The Charlotte News
Friday, June 27, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Beirut that Government security forces and rebels had engaged in battle repeatedly in the streets of the city and in Tripoli this date, as the threat to pro-Western President Camille Chamoun appeared to be growing. Clashes had started before midnight and had continued sporadically through the day, with the noise of bombs, machine guns, mortars and rifle fire echoing through the streets. Heavy fighting had broken out in the afternoon in the Basta Moslem quarter and security forces had killed some rebels, according to one report. Former Premier Hussein Oweini, an opposition leader, had said in an interview that the rebels were in a stronger position than ever and that there was no compromise which could put an end to the present crisis, that it would be over only when President Chamoun would leave office. He said that he believed the U.S. had given up the idea of sending troops to bolster the Government and now regarded the rebellion as an internal Lebanese matter. There were indications that U.N. observers had not made much headway in learning whether aid to the rebels from the United Arab Republic, headed by Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser, had increased. Government and rebel forces appeared to be sparring to test each other's defenses. Shooting had been heard in the night around the presidential palace, in the Moslem quarter and near the capital square in the heart of Beirut. In the northern port of Tripoli, where the rebel attempt to overthrow the Government had begun on May 10, security forces had shelled the rebel fortress in a renewal of the previous day's battle. The fighting in both cities had been marked by heavy explosions and the steady beat of mortar, machine gun and rifle fire. The Beirut battle had been preceded by one of the most concentrated series of bomb and dynamite explosions of the rebellion, with at least ten blasts rocking the capital in less than an hour. Rebel forces in the Basta Moslem quarter had estimated that they had 12 wounded, including a brother of rebel leader and former Premier, Saeb Salam. No casualty estimates were available from Tripoli but rebel sources had said that some persons were injured in the midnight clash. Firing also had been heavy around the presidential palace and the capital square in the heart of the city. Because of the tension, the Moslem mufti of the republic had issued an announcement seeking to cancel celebrations of the religious holiday commemorating the sacrifice of Abraham. Major mosques in the city were closed and among some sects, the celebrations often became violent. The rebel leaders claimed that they had not reached the height of their capabilities yet and said that they would not give the Government any warning when they did.
In New York, it was reported that Cuban rebels this date had kidnaped 11 American and Canadian mining engineers to protest what they called American aid to the Cuban Government of Fulgencio Batista. The engineers were employed by the Freeport Sulphur Co. of New York and subcontractors. That company's president had sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dulles stating that he urgently requested that the U.S. Government take immediate action to safeguard the lives of the men and effect their release. He said that he had been advised that 200 Cuban rebels the previous day had invaded the properties of the Moa Bay Mining Co., a Freeport sulphur subsidiary at Moa Bay, in Oriente Province in Cuba, and had kidnaped the men. The company quoted the rebels as saying that their action had been in protest against what they called U.S. Army aid to the Cuban Government, the rebels mentioning "gas", apparently in reference to gasoline having been supplied. The company said that it received the information via telephone from a company representative in Cuba. The report said that the rebels had invaded the town of Moa and that there was some fighting there, with casualties. They had then moved to the mining property, a couple of miles outside of town, where they seized the men and food, with no violence reported at the mining site. No indication had been given by the rebels regarding how long they intended to hold the mine employees or under what conditions they would release them.
The House Appropriations Committee this date had cut 872 million dollars from the 3.95 billion dollars requested by the President for foreign aid during the fiscal year starting July 1.
Before the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of unions and management, Maurice Hutcheson, president of the Carpenters Union, this date challenged the Committee's authority to inquire of him regarding the Indiana highway scandals, involving Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, as Mr. Hutcheson suddenly began asserting his Fifth Amendment privilege when asked about Mr. Hoffa, even as to whether he knew him. His testimony had prompted Senator Sam J. Ervin to relate of another story from "down home".
In New York, the city's five breweries were coming to a complete shutdown this date over a labor dispute. The breweries, which produced nearly 90 percent of the beer consumed in the city, located on Long Island in suburban Westchester County, were locked in a contract controversy with the Teamsters Union.
Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, acting Democratic Leader, said this date that there was a reasonable chance for one and possibly two preliminary votes on the Alaska statehood bill before the Senate would quit this night.
The comptroller of the currency had issued a call this date for a statement of the condition of national banks as of June 23.
The choice of a Rumanian delegate had raised speculation this date, but the boycott-threatened Geneva scientific talks regarding nuclear testing might proceed after all.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., a Snark intercontinental guided missile had been launched this date, controlled for the first time by an all-military unit.
At McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, the vast and complex electronic air warning network dubbed Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, had formally gone into operation this date.
At Westover Air Force Base, in Massachusetts, it was reported that a jet tanker plane attempting a trans-Atlantic speed record had exploded seconds after taking off early this date, killing all 15 people aboard. Observers said that the giant KC-135 tanker apparently had hit high tension wires about a mile and a half from the takeoff runway. The explosion had disintegrated the plane into hundreds of pieces, the largest of which had been described as no bigger than a chair. Among the victims had been six newsmen who were present to cover the flight of four Air Force planes attempting to break records for aircraft speed in crossing the Atlantic in both directions. Also on board had been Brig. General Donald Saunders of Athens, N.Y., airborne commander in charge of the operation. The plane had been the third of the four plane flights to take off, the first two having departed on schedule and headed directly for London, the fourth plane having been on the runway ready to take off at the time of the crash, resulting in that flight being canceled. The man on whose property the plane had crashed said that he had heard the plane taking off as he was lying in bed, and in a very little while, had heard a terrific explosion, had run outside to see it brighter than daylight because of the burning plane, emitting so much heat that it was not possible to get near it. He observed wreckage all over the countryside and ventured the opinion that no one could have lived through it. Westover Air Force officials said that the plane had made a normal takeoff and was airborne, had taken off at the precise predesignated point on the runway and had appeared to be flying normally. When it crashed, it skidded across the Massachusetts Turnpike, one of the state's busiest highways, before blowing up with a roar on the adjoining property. Wreckage had been strewn for an estimated three quarters of a mile. A patrolman had been one of the first on the scene, saying that he had radioed headquarters and said there was no need for ambulances as nobody on board had a chance of survival. The first two planes to take off had made record flights to London and had planned to return to New York following a brief stopover. At Westover Air Force Base, a spokesman said the elapsed time of the first tanker, according to the National Aeronautics Association, had been five hours, 27 minutes and 42.8 seconds, and the time of the second flight had been five hours, 29 minutes and 37.4 seconds.
It was reported that a former Charlotte resident had been among the dead in the tanker crash, aboard as a reporter for the Associated Press, for which he had worked for six years, having worked for the A.P. in Charlotte between 1952 and January, 1957, when he was transferred to Boston, of which he was a native. He had enlisted in the Army at age 16 and had a been among those who landed on Normandy with the first wave on D-Day. He had been a standout football guard in high school in Boston but had passed up the sport in college to concentrate on his studies. He left behind a widow and two sons, ages six and four, plus a daughter born the prior December, and his parents.
In Columbia, S.C., it was reported that the Marlboro County Clerk of Court, who had been held for mental observation in the election-day slaying of State Senator Paul Wallace, had hanged himself the previous night, his body having been found in the wee hours of the morning, according to the State Hospital superintendent. He had confronted Senator Wallace in the Marlboro County Sheriff's office just after Mr. Wallace had learned of his re-election, and then shot the Senator. He had shared a hospital dormitory room with five other patients, one wall of the room being composed of steel mesh wire. Sometime during the night, he had stood on his bed, looped his belt around his neck, tied the other end to the steel mesh, and then jumped, breaking his neck. The superintendent said that a ward physician had examined him five minutes after the alarm had been given, and the body had been cut down by other patients awakened by the commotion. Artificial respiration had been applied and stimulants administered, but the man had died a few minutes after he had been cut down. The superintendent said that dormitory attendants had been on duty all night at the hospital and that the man had been checked by an attendant a few minutes before he had hanged himself. A series of mental examinations had been started on him, but the superintendent said that they had not been completed. The body had been returned to Bennettsville for funeral services and burial. Columbia police, the Richmond County coroner and the State Law Enforcement Division officers had investigated the death. The man had been admitted to the hospital on June 13, three days after the slaying of Senator Wallace in Bennettsville. Police had attributed the shooting to personal differences between the two political figures. The incident had followed a bitter election campaign between Senator Wallace and W. A. Rogers, who, after the learning of the shooting, immediately announced his withdrawal from the race, which he had lost by only 47 votes. He recommended that Senator Wallace's son be appointed to the office, but the Democratic Committee for the county had instead called for a new primary. The man who shot him had been a supporter of Mr. Rogers during the campaign, but had never stated precisely why he had shot the Senator.
In Gaffney, S.C., it was reported that four men were to be brought before a magistrate this date on charges that they had dynamited the home of a woman who had written in support of a gradual approach to racial integration in the schools. Neither the woman, her physician husband, nor a visiting couple had been injured when three sticks of dynamite had damaged the house on November 19. Five men had been arrested on December 5, each charged with assault with intent to kill. One of the men had been killed on February 27 in an automobile accident and the other four defendants had been freed on $5,000 bond each. The head of the State Law Enforcement Division had said that all of the accused men had been members of an independent Ku Klux Klan unit. Since their arrests, at least one meeting of the Klan had been held to raise defense funds. The case had been originally docketed for the previous March but was continued on a motion by a defense attorney who was a State Senator attending the legislative session in South Carolina at the time. The woman whose house had been bombed was one of several contributors to a booklet titled "South Carolinians Speak: A Moderate Approach to Race Relations".
John Kilgo of The News reports that a Randolph County court official had told the newspaper this date that his department had "never heard one thing" from at least five traffic notices supposedly served by Charlotte police. The clerk of court indicated that the number of notices had been much greater than five, but that there were at least five of them. He had been contacted this date after Charlotte Police Chief Frank Littlejohn had produced evidence the previous day to show that police Capt. Lloyd Henkel had waited three months to pay a $40 traffic fine he had collected for the Randolph court. The chief had immediately sent State Bureau of Investigation agents to Asheboro, the county seat of Randolph, to see if Capt. Henkel had been involved in any more of the cases. Efforts to contact the captain, who had been suspended from the Department on June 12, had been unsuccessful. The chief had in his possession a personal check signed by the captain, made out to the deputy clerk of the Randolph court, dated June 23 for $40, plus a letter which the captain had written to her on police stationery, ending by naming the chief and then indicating "by" the captain. The chief said that it had burned him up when he saw his name on that letter and that the thing "stinks and we're going to straighten it out."
In St. Louis, it was reported that a woman whose $203,000 inheritance had been stolen by a Nevada dude ranch cowboy was now being held by the FBI, after being returned to her husband this date in suburban Kirkwood. Her husband, a minister who was rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Kirkwood, said that his wife was home and he did not wish to talk about the matter. The story had begun about three months earlier when the woman, 33, had gone to Reno to obtain a divorce from her husband, at which point she had met a husky ranch hand who had not informed her that he was an ex-convict. Their romance had ended when the man disappeared with her money. He was now in custody in Miami, charged with interstate transportation of stolen money and a stolen car. No disposition had been made of the woman's divorce complaint which had charged mental cruelty but had asked the court to award custody of two children, ages eight and six, to their father. The rest of the story had come from an Arizona FBI agent in charge of the office and another agent who held a similar post in Florida, indicating that after the woman had cashed about $200,000 in bonds, she and the ex-convict had left for Tucson where they registered in a motel together on June 20, the next day, the cowboy having disappeared with her cash, car and other belongings, last seen in Arizona the prior Saturday, as he casually flipped a silver dollar while waiting for a plane at the Tucson airport. The woman had gone to the FBI and a Federal warrant had been issued in Phoenix, charging the man with crossing a state line to defraud the woman of $203,000. The previous day, FBI agents had found the man in a Miami hotel room, in possession of a $9,000 foreign car, $2,300 in his personal possession and another $184,000 in a hotel safe deposit box, a watch, two diamond rings, expensive cuff links and a magazine opened to an article titled, "How To Make Money without a Salary". Suffering from a virus, he was taken under guard to a hospital in Miami and placed under $25,000 bond.
In Nashville, it was reported that Pvt. Elvis Presley would eventually receive a half million dollars in contracts upon his release from the Army in 1960, as his manager, Col. Tom Parker, had said that two motion picture and one television contract awaited, the latter with the Ed Sullivan Show, which had picked up an option for $100,000, calling for Mr. Presley to appear immediately upon his discharge, with another $400,000 promised under the two-movie deal. (They will not be worth the celluloid on which they are filmed. Save your pocket change, girls. He's a has-been. The Kingstons are shortly to become the new rage. Rock, rock, rock has run its course for now—until the British will renew the scene in early 1964, as folk begins to fade, fade away from the fickle tastes of youth, eager to put behind the bad memories associated with it from latter 1963.)
In Canberra, it was reported that Australian electric-power production had more than doubled since 1949. You can take from this little filler the implication that Canberra is likely the capital of that country and continent. Don't ask why; it just is.
On the editorial page, "Mecklenburg Needs Bell in the Senate" again favors incumbent State Senator J. Spencer Bell over State Representative Jack Love in the upcoming runoff primary the following day.
It urges voters to turn out in great numbers to ensure that the vote for Mr. Bell in the runoff would be equal to his large margin of victory, albeit without a majority, in the initial primary when other candidates were in the field.
"The Sideshow Is Not the Main Event" finds that whether the temporary suspension by the Arkansas Federal District Court judge of desegregation in Little Rock could bypass the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and proceed directly to the Supreme Court, was raising more controversy than it was worth, that the cause of justice could be served regardless of the route the case would take. Seeing that justice was done was more important than the shadowboxing of rival attorneys.
Where an invasion of Constitutional rights was involved, the plaintiff usually was entitled to an immediate remedy, but in segregation cases, the Supreme Court had imposed no fixed time limit on the transition to integrated public schools, indicating in its 1955 implementing decision in Brown v. Board of Education that it had to be accomplished "with all deliberate speed", recognizing practical flexibility required in various localities, leaving up to the District Courts the process of implementation.
But it finds also that "practical flexibility" also had limits and would be determined in good time by a court which had already ordered a "prompt and reasonable start" toward compliance. It finds it important to note that the District Court judge had not surrendered to Governor Orval Faubus or the mobs, that his order had only suspended desegregation for 2 1/2 years, by definition a "tactical delay" to try to avoid inevitable disruption of the educational process for the students. He had pointed out: "It is not denied that the Negro students in the Little Rock district have a constitutional right not to be excluded…"
It indicates that an orderly and rational solution could be found to the problem, that Governor Faubus and the mobs had only won a minor skirmish and that human decency would triumph in the end.
As indicated, the Eighth Circuit would accept the case on an accelerated basis in advance of the start of the school year and decide in late August that the judge's decision should be reversed and the original orders, which provided for immediate, gradual desegregation, reinstated, a decision which would then be affirmed in late September by the Supreme Court.
"On Being Clean as a Hound's Tooth" indicates that there was one thing which could be said for Sherman Adams, that he had provided civilized society with the windiest academic argument since the Scopes trial. Representative Charles Jonas, it suggests, might have touched it off when he had mused aloud to a News reporter, "Just what is an improper gift anyway?"
It finds it a fair question, offering its own "handy-dandy" guide to gracious giving. It suggests that no coats should be on the list, not even "respectable cloth coats" valued at $69 wholesale, that which Mr. Adams had indicated was the value of the vicuna cloth which had gone into the making of the coat he had received from his old friend, Bernard Goldfine.
It indicates that old school ties were permissible, as were old-fashioned stick pins, 1936 Alf Landon buttons and red flannel underwear for those cold New England winters which Mr. Adams would soon be enjoying again following his resignation as the President's chief of staff.
It was permissible to accept hams under 12 pounds, as the Truman Administration had done, but not anything which required refrigeration in a deep freeze, the object of scrutiny, along with mink coats, during the Truman years, after being given by an influence-peddler who regularly hung around the White House and was a friend to presidential military liaison, General Harry Vaughan, who had received the coats and freezers and distributed them around the White House, including to Mrs. Truman.
It advises that home appliances had to be approached carefully, permitting acceptance only of portable items, such as television sets, radios, air-conditioners, anything with which one could run.
Regarding automobiles, no Cadillacs, Continentals or Imperials were permitted, but a 1950 Buick touring car was acceptable, as were 1923 Model-T Ford coupes. (It forgets that a cheap 1929 Model A had become front and center in the controversy surrounding the relationship between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss in 1948, a car which Mr. Hiss admitted selling to Mr. Chambers for $25, nevertheless deemed significant by HUAC and Mr. Nixon in showing that Mr. Hiss allegedly, according to Mr. Chambers, had given the car to a West Coast Communist organizer in 1936—apparently so he could go about appearing as the vox populi in his rattletrap, much as Robert Rice Reynolds had campaigned in North Carolina in his first run for the Senate in 1932, reminiscent of Mr. Nixon's 1952 Checkers-speech claim, alongside the "good Republican cloth coat" worn by his wife Pat, that he drove a 1950 Oldsmobile, presumably not given to him by anyone, not even by Mr. Chambers. So, it seems, cars of any condition, make and year are right out.) It goes on to say that Government girls could accept an occasional Jaguar or Mercedes-Benz from General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic to cement relations.
Regarding trips, it advises acceptance of only those offered at taxpayer expense, as taxpayers could not influence anyone anyway.
Generally, it was not what one accepted so much as what one got caught accepting, and if a person did get caught, it was wise to admit everything and if the person were lucky enough to be needed, as the President had said of Mr. Adams, it would not really matter, with indispensability being better than a license to steal.
"But at least try to be good as Mother used to say—and if you can't be good be careful."
Mr. Nixon and his subsequent cohorts, as forecast in the Checkers matter involving the $18,000 slush fund raised for him following his 1950 Senate campaign, coming to the fore in September, 1952 during the presidential campaign, having gotten away with it at that time, attempted to get away with it in spades during his Presidency, leading to a rather bad end. "I know where I can find a million dollars."
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Chapel Hill Grows Faster than Charlotte", indicates that for a long time, Louis Graves of the Chapel Hill Weekly had been seeking to maintain the legend that Chapel Hill was a village, and now had come the Associated Press to speak of "the quaint little college town of Chapel Hill", finding that no greater myth existed in the state.
It indicates that it would have to wait until the 1960 census to approximate the town's population, but in 1950, it had increased three-fold in the previous decade, from 3,654 to 9,177, with only Jacksonville in the state showing more rapid growth, increasing from 873 to 3,960—primarily because of nearby Camp Lejeune. It says that Chapel Hill was not Charlotte but the "village" had been growing ten times as fast as the megalopolis in Mecklenburg.
While the 1950 census had included some students in its numeration, it had not included Glen Lennox, which was now a larger village than Chapel Hill, itself, had been not long earlier, that and other suburbs of the old village being now included in the town. And many people who regarded themselves as residents of Chapel Hill stretched out to the edge of Durham, Pittsboro and Hillsboro.
Collier Cobb, Jr., estimated that, not counting students, the town now contained 15,000 people, whereas in 1940, there had only been 16 towns and cities within the state with more population. In 1950, there had only been 21 towns with more people.
It finds that while Mr. Graves had every right to cling to the "village" myth, the Associated Press was liable to run over traditions into new Chamber of Commerce statistics.
It is all in the atmosphere conveyed by the place, still communicative of a village, especially Franklin Street, and not the population per se, naturally expanding as the University expanded through the years in campus size and the number in its student body, especially after the war and postwar baby boomers reached college age by the late fifties and beyond, not, of course, unique at all to Chapel Hill among major universities across the country.
Drew Pearson indicates that his column had sometimes referred to James Hagerty as the most efficient press relations officer ever to serve in the White House, and he stood by that statement and hoped it was one which Mr. Hagerty would not deny. The latter had been the man who had first persuaded the President that he could and should hold press conferences when he was first elected, at a time when he almost trembled at the idea of meeting with the press. Mr. Hagerty had been so efficient that at the 1956 San Francisco Republican convention, he had done everything for newsmen except tuck them into bed at night. But he stresses that efficiency was not to be confused with accuracy.
Sometimes it served the President for Mr. Hagerty to be inaccurate. He had recently charged Mr. Pearson with ten errors in reporting on the gift of the vicuna coat by Bernard Goldfine to White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, and he lists some of Mr. Hagerty's denials which had either turned out not to be denials or had "fuzzed up" the truth.
On Friday, June 13, Mr. Hagerty had been asked by the press to comment on the gift of the coat, whereupon he consulted Mr. Adams but did not comment, on that day having learned for the first time that the President had also received at least vicuna cloth. By Monday, June 16, it had been finally confirmed that Mr. Adams had received the coat, and on that day, Mr. Hagerty had been asked whether anyone else in the White House had received a coat, responding that, speaking only for himself, the answer was "no". He had then been asked by a correspondent of the Manchester, N.H., Union Leader whether Mr. Goldfine had not offered some suits to the President, to which he had responded that he had no knowledge of that. Yet, on the prior Friday, he had learned that the President had accepted a coat or at least vicuna cloth from Mr. Goldfine.
In the course of explaining that the President had given his cloth to a friend whose name he could not remember, Mr. Hagerty had said that Mr. Pearson said that Mr. Adams had received several rugs, which Mr. Hagerty had labeled a "lie". Later the same day, Mr. Adams had testified to Congress that he had received what he called several "Oriental mats" from Mr. Goldfine.
Mr. Hagerty had vigorously denied on August 4, 1953 Mr. Pearson's report that the President had a heart condition, notwithstanding the fact that two years later, in late September, 1955, the President suffered a heart attack.
Mr. Hagerty had blasted Mr. Pearson publicly on April 1, 1954 for allegedly breaking the release of the results of the hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini, Mr. Hagerty telephoning Mr. Pearson later to say that he was wrong and apologized, but not making that apology public.
On September 24, 1955, the White House had announced that the President had suffered a "slight digestive upset", and stuck to that story until after the noon hour, later officially admitting that "the first symptom" of a heart attack had been known as early as 2:45 a.m. that day.
On June 14, 1956, after the President had gone to the hospital with ileitis, Mr. Hagerty had been asked why the stomach condition had not been announced at the time of the President's "head-to-toe" examination, and he had replied that it did not show up. Yet, the doctors had explained that they were able to operate in a hurry because they knew of the previous condition.
On January 12, 1955, after the column had reported that Charles Willis would soon leave the White House, Mr. Hagerty had issued a denial; but on June 14, Mr. Willis had resigned.
Mr. Hagerty had told the press on June 3, 1957 that the President had not seen the telecast on CBS from Moscow of Nikita Khrushchev, but had been aware of it. But on June 5, the President told a press conference: "All I have seen was what you saw on television."
Were he to try to catalog the daily list of lies being told by the current press secretary in 2025, he would be doing little else in his columns. Of course the young girl has a difficult assignment, as everyone she is working for in the Administration are known liars. But, no one forced her to take the position, of which she seems perfectly fitted and practiced.
Speaking of lies and liars, we heard the Leader's personal attorney, masquerading as "attorney general", state in a press conference the previous day, annoyingly reading her script as if she were running for student office in high school, a long statement praising the current Administration for its superior efforts in eradicating crime by having sent away for life without possibility of parole a Mexican drug cartel kingpin, known colloquially as "El Mayo", never once mentioning the Biden Administration in the matter or expressing the least recognition that it was the prior Administration which effected the arrest of this individual in July, 2024, and initiated soon after his prosecution, as well as that of his son. But to listen to the Leader's personal attorney, masquerading as "attorney general", one would think, as most of the comments beneath the various video presentations of her press conference suggest, that it was the Leader and only the Leader who brought about this arrest and prosecution, the one man and his loyal attorney fighting crime and corruption which those nasty, old liberal Commie Democrats had let slide for four years.
That was only her first act of dissembling on the matter, also not bothering to tell the cult which follows such statements as if coming from Mount Olympus and bearing only Truth from the Oracle, that the plea bargain which resulted in the guilty plea had forgone the death penalty, which was in play for the offenses with which the man was being prosecuted, in exchange for life without possibility of parole.
We must thus question who is really being honest about eradicating crime and who is really being efficacious in that effort, the Biden Administration, which originally caught and prosecuted this individual and his son, or the current Administration, which does little but showboat promotional gimmickry and lie like hell to the American people every live-long day. If you listen to that garbage and its purveyors on Fox Prop, News Maximus Promotus, and other such ultra-right wing propaganda networks with no credibility and no real news gathering sources at all, only propaganda commentators, many of whom now work for this Administration, you will be just about as informed as the average Russian in 1958 or today, or the average citizen of places like El Salvador, making yourself therefore into a peasant subject to the sole whim and discretion of an old, decrepit madman who thinks himself a King and Lord Dictator of the world.
He is drunk with power, as best exemplified by his edict which he decreed yesterday, attempting to override both Congress and the Supreme Court by declaring with the stroke of a pen that to prosecute criminally an individual for burning a United States flag is no longer unconstitutional as violative of the First Amendment, as declared by the majority of the Court in 1989, including Justice Antonin Scalia, (whose pointed, and sometimes humorous, comments in oral argument are worth revisiting), on a Court which had at the time only two remaining Democratic-appointed Justices, Thurgood Marshall and Byron White, the latter having dissented in the case, though Justice William Brennan, appointed in 1956 by President Eisenhower and who delivered the majority opinion in the flag-burning case, was considered liberal. The President has no power to issue ukases or legislative fiats and no prior President has ever sought to do so in such a blatant usurpation of power of the other two branches of the Government, intended to act as checks and balances on despotism, being daily exercised by this dictator and his loyal retinue of smiling, sycophantic, sick and rather stupid Cabinet secretaries. That his "attorney general", who stood there looking on as dumb as a fence post, did not bother to tell him of these simple facts which every sixth grader ought to know, means either that she is, in fact, a Fascist, herself, or is so unbelievably stupid as to make one wonder how in hell she ever got a law license in the state of Florida or anywhere else. We think we know the answer to that riddle, but, out of discretion, we refrain from explaining. Suffice it to say that it probably has something to do with genuflection.
Obviously this incredibly stupid act will only cause numerous instances of flag-burning in the country to test His Majesty's absurd and outrageous usurpation of authority, as well it should. Of course, given the way things have been going with the Supreme Court in recent times, we would not put it past it to overturn the former case. Thus, those testing the law handed down by His Majesty, the one-man Legislature, might well be advised to wait until the Democrats retake the Congress in 2027 before deciding to act, as, at that point, democracy in the country will be restored very quickly and demonstrably. For now, limit your protest to flying it upside down, which no one can contest.
We might issue a caveat to the "attorney general" that she study closely the sad history of John Mitchell and what befell him after he, likewise, decided it was okay to become the lackey for a would-be despot. She is much too young to remember all of that, but she had better acquaint herself with it, lest she ultimately wind up in jail down the line in 2029 or so. Being a liar on behalf of El Presidente is not a resume-builder for anything other than jail, entertaining all the other inmates with your great war stories of past service to His Majesty, including abiding insistence that the 2020 election was somehow "stolen", probably not a very good calling card even in lock-up, where genuflection takes on a whole new meaning, even for women.
For the legally semi-literate, incidentally, such as non-lawyer Herr Doktor Goebbels and other adherents to Project 2025, who might attempt to cite the steel-seizure case of 1952 as historical precedent for a President utilizing executive authority not provided by Congress to effect a desired end, think again. First, the Court ruled that the President lacked authority under the Constitution or any statute enacted by Congress to seize private property, even, as there, when a threatened strike of the steel industry might have compromised national defense during the Korean War, the rationale which the President used under his claim of "general powers" as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The Court rejected that argument, in favor of the separation of powers carefully delineated in the Constitution.
Second, by any analogy stretched beyond reach-around to the current scenario, the flag gets twisted beyond recognition into one of those hideous Trump flags sported typically on the back of hicked-up pick-ups driven by beer-swizzling, yelling urchins out of their gherkins, those juvenile miscreants to whom this defiant executive act of theft is meant to appeal. The executive order does, effectively, seek to seize private property, that is the right to destroy one's own property, without any act of Congress to support it, and even expressly in defiance of prior Supreme Court precedent, and so, while the Youngstown Sheet & Tube case could be cited as authority contra the executive order's validity, it certainly does not in any manner support it. Nor is there any valid historical comparison, as the country is not at war and no national defense interest could practically be asserted in justification of it in any event, even by the unexcelled practitioners of circumlocution presently at the White House. The fact of the private property's symbolic content was dealt with in the Johnson case as not reaching a level giving a state (or Congress) an important governmental interest in regulating the symbolic conduct amounting to speech communicated by burning of a flag, when the burning does not amount to statutory theft, arson or otherwise endangering of public safety in some manner. Thus, Herr Doktor Goebbels, there is no justification, historical or legal, which could possibly justify under existing law or the Constitution what your Leader did in issuing his diktat—among many others of the same stripe in the past seven months.
Joseph Alsop, in the London Airport between flights, indicates that shortly after dawn, it was not a cheerful place, expressing the belief that his eternal punishment would take the form of eternal condemnation to a flight-standby list, probably a Saudi Arabian flight-standby list. He found that just being in airports influenced judgment and confesses that he was writing the piece in the airport, with the memory of the armed convoy which had taken its passengers to the plane in Beirut still recently in mind. He finds it about time to express that U.S. foreign policy was "on the naked brink of a really major disaster."
Judging by the small quantity of news which reached Beirut, the American public had been largely maintained in ignorance of the acute dangers of the Lebanese crisis, which had reached a stage which virtually assured a disaster of some sort. There was still some room for a choice between different types of disaster, but there was hardly a ray of hope. The most likely type of disaster was a landing of American Marines and British paratroopers in Lebanon, by invitation of the Government of President Camille Chamoun to protect Lebanese independence from the attack which had been ably organized by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The prospect of such a landing in Lebanon was an immediate possibility. When the fighting in Lebanon had started, the British and American governments had solemnly promised the Lebanese Government that they would land troops if requested to do so, provided that certain conditions were met, which now had been met in full, including the principal condition of prior Lebanese appeal to the U.N. The Anglo-American commitment to the Lebanese Government had not been altered or diluted by the U.N. intervention in the fighting. Immediately after the U.N. Security Council had voted to send observers, the U.S. Ambassador to Beirut, Robert McClintock, had given specific renewed assurances to President Chamoun, indicating that the U.N. resolution had in no way affected the validity of the Anglo-American commitment, that the troops remained ready to land when requested.
Either a U.N. solution or a local Lebanese solution of the crisis were equally difficult to imagine, and yet, President Chamoun was determined not to surrender. It was easy to imagine the moment when he would urge Washington and London to land the Marines and paratroopers presently in readiness in the Mediterranean. It was reasonable to say that such a landing would be a disaster, primarily because Premier Nasser had skillfully given his attack on Lebanese independence the outward semblance of a civil war. There would be local support for such a landing, but there was no use pretending that there would be support by any heavy majority of the people or likewise that the type of Anglo-American use of force would be anything but a nasty business which could result in a long entanglement.
But the question remained whether that type of disaster was not preferable to the other type which also threatened in Lebanon, final Western defeat throughout the region. The American and British representatives in the country mainly saw the arguments against such a landing and had labored, perhaps too successfully, to delay the Lebanese Government's call for a landing, having been allowed to do so because of the "goose-fleshy and Micawberish state of mind" of Washington and London policymakers. But those policymakers had given their original commitment to President Chamoun because they thought a military landing in Lebanon would be much less disastrous than the loss of all of the Middle East. That would almost surely happen if Premier Nasser was allowed to gain another victory in Lebanon, with or without the help of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold.
Mr. Alsop concludes that it was a situation like that confronting the crew tending an atomic reactor when the reactor began to get out of control. If control measures were taken immediately, a lot of people would be badly burned, but if the chain reaction were allowed to continue, the "whole show will blow up." He finds that now to be the case in the Middle East, 19 months after the Suez crisis of November, 1956.
Marquis Childs, in Moscow, finds that the rule was now apparently that for every demonstration in the West, there would be a comparable one in Moscow, that with one or two exceptions, that had been the practice thus far and appeared likely, under Moscow's stern new policy, to go on being so. Under that policy, the Soviet Union intended to repeat by every means of communication the charge that former Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy, who had led the 1956 revolt, and the others recently executed and imprisoned as a result of the uprising, had been guilty of treason and their execution justified. If the protest demonstrations in Western capitals had produced any result, it was a stiffening of the determination not merely to stand behind the decision but to champion it with the persistence and all the resources of the Communist bloc.
The demonstration in front of the West German Embassy had more punch than the demonstration against the Danish Embassy. The Germans in Bonn had thrown bottles of blue ink at the Soviet Embassy, and the Russian demonstrators had thrown bottles of blue ink at the German Embassy in Moscow. But the latter demonstration had behind it something of the passionate feeling of bitterness and hatred toward the German invaders which lay just below the surface as a result of the terrible punishment which the Russians had taken in the first two years of World War II. Banners had said, "Remember Stalingrad", the scene of the last stand of the Russian Army which had turned back the Nazis with appalling numbers of casualties on both sides in 1942-43. A woman in the crowd had screamed, "They murdered my husband! They murdered my husband!"
A deep undercurrent of feeling in the crowd, contrasting with the rather casual and even cheerful rock-throwing at the Danish Embassy, had found an outlet in sharp criticism of Americans who were there either as reporters or tourists. One of the demonstrators carrying a banner proclaiming the desire of the Soviet Union for peace and speaking English, had demanded of several Americans that they answer why their Government was against Soviet Russia and everything which Russia did, saying that he had fought at Stalingrad and been badly wounded, wanting no more war. He believed that Americans wanted war and it had done little good to tell him that such was not true, as he had heard so often another version of America's aims and intentions.
The scene in the street before the broken and bespattered side of the Embassy, with the crowds chanting various slogans, had been curiously depressing, seeming to be a repetition of what had occurred in the uncertain days leading up to World War II. In the heat of Moscow's summer, which had come on with a rush, all of the hostility and fanatical hatred of the past had boiled up in the angry crowd of men in shirtsleeves and women in light dresses.
An hour or two later, he was in the white and gold hall of St. George's in the Kremlin, at a reception for the King and Queen of Nepal, having a sensation of being on another planet, with a diplomatic corps, minus the West German ambassador, many of the diplomats in full uniform with medals. Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in a short black coat and wearing only the two highest decorations of the Soviet Union on his lapel, appeared solemn and preoccupied. The official host, President Klementi Voroshilov, had read a speech, interpreted into English, full of rhetoric about the peace-loving citizens of the Soviet Union and the peace-loving Nepalese people and the necessity for a summit conference and ending nuclear tests. The King of Nepal had read a shorter speech, interpreted into both English and Russian, full of the same sentiments but expressing it in a more restrained manner. The trumpeters in the musicians' gallery, high up in the glittering hall with its symbol of St. George and the dragon from the days of the Czars, had blown their trumpets each time a toast had been drunk. The guests, dressed in so many diverse costumes of the East and West, then had attacked the long banquet tables laden with all types of food and drink.
He concludes that the business of demonstrations would continue and so would Kremlin receptions, but what relation they had to the urgent necessities of the world at present remained hard to see.
Aletter writer expresses his support for Jack Love in the upcoming primary runoff for the State Senate the following Saturday.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., says that he had noted with both amusement and shame a letter to the editor published June 20 by a man who was against the National Committee on Right-To-Work, believing that he might receive the commendation of "labor tyrants like Walter 'Ruthless' Reuther", but would receive none from many "freedom-loving citizens both inside and outside the ranks of organized labor." The writer had conceded that the right to work was a God-given right, but apparently did not believe that the right to work carried with it the free choice of joining or not a labor union, or, if he did, his attack on the Committee had to be taken with a grain of salt. He believes it fortunate that Mecklenburg County had in the Legislature Frank Snepp, who "had the courage" the previous month to stand up in a public meeting and express "no" to the question of whether he would favor repeal of the state's right-to-work law.
A letter from a former Congressional candidate, P. C. Burkholder, expresses an opinion on an editorial of June 17, titled "After One Hurdle, the Race Begins", questioning why there should be public interest or enthusiasm regarding the issue of reorganization of the courts, suggesting that if the courts had gotten themselves in such a mess since the State Constitution of 1868 had been ratified and the Superior Courts had become so log-jammed, why the Bar Association had not cleaned up its own mess and put its own house in order, why it was necessary for the voters to give up their elective power for judges to the governor and eliminate the lower courts and their judges so that the Bar Association could clean its own house. He says that the same lawyers and judges who had let the courts get into such a mess in the past were the same lot who would operate the courts in the future, that if the lower courts and their judges were eliminated, forcing people to resort to the higher courts, how the logjam could be ameliorated, wondering also how appointive authority could be given only to the governor and it be called democracy.
The editors refer to their June 25 editorial, "The Silly Business about Spencer Bell".
A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "In Which Is Pointed Out Another Facet of Feminine Superiority Over Men:
"Although women are not
stronger
Still they seem to last lots
longer."
We wish not to touch that with a
ten-foot pole,
As we might then be sent deep down a
blent cook-hole.
Framed Edition
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