The Charlotte News
Friday, July 18, 1958
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Cairo that the United Arab Republic Government this date reported "an atmosphere of amity and understanding" in a Moscow meeting between Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which had taken place on Thursday. A statement regarding the meeting also said that "the two leaders exchanged views on development of the present international situation and what is needed for the preservation of peace." Premier Nasser had been reported sailing home aboard his yacht following a 12-day visit to Yugoslavia and meetings with President Tito, and that the stopover in Moscow had come as a complete surprise in Cairo. Egyptian newspapers said that the Premier was due in Alexandria the following day. The Middle East news agency said that the Premier had arrived this date in Damascus, the capital of the UAR province of Syria, indicating that he had met with Syrian cabinet ministers. The news had also caught Yugoslavia by surprise and informants in Belgrade suggested that Premier Nasser probably had headed directly for Communist Albania after leaving Yugoslavia and had been picked up there for the flight to Moscow. They said that the Premier had given no inkling of any plans to meet with Mr. Khrushchev and in fact had created the impression of becoming cooler toward the Soviets. His visit to Yugoslavia had generally been interpreted as a show of independence from the Kremlin, which had denounced President Tito as a traitor to Communism, though more recently having softened that approach. Yugoslavia had supported Premier Nasser in the present crisis and had hurried to recognize the new regime in Iraq, making it clear that it was not doing so to please Russia. In London, the Evening News speculated that Premier Nasser "possibly asked, or received, offers of help from Russia in stabilizing the position of the new Iraqi republic." The Soviets had recognized the rebel regime in Baghdad.
In Beirut, more U.S. Marines had landed this date as the 1st Battalion of the 8th Regiment had joined two Marine battalions already ashore. It brought the total U.S. Marines in Lebanon to about 5,100. About 2,000 U.S. paratroopers were in nearby Turkey, and Britain had completed the landing of 2,000 paratroopers in Jordan. New warship arrivals had increased the total U.S. 6th Fleet units in Lebanon to 49. An advance party of U.S. paratroopers had arrived in Beirut to scout the territory patrolled by the Marines before taking over from them. While the British and Americans had rushed their build-up in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia had put a crimp in U.S. plans to fly tanker planes loaded with oil from Bahrain to Jordan, with U.S. Embassy sources in Amman stating that Saudi Arabia, which had been on the sidelines in the latest crisis, had refused permission for the tankers to fly over its territory from the Persian Gulf, which would have been the fastest and only direct route. The oil, badly needed by Jordan, as well as by British forces there, presumably would have to be delivered by ship along a slow and circuitous route around the Arabian Peninsula and up the Gulf of Aqaba to south Jordan's port.
Mobs in Moscow and Potsdam, Germany, gathered at U.S. installations this date to protest the landing of U.S. military forces in Lebanon. In Moscow, an unruly mob of more than 100,000 Russians had smashed 50 windows at the U.S. Embassy and pelted the building with bottles containing blue and green ink. The demonstration had lasted more than three hours before Soviet militiamen had made a determined effort to get the crowd under control. The smashing of windows and the throwing of the bottles had gone on for more than an hour. The crowd covered a ten-lane boulevard in front of the Embassy and extended for half a mile in either direction. A force of 300 to 400 militiamen finally had begun pushing the demonstrators back from the Embassy to a sidewalk on the far side of the street. By that time, every window on the first three floors had been smashed and there was a scattering of broken glass on other floors up to the sixth. Lower-floor windows of the Embassy were quickly smashed, and as projectiles continued to hit the front of the building, glass was smashed on the floors above. Those in the crowd carried placards saying: "Shame on American democracy"; "U.S. gangsters"; "Hands-off Lebanon"; and "Tar and feathers for Dulles". One youngster had shimmied up a drainpipe to a third-floor balcony and placed on it a placard which said, "Long live Arab unity". He then slid down the pipe and shimmied up it again with a portrait of Premier Nasser. A Communist-led mob of 2,500 East Germans had torn down and defaced the American flag flying over the U.S. military mission in Potsdam. The mob had written on the flag "Americans go home" and then had hoist it again, according to the official East German news agency, A.D.N. The mob, made up of workers released from factories, demanded that American members of the mission come out and face them, but the American officers and enlisted men had remained inside the building. The mob also demonstrated in front of the British mission, but there had been no reports of violence.
In Washington, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd resumed his talks this date amid increasing indications that the West might have to learn to live with the new revolutionary regime in Iraq. Mr. Lloyd, accompanied by a coterie of aides, had arrived at the State Department during the morning to discuss matters with Secretary of State Dulles, who had earlier attended a Cabinet meeting at the White House, at which he reviewed the tense Middle East situation. Mr. Lloyd had participated for 7.5 hours the previous day in talks with the President and Mr. Dulles, one of the longest such consultations in recent years, emphasizing the gravity of the Middle East situation. The White House said that "a close identity of values" had been achieved, but both sides emphasized that there were waning prospects that, barring some unforeseen development, the pro-Nasser rebels who had seized power in Iraq the previous Monday could be driven out. The stated aim of the movement of the Marines into Lebanon and British troops into Jordan was to head off other such rebellions in the region. Both the British and the Americans had accused the United Arab Republic of plotting such action. Both the U.S. and Britain had made it clear before Mr. Lloyd had arrived that they had no plans to intervene directly in Iraq under the present circumstances.
In Washington, it was reported that it had taken seven hours for the Baghdad rebels to seize and secure power over Iraq on Monday and that for the rest of the day, the mobs had taken over. Based on a chronology from the available publishable information, officials had determined that just at sunrise, Brig. General Abdul Karim el-Kassem had swiftly and silently led his 20th Brigade into the unsuspecting city. Detachments, dropped off at the railroad, the bridges, the telegraph office, at main street junctures, at the post office, and at Baghdad radio, had quietly and efficiently taken over without firing their rifles and machine guns. The names of those to be arrested were whispered to the men and other detachments had gone to specified addresses, knocking and arresting, with orders to shoot upon resistance. In an hour, the secrecy was no longer necessary, as the first phase of the coup was complete. Baghdad radio told the citizens that the monarchy was dead and the republic was established, announcing the names of 15 men, mostly young Army officers, with a 12-man Cabinet headed by General Kassem as premier, plus a three-man Sovereignty Council, a new strategy-making super cabinet, topped by Lt. General Najib el-Rubai.
In Guantánamo, Cuba, new security measures were reported to be in effect this date at the U.S. Naval Base to prevent Cuban rebels from taking advantage of the Navy's preoccupation with the Middle East crisis.
In London, it was reported that an undeclared truce between Greek and Turkish factions in Cyprus had appeared this date, with diplomatic sources indicating that Greek Premier Constantine Karamanlis and Turkish Premier Adnan Menderes had quietly intervened in an effort to end more than three years of civil strife in the colony.
Secretary of State Dulles made a personal plea to Congress this date for passage of the President's 3.675 billion dollar foreign aid money bill.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., striking members of the Transport Workers Union faced contempt of court proceedings as they continued their picketing against Pan American Airways at the missile test center. The contempt hearing had been called by a U.S. District Court judge in Tampa when the strikers had defied his restraining order to end the walkout immediately.
In Washington, Assistant Attorney General W. Wilson White had refused this date to rule out the possibility that Federal troops might be used again to enforce court orders for school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark., or elsewhere. When pressed hard on the point by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. White testified that he could say categorically that it was not the program of the Justice Department to enforce school integration at the point of a bayonet and that in his opinion it would not occur again. He refused, however, to say that troops would definitely not be used again under circumstances such as those which had occurred at Central High School in Little Rock the prior September. Mr. White was serving under recess appointment made by the President the previous December 9 and appeared before the Committee for a hearing on his nomination to head the new Civil Rights Division of the Department. The hearing on his nomination had been stalled in the Committee for more than six months and this session was the first since the prior February. He maintained that the Administration had done the right thing under the circumstances in Little Rock during the prior school year. He said that the troops had been used "to set down mass defiance of a court decree", rather than to enforce school integration, as had been suggested by Senator McClellan. Both the latter and Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina argued that troops had been ordered into Little Rock without giving other methods for dealing with the situation a chance to work. Senator Ervin said that local police had been allowed to function for "only a few hours before troops were sent in with bayonets." Additionally, he said, contempt citations could have been brought against persons interfering with the court order. He and Senator McClellan had also emphasized that every able-bodied man within the 40 counties of the Eastern District of Arkansas could have been sworn in as a deputy U.S. marshal to enforce the school integration order. Senator McClellan protested what he called the bypassing of those normal procedures, but Mr. White testified that "those alternatives overlooked the suddenness with which the mob developed there." He also said that Governor Orval Faubus had placed National Guardsmen around the school to keep the black students out after the initial day of registration—claiming as justification for the move that it was for the safety of all of the students following initial violence on the first day.
In Birmingham, Ala., it was reported that three white men had been arrested, two of them beaten by angry blacks shortly after dynamite had blasted two houses in a racially mixed residential area the previous night. Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor said that the warrants charging the three men with the bombing would be issued during the day. All three of the men were from Birmingham. Damage to the two houses, one occupied by a black family and another by a white family, had been slight. Two of the three arrested had been taken into custody at the hospital where they had gone for treatment of multiple cuts and bruises inflicted by the group of black persons a few minutes after the dynamite blast. The third had been picked up after police talked with the first two. The three had been questioned through the night at police headquarters after the two beaten men were released from the hospital. Mr. Connor said that all three had made statements concerning the bombing. The bombings had occurred in the Fountain Heights area, an old section gradually changing into a black neighborhood. The houses damaged had been next to each other, with a vacant lot in between. No one had been hurt, all the broken glass having been strewn across the beds of three sleeping children, including a nine-month old baby, in the home of a 47-year old black railroad worker. The man had bought his home from a white person and moved in the previous month, indicating that there had been nothing to suggest that his family was unwelcome. Another black family lived next door on the other side, but their home was not harmed. A retired mailman had been asleep while his wife read the Bible in the living room when the blast had occurred in the other home. They had lived in their home for 25 years, but said that they were planning to sell it to a black family. Damage had been limited to shattered windows, cracked plaster and a few splintered boards on the front porches of both houses. One witness had told police that he had been looking out a window of his nearby home when he saw three white men light fuses to two separate bombs, toss them at the houses, and then flee in a car. The explosions had occurred in a neighborhood racially tense since the changeover from white to black residents had begun. A huge cross had been burned in the area several months earlier. One witness who had asked that his name be withheld said that the two white men had been caught and beaten about a block from the explosion, but would not say how many blacks were involved in the beating. The later notorious Robert Chambliss was not one of the three arrested.
At Santa Maria Airfield in the Azores, a Norwegian freighter reported this date that it had rescued three American airmen whose RB-66 jet bomber had crashed in the Atlantic off the Azores. A freighter radioed that it had first found two of the airmen and picked up the third two hours later, the freighter indicating that it was heading for the Azores with the men. The bomber had disappeared the previous day in a flight from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to a European base in the Azores. The plane's three crewmen were all stationed at Shaw.
In Washington, it was reported that a second investigation would begin the following Monday into alleged intervention by White House chief of staff Sherman Adams in Government agency affairs.
The Agriculture Department announced this date that a penalty of 19.3 cents per pound would be assessed against growers selling 1958-crop upland cotton in excess of marketing quotas under a crop control program.
In Cleveland, it was reported that an estimated $70,000 in cash had been taken this date by three masked gunmen who had held up a branch savings office.
In Dayton, O., it was reported that a man from suburban Kettering, mistaking his wife for a prowler, had shot her fatally early this date, according to police, with the woman, 58, having died about an hour and a half after the shooting.
In Ann Arbor, Mich., a 14-year old boy this date had confessed to beating severely an 11-year old neighbor and drowning the bound boy in a pond near their homes.
In Monhegan Island, Me., small girl had fallen from a cliff into the sea the previous day and her mother and another woman had drowned with the child in attempting to rescue her.
John Kilgo of The News reports that Lloyd Henkel had left City Hall the previous afternoon, having been fired by the Civil Service Commission from his job as a captain with the Police Department, for which he had worked for 23 years. He had been captain of the traffic division since March, 1943 and had almost been made chief in 1946. He said this date that he would rather not talk about the matter. In his job, he had supervised 51 persons and received $504 per month. He was married and had two daughters, who had sat directly behind him during the entirety of the hearing during the week. He was 55 and appeared to be in good health. Before joining the Department, he had worked as a salesman and had attended college for two years.
In Melbourne, the Australian Navy's pride, the new submarine destroyer Vendetta, had started on speed trials this date, and had gone the wrong way. Instead of backing away from its berth, the 3,700-ton destroyer shot forward by mistake, ripping through the heavy steel gates of a dry dock, tearing a 20-foot gap along its port side and a 25-foot gash to starboard, flooding the dry dock with another destroyer in it. Let it be a lesson to you little Aussies of the right-wing media, that when you undertake vendettas, similar to those being undertaken by the man in the White House, whom you support, bad things happen...
In Los Angeles, it was reported that the District Attorney's Office had declined to prosecute the 20-year old daughter of the late comedian Bob Burns for forgery, after she had been arrested the previous Friday when a merchant called police regarding a $55 check she had offered, police indicating that the check had a fictitious address. She had told officers she had found it easier to cash checks if she gave an address near the place she was shopping. She had previously been in trouble with the law recently.
On the editorial page, "The Pearsall Plan's Medicine Is Harsh" discusses the action taken by a Charlotte attorney on behalf of parents as a first step which could conceivably lead, under the Pearsall Plan, the State Pupil Assignment Law, to the closing of one or more public schools in the city.
The law had become operative in 1956, ostensibly designed to "preserve North Carolina's public schools", giving the people the legal means to discontinue public education in areas where racial desegregation created an "intolerable situation". Where it was implemented in a local option unit, it would deny children of both races the right to be educated in a public school. In a community where the preservation and improvement of public education had become a cherished ideal, the thought was naturally abhorrent. Residents of Charlotte did not take their public schools lightly and it counsels that they should not regard lightly any possible threat to their continued existence.
A school could be closed under the law by a vote of the people residing in an area around it, called a local option unit. The school board could order such an election on its own initiative or if 15 percent of the people in the school unit demanded it. The boundaries of the unit were set by the school board. If those inside the unit voted by a majority to close the school, then public education would cease immediately for pupils residing in the unit. None of the children in the local option unit could attend another public school unless they moved to another school district. They would be eligible, however, for State tuition grants for private education, up to the amount provided for other children in the public schools. That figure had been estimated in 1956 to be about $135 per school year in State funding. The local school board could add to that amount in accord with its per pupil costs. The public school in the unit could be opened again only on another vote by the people.
The expense grant provided for a private school would be quite inadequate, even assuming private schools would be available in sufficient number and size to take care of the students no longer able to attend a public school.
It concludes that the attorney and his clients were merely conducting a form of psychological warfare against the City School Board and perhaps the petitions merely represented a warning, that if so, it recommends to those warning that they be aware of the whole meaning of what they were suggesting.
Incidentally, we find it incredibly
amazing that there are still, quite obviously, people with deeply
ingrained racist viewpoints in this country in 2025, who feel that
the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a "bad person", that
the 1964 Civil Rights Act should never have been passed, and other
such plainly racist viewpoints. Such ridiculous and repugnant
viewpoints are held in substantial numbers or there would not have
been so much undeserved praise heaped on an individual who was killed
recently, who had openly advocated those racist points of view
repeatedly without apology. Anyone who thinks in 2025 that those
views are valid and are not plainly racist, has to be rather stupid
and short-sighted, oblivious to relatively recent U.S. history,
exhibiting no more education than about one semester at some
third-rate community college. Shame on the country for honoring such
an individual who openly espoused such retrograde viewpoints, and did
so repeatedly, not simply through some slip of the tongue once or
twice. Shame on Congress for its majority in affirming a day of honor
for such an individual. It does no honor to this country and those
who fought with their blood and their lives for civil rights to
eliminate the age of Jim Crow segregation and establish a better era.
For any dumbass to suggest openly that the Civil Rights Act of 1964
should not have been passed is outrageous beyond words. It is probable
We shall not honor any such person who said such things repeatedly, especially when he did so plainly as click-bait for his little podcasts to fund his organization to infiltrate his racist dogma into college and school curricula across the country and earn millions of dollars in the process. It is not the exercise of freedom of speech to say such things repeatedly in a public forum when the speaker knows that many people, especially callow young people, apparently respected what he said. We would no more honor such an idiot than we would Lester Maddox, George Wallace, George Lincoln Rockwell or David Duke. All of a piece.
If you don't like it, you know where you can shove it. And don't dare threaten anyone and their freedom of speech for saying so. It is absolutely sickening to see such a person honored in the least. His death merited maybe 15 minutes of news at most. Sixty years ago, it would have likely gotten no more than one minute on the nightly news and that would have been that, quite deservedly. Indeed, 60 years ago, this fool would never have been known by anyone, which is the way it should have been. In fact, we had scarcely ever heard of him until he was dead. We do not follow ultra-right-wing kooks, whether online, in the street, or anywhere else. We have since, unfortunately, had to educate ourselves as to just what this idiot stood for, which included saying that President Biden, while he was in office, "should be put in prison and/or be given the death penalty". If any statement ever deserved attention from the Secret Service, that was one. But this individual could say just about anything, it seems, and get completely away with it, with little censor or rebuke.
Anyone who apologizes for or approves of that tripe
We obviously provide no solace to anyone who unjustifiably kills or assaults others in the name of protest or for any other reason, and it is our long-held position, consistent with that of the late Justice John Paul Stevens, that the Second Amendment is an anachronism which ought be repealed in its entirety, which would be the best remedy for defusing the adrenaline-rushed bullet-heads who think the gun is an extension which makes them into a force to be dealt with while actually only confirming their utter weakness as a human being, physically, mentally and morally. But the subject in question, himself, said that sacrifices would have to be made to protect the Second Amendment, a statement so unbelievably callous and stupid that it probably contributed in the end to getting himself killed by the very modality which he so passionately defended as needful in a modern society with, if anything, too much policing and Big Brother video surveillance making it fast into the Roman culture of Empire days, ignoring the while Scriptures he pharisaically plucked from selectively, wherein, to the contrary, Jesus counseled turning the other cheek, forgiveness, healing, and not wearing one's religion on one's sleeve.
The most negative, poison force in the society is Fox Propaganda and other such ultra-right wing dispensers of garbage, spewing daily foreign notions out of foreign lands, rebirthing John Birch Society dogma of decades past along with doses of American Nazi Party and Ku Klux Klan platforms which once poisoned the democracy, primarily coming from the head of a little, old man who hails from Australia, who hates this country and who knows nothing about it obviously except how to make money from it through purveying yellow journalism to people of limited comprehension. As long as that force persists, drawing in every creep in the land to listen and watch the proverbial car wreck daily, infotainment gushed forth nauseatingly in a format designed to appeal to the soft-headed who let the tv waves roll over them uncritically, there will be little change.
If the FCC really wants to do something significant, then it should jerk the licenses of those propaganda networks which regularly spew such hate toward more than half the country every hour of every single day they exist, not for any principle but only for filthy lucre, and have since the mid-1990's. Of course, we don't expect that to happen under Trump, the King of Lucre.
Incidentally, given the absurd media lynching which the accused has received from Trump, the Utah governor, the FBI director, and a myriad of other politicians, police operatives and media personalities, declaring the suspect caught and guilty, the first motion his counsel will likely make will be to dismiss for the media circus surrounding his arrest, making it impossible for him to receive a fair trial anywhere, citing Sheppard v. Maxwell from 1966. There is a penalty exacted by the society ultimately for appointing and confirming amateurs and zealots to sensitive professional positions, the most amateurishly silly people ever to occupy these positions in the country's history, people who think that being good actors on the tv screen and wearing the right costume, like the actors they have seen on tv and in the movies and whom they grew up watching, will substitute, at least in the minds of the soft-headed, for actual knowledge of the duties, and the rationale for same, which they are charged with performing so that they need not know or say anything other than that which appeals to the soft-headed, and the hearts and minds of the rest will be forced, by mob pressure, ultimately to follow.
"Just Verdict Reached in Henkel Case" finds that the Civil Service Commission's dismissal of Capt. Lloyd Henkel from the Charlotte Police Department was a just verdict in an unpleasant case, that he was a likable person who apparently enjoyed a number of friendships in the community and no one wanted to see anyone fired from an organization after 23 years of service to it. Thus, there had been a tempting quality to the defense argument that the captain might have been a little careless but that he was merely doing what others had done.
It finds that if accepting that argument, however, the Commission would have sanctioned grossly improper activities and invited more of the same by others, dealing a blow to police discipline. It appeared that the defense was arguing that unless the captain could be proved to be a crook, it was the duty of the City to forgive him, while the prosecution had argued that the captain did break the law in cashing checks for which he had no funds.
It finds that there were certain rules of conduct, written and unwritten, which had to prevail among citizens generally and among public officials especially if decent standards were to be upheld in the community. The evidence had left no doubt that Capt. Henkel had violated those rules. And not everybody was doing what the captain had done. If his offenses had gone unpunished, many more officials and citizens would have been encouraged to do likewise.
A piece from theManchester Guardian, titled "Televiewing Can Be Perilous", quotes from the British Medical Journal that in the previous year, a doctor had seen no fewer than five patients who had collapsed with substernal pain and shock while watching television.
It indicates that it had known the pain and shock itself, but the doctor's patients were suffering from no ordinary kind of angst or repulsion. The doctor had elaborated that the link between the cases was that each had been a man who had eaten a heavy meal shortly before the attack had commenced and had then sat down in a low chair to watch the program, that one of the patients, found to be suffering from hiatus hernia had "injudiciously consumed two bottles of a popular fizzy drink in quick succession shortly before he was taken ill."
The viewer had a tendency to select a comfortable armchair which was low and deep from front to back, with the seat sometimes sloping backwards so that the buttocks were below the level of the knees, a position which was mechanically unsound as it was bound to lead to upward pressure on the diaphragm, particularly when the stomach was overfull. The doctor had thus recommended an old-fashioned straight-backed chair with a firm seat as being far more suitable for viewing, encouraging proper seating if screens were set considerably higher than was usual, with the center of the screen at least 42 inches from the floor.
The piece indicates that after extensive experiment, it had found that something like the right viewing angle could be achieved by placing the television set on the mantelpiece and watching from a high kitchen chair mounted either on the first eight volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Alternatively, the set could be screwed to the ceiling with the screen tilted downward, and the viewer lying on his or her back on a rug. Slim viewers might manage by placing the set, screen uppermost, on the floor, and lying above it, face downward, on the table. It suggests that the only disadvantage of the latter position was that while the diaphragm was unusually well-supported, it might cause a rush of blood to the eyeballs, which was not only dangerous but unsightly.
The better remedy, we suggest, is simply not to watch it at all.
Drew Pearson tells of events which had taken place behind the scenes in the White House and in the Pentagon immediately following the decision to send Marines to Lebanon. Vice-President Nixon had not participated in the decision and had been briefed by the President the following morning at breakfast. He also did not participate in the high-level meeting on Monday between the President, Secretary of State Dulles, Joint Chiefs chairman General Nathan Twining, and Acting Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles, who made the final decision after the Congressional delegation had left the White House.
The morning after the decision, the President had shown considerable nervousness about getting American troops committed too far in the Middle East. He did not want to offend world opinion or make a move not completely approved by the U.N. Some advisors attributed that position to advice from U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. The President was so jittery about the public announcement that he had ordered a news gag on the details. He also fretted about the Russian reaction to the military moves.
The Joint Chiefs, meeting most of Tuesday, had taken a more firm position than the President, arguing that once the U.S. was committed in Lebanon by the landing of troops, it could not pull punches, that the intervention had to be efficient and in full force.
The President's reluctance might have been partly influenced by word from neutral embassies in Baghdad that the new Premier of Iraq, Brig. General Abdul Karim el-Kassem, was not pro-Communist and did not want to fight the U.S. Indirect assurances had come from him that oil would continue to flow and that he wanted to be neutral.
The chief military problems considered by the Joint Chiefs had been, first, whether to use Turkish troops, and second, what to do if Russian volunteers were flown into Iraq. Regarding the use of Turkish troops, the decision had been in the affirmative. Regarding the contingency of Russian volunteers, the Joint Chiefs were in favor of shooting them down if they were flown into Iraq. The only way they could reach Iraq was by plane. U.S. military leaders advised that U.S. forces ought make certain that Russian volunteers could not reach Iraq or Lebanon, though shooting down Russian planes could bring dire consequences.
Only a cryptic announcement had been issued regarding movement of Air Force fighter-bombers and other planes to a destination "somewhere overseas". The Air Force had dispatched a composite attack force of more than 200 planes to bases in Europe and the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the British had notified the State Department that 6,000 British paratroopers had been alerted in England and were ready for deployment in the Middle East. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had sent word that he would prefer not to use the Cyprus-based paratroopers who were still needed there.
Joseph Alsop indicates that by the time the piece was set to print, an operation would have been launched to rescue Iraq from those who had plotted the military coup or the Western powers would have likely lost their chance. He posits that Iraq was everything and Lebanon nothing. Lebanese Foreign Minister Charles Malik had admitted that the U.S. landing of troops in Beirut would be fruitless unless the larger problem of Iraq were simultaneously solved. Iraq had been the chief subject of all of the anguished consultation between the British and U.S. Governments in recent days.
He finds it the most crucial turning point since the beginning of the cold war, the central fulcrum of which had been the unremitting effort of the Soviets to upset the world balance of power, opposed by a much less continuous Western effort to maintain the world balance of power. That balance in turn depended on the outcome in the Middle East and in the present circumstances, the outcome depended on the outcome in Iraq.
The presence of Marines in Lebanon might enable a new president to be peacefully elected and might permit President Camille Chamoun to serve out his legal term, as well to allow other outward signs of Lebanese independence to be preserved. But Lebanon's alleged independence would not last long and would not be worthwhile if the independence of Iraq was not also restored. Neither would Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan have independence which would be worthwhile.
If Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser's conspiratorial attack on Baghdad was permitted to succeed, every friend to the West in every Arab nation would be doomed. Even the popular idea in London of retaining the oil-rich Persian Gulf sheikdoms through brute force, if need be, would be more expensive and less fruitful than a direct attack on the heart of the problem in Baghdad.
A neutralist Iran, a neutralist Pakistan, a Turkey moving back to the position which that nation had in the previous war, would also likely be lost. The thrust of it all would be felt within the Western alliance when the Middle Eastern oil would be cut by Premier Nasser. Those were the reasons for taking bold action in Iraq.
He finds that most of the reasons for not taking action were mere twaddle, whether coming from U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, world opinion, or other sources. There was in fact only one real reason for not taking action in Iraq, that being fear of what the Soviets might do in response. The Kremlin had recognized the insurrectionary government in Baghdad and if the U.S. responded to a call for help from King Hussein in Jordan, who had inherited the legitimate leadership of the merged Hashemite states, the Soviets wanted the U.S. to think that they would respond to a call for help from their Baghdad friends. He regards it as foolish to believe that the Soviets would not so respond. If the Western nations took no action in Iraq, the crisis would be far worse than that regarding Munich in 1938. But if the West did take action, the crisis could be another Sarajevo of 1914.
There were two things to be said about the contingency in which the West would act with utmost speed, it being almost already too late, with the hope that the Soviets would only bluff and ultimately do nothing, as the U.S. had done in response to the revolt in Hungary in 1956. But if a double standard of behavior were established, preventing the West from having its say about any situation on its side of the line, leaving the Soviets to have the final say about situations in the West, the cause of freedom would be lost and the road to final catastrophe would occur by easy stages.
Walter Lippmann indicates that the Marines had been landing in Beirut in the desperate hope of limiting the disaster which the Iraqi revolution had brought on the Western position. He regards it as a miracle not likely to happen that the landing would be anywhere nearly sufficient to stabilize the situation. The Marines were able to protect Beirut just by their presence, but there was no assurance that they would be able to end the civil war.
Moreover, Jordan, beset by revolution similar to that in Iraq, had appealed to Britain and the U.S. for military assistance, and British paratroopers had been sent there. Possibly, Saudi Arabia would be able to get along without calling for help, because of its policy of neutrality increasingly benevolent to Premier Nasser.
It was most probable that the British would feel that they had to land troops in the little sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, where their main oil holdings were in the Middle East.
Thus, there was a grim prospect that the British and Americans would find themselves holding on to beachheads on the fringes of the Arab countries of the Middle East. In no Arab country, except Lebanon, about half Christian, did the West have any strong friends. The best that President Eisenhower could hope for was that the bigger Arab nations could be contained by a holding operation at the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. It would be a momentous question as to how deeply and for how long U.S. forces could be tied down in the holding operation. Premier Nasser would now control, except for Israel, all which the West did not hold onto by military force.
The decision to send in the Marines had been a tragic choice between two evils. After the Iraqi revolution, it had been a virtual certainty that Lebanon, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf states would also fall were they not to receive support from the outside. That had been the evil which the President had decided to resist. The other evil was that the U.S. was now in a military opposition to the Arab revolution, and in the Middle East the alignment was increasingly sharp and spectacular between the Moslem Arabs and the Western powers with their client states.
The President's speech the prior Tuesday evening had taken the unfortunate line of identifying Premier Nasser both with Hitler and Stalin, and in declaring that it amounted to an ideological war against Premier Nasser.
Mr. Lippmann states that his view was that the dilemma in which the President found himself on Monday morning was the result of a fundamental error, which many had pointed out, in the conception and design of U.S. Middle Eastern policy. The error was in believing that the way to stabilize the Middle East was to align as many countries in the region as could be persuaded to join in a military alliance against the Soviet Union. It was an error for two reasons, one being that it was absurd to suppose that a great power like Russia could be excluded from a region which was as close to it and as important to it as was Central America to the U.S. The other reason was that the intent of the Arabs was not to be aligned with the West or with the Soviets, but to be neutral and to profit by dealing with both sides.
The policies based on that mixed misconception had been blown up and were in ruin. They had been based on theories which were contrary to the facts of life and were certain to fail.
Mr. Lippmann regards it as probable that the West would not be able to reach any solution as long as the principle of the old policy continued to dominate the thinking of the White House and the State Department. The policy of the military containment of Premier Nasser had no promise of settlement and had the threat of far-reaching complications. The alternative was to propose a settlement in the Middle East based on the principle of neutrality, that which Egypt professed and probably wanted. For the little states, such as Lebanon and Israel, the principle of neutrality guaranteed by all of the great powers and by the U.N. offered the greatest promise.
He regards the central point to be that the U.S. ought not merely begin on the beaches and then accept as the best which was possible an indefinitely prolonged, ideological war with the Arab revolution. He finds that the U.S. ought seek a settlement by negotiation, recognizing that both the Soviets and the United Arab Republic were powers and had interests with which the U.S. had to reach an accommodation.
A letter from a representative of the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co. of New Jersey indicates that within the ensuing few days Congress would act on the bill to increase Social Security benefits by about 10 percent and the Social Security tax to cover the added benefits. Most Americans, he finds, had no strong feelings either for or against the bill and his letter was to suggest that they ought develop a definite point of view quickly and make it known to representatives in Washington. He says that few people realized that under the present law, the Social Security tax was scheduled to rise to almost double the present rate, with an employee presently paying two percent, while starting in 1960, that would rise to 2.75 percent, and in 1965, 3.25 percent, in 1970, 3 percent, and in 1975, 4.5 percent. The employer paid a similar amount so that the total tax in 1975 would be 8.5 percent. For the previous year, the Social Security system had been operating in the red, with more outgo than income. The Government said it would continue in that way until the ensuing increase in tax would occur in 1960. He indicates that when the Government operated with deficit financing, it was inflationary, true of the Federal budget and proportionately true of Social Security. Both were now operating in the red, as it would also be for the ensuing year, producing increased inflationary pressures. He indicates that an increase in benefits was politically popular because it looked like the recipient would receive something for nothing or for very little and thus legislators were naturally inclined to vote for such an increase, unless thinking people would let them know that they did not favor such action. He urges communicating therefore with Congressman Charles Jonas on the matter and with Senator Sam J. Ervin, as well as Representative Jere Cooper of Tennessee, chairman of the committee handling the legislation.
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