The Charlotte News
Monday, March 17, 1958
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Cape Canaveral, Fla., that the Navy's Vanguard rocket
had hurled the second U.S. satellite into orbit
Robert Goldenstein of the Associated Press reports from Chicago that an Army research official had said this date that space medicine pioneers were "working toward" development of a substance which would make breathing, eating and drinking unnecessary on space flights or for survival on other planets. James B. Edson, assistant to the Army's director of research and development, forecast that the "normal rate of engineering development progress" would make possible landings on the moon and Mars and flights to faraway stars within 10 to 15 years, with any unpredictable creative breakthroughs shortening that time. Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he had said that the first manned expedition to the moon probably would make their first base a hole in the ground, possibly a natural cave or fissure, providing protection from the hot sun, cold nights, cosmic rays and meteors, that it should grow into sealed caverns in which pressure would be maintained just high enough to keep the blood from boiling. He said that the moon pioneers might not need oxygen as space medicine personnel were working toward the development of a synthetic nutrient which could be injected into the bloodstream, making breathing, eating and drinking unnecessary. A moon base would have important military implications in deciding the outcome of any terrestrial power contest. "Prevention of exclusive lunar occupation by another power may someday become a major objective of U.S. foreign policy and of our technological effort," according to Mr. Edson. Within the ensuing two or three years, suitably selected and trained men could confidently embark on space strips of several days' duration, and looking further into the future, he said that the establishment of self-sufficient bases or colonies on the moon and Mars might set a trend. He stated: "The expanding range of human habitat may forever be wider than the area that can be depopulated in a violent power contest. We can imagine a time when the destruction of mankind on any single planet will be like the loss, in earlier times, of a city or a culture—a tragedy but not the end of everything." That is very comforting. Just have your own rocket in the backyard at the ready to blast off in case of a nuclear exchange.
In Florence, S.C., it was reported that the Air Force had begun this date handling damage claims because of the unarmed atomic bomb which had dropped in the Mars Bluff area five miles from the city the prior Tuesday. The chief of claims had set up headquarters at the Civil Air Patrol hangar at the Florence airport and was prepared to handle claims of less than $1,000, with more expensive claims to be handled through Congress. The family home in the backyard of which the bomb had dropped had been virtually destroyed by flying material caused by a TNT detonation charge, though the bomb was unarmed with any nuclear device, leaving a 20-foot deep crater in the yard, though no one had been seriously injured. Five other houses and a church in the area had been damaged.
In Havana, it was reported that Cuban rebel leader Fidel Castro issued a 22-point ultimatum from his mountain headquarters this date for El Presidente Fulgencio Batista to quit his post by April 5.
In Singapore, Indonesian rebels this date claimed the capture of Medan, a major bastion of the Jakarta Government in North Sumatra, following seven hours of hard fighting. The Indonesian Army headquarters in Jakarta acknowledged that a major revolt had broken out in the city of 300,000 but insisted that the fate of the city was not yet clear.
Senator Mike Monroney of Oklahoma this date proposed an automobile price labeling bill which he described as designed to "do away with the advantage now held by a few unscrupulous dealers."
Col. Gordon Moore, the President's brother-in-law, swore this date in testimony before the House Investigations subcommittee currently investigating the FCC that "in no way, directly or indirectly" had he sought to influence the award of a television channel license in Miami.
The House Agriculture Committee, operating under speed-up orders, was expected to approve this date a Senate-passed resolution which would freeze farm price supports at the 1957 level.
RNC chairman Meade Alcorn this date had accused Democrats in Congress of dragging their feet on a three-year old proposal of the President for special aid to areas of chronic unemployment.
In Rome, it was reported that President Giovanni Gronchi this date had dissolved the Italian Parliament to open the way for elections for both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, with the vote to occur on May 25.
In Clearwater, Fla., it was reported that a spectacular fire had raged through most of a city block of stores this date, causing damage of at least 1.5 million dollars, with three stores, a stock brokerage office and a supermarket destroyed.
The Associated Press reports that dynamite explosions had damaged Jewish centers in Miami, Fla., and in Nashville, and that police this date were examining the wreckage of both sites for clues to the identity of terrorists who had planted the dynamite. An anonymous telephone caller had linked the Tennessee incident the previous day to school integration and had threatened that a Federal judge "would be shot down in cold blood." The blast in Miami had occurred at 2:20 a.m. on Sunday, causing at least $30,000 worth of damage to the school recreation annex of Temple Beth El, located in the southwest section of that city. Doors had been blown out and a hole torn in a concrete wall and a kitchen ceiling, causing the roof to be lifted and walls shifted on the foundation. The Nashville explosion, occurring the previous evening, had smashed the front doors of the Jewish community center, ripping down the ceiling of the reception hall and breaking panes of glass, with damage estimated at $6,000. There had been no injuries in either blast. Although the Nashville Jewish center had been crowded with children a few hours before the blast, there was no one in the building at the time of the explosion. Rabbi William Silverman of Nashville's Jewish temple had received a telephone call right after the blast warning, "The temple is going to be next." The caller also told him that Federal Judge William E. Miller "would be shot down in cold blood." A dozen black first-graders had been admitted to six white schools the prior September amid violent crowd protests, climaxed by the midnight dynamiting of Hattie Cotton School in Nashville. The Nashville school desegregation case was still pending before Judge Miller, who had recently disapproved the school board's proposal for a voluntary desegregation plan involving three school systems, white, black and mixed. (Judge Miller is not to be confused with Congressman William E. Miller, who was currently serving in the House and would be the vice-presidential running mate of Senator Barry Goldwater on the Republican ticket in 1964.) It had been the first such incident in Miami since a wave of terrorism in 1951 when several synagogues and black homes had been bombed and dynamite had been discovered at a Catholic church. Miami police said that between ten and twelve sticks of dynamite had been involved in the explosion there.
In Artesia, Calif., it was reported that a housewife said that a man had gagged and stripped her, hung her by her wrists from a garage rafter and beaten her with a rubber hose containing a razor blade, and then burned her with a cigar before fleeing the scene. Sheriff's deputies said that the woman, 40, remained hysterical, having told them that she had entered the family garage in the south-side Los Angeles suburb on Saturday night to obtain a cardboard carton, while her husband, a trailer salesman, was away on business and their nine-year old daughter was asleep in the house. The stranger had then grabbed her, muffled her scream with one hand while stuffing a cloth in her mouth and binding her with a cord around her head, then ripped off her only garment, a housecoat, and ordered her to clasp her hands as if in prayer. Laughing continuously, he had then bound her wrists, had thrown the cord over a rafter and pulled it until her feet barely touched the floor. He puffed a cigar for a few moments and then, uttering foul language, inflicted 15 burns on her body. He took a three-foot length of garden hose, attached a razor blade to one end and beat the woman on her legs. Pounding her on her back with his fists, he asked, "How would you like me to cut your toes off?" He had then snapped open a switchblade knife, advanced toward her and said, "Well, this is it." At that moment a car had pulled into the driveway, apparently to turn around, and the attacker ran out the door and disappeared. The woman managed to pull over a step ladder with one foot and wriggle free. Her husband had returned about two hours after the attack and a physician was called to treat her. She said that she had been afraid to inform authorities immediately of the attack for fear that the assailant might return and kill her. She described the man as being between 38 and 40 years of age, 6 feet, 3 inches tall with curly blonde hair.
In Rock Hill, S.C., an elusive 16-year old escapee from the North Carolina State Mental Hospital in Raleigh was in the city jail this date as North Carolina authorities pondered legal problems involved in returning her to the state. Rock Hill police said that they had taken the heavy-set girl into custody on Saturday at a restaurant where she worked for about a day. She had been accused of killing her father in Cabarrus County in 1956 and had escaped from the mental hospital on March 4. Cabarrus County sheriff's officials, who apparently would be responsible for her return, pondered the legal technicalities this date, after the State Hospital superintendent indicated that they had no authority to send out of state for her. The sheriff said that he did not believe a person who was declared mentally deficient could properly waive extradition. She had been declared mentally incompetent to stand trial for the murder of her father by a a Cabarrus County jury in 1956, after allegedly having shot her father in the back as he watched television in their home near Concord, telling doctors that she had been hearing "the devil's" voices advising her to kill him. Her escape on March 4 had occurred as she was being returned with two teenage boys from an earlier escape, about the fifth such escape, according to a Cabarrus deputy.
U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John J. Parker of Charlotte, the nation's senior Federal judge, had died this date in Washington of a heart attack suffered the previous night. He had been in the nation's capital to attend a meeting of a committee on administration of criminal justice, of which he was chairman. The news of his death had brought immediate messages of shock and regret from state and Federal officials all over the country. A native of Union County near Charlotte, he had an established reputation for international law and for being an authority on both Federal and state constitutional law. The staunch Republican had been a candidate for both Congress and the governorship of North Carolina, and had been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Herbert Hoover in 1930 but had failed narrowly to achieve Senate confirmation. He had been born in Monroe in 1885 and through his mother, was related to Samuel Johnston, the state's first U.S. Senator, and James Iredell, a Supreme Court Justice appointed by President George Washington. As a boy, he had attended public schools and later entered UNC where he worked his way through college, graduating in 1907 with an A.B. degree and as president of Phi Beta Kappa. He had been a leader in student affairs, was president of his senior class, represented the University in debating, had won prizes in Greek, economics and law, and was awarded his law degree from the University in 1908. He had begun practicing law in Greensboro and in 1909 had returned to Monroe where he formed a partnership with A. M. Stack, later a Superior Court Judge, eventually moving his law office to Charlotte in 1923. One of his Charlotte law partners had been North Carolina Supreme Court Justice William Bobbitt. He was appointed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1925 by President Calvin Coolidge after he had established himself as a forceful and successful young attorney. One of his early successes had been the North Carolina Par Clearance case in which he had represented 300 banks against the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
In Charlotte, his death was being mourned in the legal profession and he was being recalled by many attorneys, who had known him for years, as the greatest jurist they had ever known. Senators Sam J. Ervin and Kerr Scott of North Carolina expressed regret at his death, with Senator Ervin indicating that he had conferred with Judge Parker on legal problems for years and held the highest respect for his legal views. He said: "In my judgment one of the greatest tragedies of this generation was the rejection by the United States Senate of his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States. Had he been elevated to this post, he would undoubtedly have been chief justice during the past several years and the Constitution of the United States would have been interpreted according to the intentions of those who drew it and the nation would have been spared the constitutional and legal confusion from which it suffers." Senator Scott said that he was one of the finest jurists of the country and that his contributions to his state had been great.
In Denver, a man mixed up a salad in a bowl used earlier by his wife for mixing a hair-waving lotion, and both became ill after eating the salad, requiring hospital treatment.
Since the News edition for Friday was missing, we lost the news about the conviction of Klan Grand Dragon James Cole, from Marion, S.C., for inciting to riot in Maxton, N.C., near Lumberton, the prior January 18, a Klan rally broken up by armed Lumbee Indians incensed over the Klan's harassment, with cross-burnings having taken place on or near Indian property in the week before the rally and leaflets having been distributed warning Indians, about 370 years too late, not to intermarry with white people. His cohort in the rally was also convicted by the jury comprised of twelve white men, rendering the verdicts after only 32 minutes of deliberation. Mr. Cole was sentenced to between 18 and 24 months on the roads and his accomplice to between six and twelve months.
As twists of fate would have it, the University of Houston will compete for the first time since 1984 for the national championship on Monday, April 7, 2025, having defeated Duke in a whirlwind comeback on Saturday in the semifinals, 70 to 67, after being down by 14 points with about eight minutes to play and down 9 with just over two minutes, down six with 35 seconds left. They scored nine points in that last half-minute after it had taken them eleven minutes at the start of the game to accumulate more than that tally. It is coincidental because the Houston coach, Kelvin Sampson, hails from Robeson County and his father participated in the Lumbee Indian uprising that night in January, 1958. Thus, we wish him and his team doubly well against the University of Florida on Monday night in their quest for the school's first national championship, having been frustrated in two previous attempts in the finals, in 1983 by upstart N.C. State and the following year by Georgetown, when coach Guy Lewis was at the helm. (We still recall the shellacking UNC took from Houston in the consolation game in 1967 when the Cougars were led by Elvin Hayes, listening to it on radio during the afternoon while playing basketball in a parking lot, as it was not broadcast on tv.) We did not realize Mr. Sampson's ties to Robeson County, specifically Pembroke, until this weekend after the game against Duke, and so were pleased with the upset after the fact, though we were not energetically pulling for either team, only wishing to see a close game, with the underdog always being the favorite when UNC is not on the floor—just as had been N.C. State in 1983. We bear no ill will toward Duke, and had wished it well in the tournament after the ACC Tournament and selection Sunday. Maybe next year, in every game except with UNC... As one originally from the swamp down around the Lumber, we say, Ko-es-gestshltem...
Meanwhile, here in 1958, the Eastern Regionals had taken place the previous weekend in Charlotte, won by Temple over Dartmouth in the finals Saturday night, after Temple had beaten ACC Tournament champions Maryland in the semifinals on Friday night. Maryland had defeated defending national champion UNC the previous weekend in the ACC Tournament finals.
On the editorial page, "Which Expert Do You Read, Senator?" quotes Senator Kerr Scott of North Carolina from his current newsletter as having said, "I would appreciate it very much if you would let me know how you feel on matters before Congress."
It indicates that as far as halting nuclear tests and thus ceasing to put radioactive waste into the earth's atmosphere, he might have to vote on any agreement which could be reached to stop the tests for the sake of future generations. It thinks he ought do the right thing, but does not know what the right thing would be, and the question it worried most about was whether he, his fellow Senators and the President knew, as they were dependent on experts to tell them whether any agreement with the Soviets could be guaranteed of execution if the U.S. were to stop testing and the Soviets did not.
When the Atomic Energy Commission had admitted that its underground tests had been detected 2,300, instead of 250, miles distant, there appeared to have been some reason to believe that the U.S. could afford to risk a test ban, as the underground test had been made for the purpose of measuring the risk.
Now, however, Dr. Edward Teller, the hydrogen bomb expert on whom the Government relied for advice, said that the AEC's erroneous report had not mattered anyway because according to past experience, "an agreement to stop tests may well be followed by secret and successful tests behind the Iron Curtain.… It is almost certain that in the competition between prohibition and bootlegging, the bootlegger will win."
It thus suggests that the tests had to continue. But it finds that there were also experts who claimed that an agreement with the Soviets could be made foolproof and they accused the Administration experts of distorting the evidence to stifle public inquiry and debate. The disagreement among the experts had become somewhat violent on occasion and it was confounding as to which experts to believe, with no alternative to placing confidence in those employed by the Administration which had access to the secrets of the Atomic Energy Commission. It was forced confidence and not the type founded on inquiry and discussion, not the type which Dr. Teller was talking about in his Our Nuclear Future, soon to be published by Criterion Books, in which he had stated: "If, in a free democratic country, the majority believes that something should be done—it will be done. The sovereign power in a democracy is the people. It is of the greatest importance that the people should be honestly and completely informed about all relevant facts. In no other way can a sound decision be reached."
It finds that the layman would find it next to impossible to know what to think on such a matter, given the disagreement among the experts, but urges that everything which the Senate could do to strike against secrecy for secrecy's sake would be greatly appreciated by the citizens seeking the "relevant facts".
"It Is Better To Have Laughed and Lost" begins with a quote from James Thurber: "Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." It indicates that Malcolm Muggeridge, former editor of Punch, and Charles Poore, the New York Times literary critic and occasional parodist, had expressed concern for the fate of laughter in the somber age at present.
Mr. Muggeridge said that the decline of humor in Britain and America was "more alarming than either the hydrogen bomb or the Sputnik," and Mr. Poore had made an ardent plea for parody, currently being scrutinized by the Supreme Court.
When Mr. Muggeridge had complained about the dearth of laughter in the U.S. and the average American's low comedy ration, it finds him to have been talking through his bowler hat, for there was plenty of comedy, finding it to be "the axis on which the whole broadcasting industry revolves." Even television commercials were "comic". Thus, it finds that it was not more comedy which was needed but more humor, there being a difference, in that comedy merely provided amusement while humor was a rare thing providing rarer rewards.
According to Stephen Leacock, humor was the sense within people which set up a kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the expression of that sense in art. It suggests that there had been great humor in the past produced by Aristophanes, Cervantes, Mark Twain, and Lewis Carroll, and was still being produced by the likes of James Thurber, E. B. White, S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash. But few youngsters were emerging to carry on the great tradition, with suffocating decorum tending to deaden and flatten most of the latter-day attempts at humorous prose.
Playful irreverence was out of fashion, with the result that people and institutions had to be handled with a type of milksop delicacy lest they blacken the jester's eye or discover a Marxist in his family tree. It wonders if George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind could get away with anything as pointedly exhilarating as "Of Thee I Sing" in 1958, especially the scene which Mr. Poore recalled, in which a line of men in black robes had come prancing onto the stage singing the music of George and Ira Gershwin:
"We're the one—
two—
three—
four—
five—
six—
seven—
eight—
nine Supreme Court
Judges.
We have powers that are positively
regal—
Only we can take a law and make it
legal."
It finds that such a parody of such a venerated institution would undoubtedly be frowned on now when even the Court's critics preferred to "twit it with the dourest dignity". It finds that what remained of a great tradition of humor was the crime of dullness compounded by hypocrisy, where nobody got hurt and no one was profoundly stirred. "In place of humor there is only humoring."
It appears that former News reporter Marion Hargrove's script
All this jazz, little Trump-head, regarding "political correctness" which you think started last week or during the Biden or Obama Administrations, has been in fact going on for a long time and has nothing to do with Republican or Democratic politics, but rather social adjustment to changing times and changing views and changing sensitivities as those adjustments occur in fits and starts. That does not change via the ballot box. If you knew how things worked at all, little Trump-head, you would at least understand that much.
A piece from the Washington Post & Times Herald, titled "Who's on First?" indicates that the publication of the 30th edition of Who's Who in America had raised the question of whether Gresham's Law, the principle that quantity drives away quality, applied to celebrity as much as to coinage, literature, education, etc. It indicates that all it knew was that when the first edition of the volume had been published in 1898, the editors had found only 8,602 persons who were worthy of mention, while now there were between six and seven times that number and the new volume contained almost half as many names as the far less selective Domesday Book of 1085-86, compiled mainly for tax purposes and including not only the baronial big shots of the time but also such no-accounts as copyhold tenants, cotires, villeins and serfs.
It finds in inspecting the first volume of Who's Who, published just on the eve of the Spanish-American War, there had been, for example, only slightly more than a thousand government functionaries of one type or another deemed worthy of notice, while there were now nearly 5,000 such people, though their proportion of all celebrities had fallen from twelve percent to slightly less than ten percent.
It indicates that the only moral to be deduced from it was that there were other and more easy roads to celebrity at present, such as winning a Nobel or a Pulitzer prize, such as Werner Forssman, Albert Camus, Harry Trask and Buford Boone, or just by becoming known, such as Hal March, Mike Wallace, Phil Silvers and Art Carney, familiar to millions on television. It finds that enough to put one in a class, or at least in a book, with Janos Kadar, William C. Friday, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Reverend Sister Mary Ann Ida of Mundelein College, Ill.
There were also some who had been dropped from the volume and so it calls to the reader's attention the "infinite pathos of that inflection of the verb 'to be.' 'How fleeting,' saith the mystic, 'how very fleeting is the glory of this world!'"
Drew Pearson indicates that in a town which had highlighted the dog troubles of Elliott Roosevelt, the marital troubles of James Roosevelt, and the troubles of Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., with Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, it was nothing short of a public relations miracle that for the previous five years little had been said about the operations of a relative of the President, his brother-in-law, Col. Gordon Moore. He was about to be brought before the House Investigating subcommittee chaired by Representative Oren Harris of Arkansas. Mr. Pearson indicates his belief that no friend or relative of the President who used the prestige of the White House ought be immune from public scrutiny. While no President could pick his brother-in-law, he could also see to it that he did not use White House dinners and telecasts to advance his private business, especially when that business involved influence before Government agencies.
Col. Moore was a charming, likable ex-Army officer who had been discharged from the service in 1951 and whose economic fortunes had skyrocketed since the President had entered the White House and since he had been able to invite George Baker, president of National Airlines, to a stag dinner held by the President on February 1, 1954, and to invite other clients to receptions for the Queen of England, as well as being seen in the background of telecasts when the President reported to the nation. His business had substantially increased to such an extent that he not only occupied a nice house opposite that of Ambassador Joseph Davies near the Washington Cathedral, but also had a weekend estate and racing stable in the fox-hunting section of northern Virginia. The colonel was part owner of a Dominican shipyard, financed by dictator Trujillo, along with two other men who were vice-presidents of National Airlines, one of whom had been fired by Trujillo and the colonel had now sold his stock. The latter had continued on intimate terms with the dictator for some time, having made many trips to Trujillo City and two years earlier having negotiated a complicated deal for the importation of 7,000 tons of "green sugar" into the U.S. as hog feed. Its classification as hog feed meant that he paid a duty of 1.5 cents per cwt., instead of 66.5 cents, and also that the sugar was not charged against the Dominican quota of exports to the U.S. Later, when the U.S. Customs Bureau had reversed itself and charged him 66.5 cents on the shipment, Senator John F. Kennedy had introduced a bill, from which he later withdrew, which would have given the colonel's sugar special treatment.
He indicates that the fact that the President's brother-in-law had been on close terms with the Dominican dictator had not been lost on other Latin American countries where the U.S. had been seeking to encourage democratic governments.
He also enjoyed a relation with Bob Baker, executive vice-president of American Security and Trust, which would make other businessmen green with envy, and was able to walk in and borrow large sums of money with virtually no collateral, once having borrowed $50,000 for the Air Coach Transit Association on no real security other than office furniture. He ran a factoring business whereby he borrowed money from Mr. Baker's bank, then loaned it to small non-scheduled airlines which had to wait to collect from the slow-paying Government. For that factoring service, he charged one percent.
He had introduced his friend and former employer, O. Roy Chalk, to Mr. Baker when Mr. Chalk was trying to purchase the streetcar and bus lines which served Washington. Numerous offers had been made to purchase Capital Transit, of which Mr. Baker was a director, and some of those offers had been better than that of Mr. Chalk, but his bid was finally accepted. Mr. Pearson indicates that Col. Moore had acknowledged to the column that he had helped put that deal across "in a small way".
Shortly before the President was nominated in 1952, Mr. Chalk had given Col. Moore a job at $6,500 per year to be in charge of public relations for the Air Transportation Association, later making him vice-president of Trans-Caribbean Airways. No longer in that position, Col. Moore had branched out far beyond that job as had Trans-Caribbean, such that by the prior January 15, it had become the first non-scheduled airline in the history of the country to obtain a regularly scheduled route, from New York to Puerto Rico, obtaining the route despite the formal opposition of the Puerto Rican Government, which had filed a brief favoring Capital.
In the fall of 1952, U.S. Air Lines, another nonscheduled airline, faced bankruptcy, with an overdrawn bank account and only one DC-3 which could get off the ground, its insurance also having been canceled and the Civil Aeronautics Board having canceled its permission to fly military passengers, threatening to revoke its certificate completely. But suddenly, Col. Moore managed to put $25,000 into the airline and become an executive of it, and in one week, stock in U.S. Air Lines had gone from 12.5 cents to 36 cents per share.
Stewart Alsop indicates that the late economist John Maynard Keynes was likely chortling in his grave. As the apostle of deficit spending to cure a depression, he had been the intellectual godfather of the New Deal and among proper Republicans, "Keynesianism" had become a very bad word. Yet, the Administration was now as wholly committed as the Democratic Congressional leadership to the notion that large deficit spending was to be preferred to a depression.
Republicans and Democrats approached the inevitable deficit from opposite directions, with the Democrats urging to spend more while Republicans wanted to tax less. In the end, both sides were likely to get their way, plus a deficit which would make the New Deal deficits look like nothing. Within the Administration, there was no longer any resistance to a large tax cut should the economic slide continue, with the only debate being on the timing and size of the cut. He suggests that it might be called the Nixon-Mitchell group, led by the Vice-President and Secretary of Labor James Mitchell, both wanting a large tax cut right away should the economy show any further signs of slipping.
The figures for unemployment compensation claims, published three weeks or more before the overall unemployment estimates, almost always accurately forecast the unemployment trend. The March unemployment compensation claims would be available the following Thursday and if the figures were to show a small rise, the Vice-President and the Secretary of Labor were likely to press the Administration for a large tax cut immediately. Moreover, that same group regarded a 5 billion dollar tax cut as a minimum and would not rule out a 7 billion dollar cut, based on the idea that if it was worth doing at all, it was worth doing in a big way.
Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson and the President, on the other hand, wanted to delay a decision on any tax cut at least until the March unemployment figures would be released in mid-April, regarding 5 billion dollars as a maximum rather than a minimum cut. But those were differences only in degree and it would be certain that there would be a cut unless there were a sudden and unexpected economic upturn.
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had been pushing through the Senate an anti-recession program consisting of five principal parts, the 1.8 billion dollar housing bill, the freeze of farm price supports at the 1957 level, the speed-up in road construction, an extension of unemployment benefits and a larger and more expensive education bill. It was not possible to place a price tag on the program, as much would depend on the state of the economy, especially regarding the farm spending. But 2 to 3 billion dollars in additional spending was a reasonable guess for it. Adding 3.5 to 4 billion dollars over the President's original estimates for defense spending, with a lot of Congressional sentiment for doubling and even tripling the Navy's Polaris nuclear submarine program, for ordering another hundred or so B-52 bombers and other hardware for the Air Force, and for increasing the Army from 15 to 18 divisions, would mean that it was likely that an additional 4 billion dollars in defense spending was a conservative estimate. Adding that the President's original estimate of a barely balanced budget had been based on the assumption of a continued rise in personal and corporate incomes, with all the signs pointing the other way, meant that it was likely there would be a large revenue loss in addition to the large tax cut. Even allowing for cuts of a billion dollars or more in foreign aid, it was likely that there would be a deficit in the range of between ten and fifteen billion dollars.
By comparison, the highest peacetime deficit of the New Deal and Fair Deal under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had been the 1936 deficit of less than 4.5 billion.
The Keynesian theory was that Government pump-priming would reverse a downward economic trend and thus sharply increase Government revenues, and if that theory worked, the deficit could be less than what would result from simple addition and subtraction. But it was clear that the theory would be more thoroughly tested than it had ever been during the New Deal and, ironically, under a business-minded Republican Administration.
Doris Fleeson indicates that Republican prospects in New York had been improved by the outbreak of hostilities between Liberal Party leaders and the Democratic organization, with both the governorship and the Senate seat at stake in the fall and the outcome materially to influence the 1960 political picture. The Liberals had challenged the Democratic professionals by openly projecting the name of Edward R. Murrow as a candidate for the Senate against incumbent Republican Irving Ives. That had developed as a culmination of frustrations. For some time, all of the potential candidate suggested by liberals, either in the balance-of-power party of that name or in the Democratic organization, had met with resistance from Carmine De Sapio of Tammany Hall and his upstate associates. The resistance had fanned resentments from 1956 when many Liberals had felt that Tammany and its friends had done little for Adlai Stevenson and Senator Estes Kefauver in the general election.
The professionals were pretending to scorn Mr. Murrow, but in their private discussions were taking into account the history of the last race against Senator Ives when the Liberal Party had refused to endorse the regular Democrat named to run against him, Brooklyn Borough president John Cashmore.
The Liberals were not at all hostile to Senator Ives, having thought so much of him as compared to Mr. Cashmore that they had not endorsed him lest they alienate from him conservative Republican voters upstate, and thus endorsed one of their own. The result had been that Senator Ives had carried New York City and was elected handily.
The man in the middle of the current row was Governor Averell Harriman, who would be endorsed by the Liberals and would be a clear favorite to win a second term. But the Governor wanted to have such a majority that he could run again for the presidency in 1960, despite his age of 69. It was important to him, therefore, that his ticket be bolstered by a strong and unifying candidate for the Senate. (Governor Harriman would ultimately lose to Nelson Rockefeller.)
Senator Ives was very cheerful about it all, though insisting that for physical reasons he had not made up his mind whether to seek re-election, also indicating that he had no favorites among Republicans for the governorship. One of those, Mr. Rockefeller, had been in Washington during the week seeking advice and counsel from old friends in Government, who had warned him that he must fish or cut bait soon and that politics offered a rough passage to the amateur with any illusions that it was a sport and not a fight to win.
She posits that a contest between Governor Harriman and Mr. Rockefeller would offer the drama of very rich, very famous names locked in combat. The two men had been close personal friends, but Mr. Harriman had gone through the political wars and Mr. Rockefeller would have to realize that if he obtained the nomination, he would not face his social and business pal but rather a determined politician displaying the characteristics which had won a fortune for his father in the rougher days of unbridled capitalism.
A letter writer suggests that life had become pretty cheap in the state when a hoodlum on the lam from a life sentence in another state, Frank Wetzel, having announced that his aim was to free his brother in Mississippi slated for the gas chamber, which had found him the prior January, could deliberately shoot down two innocent Highway Patrolmen and then smilingly accept two ten-year prison terms for two shocking murders. (It is not entirely clear that to which he is referring, as Mr. Wetzel had already been sentenced to life imprisonment on one of the two murders and was sentenced to a second consecutive life term the prior Friday after conviction the previous night of the second murder with a recommendation again by the jury of mercy, sparing his life.) He thus goes on with his invalid assumptions about the sentence he faced, basing it on the highly improbable notion that such a convicted murderer would receive parole after ten years when first eligible for a parole hearing, indicating that mercy and sympathy were admirable traits when tempered with common sense. He wonders why a jury would release a fiend with a minor jail sentence to endanger the lives of their fellow citizens and even their own families. He favors giving him the gas.
Mr. Wetzel, incidentally, remained in prison in 1997 at age 75, despite some having disagreed with his prolonged incarceration in the meantime, his fasting also having produced no action toward obtaining for him parole. Eventually, in 2012, he died in Central Prison at age 90. Would a quick end to his life, likely, if imposed, to have been exacted in those days of quick retribution by sometime in 1959, have been a more fitting punishment than the endless agony of incarceration for more than 54 years?
And speaking of F. Lee Bailey, a far more worthy appeal for release from prolonged incarceration would be for Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, in prison continuously since 1982 for the problematic convictions in 1979 of the slaying of his wife and two young children in February, 1970, that case, if any could, presenting originally evidence which tended to exonerate him in the form of the confession by one Helena Stoeckley, deceased since 1983, a drug addict who said that she had been at the scene of the murders while high on LSD and recounted details which only a person at the scene would have known, even confessing complicity to her own mother, that evidence having been excluded from trial in 1979 after an evidentiary hearing in which she denied being able to recall her whereabouts on the night of the murders and denying complicity therein while also admitting heavy drug use during that time, with problematic blood and hair evidence found at the scene also not available at trial, some of which was determined in 2006 by subsequent DNA testing conducted by the Army not to have belonged to the family, the scene of the crimes having hopelessly been contaminated by amateurish Army CID officers who initially responded. Rather than by the evidence, Dr. MacDonald was unfortunately convicted primarily on the basis of his insufficiently grief-stricken attitude displayed at trial nine years after the crimes, in an area of the country where "attitude", especially from Yankees or those who sound like them, is always a damning factor pointing to a person being murderous, a la Sherman, whether accused of any crime or not, plus suspect courtroom demonstrations—the repeated stabbing through cloth of a ham comes to mind—bearing no resemblance to the facts of the case to prove question marks and the mysterians, added to it the comfortable escape from and resistance in "gods' country" to the phenomenon that creeping-L.A. had finally reached North Carolina—actually having done so many years before that—, even unto Fayetteville and the military base at Fort Bragg, a case presented by an overzealous Federal prosecutor subsequently disbarred for unrelated conduct. (We admit that as a callow youth in 1970, we believed the doctor to have likely been the guilty party, based entirely on the news reports of the time and the suspicious similarities, seeming too convenient, with the hippie-cult Tate-LaBianca murders of the prior summer in Los Angeles, the MacDonald murders having taken place shortly after the arrests of the Manson family members. We became subsequently disabused of that view, however, after a few years spent as a criminal defense attorney, encountering thereby the murky, spookily irrational worlds of drug addicts on occasion, and after reading Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss in 1984, filtering the recounting of the evidentiary presentation from the author's editorialization, as Mr. McGinniss was decidedly convinced, also based primarily on the doctor's insufficient showing of grief, that he was quite guilty, a view reinforced by the slanted made-for-tv movie of 1984. We also recall reading In Cold Blood in June, 1967 in a car parked just outside Camp LeJeune, while some ragged-looking people nearby were doing something which we did not wish to see and thus blinked
A letter writer from Salisbury says that often in the spring he had seen birds coming back from the South, having run into cold winds, hail, snow and sleet. "They were shaking like the old-fashioned pioneer boy who never wore any underwear. Some of these birds actually get so cold that they go to sleep and never wake up. We should do all that we can to preserve and defend our song birds because they are insect eaters and may be the means of saving us when we enter the final battle against the insect pests."
Isn't that part of the President's oath of office: "...to preserve, protect and defend our song birds because they are insect eaters"?
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