The Charlotte News
Friday, May 9, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Lima, Peru, that stones and spit which had greeted
Vice-President Nixon
The House Appropriations Committee had this date cut $15,412,798 from new funds which the President had requested to finance the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency.
In Tokyo, the U.S. during the week had paroled six Japanese war criminals, reducing the population of Sugamo Prison to 18. The six prisoners, serving between 20 years and life on charges of mistreating prisoners of war during World War II, included Rear Admiral Hisashi Ichioka, a former prison warden, and four of his guards.
In Los Angeles, new talks had begun this date between aircraft companies and unions in an effort to reach an agreement which would eliminate the threat of a strike.
In Budapest, Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka had arrived this date for a visit long awaited by the Hungarian Communists who had taken office after the Russians had crushed the October-November, 1956 revolt.
In Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian President Jusceline Kubitschek had ordered an investigation into the crash of two commuter trains in which an estimated 150 persons had been killed, the second disaster in as many months on the Government's Central de Brasil line and the worst train wreck in the country's history.
In Sebring, Fla., a judge had ordered that a five-year old boy be returned to his father in Middlesex, N.J., after his grandparents had taken the boy from the father's home more than a week earlier. The grandparents, from Miami, were seeking custody
In Sharples, W. Va., 24 men, trapped for more than 13 hours in a flooded coal mine, had been brought to the surface unharmed and in good condition at dawn this date. They had emerged through an abandoned airshaft of the Boone County Coal Corp. No. 2-A mine. Trucks had picked them up and carried them to the mine bathhouse where they were met by their families and friends, who had waited anxiously through the night. A four-man rescue party had reached the miners by threading through the passages of a section which had not been worked since the 1920's. Contact had been made in the wee hours of the morning, but it was not until two hours later that a runner had reached the surface with news that the men were safe. One of the miners said they had planned on being trapped for five days, or perhaps longer, with no food and only a little water. They had spent their time resting, singing and praying. They had comprised the entire workforce on the day shift the previous day.
In Nashville, State investigators planned to use a tape recording at impeachment proceedings this date in an attempt to connect a judge of Chattanooga with the underworld. The three investigators, witnesses before the Tennessee House, said that they had obtained the tape from the secret files of the U.S. Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of unions and management, describing it as a recording of a conversation in Chattanooga the prior winter between Leonard Lane, a self-styled Chattanooga numbers racketeer, and Lavern Duffy, a Senate Committee investigator. The recordings had followed testimony the previous day about the relationship of Mr. Lane and the Judge, Ralston Schoolfield, during which the investigators, Jack Norman, John Hooker and W. E. Hopton, had produced evidence that they said showed Mr. Lane had paid the bills for campaign headquarters during Mr. Schoolfield's race for the judgeship, had built the judge a boat dock to use for entertaining friends, had shared with the judge his profits from the numbers rackets, up to at least $18,000, while a defendant appearing before him had borrowed $1,000 at the judge's direction to loan the money to a man he did not know and had to repay the note himself, and had contributed, with other defendants and lawyers in the judge's court, to the purchase of a $2,500 car for the judge.
In Macon, Ga., police had discovered an assortment of voodoo equipment and recipes for love potions in the home of a widow charged with the arsenic poisoning deaths of four persons, her nine-year old daughter, her mother-in-law, and two previous husbands. Her daughter had died the previous month, the first husband, in 1952, the second, in 1955, and the mother-in-law in 1957. Autopsies had revealed the presence of arsenic, first discovered in the daughter, which led to exhumations and testing of the other three bodies. The sheriff said that four bottles which had contained ant poison with an arsenic base had also been found in the defendant's home. The woman had been transferred from a hospital in which she had been staying since the death of her daughter, to a jail the previous day. The sheriff said that packages found in the home had been labeled "Good Luck Powder", "Lucky Witchcraft", "Egyptian Love Powder Incense" and "Adam and Eve Root and Oil". A recipe for a love potion called for the use of dragon blood and myrrh to be mixed with spirits of nitre and then heated.
In Garner, N.C., a six-year old boy had been seriously injured this date when he was run over by a school bus. The child's stepfather said that it had been necessary for doctors to amputate the little boy's right leg.
In Stephenville, Newfoundland, 71 passengers and crew members, most of them dependents of U.S. armed forces personnel, had escaped serious injuries this date when a flying Boxcar plane had crash-landed at nearby Harmon Field.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that the Eastern Air Lines Super-Constellation with 65 passengers and crew aboard had circled slowly over the city for nearly 3 hours the previous afternoon before making a dramatic crash-landing at Douglas Municipal Airport, with no one having been injured when the plane, with its nose gear stuck in the up position, had nosed over on the runway. The nose gear had been discovered stuck right after takeoff at noon and as soon as the captain learned of the malfunction, he began preparations for an emergency landing. Meanwhile, word had flashed through the city like wildfire and an estimated 10,000 people had rushed to the airport area while many thousands more stood on rooftops and on the streets, gazing skyward as the four-engine plane circled the city, burning off all except about 250 gallons of its high-octane fuel to lessen the possibility of a fire upon landing. The flight had originated in Detroit, with scheduled stops in Cleveland, Charlotte, Atlanta, Jacksonville and Miami. It had been only a few thousand feet in the air when the trouble was discovered and the captain notified the Charlotte tower, and Eastern officials had huddled to determine the best course of action. The captain, one of Eastern's most experienced pilots and chief of the Charlotte-based pilots, had talked with Miami and New York and it was decided that Charlotte would be the landing point. Atlanta had been discussed, but Charlotte, it was agreed, had the required long runway, foaming equipment and crash crews. The flight engineer had estimated that fuel consumption would enable the plane to burn down to 250 gallons by 2:45. After that point, the plane would come in for a slow landing, touch down and then let the nose drop slowly in the slick, fire-preventing foam. The passengers had been notified that there was "a little trouble" and the flight attendants had gone about their duties routinely. City and County police and State Highway Patrol officers had rushed to the scene, along with volunteer fire departments, Air National Guard personnel experienced in emergency cases, and the Charlotte Life Saving Crew. Doctors and nurses had been called, along with 11 ambulances. A minister, rabbi and a priest had also been called. The Red Cross had arrived with a disaster trailer. Air Force equipment was ready and City fire equipment was also ready. Spectators were cleared from the landing area and the ramps were deserted. The crowd had been so large on the observation platform at the front of the building that an airport official had gone to the PA system, instructing spectators not to lean on the railing for fear it would collapse. Hundreds of telephone calls had flooded public agencies and newspapers asking when the plane would land. Windows of buildings all over the city were dotted with tense observers, and rooftops held many hundreds more. The tension had risen in the aircraft, although passengers had remained outwardly calm. After that, the racing fans won't need to go to the Charlotte Speedway out on Wilkinson Boulevard in hope of witnessing a couple of crashes for at least a couple weeks.
In London, Hal Cooper of the Associated Press, having reported two days earlier of the case of the woman who had become stuck in the loo and had sued an urban council, tells this date of Miss England, the second person to hold the title in a fortnight, Wendy Peters, it now having been discovered that she was a married woman, contrary to the rules of the pageant. The first titleholder, June Cooper, had been disqualified because she had proved to be only 16, with the minimum contest age being 17. Miss Peters had won the title in a second judging, but it turned out that she was the wife of a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, discovered when her passport was examined along with other papers she had to supply for her trip to America to participate in the Miss World pageant. The head of the pageant said he was afraid he would have to disqualify her and run the contest for a third time. After the second contest, some of the other pageant contestants had protested that Miss Peters was wearing a "wasple" corset under her swimsuit, something which Miss Peters admitted, saying, however, that she looked just as good without one and would prove it by holding a news and photo conference dressed only in a bikini. The conference had been scheduled for the previous afternoon, but Miss Peters had failed to show and was not immediately available for comment regarding the discovery that she was actually married. Whether she, too, would now get stuck in the loo, is anyone's guess.
On the editorial page, "Little Rock: The Golden Opportunity" indicates that the whole nation could be grateful that Arkansas schoolchildren were in class only nine months of the year, such that the President could remove Federal troops from Central High School during the summer vacation without impairing his position vis-à-vis Governor Orval Faubus such that the latter could obstruct the orders of the Federal courts.
The President could force on the unwilling Governor the responsibility that was his to uphold the law and keep the peace and if the Governor again used his office to thwart the courts and encourage rebellion, the President could return the troops with the likelihood of general public support for the move.
It opines that with a minimum of restraint and responsibility on either side, the destructive situation at Little Rock could have been prevented. "With all the hate and injury that has flowed from the crisis in the last few months, it is unthinkable that it will be renewed next September." The President had seen in the impending summer vacation an opportunity to withdraw the troops without abandoning his position, and common sense dictated that he use that opportunity as he had, by challenging Arkansas officials to run their own affairs with due regard for the law and the rights of all citizens.
The newspaper asserts its belief that the President had acted hastily and unwisely in ordering troops to Little Rock the prior September and that the cause of racial harmony and social progress had been harmed, that he had failed to prove that his action was a genuine last resort, and that although there was strong reason to doubt it, Governor Faubus had claimed that his actions were within the law. Since that time, on April 28, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit had declared with compelling logic that the Governor was mistaken. The Governor had argued that he had a right to prevent black children from entering Central High School because by doing so he would forestall violence, thus deploying the Arkansas National Guard after the first day of school to prevent their attendance. The Court of Appeals had stated: "Under such a rule the banks could be closed and emptied of their cash to prevent robberies, the post office locked to prevent the mails from being robbed, the citizens kept off the streets to prevent holdups…" It suggests that the appellate court would be upheld should the Governor appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Little Rock School Board had asked that its desegregation plan be delayed until January, 1961—a request which would ultimately be granted June 20 by the District Court, though overturned by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in August, a decision then affirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court in September, rejecting the need for delay in implementing the original District Court order that desegregation begin at the high school forthwith at the start of the 1957 school year.
The piece suggests that the delay would provide a profitable cooling off period for all concerned, but that if the District Court declined the request, a return of the circumstances which had prevailed the prior September would recur the following September and the Governor would have to choose again between obstructing the law or enforcing it. The President had already made his choice.
It concludes that if a second "invasion" of Little Rock occurred, the responsibility for it would rest solely on the Governor.
In contravention of the argument for further delay in providing the black students their constitutional rights, the concurrence in September of Justice Felix Frankfurter should be given close attention
"Cool Competence Prevented Tragedy" indicates that only the sensation-seekers had tarnished the drama the previous afternoon at Douglas Municipal Airport as the Eastern Air Lines Super-Constellation was forced to circle the city with a stuck landing gear while the pilot sought to correct the issue and burn off fuel. Thoughtless thousands had clogged the roads to and from the airport, posing a threat to the orderliness of official preparations for an emergency landing.
It suggest that had a tragedy occurred, the consequences might have been worse simply because a great many people had a taste for the immediacy and no regard for the consequences. On the other hand, individuals who belonged on the scene had handled themselves with great competence and composure, including the officials of Eastern, fire-fighting personnel, law enforcement officers, rescue and life-saving squads, doctors, nurses, ambulance crews, Red Cross workers and airport authorities. It especially commends the officers and crew of the airplane. Even local hospitals had been observing a disaster alert with their personnel standing by for trouble.
Because the preparations were intact and emergency chores carried out with efficiency, a possible tragedy was averted. Some of the facilities, the full-time crash crew, for instance, had been fairly recent innovations and were only added after considerable commotion.
It indicates that Charlotte ought not only protect its present investment in disaster facilities with stubborn zeal but ought be constantly on the alert for improvements, as the best was none too good where the protection of human life was concerned.
"The Hole in Khrushchev's Memory" finds that the cynically crude Soviet veto of the Arctic inspection plan had been reminiscent of Stalinesque diplomacy in more ways than one, as the veto had overridden the expressed desires of the other ten members of the U.N. Security Council and was accompanied by a vicious attack on the U.S. which had proposed the plan, issuing scarcely veiled threats of retaliation against other nations favoring it. The Soviet delegate had also bitterly attacked U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold for commending the possibilities of the plan, despite Moscow not protesting at all when the Secretary-General had commented similarly on the nuclear test ban recently proclaimed by Russia.
It finds that a scheme designed to ease world tensions had thus died in a wave of new tension, while peacemakers such as the Secretary-General had gotten their noses bloodied. It suggests that the Soviet action had made the world's balance of terror a little shakier and had also ripped away from Soviet imperialism some of the gloss applied by the artful Premier Khrushchev. The result had been a propaganda defeat for the Soviets, but one which dimmed hopes for peace.
Even for someone like Stalin, the wording of the attack on the Secretary-General would have been remarkable for its inconsistency, Dr. Hammarskjold having been accused of "forgetfulness" and that he was commending the U.S. response rather than the original Soviet complaint that American bomber flights over the Arctic toward the Soviet Union were provocative.
It indicates that when the U.S. at first had proposed the Arctic inspection plan in the London disarmament talks of the previous year, Premier Khrushchev had said that there was nothing there to inspect but polar bears. It had not been until a few days earlier that he remembered the flights of the U.S. bombers over the Arctic and contended that they were a threat to the Soviet Union and to peace.
A piece from the Florida Times-Union, titled "Cookie Jar Knowledge", tells of a group of students at MacDonald's Teachers' College in Montréal planning to go on a cookie diet for a week as part of a nutritional study, finding it strange that school authorities would force the students into such a regimen when there had to be hundreds of small boys and girls in Montréal who would gladly offer themselves for such an experiment, not amounting to any great change in their eating habits.
Many educators had been recommending putting away childish things and they were feeding college students cookies, another sugar-coated course. It suggests that if the technique was going to be used in education, then someone ought place a mousetrap in the cherry bowl to serve as a reminder that learning was not just a receiving process, but required giving of attention and effort on the part of the learner and teacher. The bowl of human knowledge had to be replenished constantly, but it wonders what could cookie-fattened students add.
The incident provided a moral on educational development. Centuries earlier, Socrates had set a noble example for his followers by drinking hemlock rather than recant what he believed. Now, pupils were being fed cookies. The wisdom of Socrates was still sought at present, but it wonders how much respect the sugary education of the present would command 2,000 years hence.
Drew Pearson tells of there being more than met the eye behind the abrupt deportation of William Heikkila from San Francisco back to Finland, that new Attorney General William Rogers had been breathing fresh life into the Justice Department and had promptly reversed General Joseph Swing, the swaggering commissioner of the INS, ordering Mr. Heikkila back to the U.S. to have a chance to say goodbye to his wife and family and exhaust his due process rights under law. General Swing, however, had remained unrepentant, even bragging that about 97 to 98 percent of the deportations from the U.S. had been handled the same way.
The New York Times, which had simultaneously carried a biographical sketch of the commissioner, picturing him as a "soldier with a big heart", had soft-pedaled the General's statement, quoting him as saying: "About 97 percent of the deportable aliens go without protest and are given ample time to wind up of their affairs." He had actually said, however, to the House Judiciary subcommittee: "About 97 to 98 percent of our people are handled this way. We never give them 72 hours or a week or 10 days or a month if they have business to settle. There is about 3 percent of these nogoodnicks and the only way to handle them is—they know they're deportable and they know if we get our hands on them, they will be summarily deported." Mr. Pearson notes parenthetically that the grammar was that of the General. He had gone on to say that the previous year, they had physically deported 6,700-odd aliens and that the year before that, over 7,000, averaging about 7,000 per year. His testimony had shown that he had complete contempt for the due process clause of the Constitution, which he was sworn to uphold, showing every evidence of wanting to continue the practice of summarily deporting aliens without giving them permission to say goodbye or tell their wives what had happened.
Some news accounts had made it appear that General Swing had admitted he had made a mistake in ordering his San Francisco immigration director, Bruce Barber, to act as he had. But actually, General Swing had made no such admission, the mistake he had admitted having been only that he was caught, thereby exposing Mr. Barber to court action. The inside record on the General showed him to be anything but the "soldier with a big heart", as portrayed by the Times, except possibly in putting his daughter on the Government payroll at $4,500 per year. He had also been big-hearted about supplying a Government immigration plane to former Attorney General Herbert Brownell for a purely political trip to confer with Governor Allan Shivers of Texas. General Swing, a 1915 West Point classmate of the President, was the first military man ever to become INS commissioner. He had promptly appointed two other military men, Generals Frank Partridge and Edwin Howard, to be his assistants, pretty well militarizing that civilian branch of the Government. Shortly thereafter, Generals Partridge and Howard had drawn up a secret "Plan A" to defend the Mexican border from military invasion, despite the fact that the U.S. had been proud of its peaceful relations with Mexico.
General Swing had also exhibited his big-hearted proclivities when he instructed the U.S. immigration officer in El Paso to obtain a Mexican maid for his home in Washington at a lower salary than that paid in Washington. His big-hearted activities had come to the attention of the House Government Operations Committee and of Vice-Admiral J. M. Will for transporting Mexican nationals to Mexico in a ship under such foul conditions that 40 of them had jumped overboard in Tampico harbor. There had been life rafts for 330 men, none for 170.
On June 30, 1957, the column had reported on General Swing's big-hearted activities, especially his use of a Government DC-3 to fly to Mexico for weekends, where he was met by a Government-owned house trailer and relaxed on delightful hunting trips.
If all of this begins to sound disturbingly familiar here in 2025, with the second Formosa crisis with Communist China just around the corner in late August, 1958, then, undoubtedly, it is the result of the man with the magical umbrella seeking, once again, to sell you the old bunco routine to distract from his complete incompetence in delivering on his promises to lower prices, apt only to increase substantially if Iran, in response to bunker-busting Don's rodeo ride across the arena for all the ladies to see, closes the Strait of Hormuz, as they are threatening to do, and thus sends the world's oil market into turmoil, just as it was by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, as well as busting wide open his promise not only not to involve the nation in any new war but to end on his own hook on day one the Israeli conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the war instigated by Vlad against Ukraine in his attempt to reconstitute the old Soviet Union slowly but surely. Don has essentially declared war on Iran, as surely as he has on immigrants and the City and County of Los Angeles.
We might ask, as a starting point, how the possession of nuclear weapons by Communist China since 1964 and by North Korea since 2016-17, though actually begun in 1956, either of which situations having once been thought to be the flashpoints for the start of World War III, is somehow less dangerous to world peace or regional peace or to the security of the United States than the prospect of Iran getting a nuclear weapon, which would only serve as the mutual deterrence afforded by mutually assured destruction against the nuclear program of Israel and not therefore leading inexorably to a nuclear conflict any more than have the nuclear programs of China and North Korea thus far ever led to the destruction of Formosa or South Korea, with the mutually assured destruction in place from the U.S. as part of SEATO and the 1953 Korean truce. What is the difference? Was the attack on the nuclear facilities in Iran to forestall the 60 percent enrichment of uranium, to prevent it from reaching the 90 percent enrichment necessary for weapons grade material, really necessary and was it worth the risk of a long-term conflict with Iran and the potential for terrorism arising from it all over the Western world, as well as in the Middle East, a conflict which could lay dormant for years before showing its ugly head somewhere down the line? Only time will tell.
Proclaiming it as a great success is quite a bit premature. But, of course, when you have a bunch of drunks and incompetents who stumble along, able to see only a couple of inches in front of their noses, running the Trump reality-show, it is not too surprising. A chronic drunk who has managed to stay off the juice for a whole day will also declare victory over the demon rum.
If you believe them, you'll believe
anything, including that the man with the magical umbrella will
prevent the end of the world
We note that some of the Trumpy-Dumpy-Doers are so misinformed that they think the bunker-buster bombs hit an uranium "deposit" and "buried" it deep in the ground so's they can't get to it now, apparently thinking it an uranium mine containing U-235. Those who think that need to educate themselves better. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors worldwide use of nuclear material for energy production, had verified about two and a half weeks ago the presence in Iran of about 900 pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium, with 90 percent being the threshold for weapons grade uranium. The 60 percent is far higher than the 3 to 5 percent necessary for energy-producing nuclear reactors but is also not illegal under international protocols. That which was hit by the bunker-busters was the centrifuge, located some 250-feet underground, which enriches the uranium, to make U-238, the common isotope, into the equivalent of U-235, the rare naturally occurring element, all of which takes time. And even when the weapons-grade fuel is obtained at the 90 percent threshold, processing it into a usable bomb takes time as well. It is best to stay tuned and watch something more informative than the propatainment garbage which proliferates as "news" on Fox Prop and its equivalent in a Trump echo-chamber, made the more so by the Trump press room which eliminates all unpleasant probing and stresses happy-talk from the happy-talkers. (Cf. Walter Lippmann, below)
Walter Lippmann suggests that the layman and outsider who had never commanded forces in war or worked inside the Pentagon had to ask how to decide what to think about the Administration's plan to reorganize the Defense Department, and he indicates that he had been emboldened to ask an important question because not only military men were qualified to answer it, that being how great and complicated human institutions were governed by more or less ordinary men. He finds the question embodied in a piece of legislation whose "meaning", as the President had said, was that "strategy … must be under unified control." He finds the crux of the question to be who was to direct and how was that person to determine how to direct the strategy which would be under the person's unified control.
According to the new bill, a Presidential appointee, the Secretary of Defense, was to make the great strategic decisions and direct the control of their application. Mr. Lippmann finds that once a decision had been undertaken, it ought be carried out without vetoes or obstructions. Under present law and practice, the Secretary of Defense did not have full authority to enforce a decision on the separate services, and he believes there could not be serious objection to giving him that authority. But then came the question as to how the great decisions were to be made. Secretaries of Defense came and went and were chosen from lists of politically available persons, coming from banking, law, professional politics, the automobile business and the soap business, the current Secretary, Neil McElroy, having been head of Procter & Gamble, and his predecessor, Charles E. Wilson, having been head of General Motors. He questions how a person who had spent the first 50 years or so of his life far away from strategic problems would go to the Pentagon and then start making the decisions required of him.
He finds the question to be how great establishments administered by career officials could be directed and controlled by laymen, that they could be only by those laymen hearing the issues argued by qualified experts, much as a judge in a courtroom decided highly technical patent cases. He suggests that if the layperson at the top did not hear the issues argued, however, he did not really decide them, merely endorsing the decision of some subordinate who had his ear.
The question Mr. Lippmann wanted thoroughly discussed was whether the proposed reform of the Pentagon made it more or less probable that the Secretary of Defense and the President would hear the great issues of strategy thoroughly argued. In reading the new plan and the official statements which were being made about it, he says he did not know whether or not it promoted or decreased the effective analysis of the issues to be decided. He finds there was reason for wondering about it in view of the President's theories and practice as to how the head of a great establishment ought run his office, finding it fair to say that by and large his idea of a good organization was one in which the chief did not have to listen to arguments but could approve agreements after the subordinates had argued them out.
He thus finds it hard not to wonder whether in the plan the President had not gone a long way toward compelling the professional military men to reach agreed conclusions before the issues had been adequately argued before their civilian superiors. His doubts were not allayed by what the President had said at his press conference a week earlier regarding running his own office. He had said that no one could do the "best job by just sitting at a desk and putting his face in a bunch of papers. Actually, the job, when you come down to it, when you think of the interlocking staffs and associates that have to take and analyze all the details of every question that comes to the presidency, he ought to be trying to keep his mind free of inconsequential detail and doing his own thinking on the basic principles and factors that he believes are important."
Mr. Lippmann finds that he had omitted the necessity of deciding issues by hearing them argued, providing ground for wondering whether at the center of the proposed reform there had been adequate and clear discussion of how decisions were to be made.
Doris Fleeson indicates that on any normal working day, the busiest telephone in town belonged to White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, but that it had broken all records in the 48 hours preceding the President's speech to the Republican "love feast" in Washington the prior Tuesday night. That was the occasion for which Republicans had decided to use the free television time they had demanded from the networks when they were complaining of the partisan talk by former President Truman at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, with the idea that the Republicans were entitled to wield their own hatchet, though unable to find a hatchet man.
The President would not wield it and former New York Governor Thomas Dewey felt debarred by his 1948 loss to Mr. Truman. Vice-President Nixon was keeping to the high road in anticipation of running for the presidency in 1960, and Mr. Adams was afraid of imperiling in Congress such Eisenhower legislation as foreign aid and reciprocal trade. So the Republican candidates for Congress were promised the Tuesday night fiesta with the President.
Over the weekend, as they quietly perused their Sunday newspapers, they had seen an item which said that the President had chosen national security as his topic for the party. No one could be quite sure whether he intended to stress defense reorganization, as he had done with the editors the previous month, or whether he might plead the case for aid and trade. Their cries for more fireworks had been heard sympathetically by RNC chairman Meade Alcorn and Representative Richard Simpson, chairman of the House campaign committee, among others, and the complaints went to Mr. Adams, reminding that it was a party affair at which the guests expected roasting of Democrats.
A few hours before the dinner, White House press secretary James Hagerty was still telling reporters that he did not know when the speech would be ready and that the mimeograph machines were standing idle. The RNC refused to guess what it might contain. The problem was obvious and thus the President could not be blamed for remembering that he had to deal with a Democratic Congress. Mr. Alcorn was caught in the middle and was feeling it with increasing keenness. The White House rule, sternly enforced by Mr. Adams, was that the President had to be spared the controversial and disagreeable subjects. Mr. Alcorn had told White House reporters that Republicans might again lose the Senate in the fall midterms and was said to feel that the possibility was not fully grasped inside the Presidential offices.
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that he took a dim view of the expulsion of Lady Norab Docker from Monte Carlo and its surrounding dependencies, Cannes and Nice. He had found her a welcome relief from the hordes of her red-faced countrymen who sat around looking like stunned mullets on the verandas of the Hotels Carlton and Negresco. The fact that she was the wife of the former boss of Daimler motor cars, that she might stand on her head from time to time or have a hassle with customs or complain bitterly about the service in Monaco, was a kind of welcome relief from the usual dull fare one saw in public on the Riviera.
He says that Monte Carlo was nothing but a big crap game and had no more dignity of being than Las Vegas or any other place which made its business out of trimming suckers. Princess Grace was a nice doll, and Prince Rainier was a pleasant person, though he had never met him and was not invited to their wedding.
But the House of Grimaldi was founded on a tax dodge and was tacitly owned by a Greek, and if the Prince had not come up with an heir recently, France would have started charging him taxes. Monaco was a tiny suburb surrounded by Englishmen who imagined they spoke French, and Frenchmen who imagined that they spoke English. The international tramps made Monte Carlo and the rest of the Riviera their winter headquarters, and to expel Lady Docker for being rude to the dignity of Monte Carlo was "like throwing an extra pig out of a pen for the sin of being a pig."
He says that in Cannes recently, at one of the foremost nightclubs, he had observed a very famous French male singer locked in a mad embrace on a public dance floor with his business-suited friend, the while surrounded by distinguished-looking gentlemen in impeccable clothes, all dancing together. "And Cannes should be off-limits to Lady Docker?"
A letter writer from Asheville wonders whether something ought be done about the mad suicidal racing through traffic by policemen chasing suspects at increasingly fast rates of speed, wondering whether the police could carry cameras on the fronts of their cars to photograph escaping cars and then telephone or radio ahead to other police to be on the lookout. If the answer was that it was too expensive, she suggests that it was not as expensive as a broken back or running over children or even just smashing cars, finding the danger to be very great, that the practice had gone on for years and was "utterly insane".
Framed Edition
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