The Charlotte News
Wednesday, April 30, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President, at his press conference this date, had stated that any basic compromise on his defense reorganization plan would mean a retreat to a dangerous degree of military effectiveness. He said he was not rigid about the wording of the reorganization bill but that it would be wrong to change the basic principles of his proposal. While the President stated his views, the proposal continued to draw fire in a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, where influential members opposed its concentration of authority in the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs. Just prior to the press conference of the President, General Maxwell Taylor, Army chief of staff, had conceded in the hearing that the plan could reduce the civilian secretaries of the individual armed services to the status of flunkies. The General said, however, that such a situation would not occur unless authority in the bill were misused. The first question placed to the President at the press conference had been whether he believed that the decline in unemployment by 78,000 for the month ending in mid-April meant that the economic upturn was underway, replying that he did not think there was justification for such a categorical statement, noting that when the employment and jobless figures were adjusted for seasonal factors, there was still much unemployment. He went on to say that in his view, the nation could not say it was on the high road to advance or recovery from the recession. Regarding Arctic inspection, the President called it silly for the Soviets to take the position that the U.S. was trying to produce propaganda in proposing an Arctic aerial inspection system to guard against massive surprise attack. He said that his reaction to the Soviet contention was not one of irritation or resentment, but rather sadness.
The Senate Judiciary Committee this date approved the bill to curb the power of the Supreme Court in the area of subversive activities, on a vote of 10 to 5. The measure had been the subject of nearly two months of sharp controversy in the Committee, and now would proceed to the Senate, where, if called up for action, it appeared certain to create another bitter row. An unsuccessful effort had been made at the last minute to strike from the legislation a section to strip the Supreme Court of its authority to review cases involving state regulations governing admission of lawyers to practice in state courts. That was the only remaining feature of the bill originally offered by Senator William Jenner of Indiana to deprive the Court of appellate jurisdiction over five types of cases in the security field and undo the effect of some recent Court decisions in that area. The other parts of the Committee's bill were aimed at overcoming the effects of the Supreme Court decisions in cases involving contempt of Congress, state anti-subversive laws, and the conviction of Communist leaders under the Smith Act.
Investigators for the Senate Select Committee looking into misconduct of unions and management said this date that Joseph Glimco, Chicago labor union boss, had surrendered a truck-load of subpoenaed records.
At Fort Campbell, Ky., the 101st Airborne Division had finally conducted the second airdrop of 771 paratroopers after weather conditions had washed out five previous attempts. The first massive airdrop of 1,400 paratroopers the previous Wednesday had resulted in five men being killed and 137 injured when winds had swept up the parachutes carrying the men along rough terrain on the ground.
The Treasury Department announced this date that it had unfrozen some 30 million dollars of Egyptian assets tied up in the country at the time of the Suez Canal crisis of November, 1956.
In Moscow, Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser and Premier Nikita Khrushchev opened formal talks in the Kremlin this date on political and economic relations between the United Arab Republic and the Soviet Union.
In Amman, Jordan, Jordanian armed forces massed in the Jerusalem area had been ordered to withdraw, according to an official statement this date.
In New Delhi, leaders of India's ruling Congress Party drafted a resolution this date urging Prime Minister Nehru to take a holiday but to remain as head of the Government.
In Paris, it was reported from Algiers that some 300 Algerian auxiliaries in the French Army had deserted their unit in Algeria after killing their commander.
In London, the right of a journalist to keep his sources of information secret was unanimously upheld this date in a resolution adopted by the Fourth World Congress of the International Federation of Journalists.
In Detroit, Ford Motor Co., apparently no longer the immediate strike target, this date prepared to resume negotiations on a new labor contract with the UAW. Before G.M. had served a showdown notice on the union the previous day, speculation had centered on Ford as the union's likely target in the auto industry in 1958 negotiations, having been the target in 1955. G.M. took the initiative in giving the union a 30-day notice that the current three-year contract would end at midnight on May 29. G.M. virtually invited the union to make G.M. its target rather than Ford or Chrysler, whose contracts would expire three days later. In previous negotiations, G.M. had waited for the union to serve a termination notice. A UAW vice-president in charge of the union's G.M. department, told newsmen that the union would not be maneuvered into a strike, particularly at a time hand-picked by the company. Neither the company nor the union would speculate on what would happen at midnight on May 29. The union could call a strike or the company could close its plants in a legal lockout, though neither event was likely to occur. Operations could continue by mutual agreement on a day-to-day basis. G.M. appeared to be taking leadership in the industry by holding the wage line at levels the companies considered non-inflationary. It was the first to offer renewal for two years of the present contracts, which contained built-in wage increases of at least six cents per hour annually based on productivity. The contracts also provided quarterly cost-of-living adjustments. G.M. also was the first to reject the union's proposal on Monday that present contracts be extended for three months. The extension would have sharpened the union's bargaining power by putting off a showdown until the industry went into production on 1959 models.
In Massapequa, N.Y., two 15-year old schoolboys quarreled the previous day, and one waited for the other in the high school locker room during the morning, shouting to the other, "You creep!" He then jerked up a shotgun and fired a single blast into the other boy's chest, killing him instantly. Police arrested the boy walking along the road about a half-mile from the school and said he would be charged with first-degree murder. No one knew immediately why the boys had been quarreling.
John Kilgo of The News reports that the County Recorder had found no probable cause this date in cases charging a Gaston County man and woman with murder. The two were at least temporarily cleared of murder charges after the judge said that the State had failed to produce enough evidence to justify trial in the Superior Court. The two had been held in the county jail in connection with the death of the woman's three-year old son, who died in a local motel room on April 20. The coroner testified at the hearing that he could not be positive what had caused the child's death, indicating that the child had a bad heart and was in the early stages of pneumonia at the time of death. He said that the boy did have some barbiturates in his bloodstream. The solicitor said that if tests being conducted in Washington showed that the child died from an overdose of drugs, the couple would again be charged with murder. He said it was legal to issue murder warrants against the two again after the tests if they showed that the child died from drugs, as the proceeding this date was only a court hearing. A County police officer testified that the woman had told him that she had taken some barbiturates, commonly known as Red Birds, the night before she had gone off with her boyfriend. The following day, the couple had taken the child to a motel and obtained a room, the police officer indicating that the man told him that they were drinking beer and watching television. The man had said that in the early morning hours of Sunday, he had noticed that the child was cold and pale and they took him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. The officer testified that the man told him that he bought 20 of the pills from a doctor in Stanley for one dollar. When arrested, he had 13 in his pocket in an envelope marked, "Take one at bedtime." The officer said that the man told him that he gave two of the pills to the woman but he could not account for the other five. Police said that the pills were in a pocket of the man's shirt lying on a table next to the bed, where the boy had been laying, and that the man had told the officer that the child had torn the top off a package of cigarettes in one shirt pocket, but he did not believe that the child had accessed any of the pills.
Bill Hughes of The News reports that dog owners were irate about dogs passing from Mecklenburg County into Charlotte and there being picked up by the dog pound. One woman had made her third trip to the City dog pound to pick up her family pet. Former News reporter Tom Revelle, head of the City Pet Department, said that they picked up dogs from the county in the city, picking up any dog without a city license, and that there was no way for a city dog catcher to tell where a dog lived. A rabies vaccination tag, the only identification required on county dogs, did not prevent a dog from being picked up within the city limits. He advised pet owners to control their dogs so that they would not run across the border into the city limits. He said that if they were able to determine that a picked up dog was from the county, the owner could reclaim it and pay only one dollar for a pick-up charge. Meanwhile, hundreds of county dogs probably crossed the city limits every day. There was no border patrol awaiting their pick-up, but the county dogs had to be on their best behavior as they were on foreign ground in the city.
Donald MacDonald of The News reports that the statue of Johnny Doughboy, honoring World War I veterans, had found a friend in Charlotte. An attorney had telephoned the newspaper this date to say that he would personally bear the expense of repairing the vandalized statue located near Park Center. It had been left unattended for four years after it had been splashed with paint and a hand and rifle broken from it, subsequently found undamaged in a garbage can. The attorney had been active in American Legion affairs, having served once as commander of Independence Post 262. He had also served as an assistant district attorney during the last Democratic administration. He was a veteran of World War II.
In Columbus, Ind., three little sisters, who got experience playing store at home, had turned to playing for keeps and cashed $236 in bad checks at real stores. The girls, ranging in age between 10 and 13, had used authentic bank checks and filled in false names and other data. One girl explained that it seemed "like an awful easy way to make some money and get some things." The checks had looked so good that a bank clerk had given the girls $195 for one of them and stores had cashed the others. The scheme was exposed after a man was arrested on a charge of trying to pass a fraudulent check, one of the checks which the girls had thrown away. The girls had been released to their mother pending a hearing in juvenile court.
In Kansas City, a wedding of a 22-year old woman to a man of Quito, Ecuador, had run five hours behind schedule through a bridal shower of red tape. Legal amenities were so staggering that Ecuadoran Consul George Arcentales called in five of his countrymen to help secure the necessary documents to enable the marriage.
In London, it was reported that Queen Elizabeth's doctors had advised her to remain at her Windsor home for the rest of the week while she recovered from a heavy cold, according to an announcement this date from Buckingham Palace.
Also in London, the House of Lords
came to grips the previous day with the question of whether British
police were spending too much public money in speakeasies. The matter
had been raised by John Clotworthy Talbot Foster Whyte-Melville
Skeffington, Viscount Massereene and Ferrard, who was convinced that
the police were doing so. He had cited a recent case where two
officers of the law on an after-hours drinking spree had picked up a
tab for 100 pounds, the equivalent of $280, which the taxpayers had
ultimately paid. He conceded that the pair had been sleuthing at the
time for breaches of the liquor licensing laws, but thought that 100
pounds was a bit too much. He stated: "Even the most
bacchanalian of Your Lordships would agree that this was far more
than any member of the public going to a nightclub would spend. It
was more than I would spend." Replying for the Government, Lord
Chesham said that there was no point in an officer going to a club
where people lived it up and ordering only half a pint of beer. "He
must behave as the rest of the patrons of the club. He must, so to
speak, cut his coat according to the local cloth
On the editorial page, "Hodges' South: Not So Wild a Dream" indicates that after dazzling Chicago industrialists the previous day with a wide-screen, technicolor version of "the southern point of view", Governor Luther Hodges had disarmed his audience with characteristic candor, saying: "We in the South have, I think, for a long time been doing a commendable and necessary job of self-analysis and criticism. We have had to! For one thing, the South, as a region, has often been subjected to thoughtless and inaccurate criticism. Perhaps this is only a natural, but still unfortunate, aftermath of the tragic War Between the States. For many long years it was not a question of development of our region: it was a problem of survival. We were never permitted to forget or overlook our faults and imperfections. We had little chance to be complacent. Perhaps, as a result, the South is today more realistic in self-examination and more brutally frank in self-appraisal than almost any other section of our great nation. We know that we are not perfect and we know that we can improve. As an indivisible part of these United States, we shall continue to make our earnest and sincere contribution to the welfare of our beloved nation."
It finds that his frankness might have startled many Northerners, more accustomed to the self-righteous chest-thumping of Southern Governors such as Marvin Griffin of Georgia, or Senators such as James Eastland of Mississippi, and other "Dixie-Firsters" who occasionally went north to sell "the southern point of view". But Governor Hodges had expressed essentially the same disclaimer to Southern audiences and so it was no mealy-mouthed modesty packaged especially for the North.
The claimed fact that the South could do no wrong, that it could not improve because there was no room for improvement, however, was a familiar brand of pap which some demagogues had been merchandising on the political stump for roughly five generations, holding back the dawn of a new day and serving to inhibit the type of development which leaders such as Governor Hodges were attempting to promote. They opposed the New South because they imagined that it meant cutting the umbilical cord to the Confederacy. They opposed industrialization in some instances because it meant change. They paid lip service to "conservatism" but in determining what to conserve, they simply retained everything rather than exercise any selective intelligence. Enlightened Southerners with hopes and dreams of a better region and better life could only assume that those persons were "prisoners of the wrong doctrine in the wrong country in the wrong century directed against the wrong enemies."
It finds that the South at present needed more realism and less rant, more self-analysis and less self-pity, needing candor, courage and consistent hospitality to fresh thinking, which made stagnation impossible or, at least, unlikely. It needed more men and women willing to face occasional shortcomings and correct them, the people whom Governor Hodges envisioned as populating a new land of progress and opportunity in the South.
"Charlotte Needs 'Junior Achievement'" indicates that youth generally at present had little opportunity to grasp with firmness the essentials of business life, that aside from textbook economics and an occasional odd job and low-level vocational training, the youth was likely to graduate from high school with only scant notions about "the profit motive", "capital investment", "merchandising", "productivity" and the like.
It finds that a little-publicized program to give the youth of Charlotte a remarkable opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of those factors by organizing and operating their small-scale businesses was in the works, called Junior Achievement, an answer to a young entrepreneur's prayer. The program consisted of learning by doing, and was open to high school students over 15, who would form a small company, sell stock at 50 cents per share, raise capital of about $100, decide on a product or service, purchase raw materials, tools, maintain books, make sales, pay wages, rent, dividends and engage in virtually all other normal business functions of a regular corporation. The company was usually made up of between eight and fifteen youngsters. At the end of the school year, the firms would deliberately be liquidated, with the inventory sold and debts paid. If the company had been profitable, stockholders received their investment along with a liquidation dividend, but if the company finished with a debt, its assets would be prorated among stockholders as with any business which failed.
Supervising the program would be trained volunteer advisors in sales, administration and production recruited from established local businesses. Charlotte had the president of the Old Dominion Box Co., Inc., E. S. Dillard, to thank for his efforts to activate the local Junior Achievement program. Such programs were in operation in 222 U.S. cities in 36 states, including Atlanta, Houston, Birmingham, New Orleans, Memphis, Miami, Dallas, Fort Worth, Nashville and Baton Rouge in the South. It indicates that if it were successfully to launch in Charlotte, it would add an extra dimension to education and community relations, and deserved the public's support.
"Score a Round for Secretary Dulles" indicates that the latter had disapproved of his own pessimism about the U.S. ability to engage effectively in propaganda warfare with the Soviet Union. His proposal for an open skies inspection system for the Arctic Circle had made a shambles of a recent Communist campaign to picture the Strategic Air Command flights as a menace to Russia and to world peace. In a smooth response to the Russian propaganda, Mr. Dulles now had Moscow bitterly denouncing a simple and effective scheme to guarantee both countries against surprise aerial attack.
The Secretary had not been content, as he could have been, with the failure of the Communist complaint in the U.N. Since the Russians had seemed so frightened of accidental warfare and surprise attack, the Secretary had argued for a mutual agreement to guard against both. The point had been so persuasive among U.N. members that the Russians apparently were preparing a veto in the Security Council of any approval of such an action.
Thus, the Secretary had placed the Russians into the position of opposing an attractive peace proposal and of having no alternatives to propose. To the credit of the U.S., the proposal concealed no gimmick, as agreement on mutual inspection could have great practical and psychological significance in easing world tensions.
It regards Mr. Dulles as selling good policies better than the Soviets were selling bad ones. There was nothing new about the Arctic inspection plan, an outgrowth of the open skies plan which the President had suggested at the Geneva summit conference of July, 1955. The U.S. had proposed it again at the London meetings of the U.S. Disarmament subcommittee. It had always been a sound plan based on an easily understandable and practical idea, and the Soviet reaction showed its propaganda potential. It finds that, wisely and shrewdly, Secretary Dulles was making the Soviet Union pay a heavy price in the propaganda war for failure to accept the idea and for attempting to capitalize on security measures which the U.S. had been forced by Russian truculence to adopt.
A piece from the Rocky Mount Telegram, titled "Bedtime Story", indicates that the wire service ticker had revealed how patients in the North Cambridgeshire Hospital in Wisbech, England, passed the time by listening to music through their pillows. The pillows contained a device called the "pillowphone", bringing to patients recorded or live music, and was also used by the nurses to speak to the patients and by the patients to reply.
It indicates that even people who were in touch with scientific advances viewed it with some misgivings, as one of the delights in going to the hospital was to get some rest. It wonders what kind of rest there would be in rock 'n' roll coming through the pillow.
It suggests, however, that it could be used in other ways, that a doctor could transmit a recording of: "Every day I am feeling better and better. Every day I am growing stronger and stronger."
It suggest that with such a "psychomatic pillow", it ought be possible to empty the hospitals quickly, either by curing patients or driving them completely nuts.
Drew Pearson indicates that at the close of 1957, the Justice Department had issued a press release boasting of its record for prosecuting income tax fraud, comparing the Administration's prosecutions with previous years, but omitting an extremely interesting fact, that in 1949, when the Justice Department had a higher record for tax prosecutions than any under President Eisenhower, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the tax prosecution division had been Lamar Caudle of North Carolina, whom the Eisenhower Administration had now prosecuted with dogged relentlessness, giving the Caudle case all the aspects of another Dreyfuss case. Mr. Caudle had convicted 849 tax violators in 1949, whereas the Eisenhower Administration had convicted 581 in 1957. Mr. Pearson suggests that the prosecution of Mr. Caudle contrasted with the brazen manner in which the Justice Department had delayed for 14 months a grand jury investigation of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of New York, after the latter had urged blacks to vote for President Eisenhower in 1956.
Mr. Pearson indicates that he knew some things about the Caudle case, as in 1949 and 1950, the column had published a series of tax fraud exposes which led to Congressional investigations. He regards Mr. Caudle, a small town lawyer from Rockingham, N.C., to have done a good job in prosecuting those cases. He finds that he had been a little slow at first, being subjected to great political pressure, and eventually had been fired by former President Truman after the latter found that Mr. Caudle was friendly to Mr. Pearson, whom the President had called an "SOB".
One case which Mr. Caudle had prosecuted, and for which he was now being prosecuted, had been that of Irving Sachs, the operator of a shoe company in St. Louis. Mr. Caudle had prosecuted and secured a guilty plea, collecting fines of $40,000. Subsequently, however, Mr. Caudle had been relentlessly prosecuted to the point of persecution by the Eisenhower Justice Department because he had not sent Mr. Sachs to jail and because he received two telephone calls from the White House from Mr. Truman's secretary, Matt Connelly, one in September, 1949, suggesting a postponement of the sentencing because Mr. Sachs's attorney had suffered a heart attack, and the other on October 26, 1949, reporting that the attorney was in Washington and would like to see Mr. Caudle.
The Justice Department, in prosecuting Mr. Caudle, had admitted that the latter had received no monetary reward in the Sachs case, prosecuting him for "depriving the United States of his best services." The primary charge boiled down to the fact that he was tender-hearted regarding a defendant who was an epileptic and might not be able to stand the rigors of a trial. It had been the U.S. District Court Judge Roy Harper, not Mr. Caudle, who had made the final decision to fine Mr. Sachs rather than placing him on probation. The judge had said that it was a complicated medical problem, pointing to the fact that Mr. Sachs had been examined by between 15 and 20 doctors, and the judge concluded that he was "in a very serious condition" and thus fined him rather than placing him on probation.
The attorney for Mr. Sachs then recorded in the name of Mr. Caudle, without informing the latter, a small share in an Oklahoma oil lease. When Mr. Caudle had discovered the fact, he returned the royalty checks and canceled the lease.
Mr. Caudle and Mr. Connelly had been tried under unusual circumstances. Two members of the jury had been members of the Women's Republican Club of Montgomery City, Mo., and the son of one of the jurors had been treasurer of the local Republican Party. During the trial the U.S. District Court judge had been under heavy medication for mental depression, and a few days following the trial, shot himself. Though everyone had the right to a trial before a judge who was clear in his mind, the Justice Department had refused to consider the judge's condition as grounds for a new trial. It appointed a new judge to review the record of 37 days of trial and 67 witnesses, plus 200 exhibits, who then sentenced Mr. Caudle to two years in jail.
Joseph Alsop indicates that the previous Wednesday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader William Knowland of California had risen on the floor with the apparent determination of a bull ready to charge. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts had been speaking on the important, complex bill regulating industrial pension and welfare funds, and amiably had yielded the floor to Senator Knowland. The latter then announced that he would offer as amendments to the pending bill all of the labor reforms proposed by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, plus a couple of more of his own.
The resulting crisis left audiences as far away as Minnesota with no Senators to debate on their behalf, causing night sessions with resulting gaps at many Washington dinner tables and subjected several Senators up for election in the current year to the agony they felt when they asked themselves whose vote they wanted as they could not have them all. The crisis had ended with no very lasting effects.
Mr. Alsop suggests that analyzing the crisis, however, told a lot about the peculiar legislative process. The crisis had appeared to begin when the President had vetoed the Rivers and Harbors bill two weeks earlier. Senator Knowland's prospective opponent in the gubernatorial election for the fall, State Attorney General Pat Brown, had immediately sent to Senator Knowland a verbose but stinging telegram asking the Senator to vote to override the President's veto to save the California citizenry from death by thirst, flood, or both. The telegram appeared to have set Senator Knowland on the charge. The labor reforms on which he chose to charge were just about as far-reaching and controversial as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and if and when they would be seriously debated, they would likely produce the same type of storm in the Senate. Senator Knowland was patterning his strategy on the late Senator Robert Taft, and had counted on producing just such a storm, expecting "to ride the storm in the manner of a very large, very solid, very masculine version of the Valkyries."
But Senator Knowland had forgotten the foresight of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. Mr. Alsop suggests that he should have guessed that Senator Johnson was up to something because all through Tuesday, the Senate had been virtually empty, with only some quorum calls and the presence of Democratic Whip, Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana. Senator Johnson had guessed that someone would offer controversial labor reforms as amendments to the industrial pension and welfare bill, and while Senator Mansfield kept the Senate in meaningless session, Senator Johnson had spent most of Tuesday with Senators McClellan, Kennedy and Lister Hill of Alabama. Between them, they had developed a plan to take care of any amendments.
Nevertheless, Senator Knowland's amendments had started a violent flurry, with Senator Johnson's leg-man, the subsequently controversial Bobby Baker, rushing off to sound every Senator's sentiments in record time. By Wednesday evening, Senators Johnson, Kennedy, Hill and McClellan had huddled, extending through most of Tuesday. The huddle had ended with a reaffirmation of the deal which they had already made. As chairmen of the Senate Labor Committee and the relevant subcommittee, Senator Hill and Senator Kennedy had sworn to report a Labor reform bill at the current session. Senator McClellan had sworn to vote against his own proposals which Senator Knowland had offered, until those proposals could receive committee consideration. Senator McClellan's stand was vital for he was a bellwether among the conservative Democrats. Senator Johnson picked up the advice and affording the time for committee consideration instantly had become the theme.
On the Republican side, Senators such as Charles Potter of Michigan and Edward Thye of Minnesota, who had big labor groups and powerful manufacturing interests in their states, were experiencing pain over the choice which Senator Knowland had presented to them. The Republican policy committee had not been warned by the latter Senator and was outraged. But the committee nevertheless followed the advice of Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, that they give the bill less than one roll call. Senator Irving Ives of New York, who had spent three years of hard work on the Pension and Welfare Fund bill, wanted to proceed without any changes to it, saying that he would introduce the Fair Employment Practices Act as another amendment if any of the amendments offered by Senator Knowland were to carry. That had settled the matter, but on Thursday evening, ten Republican Senators, led by Senators Ives and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, were committed to vote against the amendments offered by Senator Knowland, and all the Democrats except the eccentric Frank Lausche of Ohio, were following the lead of Senators Johnson and McClellan. There was a lot of debate on Friday, but the final and decisive vote had been 53 to 37 against the amendments offered by Senator Knowland, a foregone conclusion by the previous day.
Marquis Childs indicates that if one thing irritated the President more than any other at the present unhappy phase of his Presidency, it was a suggestion that he might resign before the end of the term to make way for Vice-President Nixon. Having read it in a column recently, the President had become quite angry, according to one of his associates.
The fact had an inevitable bearing on the relationship with Vice-President Nixon. There was an undercurrent in the belief that Mr. Nixon could supply the vigorous leadership lacking at the White House, including among some prominent Republicans in their private conversations. The President could not help but be aware of that feeling which did not endear him to Mr. Nixon.
Yet, shortly before the Vice-President had departed on his good will mission to Latin America, the two men had a frank and friendly discussion about the future. Regarding the prospect of his resignation, the President said with warmth that he would never do such a thing short of another and crippling illness. He had made plain his resentment of the suggestion that he would step aside for reasons of political expediency. His concept of duty, the soldier's conviction that he must stay at his post regardless of the odds, was strong. But he also talked of the reasons behind his recent press conference statement that a vice-president could not be given executive responsibility because the vice-president had to preside over the Senate and because a president and a vice-president might not always find agreement on policy. The President explained that to give Mr. Nixon an important executive position would appear to favor him over other prospective presidential candidates and make him the inevitable choice of the Republican Party in 1960, a move which the President considered to be wrong for several reasons, as something might happen to eliminate an inevitable choice on whom all had centered their interest, and that the party ought demonstrate that it had a wealth of material in selecting both a presidential and vice-presidential candidate for the next quadrennial election.
The Vice-President had been in full agreement that the Republicans had a number of fine potential candidates, which would include, in the executive branch, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson, White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, plus several others. It would also include Senator William Knowland if he were to win the gubernatorial contest in California, as well as any Republican who would succeed in ousting the Democrats in either New York or Pennsylvania.
While the Vice-President understood the reasonableness of the President's position, the Vice-President, a political realist, knew the position in which it placed him. He was part of the Administration and would be held accountable for its failures at home and abroad, while at the same time providing him no chance to demonstrate executive talents which he might possess, at a time when those talents were urgently needed.
A move to place him in the key post of chairman of the Operations Coordinating Board had been blocked by Secretary of State Dulles. Mr. Dulles, aware of what had happened to his uncle, Robert Lansing, when President Woodrow Wilson had, in effect, supplanted him as Secretary of State with Col. Edward House, was determined that his line of authority to the President would not be blurred.
During the ensuing three weeks, when vital decisions would be taken or not regarding the recession at home and regarding the deteriorating situation in the Middle East and Asia, the Vice-President would be touring South America, to be shown in news photographs greeting presidents and extending goodwill at large and at parties. The contrast between what was happening at home and his own role was also well known to the Vice-President, but his concern over the continuing drift had not deterred him from pushing ahead with his own plans.
While the part he would take in the fall campaign would not be as extensive as in the midterm elections of 1954, he expected to concentrate on key states and particularly on California, where Republican victory was essential. He was also proceeding with a tentative plan to tour Western Europe and perhaps also Russia following the campaign in November and December. He was prepared to do everything he could to make his own future despite the handicap under which he had to labor.
A letter writer believes that a hooded hoodlum in the act of holding up a person, such as the husband in High Point being beaten by the butt of a rifle, forcing his wife to shoot fatally the attacker, had deserved what he received as a potential threat of similar brutal attacks upon others. He urges that businesses offer liberal rewards "for puddles of blood marking the spots where stood hold-up men. Citizens are entitled to the right to earn their living by the sweat of their brows, and to carry such earnings to their homes—in safety."
There is a great difference between self-defense or, in the instant case about which the letter writer comments, defense of others, in the midst of a violent attack, and what the letter writer seems to advocate, reckless vigilante violence, for which someone could be prosecuted potentially for assault or murder.
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