The Charlotte News
Thursday, March 13, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Florence, S.C., that Air Force crews had worked this date to remove the scars left by the TNT explosion of an unarmed atomic bomb, picking up the pieces of the shattered device, with a high-level investigation promised of the incident. Meanwhile, the community of 30,000 was going about its business as usual, with some even seeming to be startled at what was called the "fanfare" given their town after the nuclear weapon had accidentally slipped from a B-47 jet bomber on Tuesday afternoon. The mayor had received an apology for the incident from Maj. General Charles Dougher of Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia, the bomber's home base. Elsewhere, high ranking officers and claims personnel toured the two-mile square area surrounding the impact point near the shattered home of the family in whose backyard the bomb had dropped, five miles east of Florence. None of the members of the household had been injured seriously, with a visiting niece, 9, having been the most injured, though she was back with the family the previous day after treatment in a hospital for lacerations requiring 30 stitches. Air Force authorities explained that the bomb did not set off a nuclear explosion because it lacked the complete triggering device. It had been released because of malfunctioning equipment. Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy said the previous night that the Air Force had confirmed that the area was uncontaminated by radiation. The Strategic Air Command on Tuesday had cautioned that there might be some slight contamination. Secretary McElroy also said that a "high-level" investigation had been ordered into the wider implications of the occurrence, expressing regret for the six people who had been injured. In London, the incident had quickened concern in Parliament over possible nuclear devastation by accident from American-controlled weapons. The Labor Party stated that a Parliamentary debate this date would touch on that question.
Congressional Democrats prodded the Administration this date for an early decision on possible anti-recession tax cuts. The Administration, meanwhile, waited to assess the results of increased spending programs it had ordered and recommended before deciding whether a tax cut was needed to spur production and create jobs. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and his assistant, Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, had urged action to make it clear whether there would be tax reductions and, if so, what type. Senator Johnson told the Senate that they would face up to the question of tax cuts and he hoped they would do so quickly, indicating that he had not reached any firm conclusion himself, but that he believed they owed it to their fellow Americans to end the suspense at the earliest possible time. Senator Mansfield said in an interview that he was glad that Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson had announced that he would confer with leaders of both parties on the issue of a tax cut. He said he hoped the conferences would be held quickly and that the results would be announced immediately, as the people ought be told where they stood. Secretary Anderson had announced that the Administration would delay any tax decision until the future course of the economy had been clarified, leaving up in the air any possible tax cut. Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, opposed tax reductions at present and said that any tax cut would likely cost the Treasury up to 7 billion dollars in revenue and bring on a 15 billion dollar deficit. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was reported to feel that Congress ought make its objective clear in the tax area before an anticipated Easter recess on April 3. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois and Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico had proposed five billion dollar reductions in personal and business taxes as amendments to a House-passed measure.
The FCC this date moved to reconsider its grant of a television channel in Miami to a subsidiary of National Airlines. The case had become the focus of a House Investigations subcommittee investigation which had led to the resignation of FCC commissioner Richard Mack. The Commission took note of the charges in the House investigation, that pressures may have been exerted to make the award of the channel, and filed a motion in the U.S. Court of Appeals requesting that the case be returned to the Commission for further review. By a vote of four to two the previous year, the FCC had awarded the channel to the subsidiary of National. The decision was presently before the Court of Appeals in two proceedings, in one of which, an unsuccessful bidder for the channel was challenging the FCC's refusal the previous September to reconsider the award, while in the other case, brought by Eastern Airlines, the Court was being asked to overrule the FCC order denying Eastern the right to intervene in the proceeding. Meanwhile, the subcommittee was continuing its inquiry into financial relations between Mr. Mack and a Miami attorney who had provided Mr. Mack loans while he was a member of the FCC. At one time, the attorney had been seeking the award of the channel to the subsidiary of National, but had never been an attorney of record in the case and had testified that he refused an offer of employment by the law firm which was handling the application. A Miami Beach radio station operator, who had lost a bid for the channel, was also slated to return to testify before the subcommittee. The two other listed witnesses had been quoted by that individual as telling him before the FCC decision that they had heard he was going to lose. The subcommittee chairman, Representative Oren Harris of Arkansas, told reporters that the subcommittee was through questioning Mr. Mack, who had appeared before the group the previous day for the first time since his resignation on March 3. The subcommittee also planned to hear from other FCC commissioners on their vote in the case.
Percival Brundage had resigned this
date as director of the Bureau of the Budget, and the President had
appointed Maurice Stans, presently deputy director, as his successor.
The President had also named Robert Merriam, currently an assistant
to the director, as deputy chief of the Budget Bureau. Mr. Brundage
had said to the President that he was stepping down because he had to
attend to some personal matters which had been neglected. White House
press secretary James Hagerty said, when asked, that Mr. Brundage was
not leaving because of any fiscal policy differences with the
Administration during the time of the business recession. The
President had accepted the resignation "with great regret and
reluctance". Mr. Brundage had served in the post since April 2,
1956, succeeding Rowland Hughes. Everything now is going to be as
clean as a hound's tooth henceforth. And remember, should it prove
otherwise, never throw out the baby
In Jakarta, Indonesia, Premier Juanda this date claimed that Jakarta paratroopers had captured the American-owned Caltex oil fields near Pakanbaru in Central Sumatra. The rebel regime in that region had disputed earlier Government claims that paratroopers had dropped on the airfield the previous day and that a combat regiment had captured the nearby town of Pakanbaru. The Premier said the capture of the oil field would permit Caltex to resume operations should the company so desire. He told the press that evacuation of American personnel from the area would no longer be necessary. The company had shut down operations the prior Monday and evacuated a few women and children at the suggestion of the Government. An Army spokesman said that the Jakarta troops had suffered no casualties in occupying the area, but could not say whether there had been casualties among the rebel forces. Caltex officials had earlier declined direct comment on the status of future operations at the oil field but said it might be possible to resume production soon. A Caltex official who refused to be identified said the company officials in Singapore were trying to move in food and fuel to their 3,000 to 4,000 employees at oil installations in Central Sumatra and that all workers were safe.
In Paris, Interior Minister Maurice Bourges-Maunory called out armed riot police this date to deal with a demonstration by a crowd of about 500 other policemen demanding "danger pay".
In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Brig. General Antonio Kebreau, a top member of a three-man military junta which had installed Dr. Françoise Duvalier as President six months earlier, was reported to have resigned under pressure.
In New York, General Kebreau was reported to be planning to quit Port-au-Prince for Paris, with his departure possibly to touch off a new struggle for power in the Caribbean republic.
In Tunis, President Habib Bourguiba this date had canceled public celebrations of the second anniversary of Tunisian independence and warned that Tunisia might have to fight France again.
In Kansas City, it was reported that the Weather Bureau had issued a special warning early this date forecasting up to 6 inches of snow across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas and between one and four inches in the southern and central sections of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
In Petros, Tenn., riot-torn Brushy Mountain State Prison had resumed a nearly normal routine this date but no settlement had been reached with the prisoners who had reduced their cell blocks to rubble in riots the prior Monday and Tuesday. (It would be from that prison that James Earl Ray, sentenced to 99 years after pleading guilty in 1969 to the April 4, 1968 assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., would escape for three days in 1977.)
In Beaver, Pa., a blonde beauty contest entrant had been shot to death early this date while walking with a married man who later said that he had been keeping company with her. Police found the body of the 21-year old woman slumped at the foot of a tree in a wooded area about a mile from her home. The deputy coroner said that three .22-caliber bullets had struck her chest and that three other shots from the same gun had ripped into her back, at least one of the bullets having reached her heart. A mill worker had hitched a ride to the Beaver police station shortly after 2:00 a.m. and told a patrolman that he had just killed the young woman. In a later statement, he said that he loved the deceased very much and had been dating her for several months, that the affair with her was the reason why his wife had left him, taking their seven-year old child. The deceased had been an entrant in a number of western Pennsylvania beauty contests in recent years and had been runner-up in the 1955 Miss Pennsylvania contest of the Miss Universe competition. She had recently been employed as a clerk in the accounting department of a manufacturing plant. The man who had confessed to the killing was being held without charge in jail pending further questioning, a detective indicating that a murder charge probably would follow.
In Lumberton, N.C., it was reported that hired private counsel to assist the solicitor in the trial of Klan Grand Wizard James Cole had demanded that he be convicted of inciting to riot "before there is death and bloodshed in this county." Mr. Cole and fellow Klansman James Martin of Reidsville were both charged with inciting to riot after a Klan gathering of January 18 near Maxton, broken up by armed Lumbee Indians, incensed at Klan cross-burnings on or near property owned by Indians in Lumberton and with flyers distributed in advance of the rally warning Indians of the community not to intermarry with whites. The testimony in the trial had ended the previous day and the defense had presented no evidence. The jury in the case was comprised entirely of white males. The charge, a general misdemeanor, carried a maximum penalty of two years in jail. Luther Britt, one of three Lumberton attorneys hired by private citizens to assist the solicitor, had told the jury: "Gentlemen, you had better stop this. If you don't, there will be more bloodshed. There will be people killed and another jury may be trying someone for your murder. Stop this thing, gentlemen. There is but one way to do it and that's by your verdict." As he paced the floor and declaimed in a vigorous courtroom style, he said that he had been involved in one way or another in every Klan trial in the area during the previous 30 years, pointing his finger at Mr. Cole, and shouting: "If you think you can take every Kluxer in Marion, South Carolina, or Reidsville, North Carolina, or everywhere and drive that crowd around," gesturing the while to the Indian audience of about 350, "you've got another think a-coming." The State had built its case on evidence adduced by the sheriff who testified that after learning that the Indians were incensed at the Klan, he had driven to Mr. Cole's home in Marion, S.C., and sought to dissuade him from holding the rally. Bruce Roberts, a former Lumberton newspaperman, had quoted Mr. Cole as persisting in holding the rally because "the Klan never backs down." The defense contended that the State had not proved a necessary element of the charge, that the rally constituted unlawful assembly. The defense asserted that the Klan had a legal right to rally on land which it leased for the purpose, concentrating on Constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly and the right to keep and bear arms. The defense had questioned the sheriff closely on whether or not any Indians had been arrested and charged in connection with the riot. The sheriff responded that he had not made an investigation of the Indians who participated. The State had presented ten witnesses, four of whom were newsmen who covered the rally, most of the witnesses having corroborated the sheriff's testimony. (The Constitution only forbids governmental interference with the rights secured by the First Amendment, not interference by private parties, such as the Indians in this case. The Second Amendment is circumsribed by the "well regulated militia" clause. The argument might be advanced, similar to such cases as the private housing discrimination in Shelley v. Kraemer where court enforcement of racially restrictive residential housing covenants was held to be state action prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause, that as soon as the government begins to enforce the Indians' right to break up the rally with armed force and arrested the Klan participants for inciting a riot, the government became involved in the private "discrimination" of the Indians; but there are obvious problems with such an argument in the case at bench, given the Klan conduct in the community during the week preceding the rally, as the incitement embraced those earlier activities on the private property of Indians.)
Bill Hughes of The News reports from Sanford, N.C., regarding the trial of Frank Wetzel for murder of a North Carolina Highway Patrolman, J. T. Brown, killed on the night of November 5, about an hour after the murder of another patrolman, Wister Reece, in another county, for which Mr. Wetzel had already been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The testimony had concluded the previous day when the State rested its case and the defense announced that it would present no evidence. That followed the same pattern as the first trial in Rockingham the prior January. During the morning, the solicitor had dramatically argued for imposition of the death penalty, stating that the State had shown circumstances from widely scattered geographical locations to prove that Mr. Wetzel was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution said that the defendant had escaped from a New York mental institution with the announced intent of freeing his brother from a Mississippi state prison, that brother, William, having been executed earlier in the year. The State had called 58 witnesses and presented more than 120 items of physical evidence in showing that Mr. Wetzel had staged a series of break-ins along the route from North Carolina to Chattanooga, Tenn., via Mount Airy, N.C., eventually being caught in Bakersfield, Calif. The defense stressed the weak points in the chain of circumstantial evidence, stating that the single eyewitness to the murder of Patrolman Reece, a hitchhiker who said that he had been picked up by Mr. Wetzel, was unworthy of belief because of a checkered past.
In New York, an ingenious resident of Greenwich Village had found an offbeat way of gaining entry to the traditionally carefree parties in that area of the city, simply advertising in the Village newspaper that he was doing research for a thesis on house parties.
On the editorial page, "End Mecklenburg's Duplex Bureaucracy" wonders why Charlotte and Mecklenburg County should maintain separate tax offices when a single, combined operation would be more efficient, more economical and more convenient. The question was being taken up by the City Council and County Commission for the mutual benefit of their own public consciences and the tax-burdened citizenry.
It indicates that government in Mecklenburg County had become so big, complicated and costly that it demanded constant scrutiny and attention to the possibility of improvement. Flexibility was the saving grace of the system, the power to improvise, to alter the government in an orderly manner to make it serve the changing needs of the people.
It suggests that more residents of the county ought give their government a few hard stares, that the Chamber of Commerce had set a useful example which others ought follow. Consolidation of the tax departments could be accomplished without undue stress or strain at present and would speed the day when the entire government of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County could be consolidated, which it regards as the ultimate goal, when individual political interests could be subordinated to the common welfare.
"Keep Runaway Bombs on Their Leashes" indicates that the Pentagon had placed the odds at two billion to one against any accidental nuclear explosion, in the wake of the accidental release of an unarmed atomic bomb near Florence, S.C., two days earlier.
It finds that the question ought be the odds against accidental dropping of any bombs, obviously much less because it was the second nuclear device to be accidentally dropped in recent weeks. The TNT in the device had exploded near Florence injuring six people in one household, and, it suggests, had fortune been less kind, could have killed them and many others. It thus wants the military to keep its cargo in its planes.
The fact that atomic weapons were being carried often in planes, ships and trucks during maneuvers and practice alerts reflected the great information gleaned from tests by the Atomic Energy Commission in Nevada and the Pacific, with the maneuvers and alerts having to be held if defense forces were to remain in readiness.
It assures that there would be no hysteria in the region resulting from the accident, as the citizens of the Carolinas had enough confidence in the military and enough knowledge of the necessities of security to prevent it. Perhaps the general calm which had followed the incident would serve to shame some of the British fire-eaters who felt affront at U.S. defense of their territory with planes carrying atomic bombs. But if Americans did not become hysterical over such accidents, they did expect the military to get excited about them and prevent them. It trusts that the Pentagon had already addressed that task.
"'People in Trouble': Charlotte's Shame" indicates that among the Youth Bureau statistics showing that juvenile crime in the city had jumped nearly ten percent in 1957 had been a warmly humane observation: "The statistics in this analysis are not cold figures. They are vivid symbols of people in trouble."
It suggests that if the community
would respond to the human aspect
Most of the recent attempts at solutions had seemingly degenerated into a finger-pointing exercise. Dr. Marjorie Rittwagen, staff psychiatrist for the Children's Division of New York City's Domestic Relations Court, had recently written: "For every unsolved problem there is a scapegoat. Never is this more true than for a complicated problem where a single answer is demanded. With a scapegoat life becomes easier. No longer is it necessary to work on the basic causes of the problem, and now all the accumulated frustrations can express themselves in hatred. Good old hate. If there is a depression, blame the party in power. If there is a feeling of injured national pride, blame the Jews. And if you are discussing the causes of juvenile delinquency, blame the parents! One cause, therefore, one solution. Fine the parents, beat them, jail them, lecture at them, legislate against them!"
It finds that while the parents wielded great influence in determining how children would turn out, the difficulty was not always that simple. As Leo Tolstoy had said, "Happy families are all alike: every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It posits that family life had to be strengthened if juvenile delinquency was to be treated effectively, but that there were other sources which also had to be treated, within the community in which the families lived, within the schools being attended by the children and within the moral and religious climate of the era.
It suggests that the problem, whether in Charlotte or the nation at large, would require great understanding and help, that it was easy to shrug and say that the parents had let youth down, while it was not only the parents but also politicians and scientists, churchmen and educators, as well as reporters and all others who had failed to provide youth values by which to live, concluding that everyone were "people in trouble".
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "Of Ghoulies and Ghasties", indicates that there were not many mysteries presently left in the world and so it ought be grateful for those weird occurrences which had been turning the hitherto normal and peaceful household of a couple on Seaford, Long Island, into a type of 24-hour nightmare. They could not keep any type of liquid, including holy water, in the house without inviting disaster because the stoppers on the containers had a way of coming off for no reason at all and spilling the liquid all over the place.
A reporter from Newsday had been permanently assigned to the story and the Nassau County police had detailed a detective to keep a continual eye on the premises. Scientific investigators had rushed from Brookhaven laboratories with their Geiger counters and other apparati to determine whether atomic fallout or some other nuclear phenomenon might have been at work. A parapsychologist from Duke University had been rushed in to see whether someone was practicing psychokinesis on the house and its contents. A local clergyman was called in to bless the premises, as the couple were Roman Catholics, and a professional douser had brought his witch hazel wand to inspect thoroughly the whole neighborhood to find out whether rising water tables were the cause.
The parapsychologist had returned to North Carolina to write his report and the physicists had returned to Brookhaven, the douser to his home in Baldwin, while the reporter and detective remained on the job. But thus far, no one had been able to get to the bottom of the problem.
It leaves it to the reader to determine whether it was the work of a playful poltergeist, but it offers a clue, as it had yet to see a story about the household which had not been "grotesquely pied up with transposed lines, upside-down-type and the most extraordinary assortment of typographical errors."
Drew Pearson indicates that it would be interesting to see what would happen to Senator Clinton Anderson's drive to allow distressed industries to obtain tax concessions similar to that urged for the undistressed insurance companies. Senator Anderson was an insurance man and had warned his colleagues that they had been told in the past that they could not approach tax revision on a piecemeal basis and yet at present the life insurance companies, which had one of the finest lobbies in Washington, wanted piecemeal legislation which would give them tax concessions of 124 million dollars. He said that the insurance business was booming and if they were going to obtain piecemeal legislation, there should also be piecemeal legislation for the auto industry which was in a slump, removing excise taxes on vehicles, which Henry Ford had said would help the industry, something with which the Senator agreed. He also proposed that if the insurance companies were going to obtain piecemeal tax relief, there should be piecemeal legislation to provide a personal tax exemption of $650 to each family, plus removal of the transportation tax and lowering of the rate on the first $1,000 of earned income to help small taxpayers.
The ouster of Maj. General John Ackerman, 13th Air Force commander in the Philippines, for his decorating binge had revealed only part of the military decorating in the Pacific. The Navy also had a case involving Admiral W. B. Ammon, commandant of the Marianas, whose wife had kept the island of Guam in a whirl of decorating and gardening. The changes which Mrs. Ammon had made since she and the Admiral had taken up residence on Guam would make the average taxpayer's wife green with envy. One of her most famous projects, facetiously known as "Operation Jackhammer", had been her cutting down of coconut palms planted by Admiral Chester Nimitz on the driveway to their residence, replacing them, with her husband's approval, with royal palms, taller, statelier and without coconuts.
Marquis Childs indicates that a question asked increasingly was who was Sherman Adams, White House chief of staff, dubbed by the press, "assistant president". Although the President was not yet a target of press criticism, Mr. Adams and press secretary James Hagerty, as well as others, were becoming increasingly subject to it.
Mr. Adams had been woods boss for a lumber company in his home state of New Hampshire before entering politics, initially elected to the State Legislature and then serving one term in Congress, defeated once for governor before becoming Governor on his second attempt. At that point, he had been tapped by the President in 1953 to be chief of staff. Mr. Childs suggests that the bare bones of that record appeared unrelated to the remarkable legend which had grown up around him, making him appear ten times life-size, "a cross between Rasputin and Svengali."
He had run the independent agencies, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the FCC and the FPC. The truth, lying somewhere between the facts and the legend, was difficult to appraise. The reason for the public inflation of his post to "assistant to the President" could be found in two developments, the first being that the President's increasing withdrawal during the previous three years from the responsibilities of his office, having said when he agreed to run for the second term that he would, because of his 1955 heart attack, lead a more restricted life with times of rest and recreation. Even prior to that time he had shown an indifference if not an antagonism toward the political aspects of the job. Thus, a large measure of the political duties of the Presidency had fallen on Mr. Adams. In 1952, Mr. Adams had bucked the Taft Republicans in New Hampshire, headed by Senator Styles Bridges, to help General Eisenhower obtain the nomination, and had a leading role in the subsequent campaign.
He had passed virtually all domestic appointments but would not discuss the degree of his responsibilities, with many insisting that he made the decisions subject to the President's approval, affording him wide latitude in the far-flung bureaucracy of the Government.
Recently, when Mr. Hagerty had announced the appointment of Gordon Tiffany, a former New Hampshire State Attorney General, to be staff director of the Commission on Civil Rights, formed pursuant to the 1957 Civil Rights Act, Mr. Hagerty had stated in response to questions that he had not been selected by Mr. Adams. But at the same time in Concord, N.H., Mr. Tiffany was saying that Mr. Adams had asked him to take the post.
Mr. Childs posits that the second reason Mr. Adams was being criticized was because of the growing complexity of the impossible office of the Presidency. There had been much talk during the Eisenhower Administration about revising and strengthening the office, but it had never been done and thus the position of Mr. Adams, in effect being the deputy president, was extra-legal. That made him vulnerable, just as had been Harry Hopkins during FDR's wartime term, a favorite target for those wishing to criticize the President without doing so directly.
Mr. Adams readily admitted that he had a murderous job. At present, he had gone away for a few days of skiing in New Hampshire, but would soon be back at the job, and, given the situation of the President and the anomalies of the office, there was no substitute for the deputy who minded the store when the boss was away.
Joseph and Stewart Alsop indicate that at the end of the month, their joint byline would cease to appear in its accustomed place, as it had become desirable for practical reasons to divide the functions of newspaper reporting and magazine writing which their brotherly partnership had always combined. The News editors parenthetically note that Joseph Alsop would continue the column while Stewart would join the staff of the Saturday Evening Post as contributing editor on national affairs.
The Alsops indicate that they had formed their partnership shortly after the war, during the first peacetime months of the Truman Administration. They had run into their first trouble as columnists because of insufficient faith in the high and noble purposes of the Soviet Union, at the time of the first Azerbaijan crisis. In analyzing Joseph Stalin's grab for Persia, they had followed the line of the exceptionally brilliant Soviet experts that the U.S. Government had at that time. They indicate parenthetically that one of those experts was now in exile and another had been driven from the public service, such that they now relied on the Secretary of State's direct wire to the Almighty for the functions the experts had once performed.
Having followed the line of their expert friends, they were denounced as hard-nosed, maliciously anti-Soviet pessimists by an impeccably Republican publisher of great importance to them, who had later indulged in more than a little appeasement of Senator McCarthy.
"Being a newspaper columnist is a little bit like being a Greek chorus. You report, you analyze, you comment and you describe the parts of the drama that did not take place on the open stage. Since irony is a principal ingredient of the political drama, anyone who spends much time in the chorus is bound to remember a good many ironical episodes, like the episode of the indignant publisher."
They indicate that the business itself had its own ironies, that they found that they bored people until their teeth hurt when they were most correct, as they had with their angry reports on the disarmament program undertaken by President Truman and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson prior to the Korean War, as well as with their similar reports on the Eisenhower disarmament program which had been only a little modified by the Russian launch of the Sputniks the prior October and November. They also found that the things they had to drive themselves to do very often ended by being no more than wryly funny, as when one of them had decided to go in with the first wave of the Inchon landing in Korea in 1953 and had been peacefully deposited on the wrong beach. They found also that sometimes they were the most popular when what they were writing was the most wrong or most empty of real content.
They found that the ironies of the business underlined the cardinal rule that a newspaperman's feet were a lot more important than his head. There was another rule also, that a newspaperman should never forget that the drama in which he was one of the chorus was a real drama involving national and human destiny. That had made the previous 12 years full of movement and suspense.
When they had first gone to work, "the American lead" was beyond imaginable questioning, with the question having been instead whether the great technical and economic lead would be transformed into American leadership in freedom's bitter struggle to survive in a divided world. "Every American political tradition was against the transformation. The wisest and most experienced Americans regarded the transformation as utterly impossible—for instance, one of us can vividly remember that very experienced man, James F. Byrnes, inveighing against the first proposers of the Marshall Plan as featherwitted visionaries who did not 'know Congress.'"
Yet the great transformation of the American lead into American leadership had nevertheless taken place and subsequently there were troubled but heroic years. They suggest that perhaps it had been the unaccustomed effort of peacetime heroism which had caused the subsequent poisonous mutual suspicion and quick hatred among Americans. They find that poison to have been neutralized at present, but also that the American lead had been lost and the future appeared more doubtful at present than had appeared remotely possible 12 years earlier.
"Maybe, indeed, our particular section of the chorus is separating just as the drama reaches its climax, which is another reason why we regret the separation. But the separation has been decided, and this retrospective has gone on long enough."
A letter writer indicates that it was terrible that William Penn and Roger Williams and thousands of opponents of war and lovers of peace had not been able to convince present-day Americans that they were slaves of the very thing they claimed to abhor but to which they were chained. General Lewis Hershey, head of Selective Service, complained that parents and others were not letting young boys choose for themselves whether to enter the military. The writer finds that no one could be more guilty of that than the conscriptionists, that youths were forced to make themselves available for induction even if they did not want to join the Army. He suggests a volunteer force of those who wanted to help the poor, the needy, the sick, and the aged, without any draft. He thinks it would be fine if all youth, including girls, would declare independence of everything evil, tobacco, liquor, profanity, loose living, delinquency, and hatred. "How great to acknowledge dependence on God and everything good that means!" He suggests that a new world could never be built until youth chose freely the only path which could possibly lead to true freedom, freedom for all the youth of the world.
The Kennedy Administration would inaugurate the Peace Corps as a means to do what he suggested on foreign soil, and the Johnson Administration would inaugurate the Vista program to do what he suggested on domestic soil. The Carter Administration would institutionalize the all-volunteer armed forces in 1978, after the Nixon Administration had ended the draft in 1973 in the wake of the Paris Peace Accords ending active American military involvement in Vietnam.
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