The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 14, 1958
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senators Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Charles Potter of Michigan, both Republicans, had suggested this date that White House chief of staff Sherman Adams ought leave his position unless he offered a complete accounting regarding the allegations that he had received expensive favors from Boston industrialist Bernard Goldfine. Democratic Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania told the Senate that Mr. Adams had "acted in extremely bad taste." The White House remained silent in the face of that criticism. Press secretary James Hagerty declined to discuss Senator Potter's assertion that Mr. Adams "has lost his usefulness to the Administration" unless he could explain more fully the situation. Mr. Hagerty had replied with "no comment" to repeated questions by reporters. He referred them to his statement of the previous day, that the issue was one of whether Mr. Goldfine had received any favored treatment from Government agencies resulting from the gifts to Mr. Adams. Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Hagerty had denied that Mr. Goldfine had received any such preferred treatment. Mr. Adams had been available to newsmen for questioning about the reports that he had received a $700 vicuna coat and a $2,400 oriental rug as gifts from Mr. Goldfine and that the latter had picked up the bill for Mr. Adams on more than $2,000 worth of hotel accommodations in Boston and Plymouth, Mass. In a letter to Representative Oren Harris of Arkansas, chairman of a House subcommittee which had produced evidence of the payment of the hotel bills, Mr. Adams had acknowledged that he had been a guest of Mr. Goldfine at the hotel, describing the latter as an old friend and indicating that he used hotel rooms which he thought Mr. Goldfine maintained on a permanent basis. The letter had made no mention of the coat or the rug. Parenthetically, of course, as a harbinger of things to come down the road a way, it would be Senator Goldwater, along with then-Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona—who had succeeded to the role when Representative Gerald Ford had become Vice-President the previous fall following the resignation of Vice-President Spiro Agnew—, who would go to the White House August 7, 1974 to convey the message to President Nixon that an affirmative vote on bipartisan lines on the articles of impeachment just voted by the House Judiciary Committee was inevitable in the House in coming days and that in a subequent Senate impeachment trial, he could expect no more than perhaps a dozen votes in his corner. What's past is prologue, a rule of history which Mr. Nixon by 1972-73, drunk with the heady victory from a landslide win in the 1972 election followed less than three months later by the Paris Peace Accords to end American involvement in the Vietnam War, had forgotten after his tempestuous relationship with Mr. Adams finally ended in the latter's resignation regarding primarily the vicuna coat provided Mrs. Adams, not the plain cloth coat of Mrs. Nixon, to keep the Administration "clean as a hound's tooth". Even Mr. Nixon, however, did not seek to escape the inevitability of his fate by going to the White House roof in a last ditch effort to proclaim dominion over his royal preserve.
In Paris, Premier Charles de Gaulle this date sought a sound financial foundation for his political and colonial reform plans by asking his countrymen to take hoarded money from their mattresses.
In Algiers, General Raoul Salan said this date that he expected the Algerian nationalist rebels to step up their fighting against the French.
In Tunis, spokesmen for the Algerian rebels accused the U.S. this date of standing back and watching their rebellion like a football game while arming the French team.
In Nicosia, Cyprus, British paratroopers had flown to the island colony this date to reinforce troops maintaining a tight curfew following communal fighting which had taken 15 lives.
In Philadelphia, four children had burned to death early this date as fire had swept their West Philadelphia home. Five others in the household had escaped through windows and over a porch roof.
In Denver, the pilot of a United Air Lines DC-6 airliner with 53 persons aboard said that his plane had narrowly missed a collision with three unidentified jet aircraft over the Rocky Mountains late the previous day. The pilot said that he had taken evasive action to avoid a possible collision shortly after takeoff from Salt Lake City, indicating that the three jets had passed under his four-engine airliner, not indicating the margin by which he escaped possible collision. A spokesman for the airline said that a report of the incident would be made to the Civil Aeronautics Administration.
In Los Angeles, former gambler Mickey Cohen would be retried on a charge of assaulting a Federal officer after a jury had been dismissed the previous day when it could not agree on a verdict. The second trial was scheduled for July 21. Mr. Cohen said that it was a "dastardly thing", "a way of breaking a man's back" financially, as he could not afford another trial. He was charged with assaulting a narcotics agent. Mr. Cohen said that he had gone to the agent's office to inquire about a report that narcotics agents were trying to frame him.
In Bennettsville, S.C., a murder warrant and a mental examination had been authorized the previous day for a 67-year old veteran, the Marlboro County clerk of court, who was held in the slaying of State Senator Paul Wallace. The mental examination had been ordered by a judge and state law required that a report of the findings be made to the judge within 30 days regarding the mental condition of the defendant. Accounts of the election-night slaying had been provided the previous day at a coroner's inquest, with the coroner's jury having recommended that the defendant be held for grand jury action. Witnesses who testified at the inquest said that the defendant had stalked into the office of the State Senator and, without speaking, had opened fire at him with a .32-caliber revolver. The Senator had gotten to his feet after the first shot and pleaded with the defendant not to shoot again.
In Raleigh, it was reported that a mother of three children was improving satisfactorily this date from injuries suffered when she had been brutally raped and slashed on Thursday. She had been first listed in critical condition when she entered the hospital, but had spent what doctors described as a fairly good day and night the previous day. A medical spokesman said that during the morning, she had improved satisfactorily, requiring no further blood transfusions and was not in a condition of shock. Meanwhile, a janitor, charged with the attack, was confined without bond in the Wake County jail to await grand jury action, probably around June 23. He was quoted by police as having admitted the slashing and rape, having said that he had no choice but to kill the woman when she had said to him following the attack, "I'll see you hang for this." The woman had undergone seven hours of surgery on Thursday night to close multiple penknife cuts about her face and head. She had been attacked on Thursday in an insurance company office where she was staying late to catch up on work. After being left for dead by the attacker, the victim made her way to an elevator and summoned aid. The accused was a janitor in the building and he was arrested while trying to dodge police officers on the mezzanine floor.
In Charlotte, Police Chief Frank Littlejohn was preparing records and evidence of irregularities in the operations of the clerk of City Recorder's Court for presentation to a grand jury. He had issued subpoenas the previous day for ten witnesses whom he said would be presented to support his recommendation to the Civil Service Board that a police traffic captain and the former clerk of the court, a police lieutenant, both suspended from the force, be permanently dismissed.
John Kilgo of The News indicates that a transcript of proceedings in Judge Basil Boyd's City Recorder's Court on June 4 had showed that the judge was in the process of making substantial reductions in forfeited bonds when he had been interrupted by a News reporter. The reporter had walked into the court during the morning that date and Judge Boyd had considered eight of the cases listed in an auditor's report made public during the current week, with seven of the eight cases having had bonds forfeited but never paid. The judge and the solicitor had summoned local professional bondsmen for a conference on the subject of the unpaid bonds. It provides the relevant text of the transcript.
In Charlotte, the County Recorder's Court judge this date had put all professional bondsmen on a "strictly cash basis" within his court after meeting during the morning with County Police Chief Joe Whitley and the court clerk. He told the newspaper that in view of what had happened in the City Recorder's Court, and since that situation had not yet been cleared up, he had decided to put all professional bondsmen on a strictly cash basis with their court.
George Cornell of the Associated Press reports that a drunkard acted like a drunkard even if he was a lamb, and the same thing was true for a dog, a mule, a pig, an ape or a bug. Any of them could become chronic alcoholics, according to a doctor who was an expert on the subject. Animals reacted about the same way as humans, badly. The doctor, of Chattanooga, Tenn., was a specialist in treating addiction to drugs or alcohol, and had amassed many case histories of animal dope fiends and boozers. He said, "The cases contradict the old opinion that addiction arises from moral or psychological deficiencies." He said that people or animals drank because they drank, that they drank today because they had drunk yesterday, that it was a physical affliction and not a character defect. As with human drunks, animals who became addicted to alcohol would forsake their responsibilities. He said that bees as well as ants did it. He told of some hives in Tennessee which had begun feeding on a moonshine still and as a result, had neglected their work and did not gather enough honey, such that when winter came, they began to die out. A similar fate had befallen a den of ants which had become addicted to intoxicating "honey dew" from a store of plant aphids and butterfly larvae. He also told of a Tennessee mule which had become addicted to whiskey, of a coon which had become addicted to morphine, hard-drinking pigeons, and a dog which would break into a doctor's office to obtain dope. Malayan orangutans, usually faithful spouses, turned pugnacious and promiscuous under the influence of a "durian fruit". He had heard of a bunch of pigs which broke into a still, indicating he did not know what it proved unless it was that the pigs were making people out of themselves.
In Dallas, it was reported that the
lovesick airman, 19, who had taken a rented plane the previous day on
a supposed suicide mission from Gulfport, Miss., had been picked up
this date in his hometown. He said that he had just wanted to see his
girl, that it "was kind of a crazy idea." His flight, which
had included evasive tactics when pursued by fighter planes, and a
crash landing in a swampy field, had been in vain, as his 17-year old
girlfriend said that while she would still date him, she continued to feel that she
was too young to marry him. She had rushed into his arms at the
police station and the airman had flushed and embraced her. They
talked in low tones for a minute or two before she faced newsmen. His
mother said that he had just walked into her room, awakened her and
greeted her. She said that her faith had never been shaken and she
was relieved that he was all right. He had left a suicide note at his
barracks indicating that to die in the air was the way to go. He said
he had landed the plane in a swampy field near Tyler, Tex., and that
there was not a scratch on the plane. He said that he had expected to
make it to Dallas but had run out of fuel because of low altitude
flying and evasive action. He said that he had been unable to obtain
leave to get back to Dallas and wanted to see his girl. He did not
think it would do any good to talk to her by phone, that he needed to
see her. He said that if he were allowed to see her, as the police
said they would allow, it would be worth it for just an AWOL
An elderly woman was surprised to learn that she had won this week's Social Security Game sponsored by the newspaper, and has her Social Security number printed in the newspaper. Hurry up and enter next week's game so that you, too, perhaps can have your identity stolen.
On the editorial page, "A Nightmare of the Human Spirit", an editorial book review of The Question by Henri Alleg, begins with a quote from the introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre: "In 1943, in the Rue Lauriston (the Gestapo headquarters in Paris), Frenchmen were screaming in agony and pain: All France could hear them. In those days the outcome of the war was uncertain and we did not want to think about the future. Only one thing seemed impossible in any circumstances: That one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name."
It indicates that it was an introduction to a nightmare and, as the author and M. Sartre had pointed out, there was no such word as "impossible". That men and women were tortured regularly and systematically by French paratroopers in Algeria was no longer even denied, but was a part of the record of the Algerian war and a part of the shame of France.
The small book of 123 pages was an amazingly lucid and calm account of the author's own ordeal at the hands of "the paras", or paratroopers. It finds it a revolting book and that only readers with strong stomachs could tolerate its coolly clinical detail of man's inhumanity to man without becoming sick. Yet, it was a book which ought be read widely because its significance transcended France's travail and affected the entirety of the human family.
It had been published in France a few months earlier and already had a fantastic history in that the French Government had banned it on political grounds, the first such book to be banned since the 18th Century, after about 60,000 copies had been sold. Although it remained illegal, its sales had reached more than 150,000 in France. A petition protesting its seizure and "the use of torture" had been initiated by four of France's most distinguished literary figures ranging from the Right to the Left, including M. Sartre, Andre Malraux, Francois Mauriac and Roger Martin du Gard.
The author was a Frenchman who had edited the suppressed Alger Republican in Algiers and had gone into hiding to avoid internment. The previous June, he had been arrested by General Raoul Massu's paras on a charge of "endangering the safety of the state" as a Communist, and had been then "questioned" for months by officers and men in the grips of a violent and anonymous hatred. His description of those pain-wracked days and nights of violence was at once incredible and strangely convincing. M. Sartre had set the stage: "The torturers, as they themselves promised, 'looked after him': Torture by electricity, by drowning as in the time of Brinvilliers, but with all the perfected technique of our time; torture by fire, by thirst… We fascinate ourselves with the whirlpool of humanity; but it only needs a man, hard and stubborn, obstinately doing his duty to his fellow man, to save us from vertigo. The 'Question' is not inhuman; it is simply an ignoble and vicious crime, committed by men against man and that another man can and must rebuke."
M. Alleg had not broken under the torture and eventually his torn and singed body had been delivered to civil authorities, though he remained jailed in Algiers. The manuscript which he had smuggled from his cell contained candid descriptions, a mild excerpt of which was:
"J______, smiling all the time,
dangled the clasps at the end of the electrodes before my eyes. These
were little shining steel clips, elongated and toothed, what
telephone engineers call 'crocodile' clips. He attached one of them
to the lobe of my right ear and the other to a finger on the same
side.
"Suddenly, I leapt in my bonds and shouted with all my might. C______ had just sent the first electric charge through my body. A flash of lightning exploded next to my ear and I felt my heart racing. I struggled, screaming, and stiffened myself until the straps cut into my flesh. All the while the shocks controlled by C_______, magneto in hand, followed each other without interruption. Rhythmically, C________ repeated a single question, hammering out the syllables: 'Where have you been hiding?'"
It finds that what gave the book universal significance was the universal nature of torture, senseless violence born of fear, as M. Sartre had described it. The purpose of it was to force from the subject's mouth the secret of everything. It had not been invented by Europeans, the white race or certainly not by the French paratroopers in Algeria. Nor was it always in the form of physical torture. It was a systemized form of hatred which created its own instruments. Mental torture, practiced behind the façade of democratic legality, was one of the more exquisite forms of race hatred practiced in the South at present. The sadists had many weapons and an enormous capacity for invention.
The title of the book came from a polite term used to describe legal torture employed long before the French Revolution as a means of producing evidence. The "question" in Algiers was no less vile. As M. Sartre explained it: "Whether the victim talks or whether he dies under his agony, the secret that he cannot tell is always somewhere else and out of reach. It is the executioner who becomes Sisyphus. If he puts 'the question' at all, he will have to continue it forever… It is normal for us to kill each other. Man has always struggled for his collective or individual interests. But in the case of torture, this strange contest of will, the ends seem to be radically different: The torturer pits himself against the tortured for his 'manhood' and the duel is fought as if it is not possible for both sides to belong to the human race."
While anti-Communists could share the author's sense of triumph over bestiality, they could not help but remember that members of the Communist Party had been consenting parties to atrocities as revolting as those described in the book. It finds that it was not the case, however, that the author appealed to humanity with "dirty hands" but that the tragedy was all-embracing, that violence begets violence and the tortured eventually become the torturers.
It indicates that there was an irony in what Joseph Alsop described in his piece on the page regarding General Massu being a deeply religious man while ordering torture because it was necessary to extirpate terror.
The book was right out of the headlines and the challenge it posed for the human spirit, the piece fears, would be mirrored in headlines the following week, month and year. It recommends reading and remembering the book, and suggests that it would contribute a new awareness of the need for a return to decency in the family of man.
A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "Diary for a Spring Day", tells of a sunny day on which by late afternoon a thunder shower had erupted with a wind. They decided to sit outside and watch it.
"All the while the thunder
muttered and grumbled, first in the hollow sounds and then in more
solid chords and octaves, arpeggios of thunder, deep in the bass
clef, good Sibelius thunder
There would be such a thunderstorm in the area of Charlotte the following day, which would cause scattered damage, including ripping half the roof tiles off the relatively new Charlotte Coliseum. We happened to be in Shelby during this weekend and witnessed the same thunderstorm, after which the image of the peeled Coliseum on the television set that Sunday afternoon sticks, for some reason, in the memory banks very vividly.
The piece actually captures the
atmosphere of such storms rather well, except that no one except
fools sit out on the porch in the breeze and watch the "storm
come up". It is a far wiser thing to take refuge inside the house,
eliminate all drafts by closing windows, turn off any fans or devices
which lead from the outside to the inside, and watch the sheets of
rain pelt against the windows and slam every now and then the sides
of the house. But, assuming it was Mr. Kilpatrick who indited the piece, he never displayed a lick of sense anyhow—arguing, as with whether or not to come in from the rain and close the window against the draft, out of both sides of his mouth at once
We don't recommend, incidentally, purchase of a used car from Mr. Nixon, as you are liable to wind up with a lemon Lincoln
Drew Pearson indicates that the most important conclusion which a newspaperman had brought back from behind the now porous Iron Curtain was that the U.S. had to take the offensive for peace, that instead of talking about war and the lag of the U.S. missile program, the country had to keep the missile program strong as an insurance policy, while also working at peace. The Soviet-bloc countries had taken the initiative away from the U.S. in terms of people-to-people friendship. That policy, which had been publicly proclaimed by the President at the Geneva summit conference in 1955 and had been re-emphasized by him as the official policy of the country in 1956, had now been adopted by the satellites, who were not merely talking but also acting, out to win friends and influence people.
It was a complete reversal of earlier times when the Iron Curtain was clamped so tight that the only way one could get anything into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania or Hungary was via balloon. By contrast to the times when they were releasing freedom balloons seven years earlier to drift over the satellites, Mr. Pearson had recently been welcomed everywhere in the satellite countries, and though his passport had been stamped by the State Department as not being valid for travel in Hungary, it had made no difference to the Hungarians. The only thing to which they objected was taking pictures of an old man sweeping up cigarette butts with a dilapidated broom at the Budapest Airport, but had no objection to his taking pictures of an Hungarian honor guard welcoming Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser or of the large Russian jet which had carried him from Moscow to Cairo.
He posits that the reason for the lifting of the Iron Curtain was easy to understand and very important, resulting from two significant developments, that the governments of the Soviet bloc were no longer afraid to let people witness their economic situation, the old inferiority complex having disappeared, having made progress and proud to have the people see it, while the other was that the governments of the satellite countries were no longer afraid that their people would desert to the West because of comparisons with the West.
Joseph Alsop, in Algiers, tells of the "fantastic" Algerian atmosphere, in part because the country had been at war for three years and war heightened experience such that diners at the Hotel Saint George had a bit of the air of dancing at the Duchess of Richmond's famous ball before Waterloo. The civilians were far safer than they would have been in any automobile on any major highway, but the scene acquired its own inevitable drama because one saw the young officers enjoying their meals in the bright evening air and one knew that they would be off on operations the following day and dead the next.
A political drama had now been added to that natural drama, and the essence of the drama was an immense moral choice by the professional officers of the French Army. There were also more sordid actors, including Algerians of French extraction who had great interests at stake, and, much more important, there was the group of men from metropolitan France who had claimed the leadership of what they called "the Algerian revolution". That second group, headed and controlled by the dark, saturnine Jacques Soustelle, had experienced bitter disappointment, having thought that they would be called to leading posts in the new Government of Premier Charles de Gaulle, but now knew that they had nothing of the kind for which to hope.
Before Premier De Gaulle had been legally voted into power, those men had been orchestrating the shouts of the mob, "The paratroopers to Paris!" The paratroopers had then been ready to obey the call and could have taken Paris with ease. The same group was tempted therefore to set the stage for renewal of the former outcry, longing to fly to Paris with the paratroopers, chanting a pious new slogan, "We must rescue De Gaulle!"
The complex interplay of civilian interests and civilian ambitions, however, sunk into insignificance beside the ferment in the French Army. If the Army did not march with the civilians, the latter would soon cease to have very much importance. A decade of unceasing, bitter, fruitless war had made of most of the French professional Army officers a new breed of men, different from those whom anyone had seen. The use of grim third-degree tactics had been unavoidably necessary to extirpate terror in Algiers. General Raoul Massu, who decided to use those tactics, was a deeply religious man who suffered a severe crisis of conscience before issuing the necessary order. But he had first undergone the tortures which he had ordered and further commanded that all officers involved in the torture do as he had done so that they might say they had inflicted no suffering on others which they had not undergone themselves.
Mr. Alsop suggests that such men belonged in the Israeli Army, as in a nation besieged they would have no moral doubts. But in the French Army, they had become alienated from the bustling, prosperous, vigorously bourgeois France of the present, and for that reason, were all the more imbued with a passionate patriotic longing for a France with great aims and a great but ill-defined faith. In their alienation, they could not see that a France which was neither besieged or drunk with conquests could not possibly live its life on the intense level which they demanded. Below that level of intensity, they believed, both men and nations became mere cabbages.
With no experience in political processes, they could only dimly perceive that artificial efforts to achieve that intensity of living could easily and rapidly lead to the Fascism which so many of them fought in the resistance years. Their own experiences had filled them with loathing of the parliamentary weaknesses of the Fourth Republic. They had an almost religious faith in the unqualified integration of Algeria into France and an enormous effort to make "complete Frenchmen" of Algeria's wretched Muslim masses. They had begun quite rightly to doubt whether General De Gaulle was really willing to take the whole enormous step which they desired, because the vast majority of Frenchmen of France did not desire it.
He posits that one could therefore understand the inner ferment which had caused the officers of the Committee of Public Safety to sign the insubordinate manifesto which the Algerian Committee of Public Safety had addressed to General De Gaulle. A high authority had said that it was mere "spume on a great wave of change." It was not spume but rather a symptom of a choice in the making. Mr. Alsop is convinced that the men of the French Army would finally make the correct choice, to return to the discipline proper in the Army of a great country, but adds that the final outcome was not yet certain.
Doris Fleeson, in Paris, indicates that the most striking impression obtained by the casual visitor to the city was one of surprise that at least half of a revolution could take place with almost complete absence of passion, violence and disorder. She finds that there was remarkably little intellectual pain. Of the dictators who had come up the harder way, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain was left alone to envy Premier De Gaulle. Hitler and Mussolini were long gone, though it was really not that long earlier.
The obvious weakness of the displaced regime had been in the newspapers for a long time and the absence of mourners for the death of democracy, however feeble it had been, produced surprise. At present, there seemed to reign the three abstemious monkeys. The Communists might be waiting only for the inevitable difficulties to develop for Premier De Gaulle, but the barricades were missing. According to the newspapers, Paris was not the exception and other French cities and towns were also going about their business in an orderly manner.
Reporters shuttled back and forth to Algeria with and without the Premier, to seek ferment and emotion with which to make their stories come alive. Whether the placidity in Paris was an illusion was impossible to judge. Americans in the city seemed to question it least of anyone despite their presumed devotion to democratic institutions.
A letter writer comments on the suspension of the captain and lieutenant from the Police Department, indicating that he had high regard for both men, though not faulting anyone for their suspension until all the matters were cleared up. The father of the lieutenant had been holding the job of clerk of the Recorder's Court when he died, and his son had succeeded him 16 years earlier. During the six years in which the letter writer was solicitor of the court, he had found the man loyal to the Police Department and faithful in the execution of his duties, courteous and fair. The captain was a poor man with a lovely family and grandchildren who had lived as much as he could on a policeman's salary. He finds it regrettable that those good men were to some extent the victims of an apparently never-ending feud which had the Police Department at odds for many years.
A letter writer comments on the Nieman Fellowship received by associate editor of the newspaper, Perry Morgan, to study at Harvard regarding the economic and social problems of the South. He says that it probably figured that if one wanted to learn about the South, one went to where the Southern experts stayed at Harvard and if one wanted to be an expert on the even worse Northern situation, one went to the University of Mississippi.
A letter writer from Rock Hill, S.C., indicates that Reconstruction historian C. Vann Woodward had written in his latest book that South Carolina Governor Wade Hampton had urged black voters to support his Administration. He indicates that the forthcoming South Carolina gubernatorial runoff perhaps would be the first time since Reconstruction that blacks would be courted with great fervor. He indicates that out of a total vote of nearly 340,000, Mr. Johnston had won more than 80,000 votes. The black statewide registration was close to 10 percent of the total registration of more than 500,000. He indicates that if blacks voted in the same proportion as whites, their total vote should be almost 35,000, that a swing of half of those votes to either candidate would assure victory. He says that two alternatives faced the two remaining candidates, that they could hope to win the black votes or, if the race became desperate, claim that the opposition would win the black votes, thereby hoping to alienate the remaining nearly 50,000 white votes for Mr. Johnston. In either event, he says, it was possible that the balance of power rested with the black vote.
A letter from the president of the junior committee of national society, Daughters of the American Revolution, indicates that the flag was an indestructible symbol of hope, a promise to all of new strength and a better tomorrow in freedom under law. On Flag Day, she offers a history of the flag.
We think it would be more apropos to offer a history of the Constitution, without which, the flag is merely a piece of cloth which is meaningless.
Framed Edition
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