The Charlotte News
Monday, May 5, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Moscow that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had delivered to the ambassadors of the three Western powers this date a new communication which diplomatic sources said had left the formal opening of pre-summit talks still to be negotiated. He had summoned the French, American and British ambassadors and handed them the Kremlin's reply to the West's note of the prior Saturday, rejecting participation of Czechoslovakia and Poland in discussions on a diplomatic level and agreeing that Western envoys would meet individually with Mr. Gromyko. The Western envoys said that Mr. Gromyko's latest note would be published by the Soviet Union this night and would presumably be released at the same time in London, Paris and Washington. Llewellyn Thompson, U.S. Ambassador, had followed France's Maurice Dejean to the Foreign Ministry and had spent exactly half an hour inside, saying that the situation had not changed and that he would leave as planned the following day for a Paris conference of American envoys in Western Europe. Diplomatic sources speculated that the new Soviet note acknowledged Western agreement on individual meetings as opposed to a roundtable session. They also speculated that the note again presented the Kremlin's preference that the envoys would discuss the time and place of a foreign ministers' pre-summit meeting only, rather than considering an agenda for such a meeting. The West's note of the prior Saturday had expressed the desire of the U.S., Britain and France to begin diplomatic meetings with discussions of subjects to be considered later by the foreign ministers, then take up the date and place for the foreign ministers' meeting.
General Omar Bradley told the House Armed Services Committee this date that he supported the President's military reorganization plan, because the present military organization had made it possible for one service to block the flow of information or requests between the Defense Department and field commanders. He backed the changes which the President had said were necessary to allow orders to go from the Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs directly to the commanders of unified forces in the field, without passing through the Secretaries of the Army, Navy or Air Force. The secretaries had acted as "executive agents" of the Defense Department in the chain of command. General Bradley, a five-star general who had commanded the 12th Army Group during World War II and later served as Army chief of staff and first chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the committee: "I understand that in the past there have been occasions where information or suggestions from a unified commander were retained by the executive agent without the Joint Chiefs of Staff being aware of the request or the information sent in by the unified commander. There have also been occasions where orders were transmitted to unified commanders from above without the executive agent being informed. This also leads to confusion." When asked how any law could give the Secretary of Defense more power than the "direction, authority and control" specified in the present statute, the General said that he believed Congress ought repeal the existing provision that the Army, Navy and Air Force must be "separately administered".
Congress was urged this date to get started on a 12 billion dollar program to build fallout shelters. A Civil Defense expert, Dr. Ellis Johnson, director of operations research at Johns Hopkins University, had said to a Government Operations subcommittee that as many as 50 million Americans might die in a Soviet raid from fallout alone. He said that it would be too expensive and inadvisable to build shelters against hydrogen bomb blasts and thermal effects, as there would not be enough time to get a big fraction of the population into blast shelters. He said that there would, however, be sufficient time for Americans to seek protection from fallout. His organization performed classified defense research for the Government. He said that strategic attack and defense forces ought be built up. He told the chairman of the subcommittee, Congressman Chet Holifield of California, that "a defense against manned aircraft and a civil defense shelter program are required indefinitely—whether we have disarmament in other military weapons or not. We have no reason, at present, to believe that either with or without world disarmament the Soviet Union can be trusted… A fully balanced security program would cost, on the average, about 15 billion dollars more a year for defense than at present."
In Washington, with more than 250 North Carolinians observing from the gallery, B. Everett Jordan, 61, had been sworn in this date as a U.S. Senator, having been appointed by Governor Luther Hodges after the death of Senator Kerr Scott on April 16 in Burlington, following a heart attack. Governor Hodges was present at the ceremony, as was Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina and other members of the North Carolina Congressional delegation. Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, dean of the Senate by reason of his 31 years of service, administered the oath.
Senate Minority Leader William Knowland this date rejected a suggestion that an omnibus 1958 labor bill be limited to non-controversial provisions.
The Senate Judiciary Committee this date approved the nomination of Gordon Tiffany to be staff director of the Civil Rights Commission.
In Bern, Switzerland, Swiss intelligence officer Max Ulrich had gone on trial this date on a charge of violating Switzerland's strict neutrality laws by slipping Arab diplomatic secrets to the French.
In Colombo, Ceylon, 37,000 Government employees, who had been on strike for 13 days, had returned to work this date. They had first met and denounced their Communist-influenced union leaders, accusing them of betrayal and demanding that they resign.
In London, more than a million Britons had walked, cycled or hitchhiked to work this date, after the city's mammoth fleet of bright red double-deck buses had remained in the barns because of a strike.
The International Union of Electrical Workers had handed a check for $200,000 to the UAW to bolster the finances of that union in its negotiation with the major automobile producers.
In New York, the output of filmed television commercials was threatened this date by a strike of 10,000 cameramen, cartoonists, editors and technicians concerned over the newest electronic marvel, videotape.
In Washington, a teenage gunman had been shot down early this date when he had made the mistake of trying to hold up a restaurant where two off-duty police officers has stopped to get a bite to eat. Police had identified the 17-year old youth, who had been transported to a hospital suffering a critical chest wound. The shooting occurred in downtown Washington when the youth had walked into the restaurant waving a gun, and when he fired a shot, one of the officers, standing behind him, fired from his revolver and struck the boy in the right chest. The other police officer had not fired.
In Alameda, Calif., a police inspector said that a rejected suitor had been captured this date after slaying an Alameda divorcee, kidnaping a young couple and finally wrecking a car. The 37-year old Alameda Naval Air Station stenographer and mother of two had been shot just before midnight as she got out of her car in front of her home. The inspector said that the 34-year old man, booked on suspicion of murder and kidnaping following his capture, had shot the woman four times in the head. He had been waiting for the woman, and friends said that she had been trying to avoid his unwelcome attention, being "deathly afraid of him". The inspector wondered why she had not reported the matter to the police. After he had shot her, he ran down the street and at gunpoint, forced his way into the car of a 22-year old man, accompanied by a 21-year old woman. After forcing the man to drive him to Oakland, he shoved the man into the car's trunk and locked it, driving on with the other man's female companion in the front seat beside him. After circling through the Oakland hills, he had stopped at a San Leandro drive-in restaurant, released the couple and had taken another car from a parking lot. He lost control of that car at a railroad crossing and had run into a power pole, where, dazed by a head injury, he had been captured by a Highway Patrolman.
In St. Louis, a 15-year old boy told police how he had given a six-year old girl a ride on his bicycle to a ramshackle house 30 blocks from her home, had torn off her dress and tied her up, leaving her in that condition without food or water for three days. She had managed to free herself and was found scratched and dirty but otherwise unharmed. She had not been sexually molested. The boy told officers that he was scared to go back to the house and intended never to tell where the child was. He said he had no reason for the act, that he had just done it. He was slightly over 5 feet tall and weighed 90 pounds. Police said that he suffered from rheumatic heart disease and had missed a lot of school, attending special classes for mentally retarded children. The boy had lived most of his life with his widowed grandmother, who said that she could not believe he had done it, but that if he had, he needed psychiatric attention. His father, an epileptic, was in a mental institution, and his mother had remarried. The boy's teacher said that he had never been a behavioral problem at school. His grandmother said that he was a gentle youth and good to children. He had gone to the police the day after the girl's disappearance with a story that he had given her a bike ride and left her at her home where he had last seen her talking to a man. He admitted the abduction three hours after the girl had been found. He was now before the Juvenile Court.
In Casper, Wyo., a suspicious suitor, 34, finding his girlfriend talking with two other men, had drawn a gun the previous night and begun shooting. He had killed the girl and one of the men, had wounded the second man and then committed suicide. He was a service station attendant. The woman was married but had begun a divorce suit recently.
In Lincoln, Neb., it was reported that Charles Starkweather, 19, following his capture three months earlier after an alleged killing spree, had inscribed a note on a jail cell wall in which he had taken the blame for nine of the eleven killings but attributed two to his 14-year old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, according to his attorneys this date. Mr. Starkweather, who stood 5 feet, 5 inches tall and right after his capture had acknowledged that he always wanted to be a criminal "but not this big a one", had gone on trial this date for murder in one of a string of late-January killings. Selection of a jury was expected to take three or more days. His court-appointed attorneys said that his note was scrawled on the wall of a cell at the Scottsbluff County Jail in Gering, Neb., where he had been lodged during an overnight stop while being returned to Lincoln after he and his girlfriend had been captured near Douglas, Wyo., on January 29. The note, according to the attorneys, had said: "Caril is the one who said to go to Washington State. By the time anybody will read this I will be dead for all the killings, then they cannot give Caril the chair to [sic]. From Lincoln, Neb., they got us Jan. 19, 1958. 1958, killed 11 persons. Charles kill [sic] 9, all men. Caril kill 2, all girls. The [sic] have so many cops and people watching us I can't add all of them up." It indicates that his reference to January 19 had not been clear and the count of nine "men" and two "girl" victims was faulty, that of the 11 victims in whose slayings he had admitted involvement, six had been male and five female. Conviction would mean either life imprisonment or death in the electric chair, with the jury setting the penalty under Nebraska law. The defense would apparently plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but the attorneys had run into reluctance from the defendant and his family members on that score. Ms. Fugate was charged with murder as Mr. Starkweather's accomplice during the killing spree and had been listed as a prosecution witness, although she might not be called. Both defendants were charged specifically in the death of Robert Jensen, 17, of Bennet, a village 19 miles southeast of Lincoln, Mr. Jensen and his girlfriend having stopped to pick up the couple when they saw them on the side of the road after their car had become mired in the mud. Shortly thereafter, according to the prosecution's case, Mr. Starkweather had directed the couple to an abandoned storm cellar, in which they were murdered, whereupon Mr. Starkweather took Mr. Jensen's car. It does not explain why the murder of the girlfriend was not also being prosecuted, but in all probability it was because the prosecution had theorized that Caril had killed her and the strategy was to use that theory as a means of gaining the juvenile's cooperation in testimony against Charles.
Jerry Reece of The News reports that the County Commission had taken issue this date with bills submitted by members of the County Board of Elections for the recent bond election. The bill submitted to the Commission were for services by the chairman of the board for $600, the secretary of the board for $300 and by a member of the board for $300. A motion put forward by a member of the Commission to cut the fees to $300 for the chairman and $200 each for the other two members had passed unanimously.
In Derby, Pa., a 19-year old college student suffering from a possible leg fracture had been removed from a cave near the southwestern Pennsylvania community early this date after a 12-hour rescue effort. He was then admitted to a hospital in fair condition with a possible fracture of the lower left leg. He was a student at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He and 14 other members of the Pittsburgh Grotto of the National Speleological Society had been exploring Copperhead Cave at Hillside, 6 miles from the community, when the young man had been injured in the early afternoon the previous day. A member of the rescue party said that the injured youth was about 1,000 feet from the cave entrance when he suffered the injury. He said that the rescue team had carried the youth on a stretcher over three crevices ranging in depth between 50 and 100 feet.
In Moscow, Pravda marked this date as the 140th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx by proclaiming that Marxism was the "victorious banner of the epoch".
Incidentally, just why this program
To clear the palate, we offer this musical interlude
On the editorial page, "Civil Defense: Misnomer of the Age" finds that there were faint but hopeful signs that Washington was about to face up to the fact that the Government was spending 40 million dollars per year on a joke which was not funny, that being the Civil Defense Administration, as there was no civil defense to administer.
Columnist Marquis Childs had reported from Washington that the President was preparing to recommend merger of the Civil Defense Administration and the Office of Defense Mobilization. Meanwhile, the House had approved a bill to enlarge the Federal role in civil defense, permitting use of Federal matching funds for administrative costs at the state and local levels and for purchase of testing devices for radioactivity.
It finds that those were steps toward confronting the public's helplessness before the ever-present possibility of atomic warfare, but were steps only and were timid, unless they came from a willingness in Washington to admit into political discussion the realities of the problem.
A sound organizational structure and larger expenditures would come to nothing without a popular conviction that civil defense was a necessity and not something which bored people talked about in their spare time. It was a heartwarming proposition to have civil defense, but rested on nothing more substantial than a mixture of hope and futility. Both the U.S. and Russia were putting increasing amounts of their military eggs in the nuclear basket. The U.S. would be hard put to fight any other kind of war. Soviet willingness or ability to retaliate in kind was no longer in doubt. In recognition of those trends, the still secret Gaither Report was said to recommend the beginning of an underground shelter program which might eventually cost 20 billion dollars.
Politicians seeking to balance the budget had responded to that as if it were poison, but the recommendation remained as a haunting reminder of how much there was to do and how little had been done.
Along many highways, for example, signs still carried the warning: "In the event of enemy attack this highway will be closed to all but emergency traffic." The signs had some meaning when the biggest nuclear weapon had only produced the equivalent force of thousands of tons of TNT. But now the bombs were rated by millions of tons and there would be no traffic, emergency or otherwise, going into the target cities.
The threat of fallout remained a constant hazard and nothing had been done about it. Most citizens had not seen a Geiger counter and those who knew how to use one were rare. Both Congress and the Administration had responsibility to move quickly toward establishing a realistic civil defense organization. More could be done and more had to be done to give Americans a chance to survive possible use of the weapons on which they were spending billions.
In about three years, we shall know
precisely where to go in the event of a nuclear attack: to the
basement of the pharmacy up the street, wherein there was a
barbershop, a beauty parlor and a laundry. We know and have faith
that in that event, we shall be as safe as a bug in a rug. The little
yellow sign on the outside of the building bearing "CD"
told us so. It did not matter that it was only a couple miles from
the Western Electric plant, wherein they made the guidance systems
for the missiles, or something like that. We shall be safe
"Keeping the Peace: A Rule Reaffirmed" indicates that Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus probably had yawned the previous week when the U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis had ruled against his attempt to justify use of the Arkansas National Guard in the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of the prior fall to prevent attendance of Central High School by black students on the rationale that it would prevent violence. Although he planned to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court, he was bound to know that the result there would be the same.
The appellate court had rejected the Governor's appeal from an injunction against his use of the troops. The Court had stated: "A rule which would permit an official whose duty it was to enforce the law to disregard the very law which it was his duty to enforce, in order to pacify a mob or suppress an insurrection, would deprive all citizens of any security in the enjoyment of their life, liberty and property."
Thus, the Court had found that the Governor had a right to use troops to restrain a mob, but not to deny citizens their rights so as to placate the mob, the same thing as making the militia an instrument of mob rule.
The Supreme Court would have the last word, but if, as expected, the ruling was essentially the same, it wonders whether Governor Faubus would then be willing to fulfill his oath to uphold the law and keep the peace. If so, Federal troops could be withdrawn from Little Rock and a start made toward removing the emotional debris and easing the racial tensions which had resulted from the Governor's irresponsible posturings. If not, the troops would remain and the bitterness would grow. It finds that the Governor remained the only person presently in a position to clean up the mess.
The following year, the Supreme Court would merely affirm the decision per curiam, without opinion.
"Candor Should Come in Small Doses" indicates that perhaps there would never again be a politician such as Meade Alcorn, the RNC chairman. Recently, when he should have been forecasting a Republican landslide in the fall, he allowed that his party had little chance of taking the Senate.
It suggests that there would likely be repercussions from such an admission, there already having been one, in that in Charleston, S.C., recently, a candidate had told an audience that "if elected I promise to work to the best of my advantage…"
It suggests that if it continued, people would hear of an automobile manufacturer admitting that while those whale-tailed rear-end assemblies were very flashy, they were pushing up auto insurance rates quite a bit, that a Paris dress designer would concede he had shown the sack in the current year because he mislaid the creation which came in it, that Nikita Khrushchev would confess that there was no dog aboard Sputnik II, but rather Marshal Zhukov. And the Greensboro Daily News might admit that Greensboro really was not the dogwood capital of the world, nor anywhere near it.
It suggests that while the truth would make people free, sometimes it was easier to accommodate in small doses.
A piece from the Manchester Guardian, titled "U and Non-U in Burma", indicates that according to Daw Mi Mi Khaing, writing in "Perspective of Burma", a special supplement of the Atlantic Monthly, Burmese names were often confusing to foreign visitors. She had explained that the Burmese did not necessarily hand down family surnames generationally and that wives seldom used their husband's names, and thus "U Sein Tun's son might be Maung Saw Tin and his wife might be called Daw Mya Aye."
She further explained that the titles "Maung" and "Ma" corresponded roughly to Master and Miss, but were also common personal names. When Maung Saw Tin was older than 20 or a little better off, he would be called "Ko", and when he was older and more successful still, he might graduate to yet another prefix.
She said that one or more of a Burmese child's names was almost certain to show the day on which the child was born, with certain letters of the alphabet ascribed to each day. Each part of the name was an actual word which meant something or even several things, depending on how it was pronounced. Thus, Prime Minister U Nu was "Mr. Tender", and the Rector of Rangoon University, Dr. Htin Aung, was known to fellow-countrymen to be "Distinguished and Successful", while a merchant known to the writer was aptly given a name which meant "Surmounting a Hundred Thousand".
Drew Pearson indicates that there had been active debate at a closed-door session of the House Education and Labor subcommittee, when Democrats, in a surprise move, had forced the Republicans to accept the old Eisenhower school aid bill which the President had let fall by the wayside. Congressmen Frank Thompson of New Jersey, Lee Metcalf of Montana and Stewart Udall of Arizona had caught their Republican colleagues off guard by suddenly moving for approval of the Eisenhower bill. To save Republican embarrassment, Congressman Cleveland Bailey of West Virginia, chairman of the subcommittee, had cleared the hearing room for a secret discussion. Republican Representative Peter Frelinghuysen of New Jersey had said it was most unfair, finding that Mr. Metcalf had engaged in a "clever maneuver" to embarrass the President and put Republicans on the spot, indicating that the President had been for the measure the previous year, but had not included it in the legislative program for the current year. Mr. Metcalf had replied that he could not see anything unfair about it, but indicated that if the Republicans had promised to support the Eisenhower bill the previous year, then he could see how they were on the spot, with the Democrats merely giving them a chance to back up what the President had previously requested. He said that he was not playing politics but wanted a solution to the problem of the need for additional classrooms across the country, that if the President had been for the bill the previous year, there was even more reason for him to support it in the current year because the need for school construction had only increased. Despite the President having not called for action on the bill at the current time, he said that the Congress needed to do something for the schools and that he was tired of seeing some Republicans duck out on the matter on the specious excuse that Democrats had changed something the President had proposed such that it was not any longer "the President's bill". He said that they were not changing the current one at all from what the President had previously proposed, giving the President and the Republicans an opportunity to prove that they meant what they had said when they stated they were for Federal aid to schools.
In a showdown vote, the three Republicans, Mr. Frelinghuysen, Harry Haskell of Delaware and John Lafore of Pennsylvania, had voted against the bill, producing a tie which Mr. Bailey then broke as chairman by voting with the Democrats. To save the Republicans from public embarrassment, it was then agreed to announce a "voice" vote and Mr. Bailey ordered the Democrats not to discuss what had occurred in the closed-door session.
The air in Alabama was filled with politics and music, as 14 candidates for governor would be running in an election the following day, all of them running on a segregationist platform. The singing accompanists included Minnie Pearl of the Grand Ole Opry, barnstorming as a side attraction to George C. Wallace, "an able Black Belt jurist who has labor backing." Ms. Pearl was reported to be drawing $2,000 per week while doing so. A. W. Todd, the one-armed Alabama commissioner of agriculture, was accompanied by Wally Fowler and the Chuck Wagon Gang. He was running strong until he said he would handle the school integration problem "in a Christian manner". State Attorney General John Patterson, whose father had been killed by Phenix City gangsters in 1954, drew his crowds with the help of Rebe Gosden's Sun Valley Boys. Mr. Patterson had once enjoined the NAACP at Tuskegee to prevent blacks from voting.
Walter Lippmann indicates that at the U.N. the previous week, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold had said that the basic reason why no progress was being made on disarmament was that there was a "crisis of trust from which all mankind is suffering at the present juncture." He said that it was reflected "in an unwillingness to take any moves in a positive direction at their face value … because of a fear of being misled." He referred to the current U.S. Arctic bomber flights as "the present state of extreme preparedness", reflecting an absolute mistrust in the intentions of the Soviet Union.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in the same debate, had set out that mistrust actuating U.S. military policy by saying that "the awesome destructive power of modern armaments makes it at least theoretically possible to wipe out the military capacity of a state—even one of the great powers—in a single attack. But such an attack must come without warning if it is to succeed."
The proposals for international inspection in the Arctic zone had been based on the theory that the inspectors could detect the preparation for a super-attack and could, therefore, nullify the danger of an all-out and absolute surprise attack. The U.S. remedy for the mistrust of Soviet intentions was to place great trust in an inspection system, a proposal vetoed in the Security Council the prior Friday by the Soviets.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that if he interpreted Mr. Hammarskjold's remarks correctly, the latter believed that if the Soviet Union and the U.S. would make an agreement to set up an Arctic inspection system, it would reflect a state of mind in which other agreements might then be reached
Foolproof inspection was not realistic, for if the will existed and the means existed to deliver the absolute knockout, no system of inspection would prevent it. The real guarantee against a surprise attack was that the means did not exist and therefore the will to attempt it could not exist. It was not necessary to trust the Russian intentions, only to have trust in Russian sanity. Ambassador Lodge's key words were "theoretically possible" to strike a knockout blow. Mr. Lippmann questions, however, whether it was even theoretically possible to do so at present. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, had said in an address the previous week that "as I see it, under its present policies, the U.S.S.R. does not intend to use its military power in such a way as to risk a general war." He said that the reason was that "they have a healthy respect for our retaliatory capability."
Thus there was a right to believe that Mr. Dulles did not believe that it was even "theoretically possible" at present to knock out the U.S. retaliatory capacity, though he had cautioned that the U.S. had to be constantly vigilant to anticipate attempts at a breakthrough which would change the balance of military power. Until there was such a technological breakthrough, there was a balance of military power which was the true deterrent to a surprise attack.
Mr. Lippmann indicates that a more flexible policy on the part of the U.S. did not depend on putting trust in the intentions of the Soviets, but rather on putting trust in their ability to read correctly the balance of power. Mr. Dulles had reinforced that view in the remainder of his address, concentrating at length and in great detail on the spectacular success of the Soviets in promoting their own industrial development, and with the prospect that in the course of a generation, their industrial capacity might catch up with that of the U.S. With such prospects, it was not likely that the Soviets would risk everything on a theoretical possibility that it could knock out the U.S.
The prospect of a surprise attack paralyzed U.S. military thinking and stultified most of U.S. diplomacy, and he suggests that instead, being conscious of U.S. security, it should address itself to the fact of the era, that in almost every field of human endeavor, there was the pressure of competition of a new and extraordinarily powerful social order.
Joseph Alsop indicates that the President had described one of the main causes of his Administration's inability to take rapid and decisive action on great and urgent matters, saying that he did not believe that any individual could do the best job by just sitting at a desk and "putting his face in a bunch of papers". He stated that the job of the President was to keep his mind free of "inconsequential details" so that he could make clearer and better judgments.
The President's staff had been developed to relieve the President of the burden of "inconsequential detail" and the bother of "putting his face in a bunch of papers." It worked to perfection in that regard. He opines, however, that given its effect on U.S. policy and posture, it did not work at all. He offers as example that there was a whole series of moves which the Government could make to capture the initiative in the miserable maneuvering toward a summit meeting, the simplest being a one-sentence letter from the President, declaring his readiness to discuss disarmament anywhere on any terms, within two weeks after the Soviets had provided solid proof of their willingness to accept serious inspection and control of disarmament.
But because of the staff system, no such letter could be written and pre-summit initiatives had to be left to the Soviets. Secretary of State Dulles had said that it was not possible to "recapture the initiative" if one did not know one's own mind. The U.S. Government at present did not know its own mind regarding disarmament, with the official position being that it had not been firmed up yet. The President had turned the matter over to Secretary Dulles, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Admiral Lewis Strauss, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy and Dr. James Killian. Those high officials had in turn passed the matter to subordinate officials, who fully reflected the bitter disagreements of their chiefs. In repeated meetings, "the areas of disagreement are being pinned down" in numerous highly classified documents, but no decisions were being taken except on the issue of suspension of nuclear tests. On that issue, Secretary Dulles had contemptuously bypassed the staff system, making his own decision in favor of eventual test-suspension, and was boldly preparing to implement it.
Very little got done except under the irresistible pressure of events, or when a single member of the Cabinet forged ahead on his own. Even the defense reorganization bill, universally described as "the President's own baby", did not really constitute an exception to the rule. In that instance, the President had merely indicated that he wanted a plan of defense reorganization which would eliminate the evil influences of inter-service rivalries. Secretary McElroy was new at the job and the President had spent all of his pre-political working life in the War and Defense Departments, but when Secretary McElroy and his working group, headed by Charles Coolidge, had tackled the problem of defense reorganization, they had received no detailed specification from the White House, resulting in a McElroy-Coolidge defense reorganization plan, not the President's baby in any normal sense.
The result had been good in that instance, but in the majority of cases, the result had been something close to paralysis. Mr. Alsop remarks that the type of government which the U.S. had could not function when the man in the White House delegated 90 percent of the vital process of decision-making to a Rube Goldberg machine called a staff system.
A letter writer indicates that 25 years of violation of the Constitution had been responsible for the plight of the nation. He believes that businessmen and industrial leaders had been so intimidated and browbeaten by those who were supposed to be their public servants in Washington that they had become as timid as field mice and were afraid to call their souls their own. Members of Congress were sworn to uphold the Constitution and the intent of the document was to limit the power of the Government. He thinks that for 25 years Congress had violated the intent by passing laws which permitted elected servants to become masters, not good for anyone. He says that politicians could not maintain a wartime boom forever, any more than they could force a square peg into a round hole.
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