomats could laugh with some justification at the dream of "Arab nationalism", as there was so much friction within the Arab world. But it was nevertheless the fact that the dream of a unified Arab state "from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf" was viewed throughout the area as an ancient and honorable ideal. Jordan, for instance, opposed the union for good reason. Most Jordanians, however, spoke lovingly of Arab nationalism and cherished their dreams of an Arab federation. They knew too well that disunity had been the great weakness of the Arabs, leaving them prey to foreign exploitation.
Western diplomats who failed to recognize that longing, as well as the other longings and fears which made up the Arab mystique, were in for rude awakenings. Diplomacy based solely on military considerations was a frail effort upon which to base hopes for lasting global peace. The Middle East was more than "just another strategic area", being a strange complex of ancient ambitions and new anxieties.
Arab nationalism did not need to be feared, but had to be respected. The danger lay in the fact that Soviet Communism had entered the Middle East behind Arab nationalism. The chief condition for joining the new Arab union, led by Egypt's Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser, was that the people and leaders adopt a curious policy of "positive neutralism", meaning non-alignment with either the East or West, at least on paper, while in fact the West was viewed as an imperialistic enemy as the Soviet bloc was viewed as a trusted benefactor.
Fear of Soviet penetration was the principal reason for the Baghdad Pact, one of the new alignments bred by the cold war. Although it refused to become a member of the pact formally, the U.S. strongly supported it. But support of the military alliance alone did not make for a policy. Nor was the cause of peace in the Middle East served by Western statesmen who ridiculed or ignored the potential of Arab nationalism, pretending that the Arab-Israeli dispute did not exist, and failing to respond to the challenge of economic development of the region.
Sooner or later, Arab leaders were going to have to acknowledge publicly what many admitted privately, the right of a permanent and ineradicable Israel to live in peace. At the same time, Israel had to satisfy the Arab states that it was without expansionist aims, and progress had to be made, with the help of Israel, on the Arab refugee problem. Such longstanding political problems could be solved more easily if accompanied by economic development which the whole area needed desperately. Something akin to the ill-fated Jordan River development plan would be required, and the U.S. would have to help with it.
The possibilities of enriching arid desert land were endless. The imaginable rewards in human happiness were equally limitless. What was needed was for the U.S. to help focus attention on regional objectives which were so appealing that national enmities and frustrations would be overcome. That kind of union of hopes and dreams could be an enormous pacifier in the Middle East, where there was no such union at present, only federations of hate.
"And there is muffled amusement in some Western capitals."
Had some dumb cracker come up with a hare-brained plan at the time to establish a Middle East "Riviera" in the Gaza Strip, that person would likely have been sent to Bellevue for mental examination. Oh, we know, there will be those who say that they mocked "Fulton's folly", too. But this is not a steamboat and it is not the Nineteenth Century. Talk about someone in need of intervention for the elderly gone astray and application of the 25th Amendment... No, he is not crazy like a fox. He is just a complete lunatic.
"They Flew the Coop Too Easily" indicates that the Monday morning jailbreak of five prisoners from the Mecklenburg County Courthouse suggested that something more satisfactory than the usual medieval measures were necessary to keep the modern criminal locked up. The ease with which the five prisoners had outwitted the jailer had been more than a little absurd. At least one of the escapees was known to be extremely dangerous, with a long record of previous escapes.
Yet County officials had failed to exercise the special caution necessary with prisoners of that type. The jailer might have been killed and said that the subject had come up while he was being bound and gagged.
Members of the County Commission had a clear obligation to give more than routine attention to conditions which made the jailbreak possible, and it advocates for an immediate review of the jail's security.
"For Charlotte's Future, a Secret Asset" tells of Charles Coira having won the Junior Chamber of Commerce Distinguished Service Award for 1957, finding him a man of "almost exasperating energy and enterprise", the type of community builder who created the "successive and irresistible pulsations of progress in such a city" as Charlotte.
It finds him particularly deserving of the honor and indicates that he was a representative of a whole new youth movement which was fast rising to prominence in civic service in the city.
"Weep not for Charlotte's future. It's quite safe."
A piece from the Milwaukee Journal, titled "Tippler's Progress", indicates that Switzerland was not among the leading nations as a wine producer, as there was only so much room for vineyards within that craggy land. But they were very likely the most progressive and ingenious. The Swiss dairy industry had success in transporting milk through underground pipelines made of polyethylene and it was now reported that a leading wine producer had applied the technique to his age-old business as well. His polyethylene pipe ran down a 2.5 percent grade for more than three-quarters of a mile from the vineyards to the bottling works on the shore of Lake Leman. The flow of the mature wine was controlled at about two mph so as not to shake it up. The saving in transportation costs would pay for the polyethylene in five years.
The revelation from nearby Lausanne did not mention any difficulty with local superstitions about such unceremonious treatment ruining the wine or the polyethylene being poisonous. On the contrary, it insisted that the quality was not impacted at all. It concludes that it sounded like a tippler's pipe dream.
Drew Pearson indicates that Eric Johnston, who had the courage to try to arrange peace between the Jews and Arabs, had sought recently to appease the rift between President Eisenhower and former President Truman, though not quite succeeding. He had obtained an agreement that Mr. Truman would be invited to be the main speaker at a large bipartisan luncheon to boost foreign aid on February 25, and that the President would be the main speaker at a dinner the same night. But he had not succeeded in getting the President to sit at the same meeting with the former President, even though Vice-President Nixon had strongly backed up Mr. Johnston's proposal.
Mr. Johnston was head of the Motion Picture Association, had been president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce longer than any other person in history, and had been appointed by the President to lead a bipartisan campaign to mobilize public opinion for foreign aid, presently facing rough sledding in the Congress. The campaign was to include a bipartisan conference attended by the President, former President Hoover and former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce on the Republican side, with Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt and former President Truman on the Democratic side.
Mr. Johnston believed that the future of American world leadership was at stake and that complete political unity was necessary, and to sell the idea to the President, he and Vice-President Nixon had gone to the White House. The President approved the plan until the name of the former President was mentioned, at which point he became upset and objected to having him participate. Mr. Nixon had argued that some dramatic spectacle such as a joint appeal by the President and former President Truman was necessary if the Administration was to put foreign aid through Congress, but the President remained opposed.
The President had not elaborated but it was no secret that he had a grudge against the former President, having never invited him to the White House in five years and had refused to see him when he first had gone to Kansas City in 1953, when President Truman had sought to pay his respects at the time but was informed that Mr. Eisenhower was busy.
Mr. Johnston looked discouraged when he left the White House after his session with the Vice-President and the President. But he had gone to Kansas City to see Mr. Truman, who was a good sport and had accepted an invitation to speak at a gala luncheon. That night, President Eisenhower would speak at a gala dinner and the two would not meet.
Mr. Pearson notes that there was a definite advantage to holding both a luncheon and a dinner, according to the White House, for if too many big names were at one speaker's table, it curtailed the time limit for each speaker and made for too many important speeches for the newspapers to absorb in one story.
Stewart Alsop indicates that with the launch of Explorer, the first U.S. satellite in orbit, it was likely that the President would be prompted to call a special session of the U.N. General Assembly to propose international control of the ballistic missiles and other space weapons. The idea of convening a special session for that purpose had been a notion tossed around sometime earlier by middle level officials, and had begun to be seriously considered about two weeks earlier, when Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson promised "undivided support" for the President if he would thus "demonstrate initiative before the United Nations."
Calling a special session had now become high on the list of things considered by Secretary of State Dulles to have priority. As the President had demonstrated in his "Atoms-for-Peace" speech before the U.N. in December, 1953, a high-level appeal to the representatives of the Assembly was the sort of thing which the President did well.
There were other reasons also, some extremely practical, as to why the idea was tempting. On the most practical level, a Presidential initiative would be good domestic politics and would tend to re-create the image of the President as the father-leader, badly damaged by the two Soviet Sputniks launched in October and November.
That image of the President had been the greatest Republican asset during the previous five years and the Republicans were badly in need of assets in the midterm election year. Since the idea of a Presidential "initiative before the United Nations" to control the space weapons had first been put forward by Senator Johnson, the Democrats would be in no position to attack that initiative as a grandstand play.
The idea was also tempting for international reasons, for the image of the President had also been damaged in the NATO nations and among the neutrals, such that the plan would provide an opportunity for the President to regain some of his lost prestige.
The most tempting part of the idea was the thought that it might be putting the Soviets at last on the defensive, tending to undercut the Soviet drive for a summit meeting which had been gathering force daily and which had the U.S. Government squirming in discomfort. It would also again put the Soviets in the position of being naysayers, a position now occupied by Secretary Dulles in the eyes of the world. Even before Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev had made a recent speech in Minsk, there had not been much doubt that the Soviets would say no to any proposal for control of the space weapons. Now, there was virtually no doubt at all. For Mr. Khrushchev had placed conditions on control of the ballistic missiles, such as dismantling the U.S. forward bases in Europe, which he knew would be unacceptable.
That was another reason why the plan for a Presidential address to the U.N. was more likely than not to be adopted. Before Mr. Khrushchev had spoken, there was at least a small amount of hope that the Soviets might be ready to talk seriously about control of ballistic missiles, as it was argued that the Soviets had to know that the U.S. would, in time, challenge their lead in that area and that the missiles, in their present crude stage of development, were still technically, as Secretary Dulles had said, "readily subject to be controlled." They also had to know that such a stage of development would not last long and that control of the missiles, as Mr. Dulles had also stated, would soon become "impossible".
The hopeful argument had gone that the prospect of a world armed with such weapons of total and instant destruction could not be agreeable to the Russians and so it was thought that serious and secret negotiation with the Russians could produce a basic agreement to control the new weapons. The hope that the Soviets might be willing to negotiate seriously, suggests Mr. Alsop, was probably, however, illusory.
But if the plan for a Presidential address to the U.N. was adopted, it could be taken as a signal that the hope had been completely abandoned. Whatever its advantages in other ways, such a gesture was obviously unlikely to produce any agreement whatever.
Marquis Childs indicates that in the hope of reversing certain policies of the Administration, a half dozen key figures, including Vice-President Nixon, had been holding informal meetings recently to discuss high political strategy. The night meetings, usually following a dinner in the private dining room of the office suite of Secretary of Interior Fred Seaton, took in the younger members of the Administration generally regarded as allies of Mr. Nixon, looking to his nomination and election in 1960 to the presidency. Every effort had been made to keep the meetings secret.
The group included Attorney General William Rogers, RNC chairman Meade Alcorn, constituting a new focus of power. Secretary Seaton, one of the ablest members of the Cabinet, was being upgraded in status, and if conservation and other policies of the Department of Interior could be given a new look, he was a conspicuous possibility as a vice-presidential candidate with Mr. Nixon in 1960.
At a dinner meeting about two months earlier, at which White House chief of staff Sherman Adams had been present, the group reportedly had discussed the handicap of the power and conservation stand of the first term and considered also what could be done to put a new aspect on the Administration's approach to issues which directly influenced voters in a large part of the country. The "partnership" power and other policies of Mr. Seaton's predecessor, Douglas McKay, had won little favor in the West. Mr. McKay had resigned as Secretary to run for the Senate against Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon and had lost by a wide margin, despite the party having poured large sums of money into his campaign and both the President and the Vice-President having gone to Oregon to campaign for him. Mr. Morse had campaigned on the notion of a Government "giveaway" of natural resources by the McKay Interior Department.
The Nixon strategy board had realistically appraised that and other Republican losses in the West and Northwest. In states such as Oregon and Washington, once regarded as comfortable Republican territory, the Democrats presently held most of the high offices. Power, irrigation and conservation were issues directly touching voters in at least a dozen states. One of Mr. Seaton's recent moves had been to call for a consideration of reversal of the order of Secretary McKay opening up wildlife refuge lands to oil drillers. That move had produced an angry outcry from conservationists who protested that the last remaining areas for protection of wild fowl were about to be despoiled.
On the Trinity River project in California, the Administration was committed to the "partnership" policy and development of power resources by the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. That had become a major political issue in California, crucial for the Republicans in 1960, and raised the question whether the new look of Secretary Seaton was more than superficial. But whether fact or political fiction, Secretary Seaton's stock was on the rise in Washington.
A letter writer comments on the editorial of January 25, "Organized Labor's Cancer Is Curable", commending the newspaper for making it known to the public that organized labor was making a housecleaning from top to bottom, clearing out the racketeers and undesirables at the top levels. He believes that George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, had cracked the whip hard and made it known to the leaders of organized labor that the movement would not tolerate any conduct unbecoming a gentleman or a labor leader. He finds the President's ten-point program to eliminate labor and management corruption to have been untimely as organized labor was doing an exceptionally good job itself. The Senate Select Committee investigating labor and management misconduct had made it known publicly from its outset that it would expose labor and management corruption. He finds that the Committee had made only one effort to show corruption on the part of management and that had been hushed up. No further testimony had been heard since on that topic. A member of management, he asserts, was just as guilty for offering a gift as it would be for a labor leader to accept it for settling a sweetheart contract.
A letter writer says that he had always made an effort to vote but guesses he would not vote anymore. "No candidate seems to want the white vote anymore."
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