The Charlotte News
Thursday, June 12, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Boston that Boston millionaire industrialist Bernard Goldfine had confirmed that one of his companies had paid hotel bills for White House chief of staff Sherman Adams and Mrs. Adams, but denied that Mr. Adams had used influence on Government officials on behalf of Mr. Goldfine. In a statement the previous night, he contended that charges in Washington by members of a House subcommittee on legislative oversight "were an irresponsible smear on my good name and the good name of Sherman Adams." The statement, issued by his counsel, said that the Goldfines and the Adamses had been close friends for 20 years as a result of an acquaintance which had grown out of Mr. Goldfine's textile manufacturing business in New Hampshire, the native state of Mr. Adams, where he had been Governor. Mr. Goldfine said that on occasion when Mr. and Mrs. Adams had been passing through Boston, he had entertained them at a Boston hotel and that the bills had been paid by one of his companies. He said he had never asked Mr. Adams to exert influence with any government agency on his behalf, and that he never had. He said that the statements coming from the subcommittee investigators the previous day had been "an attempt to twist a fine and longstanding friendship into something improper and sinister." He said he believed that things were in a sad state when a man could not entertain old friends without being subjected to that kind of vilification.
The Senate had voted 86 to 0 to write into the labor bill additional powers for the Secretary of Labor to force union compliance with its terms. Lack of such powers had been one of the criticisms of the bill expressed earlier in the week by Secretary of Labor James Mitchell. The amendment had been offered by Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, and had been accepted by Senator John F. Kennedy, the chief sponsor of the measure. Senator Kennedy said that he would have been glad to put it in while the bill was in the Labor Committee had the Administration pushed it while in committee. The amendment would give the Secretary subpoena power to compel testimony of witnesses and the production of books and records in enforcing sections dealing with union elections, trusteeships, and financial reporting by unions, union officers and employers. Senator Kennedy had also agreed to accept amendments by Senator Cooper relating to exemption of small unions from the financial reporting requirements and with making financial reports available to rank-and-file members. In opening debate on the measure, designed to curb union abuses and provide organized labor some of the things it wanted, Senator Kennedy accused Secretary Mitchell of gross misstatements and fallacious claims about the bill, saying that the comments by the latter in a statement on Monday denouncing the bill as weak and ineffective had been "unfortunate because they have sought to confuse rather than clarify; introduced partisanship where it had been minimized; and jeopardized rather than enhanced the possibilities for favorable Congressional action on legislation this year."
In Durham, N.C., 15 scientists would meet this date to discuss whether there was a connection between effects produced by radiation and the normal aging process. It was being conducted under the sponsorship of the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Institute of Health. The three-day conference would also discuss the value of experimental radiation of animals as a research tool to study aging.
In Algiers, military authorities were reported this date to have seized five Paris daily newspaper editions for carrying stories about dissension in the ranks of the All-Algeria Public Safety Committee and Committee clashes with the military.
In London, it was reported that Russia had accused Secretary of State Dulles this date of failing to take a serious approach to Premier Nikita Khrushchev's proposal for increased U.S.-Soviet trade.
HUAC chairman Francis Walter of Pennsylvania said this date that he had walked out of a conference with Cyrus Eaton because of the latter's comparison of the U.S. with Hitler's Germany, complaining that it "was too much for my stomach."
A sharp dispute had developed within the Civil Aeronautics Board over whether to fire an employee accused by one member of trying to browbeat United Airlines officials for criticism of the CAB's safety record.
In Detroit, the UAW, which had insisted that it did not want a strike in the automobile industry, had disclosed this date that it was conducting a strike vote among 100,000 Ford Motor Co. production employees.
In Baltimore, it was reported that veteran jockey Joe Snyder of Washington was in critical condition this date with a skull fracture suffered in a two-horse spill at the Charles Town, W. Va., racetrack the previous day.
In Albany, Ga., a garage apartment fire had killed an airman's family of five early this date. The airman was stationed in Germany. His wife and the children had only recently come to visit her parents, operators of a jewelry store, and had been living in an apartment above the garage at the brick home of the parents. The cause of the fire had not been determined.
In Ponca City, Okla., a flaming Air Force jet trainer had crashed during a rainstorm into an isolated farm home near the town the previous night, killing an Air Force instructor and his pupil, plus a woman resident of the house. Her husband had been driving his pickup truck into the garage when the T-33 had slammed into a corner of the house late at night. A witness to the crash said that the plane had been on fire as it came down, with another witness indicating that it appeared to be coming apart about 100 feet above the ground. Two unopened parachutes had been found in a field and wreckage was strewn over a six-acre area.
In Venice, Ill., a seven-hour search for two children had ended this date with the discovery of their bodies in an abandoned refrigerator.
Dick Young of The News reports that Police Chief Frank Littlejohn this date had ordered a police captain and a lieutenant suspended for 30 days and recommended their dismissal. The two officers were central figures in the continuing investigation of the records in the office of the clerk of City Recorder's Court. Under the civil service law, the chief had authority to suspend officers for no more than 30 days. The Civil Service Commission had to act on his recommendation for their dismissal. The chief, in a letter to the lieutenant, said that he was charged with violating police rules and regulations, including conduct unbecoming a police officer and conduct subversive of good order and the discipline of the force. The captain was charged with violation of the same rules and regulations, plus neglect in paying his honest debts. The captain said that he was overwhelmed and surprised at his suspension and the charges, and felt that they were without foundation in fact. The lieutenant said he had no comment and wanted to confer with his lawyers.
Donald MacDonald of The News poses the question as to how a police captain with a salary of $6,057 per year could cash checks totaling more than $26,000 in less than a year, wondering where the money had come from. The captain told the newspaper this date that he did not have that much money, that it was all a matter of "kiting" checks, that because of the delay between the time of cashing a check and its receipt by the bank, it was possible to cash an insufficient funds check and then cover it with another insufficient funds check. When the final accounting was taken, the total of the checks cashed did not necessarily mean that the person had that much money. Regarding the $32,911 worth of checks which had been deposited by the clerk of court without identification, the captain said that some of those checks may have been his, but not all of them.
John Kilgo of The News indicates that an attorney for a City police officer, whom the attorney declined to identify, had knowledge that a case against one of his clients had been illegally nol prossed. The report on the City Recorder's Court clerk's office which had been made public the previous day had shown that at least 76 cases had been illegally nol prossed out of court since April, 1954. The attorney said that his client had been told that he would not have to come to court and that a member of the police department had told him that his case would never be tried. The defendant had been found guilty this date by Judge Basil Boyd of operating an automobile under the influence of an intoxicant, and fined $100 plus court costs. The attorney immediately had given notice of appeal to the Superior Court. The defendant had been arrested in February, 1956 by two police officers and his case had apparently been one of the 76 in question. When one of the police officers had been questioned on the stand by the attorney as to whether he had told his client that his case would never be tried, the officer responded that it was the first time he had seen the defendant since he had arrested him. He also denied telling the defendant that he was not guilty of anything. The attorney complained to the judge that the case had been brought up nearly three years after the man had been arrested.
In New York, a psychiatrist, who had practiced under an assumed name to hide his former status as a mental patient had dropped from sight this date, with his future unclear. He had held a City job as a jail psychiatrist under the assumed name. He left a typed statement at his Yonkers home, saying that he was contemplating suicide or retirement to Harlem Valley State Hospital for the rest of his life, or "taking it on the lam". He said that he would report for duty on July 1 at the State Hospital at Fulton, Mo., and believed that he ought to give up his practice of medicine. He said the previous day that he had been hired as a senior psychiatrist at the Missouri hospital at a salary of $9,600 per year, and had lost 15 jobs after his employers had discovered that he had been a mental patient, despite having been discharged as competent. He told the New York Times the previous night that he had returned his license and narcotics permit, and had abandoned his practice of medicine. His double identity had been discovered by City authorities through a routine inquiry into a traffic violation. When he resigned from his job on June 3 at a Brooklyn jail he had made public a letter which he had sent to Mayor Robert Wagner, describing conditions at the jail as "a disgrace to civilization". The district attorney's office said that the situation appeared to involve confusion rather than possible crime, with a spokesman for the office indicating that use of an alias was not a crime unless there was legal proof that it had been used to perpetuate a fraud. Upon discovery of the doctor's history, he had been referred to a psychiatrist, who said that after spending three hours with him, he could not diagnose him as being insane, that all he had been trying to do was to obtain a job, that there was a tragedy involved of a man who could not get a job because he had once been mentally ill. In a second letter to Mayor Wagner, the doctor had said that he was ruined professionally and personally, signing it with his true name, "late M.D., and now only a bum."
In Annapolis, Md., information specialists at the Naval Academy thought that they had answered every conceivable question about the Navy, until a letter had arrived from a young girl who had seen a television show about Midshipmen, asking: "Is it true that the Academy laundry puts extra starch in their underwear to make them stand so straight?"
In Atlantic Beach, N.C., a man had brought a live 32-pound, seven-foot porpoise by station wagon from Marathon, Fla., and deposited it in an aquarium, claiming that it was the longest car trip ever made by a porpoise, 25.5 hours and 1,026 miles.
On the editorial page, "The Condition Will Not Cure Itself" comments on the auditor's report which had been released to the City Council the previous afternoon, raising more questions than it had answered regarding the City Recorder's Court.
It finds it only small consolation that it reported that no money was missing, for there was missing a semblance of order in the processing of cases for judgment and a guarantee that defendants had received equal and exact justice in a court of law. There was an unknown number of warrants which had been illegally nol prossed. There had been a number of forfeited but uncollected bonds. A police captain had cashed checks worth $26,000 in less than a year against those funds, checks which occasionally had bounced only to be redeposited and accepted later. None of those matters had been dealt with successfully, despite the public scandal having been developing for about two months.
It finds it to be the responsibility of the Council to get at the facts and share them with the public, that the court could not properly investigate itself and the newspapers could not do the job either, despite having turned up a considerable part of the mischief. Only the Council was equipped to determine the cause and cure for what ailed the Recorder's Court.
"After the Sideshow, Back to Business" indicates that the exchange of verbal attacks between City Manager Henry Yancey and Police Chief Frank Littlejohn in the office of Mayor James Smith the previous day had been a lively but nevertheless unseemly sideshow, adding nothing to the solution of more serious problems involved in the Recorder's Court scandal, serving only to divert the public's attention from the main issue.
It finds it regrettable that the chief had felt it necessary to question Mr. Yancey's integrity, and that it was even more regrettable that when the error of his assumption had been pointed out, he had not offered Mr. Yancey any withdrawal of the charge.
It finds Mr. Yancey's display of temper to have been unbecoming the previous day, but that there had been nothing wrong with his integrity. It is confident that he had been as straightforward and fair in his handling of details of the scandal as his custom was in all matters of municipal administration. It finds patently absurd the assumption by the chief that Mr. Yancey had "deliberately delayed" the release of the audit of the court's records to give Judge Basil Boyd a "chance to start cleaning up his own house".
"Ike Leaves His Allies in the Lurch" indicates that when Republicans and Democrats had joined in support of the Administration, only to find on occasion that the President had changed course in the meantime, it was disconcerting. The latest example was the Senate's unexpected one-vote defeat of an amendment sponsored by Senator John F. Kennedy to grant the Administration authority to extend economic aid to Soviet satellites.
The President, apparently having been influenced by Senator William Knowland, opposed to the amendment, had reversed his stand on the matter, thus denying to himself the authority which he might have used to advantage in attempting to wean satellites from Soviet dominance. He had used that authority with promising effect regarding Yugoslavia and Poland. But at the point of getting formal Senate endorsement of the authority, he had apparently been overwhelmed by his timidity and the bluff of the Republican right wing. He had left his political allies to take the risks involved in the attempt to make U.S. foreign policy more dynamic, and, it concludes, risk was always involved in leadership.
Caroline Coleman, writing in the Greenville Piedmont, in a piece titled "The Old Blue Back Speller", indicates that learning the ABC's had been a laborious process for the youngster who, according to Noah Webster, could not learn to spell until mastering the alphabet. Parents were considered careless and indifferent if they failed to teach their children the alphabet before they started school. Nevertheless, few of them knew the alphabet before they matriculated. Children had started to school at an early age in the previous century, at least those who did not live far from the schoolhouse. When it was a walk of two or three miles, however, the starting student had to be six years of age before being able to walk that far.
Each child when beginning had been provided the Blue Book speller, the only textbook, the class text and the homework, all in one. The first page in the book was taken up entirely by the alphabet. Those who did not know it initially in a room full of children who seemed infinitely learned, quailed at the thought of the lack of knowledge and the prospect of ever being able to master the quirks of those strange designs on the page.
Students would seek to match the sounds of the letters uttered by the teacher with the letters on the page, a process going on for days and weeks until the student had proudly mastered the entire row of letters, which were learned in Roman and Italic, small letters and capitals.
By the time the student had finally mastered them, the first page in the Blue Book had been worn thin and bore the marks of the student's thumbprints, which were not too clean.
Learning the ABC's as a prelude to spelling had been the method of teaching until the turn of the century, with other methods now being used, and as each new method was developed, there were those who still believed in the earlier methods.
Drew Pearson tells of the inside story of why the President had suddenly caved to Senator William Knowland the previous week regarding his request for authority to win friends behind the Iron Curtain for the U.S., the President's change having occurred after Senator Knowland had been repudiated by the people of California in the primary election, and yet was able to cause the President to reverse his own State Department. The President had wanted authority to offer the same kind of economic aid behind the Iron Curtain that Russia was presently offering all over the world, particularly in South America. Originally, the Marshall Plan had been offered to the Communist satellites, but had been vetoed by Russia. With Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania presently more friendly to the U.S., the President wanted to reinstate the Marshall Plan policy. It had been why Senator John F. Kennedy had drafted an amendment to permit the President to assist any satellite country. The State Department welcomed the amendment but suggested some changes in its language, accepted by Senator Kennedy on April 14. That amendment had then been accepted by the Senate committee behind closed doors, without objection from Senator Knowland, its most outspoken member.
The first confidential version of the bill carried the State Department's official endorsement. Then suddenly, Senator Knowland went to the State Department and threatened assistant secretary William Macomber with slashing foreign aid appropriations unless the State Department reversed its position on the Kennedy amendment. At the time, Secretary of State Dulles was vacationing at his log cabin in Ontario, and so Senator Knowland had repeated his threat to Acting Secretary Christian Herter, who then panicked and retreated fast from the Department's position. But deputy undersecretary Douglas Dillon did not, standing his ground. As a compromise, however, they had agreed to favor the Kennedy amendment in principle but allow Congress to decide how to implement it, that decision having been reported to Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island, chairman of the committee, by Mr. Macomber on May 29.
That arrangement had not satisfied Senator Knowland, who arranged a breakfast with the President a day after the California primary. Ignoring the fact that the U.S. was bound to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary by years of history and thousands of immigrants, Senator Knowland demanded that no aid money be spent to assist them. The Kennedy amendment, according to the Senator, would open "the floodgates of American aid to Communist dictators." The President had explained that he wanted his hands untied so that he would be free to use economic aid where he thought it would do the most good. But he nevertheless retreated and said that he would not insist on including that authority in the foreign aid bill, meaning that the Kennedy amendment was buried until the following year.
Joseph Alsop, in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, tells of David's District, the mountainous country of the Kabyles, the "free people", as they called themselves. The mountains of the Djebel Aissa Mimoun reached steeply upward from the valley floor, with each village occupying its own lonely crag or peak on the uppermost crest, where the tiny, earthen-built houses of the district's 10,000 to 12,000 people lived.
Since the French had subdued the Kabyles, the population had increased at a rapid rate, such that the land now only fed its people for three months of the year, with the villages on the mountaintops chiefly earning their living by exporting labor to metropolitan France.
But from David's point of view, the most immediate problem presented by the region was its ideal character as guerrilla country. He had come to it about two years earlier from an assignment in Hong Kong as its liaison officer of French intelligence. He had made a lot of newspaper friends in Hong Kong as one of the few informed about Communist China.
As a jeep carried Mr. Alsop and his party up an enlarged goat track into the mountains, David had vividly described the condition of his district in 1956. As it was a natural fortress, it had been occupied by large bands of fellagha from the beginning of the Algerian uprising, with an entire French battalion initially needed to fight them. He told Mr. Alsop that the worst part of the job was over when the battalion left and he had moved in with a company of troops, but that the rebels still had a field force of 20 men on the Djebel, to whom the villagers paid tribute, feeding and clothing them, and keeping them constantly informed about their movements. He said that the villagers were the actual rulers, that they were an absolutely closed people who did not speak to them and would do no work for them, that they could not go among them except in armed groups.
At the company headquarters, a veteran of the French Army and now the mayor of the surrounding village had drawn up his self-defense force of 15 men to show their newly issued hunting rifles to David. In the two lower rooms of the company headquarters building, school was being conducted by teachers who were soldiers in uniform and whose rifles hung by the blackboard. But the hundred or so students in the two classrooms, who had never known any other kind of schoolteacher, were learning of their ABC's with cheerful enthusiasm.
In other villages they visited, much the same scene was repeated, with French soldiers running schools and French medics running infirmaries. In all of the villages, there were small self-defense forces. There were also practical improvements, as one village had a new fountain which provided good water even in the most dry weeks of the summer. Another had just built one of the goat-track roads and had invested in a communal truck.
It was obvious that the fellagha's absolute grip on the Djebel had been broken and that they no longer ruled the region. David had described enthusiastically how it had been accomplished, through Mao Tse Tung's theory, that an army had to live among the people "like a fish in water". The whole process had started when David had moved his company from an isolated, fortified farmhouse into the midst of one of the hostile villages. From there, the process had proceeded by steps, getting the people to work for the company being the first step and the next, strengthening their confidence that the company would protect them from the vengeance of the fellagha. Village by village, the whole Djebel had been reconquered, and David said that it could be done everywhere.
Mr. Alsop suggests that one could not help but wonder whether doing it "everywhere" in troubled Algeria might not strain the supply of men of David's character as well as the French Army supply of ordinary manpower, but David's District, he found, was a striking exhibit all the same.
Walter Lippmann indicates that the previous week, the Senate, in dealing with the foreign aid bill, had touched briefly on the fringes of a great question which was becoming increasingly important and insistent, that being whether the general direction of U.S. policy ought be expanded or restricted in terms of economic relations with Communist countries.
The question had been raised on a narrow technical issue, that of an amendment put forth by Senator John F. Kennedy, which would have eliminated the rigid prohibitions of the existing law. But Senator William Knowland of California, who had managed to defeat the amendment, had based his fight on the broadest possible ground, that any intercourse with a Communist country was an unfortunate lapse from the ideal policy, which would instead utilize embargo, boycott, and, if feasible, blockade to prevent any economic intercourse. His thesis was that economic intercourse brought in goods which strengthened the Communist states, and that non-intercourse, as nearly perfect as possible, would weaken the Communist states, reduce their military power and cause discontent among their peoples. He believed that in the cold war, the country should behave on economic matters as it would toward an enemy in a shooting war, that anything short of that was a compromise with evil and a threat to U.S. security. Although he had brought about the defeat of the Kennedy amendment by a margin of only a single vote, it was fair to say that his fundamental theory had for long and until recently been that of the preponderant majority of Congress.
The cold war had begun in July, 1947, when V. M. Molotov had withdrawn from the Paris conference dealing with what was to become the Marshall Plan, taking Czechoslovakia and Poland with him. A few months later, in March, 1948, the Truman Administration had initiated a program for export controls designed to prevent the sale of commodities which would strengthen war-making capacity to the Soviet sphere. In 1950, as a result of the Korean War, the U.S. had established an embargo on trade with Communist China, and in 1952, U.S. allies had joined in a system of controls which were stiffer than those applied to the Soviets. The whole system fell short of complete economic non-intercourse, as there was some licensed trade. Among the great powers, only the U.S. had a complete embargo on trade with China.
The existing system fell short of Senator Knowland's ideal because the country's allies and clients had been able to refuse to participate in complete non-intercourse. The system had undergone a reliable practical test for a decade, with only a small amount of trade with Communist countries. If the Senator's conception was correct, his policy ought by the present time to have shown that it had caused serious trouble in the economic life of the Soviets. Instead, the Soviet economy had undergone amazing growth, perhaps slowed somewhat by the restrictions, but, according to the recent staff memorandum to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, "the Soviet rate of industrial growth for total production is considerably larger than that of the United States… Although our total production is presently growing faster in absolute terms, the Soviet rate of growth is greater." Despite the restrictions, the Soviet Union had become a great military power, and in the areas of trade and economic aid to the underdeveloped countries, had become a formidable challenger to the U.S.
The basic theory that Communist development could be slowed or strangled by U.S. controls and boycotts was not working. The theory was left over from the past history of military warfare, when Britain had undisputed command of the seas and could enforce an effective blockade on an enemy. The doctrine of blockade had worked effectively against the Germans in World War I, but in World War II, had not worked against the empire conquered by Hitler. It had worked against the Japanese islands when Allied submarines and air forces succeeded in blockading them. But against a continental mass, which included the Soviet Union and China, extending from the heart of Europe to the Pacific, the notion of blockade or its near equivalent was a delusion. Mr. Lippmann finds it a form of delusion of grandeur to think that such a great central land mass, with major resources and an enormous population, plus a powerful government, could be brought down by restraints on U.S. trade and that of its allies. The Knowland theory had not worked out in practice because it was mere wishful thinking which ignored the facts.
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