The Charlotte News
Monday, July 7, 1958
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Guantánamo, Cuba, that Fidel Castro's rebels still held 36 U.S. citizens and one Canadian this date, with hope continuing that their release would be accelerated. There were strong indications that the rebels were in no hurry to effect the releases because the presence of the Americans had brought a halt to air attacks by the forces of El Presidente Fulgencio Batista. Four American civilians and one Canadian had been brought by U.S. Navy helicopter to the Guantánamo Navy Base the previous day. The rebels had freed four Americans and a Canadian the prior Wednesday and three Americans on Saturday night. One of those released the previous day had said that arrangements were being made to send trucks into the jungle mountains for the 30 U.S. sailors and Marines kidnaped from the area of Guantánamo. Park Wollam, U.S. Consul in Santiago, continued his negotiations with rebel leader Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, who had directed the kidnapings. The released man said that Raul Castro had told them that there were still many more things to be discussed before all of the captives could be released. The motive for the kidnapings had reportedly been to pressure the U.S. not to supply the forces of Sr. Batista with fuel or ammunition, with the released man stating that Mr. Wollam had convinced Raul Castro that the U.S. was not aiding the Government forces trying to put down the rebellion.
In Moscow, it was reported that the Soviet Union had released this date nine U.S. airmen whose military transport had been forced down inside Soviet Armenia 11 days earlier. U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson said that the men had been turned over to U.S. authorities on the Soviet-Iranian border. It left nine U.S. Army soldiers in the hands of Communist East Germans after their helicopter had strayed into East Germany on June 7. The Soviet news agency Tass had reported that the airmen released from Armenia had been delivered to the U.S. Army representative at a border town in the Azerbaijan region just west of the Caspian Sea. Their plane, a C-118 transport, had been forced to land by Soviet fighters, and, according to a Soviet announcement made the same day, the plane had burned on the ground, it not being clear whether it was because of fighter action or because the crew had done so deliberately to keep it from Soviet possession. The Soviet Union had officially protested the flight over Soviet territory as a frontier violation and the U.S. had replied that there had been no such intention and that the transport had become lost because of a navigational error during inclement weather.
The aides of Bernard Goldfine had charged this date that the hotel room of his secretary had been burglarized, after previously discovering a microphone placed in a position to eavesdrop on conversations of the aides. Jack Lotto, a public relations man newly hired by Mr. Goldfine, had said that bank records, correspondence, lists and documents had been taken from the room of the secretary, Mildred Paperman, and that a report had been made of it to the police. Mr. Lotto said that they felt the burglary was a continuation of the "Gestapo tactics being employed against Mr. Goldfine and his associates." He said that the missing papers were to have been used by Mr. Goldfine during his appearance the following day before the House subcommittee investigating the relations between him and White House chief of staff Sherman Adams. Mr. Goldfine and his assistants did not know how much was missing and consequently could not say yet whether it would interfere with his testimony. The discovery of the microphone had already plunged the investigation into a serious controversy. Baron Shacklette, the chief investigator for the House subcommittee, had been at the other end of the microphone wires, along with assistant to columnist Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson. Representative Oren Harris of Arkansas, chairman of the subcommittee, said that it would get to the bottom of the bugging and the burglary. The subcommittee had not yet determined whether to fire Mr. Shacklette. Roger Robb, Mr. Goldfine's attorney, had demanded examination under oath of anyone who might know whether confidential data had been obtained through the tactics. Mr. Lotto said that Mr. Robb had also complained to the FBI about the bugging and that the Bureau was investigating. Mr. Lotto, registered in the room where the microphine was discovered, said that he had filed a complaint with the U.S. Attorney. The secretary of Mr. Goldfine had been living in a room at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel. She said that her room appeared to have been ransacked and that she had found an empty cigarette package. Mr. Lotto said that she returned to the room late the previous night after having been in Boston during the weekend and had gone to bed, had closed a bolt on the door connecting an adjoining room and had thought nothing of it at the time. The adjoining room had been occupied by a member of the staff of Mr. Goldfine who was not there the previous day. She said that she had discovered the loss of the papers in the morning when she had gone to a closet. Mr. Lotto said that sealed letters marked "personal" had been broken open. Mr. Goldfine was reported by his aides to be still in bed, indicating that he did not go to bed the previous night until 5:00 a.m. because of the excitement generated by the discovery of the microphone.
During the Fourth of July weekend, traffic deaths had totaled 364, drownings 179 and deaths from miscellaneous accidents 93, for a total of 636 fatalities, after traffic deaths had tapered off during the closing hours prior to midnight Sunday. Late reports of highway deaths would still increase the total, but indications were that it would fall short of the record toll which had been predicted by the National Safety Council for a three-day July 4 holiday period. The final count was likely to be close to the number killed during the recent Memorial Day holiday, when there had been 371 traffic deaths in three days, a new record for that holiday. The traffic death toll for the first two long weekends of the year had been at least 735, whereas during the first five months of the year, traffic deaths had averaged 88 per day. The Council had estimated that there would be 410 traffic deaths during the 78-hour holiday period, with the record for a three-day July 4 holiday having been 407, set in 1955, while the record low since the end of World War II had been 225 in 1947. Several multiple-death traffic accidents had been reported, with one of the most deadly having occurred near Junction City, Kans., on Saturday, when six persons had been killed in the collision of two cars. Drownings had taken a heavy toll, surpassing the 132 reported during the Memorial Day weekend. Deaths from miscellaneous causes had also been higher than the 88 reported during the Memorial Day holiday. A fireworks plant had blown up in Portland, Ore., killing one child and injuring at least 20, but there had been no deaths reported from individual fireworks displays. An Associated Press survey during a non-holiday period covering 78 hours, between June 19 and June 22, had recorded 339 traffic deaths, 18 drownings and 63 deaths from miscellaneous accidents. The overall total of 520 deaths for that earlier time frame was more than 100 fewer than the combined total during the July 4 weekend.
Congressional leaders, aiming for an early August adjournment, mapped out a heavy work schedule this date as the Congress returned from its last prolonged 1958 holiday.
In Algiers, it was reported that small bomb attacks had flared throughout the country over the weekend, with French authorities indicating that the situation was "rather lively".
In Tunis, Tunisia was getting ready to establish diplomatic relations with Russia and Communist China, although its Government planned to remain friendly with the West.
In Belgrade, Yugoslavia, President Tito and Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic this date were reported ready to welcome to their conference on the Adriatic island of Brioni Greek Foreign Minister Evangelos Averoff.
In Düsseldorf, West Germany, an election victory for West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats in the largest state of the country was seen this date as an endorsement of the Chancellor's plans to provide the nation's new Army with atomic weapons.
In London, it was reported that a leading British airman had said that the late Ernst Heinkel had told him that Germany was plotting a third world war against the Western allies, with the Soviet Union on the German side.
In Boston, a million dollar waterfront fire the previous night and early this date had destroyed two piers, two warehouses, about a dozen small vessels, ten trucks and several loaded freight cars, with two firefighters having been injured.
In Durham, N.C., a bomb of some type had been thrown through a window of the home of the chairman of the city's Human Relations Committee the previous night, shattering windows when it had exploded. The Reverend Warren Carr, chairman of the group which had been set up to promote understanding and better relations between blacks and whites, told police that the blast had occurred shortly after midnight. Neither the minister nor his wife, who were alone in the house, had been injured.
In Long Beach, N.C., a father and daughter had bade each other goodbye when realizing that they were drowning in the Atlantic the previous day. The father, however, had been rescued by another man, who had drowned in a vain effort to rescue the daughter. The other man, of Southport, N.C., previously had rescued another daughter, age ten, who had been swept off her feet by current on Long Beach Inlet. The drowned daughter was 14. The rescued daughter had first ventured into deep water and was knocked down by the current, with the older sister trying to help her as she was also swept by the current, their screams having attracted their father and the man who attempted to make the rescues. The man had towed the younger daughter to shore and the father had then sought to rescue the older daughter, going in several times and, eventually, believing that they were going to drown, had said goodbye to each other. After the other man had rescued the father, he reached the older daughter far out in the water and witnesses said that they appeared to struggle and then disappeared beneath the waves of the beach near Southport and Wilmington.
In Charlotte, nine new jurors had been sworn in this date and taken their places on a grand jury investigating alleged irregularities in City Recorder's Court. A judge from Tarboro charged the jury and ordered the 18 members to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into the affairs of the court. A representative of an auditing firm said that his company was ready to begin another investigation of the court's records, as he was picking up records this date to provide investigation back through 1952. The first investigation by the firm had gone back to 1955 and the City Council had ordered the second investigation to 1952. State Bureau of Investigation agents were expected to appear before the grand jury during the afternoon and bring them up to date on the investigation.
J. A. Daly of The News reports that Charlotte's realistic management men in traditional finance and industry had turned to optimistic thinking, influenced by the numerous bright spots in the business of Charlotte and the area during the early part of the third quarter of 1958. The economic outlook for the country had bright spots also, creating widespread hopefulness for a decisive upturn in the economy, beset by a recession. Steel magazine had said in an editorial that "recovery is in sight" for the metal working industry. Analysis of many reports and statistical summaries showed that the current encouraging conditions presented a favorable contrast with the major recessionary factors which had prevailed in the economy a year earlier, when sentiment was being chilled by the emphasis on the "tight money" trend, whereas now, "easy money" and a record volume of funds for loan investments were being emphasized. Six months earlier, emphasis had been given to the severe decline in employment, drastic and progressive reductions in inventories and broad cutbacks in construction, whereas now, employment was slowly rising after stabilizing a month earlier, and the inventory trend had quietly turned upward, with construction at record volume. He reports that each of those tendencies was discernible in the Charlotte area economy as well as across the nation. Analysts of the industrial and financial institutions in Charlotte still insisted that the two Carolinas had experienced during the worst of the recession several months earlier much less financial stress than had other areas. Residents of Charlotte had attained a new record in accumulated savings, but nevertheless, checks drawn on individual bank accounts in Charlotte continued to show increases month by month over the totals a year earlier. In May, the total of debits had been officially reported as $474,351,000, compared with $447,212,000 in May, 1957. Bank clearings in Charlotte, another indicator of business trends, had totaled $888,777,445 during the previous six weeks, whereas the total for the same weeks a year earlier had been $867,225,776. Building permits in Charlotte and its perimeter areas, as recorded in City Hall, had totaled $4,489,708 in May, compared to $2,258,213 a year earlier. The North Carolina Labor Department had described construction as booming across the state as a whole. The last weekly report from the Charlotte agency of the North Carolina Employment Security Commission had shown that only 323 new claims for unemployment compensation had been received in that week, with the total initial claims in the same week in 1957 having been 421. In the second week of January of the current year, the agency had received 1,297 claims, with 1,059 more having been received the following week. The Charlotte agency of the ESC had reported that its latest weekly figures showed 2,462 continuing claims for compensation from unemployed men and women, compared with 1,979 in the same week of 1957, the total continuing claims having been 3,094 for the second week of January, 2,727 for the first week of February and 3,068 for the first week of March. Many thousands of dollars in benefits had been paid by ESC to the unemployed of Charlotte, those payments having provided substantial support for the area's economy while actual employment remained at high levels. The economic strength of the city and its population was reflected impressively in the recent report from the public school system that 45.6 percent of Charlotte's 1,158 June graduates from high schools had already been accepted for entrance to colleges or universities, with the official forecasts having been that the rate would be increased to around 57 percent by the end of August, which would be about seven percentage points higher than in 1957.
In London, it was reported that nine-year old Prince Charles had suffered a reversal in his deal to straighten out his shaky finances at the school candy shop at Cheam, a boarding school in nearby Berkshire. Queen Elizabeth allowed the Prince to have money each three-month term and, as with the other boys, he kept it at what was called the bank in the candy shop. With three weeks left in the term, Charles had discovered that he had no money left in the bank. He had thought of a way out of the predicament, staging a sale of some of his belongings. Other boys, aware of the excellent opportunity to buy royal souvenirs cheap, came to the sale. Delighted with the result, the Prince had visited the candy shop, once more dreaming, according to friends, of chocolate fudge and other delicacies. But he was not allowed to make any purchases, as the woman in charge of the shop knew that the Prince had exhausted his candy funds. He had to return the money to his friends and his friends had to return their purchases. "And, the boy who will be king has no sweets." The Queen and Prince Philip, in sending him to school with other boys, had insisted that he be treated the same as any other student, and he had been.
It was like that time when we used
our $1 precipitously on a Friday to buy a 1962 Cadillac, which did
not even have moving wheels once we got it home and put it together,
a real piece of crap. We begged our mama to loan us an advance so
that we could buy something decent for $1.49, with moving wheels—for which, had we waited a day until Saturday, we would have had sufficient funds to afford the purchase price. But
she refused, saying that we had spent our money profligately and
would have to suffer for a week without movable wheels. Never buy a
Cadillac on spec
On the editorial page, "Veterans' Pensions: The Costly Paradox" indicates that no one would begrudge truly deserving veterans adequate benefits, with those seriously disabled during military service due every reasonable consideration.
But it finds an incongruity between that ideal and the manner in which veterans' pensions were handled in the country, with millions spent on veterans with insignificant disabilities who had suffered no loss of earning power, while seriously injured veterans who needed generous help were being shortchanged, a tragic and costly paradox.
Few Congressmen had the courage to challenge the situation, much less correct it, as it was far easier to extend pensions to the undeserving than to restrict them to the deserving while providing the latter a fair shake.
John E. Booth, writing in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, had said in an article how the most powerful lobby in Washington, that of the veterans, was bleeding every taxpayer to subsidize veterans who neither needed the money nor deserved it. Mr. Booth had a 10 percent disability for a minor ailment resulting from service, but had refused to collect the payments because his ability to earn a living had not been impacted.
Of the 1.8 million veterans of the Korean War and World War II presently receiving compensation for disabilities incurred during service, well over a million suffered from no more than minor issues. Those were the 10 to 20 percent who received between $19 and $38 per month, a high proportion of whom had suffered no loss of earning power, according to doctors who had studied many of their cases.
As Mr. Booth had pointed out, those who were totally disabled, lying flat on their backs at home, unable to work and being a burden to their families for the rest of their lives, received a maximum of $225 per month, able to go higher in some cases, even so, inadequate.
It urges that the system ought be completely overhauled and that the totally disabled veterans ought be increased in benefits by cutting down on the payments to those who had suffered no loss of earning capacity. Yet, the major veterans organizations and their powerful lobbies were generally opposed to that approach and members of Congress found it difficult to resist their political pressures.
It suggests that it was time for some pressure from the rank-and-file, including among veterans, who viewed the waste of the taxpayer money with considerable and wholly justified alarm.
"That's One… Shall We Try for Two?" indicates that now that Congress had passed the bill to provide statehood for Alaska, it could properly turn its attention to the equally convincing case of the Territory of Hawaii, with most of the arguments advanced in favor of statehood for Alaska also being applicable to Hawaii.
Both Democratic and Republican platforms had called for statehood for both territories and the President, in his 1957 budget message, had repeated requests for Hawaiian statehood, indicating that Alaska ought be admitted "subject to area limitations and other safeguards for the conduct of defense activities…"
Hawaii's 1950 population had been 499,794, more than double that of Alaska. Both territories had great economic potential which could be utilized fully under their own administration. Opinion polls regularly favored the admission of Hawaii and the House had passed Hawaiian statehood bills by heavy majorities in 1947 and again in 1950.
The issue of contiguity of the territories had lost force with the addition of Alaska. There had been honest fears raised regarding Communists in Hawaii, largely by a Senate subcommittee's 1957 report on "conspiratorial forces" allegedly controlling two labor unions. But no evidence of Communist participation in government had ever been revealed and a 1953 House report had said that in 1950 there had been no more than 90 Communists in Hawaii, a territory nearly twice the size of Texas. The territory, traditionally Republican, had elected in 1956 its first Democratic delegate since 1934.
At present, the Hawaiian statehood bill was bottled up in a House committee and it would be difficult to obtain final passage before the adjournment of the present Congress, but it finds the matter deserving of early and earnest consideration.
"Vice Presidency" quotes Representative Frances Bolton of Ohio as having stated: "A woman vice president? I think that would be a mistake right now. Although a woman could do very well what Dick Nixon is doing—go around and be friendly."
It suggests that if the job was not big enough, she should just say so.
Well, we just got through with four years of the first female Vice-President, and everything went quite well, unless, of course, you dwell in the land of Nod, where all Democrats are evildoers bent on coddling criminals and encouraging crime, while your grand hero of the extreme right pardons and coddles some of the wickedest of criminals, those bent on actual overthrow of the U.S. Government over a faked "stolen" election and those convicted of conspiracy in human trafficking of minors, and then sends the military and federalizes state National Guard units to patrol and wage "war" on Democratic-controlled American cities while claiming a concentration of crime only therein, focusing the microscope only where desired, ignoring the fact that all large cities, for time immemorial, have been cesspools for the conjuring of criminal activity of all kinds, not that some small and medium-sized towns have not been also, as crime is as old as humanity itself and could never be eradicated without so restricting society and the civil liberties of the citizenry as to make life intolerable and produce at the head of it all a dictator, a new Caesar, who will ultimately be despised so much as to be deposed one way or the other. These are immutable laws of society and human nature, known by everyone who has ever studied history to any significant degree, both modern and ancient.
And we do not in peacetime suspend the Constitution temporarily, Supreme Court majority formed solely through McConnell's ad hoc, unprecedented rules of judicial nominees implemented in 2016 and 2020, so that your supreme dictator can consolidate and wield unprecedented power instructed by the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, based on a tenuous plurality of inattentive voters who obviously cannot make the connections between the preservation of civil liberties for all and prosperity for all as bedrock principles for any society to succeed and not to sink into third-world decrepitude at the bottom and insouciant decadence at the top, that plurality now reduced in eight months to a spare minority of right-wing kooks, all onboard the on-time trains headed for a fascist dictatorship, as long as it is their own unschooled ideas being implemented, the rest being considered inimical evil brought by dehumanized bogeymen conjured somewhere between the ice cubes in the wet bar and the other hallucinogens consumed down on the bayous and in the hill country where the Smokeys are either loath to go or have been paid off sufficiently with the lucre to look the other way except regarding the outsiders coming in as troublemakers with their bogeyman evil ways, on whom the eyes will always be focused with extreme microscopy, finding the fibrous strands to connect the presuppositions of untoward intent and if not, supplying the necessary missing parts of the picture from the miscellany accumulated through time via the tv and other mass media, forming their "common sense" handed down from ol' grandpa who also watched the tv incessantly as a new religion.
"Can Nothing Be Done about Summer?" finds that the poetic muse appeared to take a vacation during summer, though there was much written about summers, but mostly summers of the past and the quaint practices then prevailing, such as pulling the buttermilk from the well and having a draught about making ice cream in an old hand-freezer under the cottonwood tree, or the joys of the old swimming hole. Nobody had much to say about summer weather, which was the central part of summer more than any other season.
It was hot, but people generally did not talk about the heat, though thinking of it, the weather by unspoken consent simply being held too loathsome to discuss.
It finds it understandable but suggests that if no one talked about it, there was nothing that could be done about it. The Atomic Energy Commission had admitted the horrors of the atom bomb and had promptly gone out and made a "clean" bomb. The iniquity of socialism had been discussed so thoroughly that there had now been a sensible suggestion that crime be socialized to prove that it did not pay. It thus questions whether anything could be done about summer.
A piece from the London Daily Mail, titled "'A Little More Humility'", indicates that despite a vast complex of curative and welfare services, crime flourished, including very serious crime, and the jails were so full that the walls almost bulged. It finds that something had gone wrong.
Money was being spent on education while producing the "blackboard jungle". It finds the symptoms of the present "Age of Unreason" to be found also on a much wider scale. There was never so much matrimonial guidance or so many divorces, so much knowledge of the mind with so much mental illness, so many victories over disease with so many violent deaths. Never before had people been able to mingle with those of other countries so easily, or been so restricted when they did.
It had been said that personal contacts ought make for good will, but it had seen the two most terrible wars ever fought and yet now all nations could be silenced forever.
It finds it easy to become cynical but instead favors analysis, to find the reasons for the paradoxes. It suggests that it would be absurd to repudiate new theories and philosophies, psychology, modern ideas on the upbringing of children, the treatment of criminals, etc., all of which were more than fads and fancies, embodying the thought and advance of the times, though not to be regarded as the beginning and the end of knowledge.
It finds that it would be wrong to hold that psychology alone could deal with criminal tendencies, equally wrong that punishment alone was the answer. There had to be a sense of proportion, that while recognizing that the new methods were of great value, there should also be a recognition that the older ones had their place. It counsels trying to believe that the present generation did not know everything and that perhaps there were still some things to be gleaned from the wisdom of the past.
"Our age has invented many marvels but it has not yet discovered the secret of human perfection. Until it does, a little less arrogance, a little more humility might give us the key to many problems."
Drew Pearson indicates that the public was becoming so accustomed to hearing that Project Vanguard had failed to get off the ground again that they scarcely paid any attention to the routine announcement that "the second stage failed to ignite", with another 20-inch satellite going to the bottom of the Atlantic. The latest failure, however, had been the worst scientific defeat which the country had suffered in its space race with the Soviet Union. The small satellite which Navy scientists had been seeking to place in orbit had been packed with instruments with which they hoped to obtain vital secrets from space. The Russians, by having put up three very large Sputniks, the second carrying a dog and the last a virtual flying laboratory, had been learning vast amounts of information about outer space.
The Russians had been tantalizing U.S. scientists by hinting a few things which they had learned, but not providing any significant data about cosmic rays, submicroscopic particles, etc. They had especially not turned over any data concerning conditions which might affect the ability of human beings to live in outer space. American scientists had been able to detect the radio signals from Sputnik III and analyze them, but did not know how the instruments inside the satellite were calibrated and therefore could reach few scientific conclusions. Reluctantly, they had concluded that the coded information from the satellite could be interpreted only by the Russians.
Unfortunately, the 20-inch ball which had been launched into the ocean by a Vanguard the previous week was the last of the fully instrumented satellites of the International Geophysical Year, which would expire at the end of 1958. The Naval Research Laboratory had another satellite on which it had been working, but it would not be ready prior to October. They had been rushing work on others, but two years of patient work on instrumentation had been lost in the recent abortive attempt. The U.S. would now attempt to fire a couple of more satellites, one made of plastic for the purpose of measuring the earth's gravitational field and another to be equipped with a television instrument to test how satellites could be used to scan cloud cover and help make weather forecasts.
If those satellites were successful, the American public would be kept superficially satisfied, but the satellites would not tell the kind of vital data which the Russians were now obtaining from Sputnik III. The Russians, already months ahead of the U.S. in space technology, were now lengthening their advantage by many more months and it would not be before October that the U.S. could begin to discover some of the information which the Russians already knew.
The unpleasant truth was that the U.S. was falling further behind every day in the race into space and its only chance to catch up would be to try to send a human pilot into space with the new hypersonic 3,600 mph X-15 plane. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics might send a volunteer pilot in that craft to the frontier of space, 80 miles in altitude, as early as August, but it would be a risk because there was no idea what conditions prevailed at that altitude. (We had one of those planes and its launch plane.)
U.S. scientists were, however, getting desperate, realizing that the Russians might also be getting ready to put men into space and, with their superior knowledge of conditions beyond the earth's atmosphere, were in a position to design more efficient rockets and expand their superiority over the lagging U.S. He concludes that despite the complacency of the public and the optimistic overtones of the Administration, the U.S. was not catching up with the Russians.
Meanwhile, though it had garnered little notice in the fledgling space program, the Eagle had landed
Joseph Alsop indicates that the dangerous Lebanese situation had produced at least one good result, providing the best insight to the strengths and weaknesses of the character and situation of Secretary of State Dulles, who now made American foreign policy almost alone. From the foreign perspective, Secretary Dulles appeared as a most regrettable Secretary, while seen from Washington quite differently, looking like "the only tussock in the swamp."
He had played that latter role when the trouble in Lebanon had begun, initially showing the firmness and decisiveness which set him apart from the rest of the present Government. He had joined British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd in making a grave commitment to the Lebanese Government, that if the need were to arise and if the Lebanese Government asked for help from the West, an Anglo-American military expedition would be sent to protect its independence, about as serious a promise as the Administration had ever made to any foreign government.
Before making that promise, Secretary Dulles had informed Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, but he finds that it would be exaggerating to say that he had consulted him. Mr. Dulles had also obtained the consent of the White House, but the President in present times almost automatically consented to anything which Mr. Dulles proposed. The whole responsibility ultimately for the promise to the Lebanese was with Mr. Dulles alone. He made the promise with his eyes open, knowing that Anglo-American military intervention in Lebanon would be unpleasant and risky. He had quite correctly argued, however, that if the worst situation arose, intervention would be less risky and unpleasant than the total destruction of all of the Western interests throughout the Middle East, with that catastrophe to be the certain price of allowing Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser another victory in Beirut.
Secretary Dulles had thus started with the decision which was wise. But it was unwise, if not criminal, to make such a promise unless the country were willing to follow through on its logical consequences and mean every word of it. The British Government had sought to draw the consequences from the promise which had been made, but the U.S. Government instead had insisted on repeated delays, with the main trouble having been that just about everyone in the U.S. Government except Mr. Dulles having disliked the promise, with the most important opposition coming from the U.N. delegation and the Pentagon.
The Joint Chiefs had indicated their position at the outset by doing the exact opposite of showing that the U.S. had meant every word of the promise. For some time after it was made, the Marines on duty in the Mediterranean had been left to vacation on Spanish beaches, several days of sailing time from Lebanon.
At the U.N., the nation's a secondary foreign policymaker, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had committed himself to a parliament-of-man line when the U.S. Government was making its disastrous decisions about the Suez crisis in November, 1956. He had now taken the same line about the Lebanese crisis. He apparently ought receive most of the credit for the U.N. mission to Lebanon, which had resembled the shameful Runciman mission to Czechoslovakia prior to Munich in September, 1938. A Middle Eastern version of Munich was now quite likely. Secretary Dulles still insisted that the U.S. and Britain would send troops to Lebanon rather than permit another Munich there, but if the U.S. intervened at present, it would be doing so after the price of intervention had increased many times, such that one had to conclude that the only tussock in the swamp could not support the weight of such a policy decision as Mr. Dulles had made.
Marquis Childs, in Moscow, indicates that no aspect of Soviet society was more puzzling to the Western observer than the status of religion. While it had been reported that something resembling a religious revival had been taking place, with increasing numbers of young people attending church and participating in church ceremonies, it appeared to be an exaggeration. But in religion, as in many other fields, Communism was rediscovering the Russian past and adapting it to its own objectives.
He finds that a striking example of that which had been taking place was in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, which had once been the primary center for both the Christian and Jewish religions, known as "the Russian Jerusalem". To visit the Monastery of Lavra on the outskirts of Kiev was to have some idea of the transition taking place and the different layers of development which coexisted. Part of the monastery dated back to the 11th Century when its deep caves had been occupied by famous hermit monks, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 having been one of the two or three holiest places in Russia. After the Revolution, when there was aggressive atheism, electric lights had been placed in the caves and the mummified saints and other objects of religious veneration had been made a kind of chamber of horrors to illustrate the superstition and usefulness, from the Communist perspective, of religion.
Since the end of World War II, part of Lavra, including the caves and one of the churches, had been restored to the church, the electric lights having been removed and the devout as well as tourists and sightseers carrying lighted tapers which shed a sort of glow on the coffins, with their glass lids containing the mummified bodies of elders and venerables attired in richly embroidered vestments.
For the faithful, mainly older peasant women from the surrounding countryside, those saints aroused the deepest veneration, as they kissed the glass cover of the coffins and fell on their knees, crossing themselves repeatedly before going on down the dark, winding corridor to another recess where rested another saintly mummy. The courtyard at the principal entrance to the caves looked like a scene out of Dostoievsky, as bearded monks, some of them young, came and went, kerchiefed peasant women sat by the whitewashed wall or lay sleeping on the ground, some of them having traveled considerable distances for the pilgrimage. Young priests were being trained in a seminary which was part of Lavra.
In the part of the monastery retained by the state, steel scaffolding surrounded the 300-foot bell tower. Restoration was to be completed the following year. The Germans, four months after they had occupied Kiev, having held it for more than two years, had blown up the 11th Century Cathedral of the Assumption with its early frescoes, such that it could not be restored.
The restoration at Lavra and the work being done by religious movements in other cities represented a considerable investment at a time when the state was straining to build industry and agriculture. One could only conclude that since nothing was done in Russia for whim or caprice, the investment, though small relative to that spent on industry and transportation, was considered worthwhile if only to recall the greatness of the Russian past.
In rediscovering that past, part of the theme of patriotism, an important element in the present ideology, the Communist Party was taking little or no risk. Young people almost invariably told visitors that in Russia very few people believed in God. Yet at the same time, the search for new forms to provide life a broader and even happier content suggested that there was a realization of the need for what the church once had provided. The Young Communist League, with up to 20 million members under 30 years old, had recently been encouraging wedding ceremonies at the registry office, with the bride and groom in formal dress, including presents and a wedding repast.
The Russian church had more often than not in times past been an instrument of the state. At the time of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, followed by the world indignation which had accompanied its suppression, the statements from the church authorities in Moscow closely paralleled those of the state. But religion was a major fact, with Russia claiming to be the fourth Moslem power in the world, not unimportant in Communist relations with the Arab world.
During his recent tour of the Soviet Union, Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic was said to have been deeply impressed with the status of Moslems in Central Asia.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the German invaders had taken a heavy toll, liquidating between 70,000 and 80,000 Jews in Kiev alone. One synagogue was functioning in that city at present. With so much of the past destroyed, the Russian people appeared to cling to what remained, particularly as they saw it in the classical form of literature, the ballet and the theater, with an almost passionate desire. And if they had any problems in reconciling the past and the present, they were not visible on the surface.
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.