The Charlotte News

Thursday, August 21, 1958

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota this date greeted with approbation a report that the U.S. appeared ready to announce a temporary suspension of nuclear weapons testing. The Senator, chairman of the Senate Disarmament subcommittee, said in an interview that his staff had been informed that such a step was under consideration. He said: "A temporary suspension on our part as a prelude to negotiation of a safeguarded agreement would be good, sound public policy. It would win us friends around the world, and put us out in front in the disarmament field." The White House declined to confirm or deny the report, which had come from an informed anonymous source the previous night, indicating that the Government hoped to be able to suspend testing temporarily in an effort to enable a permanent international agreement for test suspension, with adequate safeguards for inspection. The U.S. had been conducting a nuclear test series in the Pacific, having begun in the spring and scheduled to end soon. The Soviet Union had announced a unilateral test suspension the previous March at the end of its test series, and Britain had been preparing to start a new series of tests in the Pacific. Scientists from both Western and Communist nations announced agreement on Tuesday on a technical system for policing any test suspension, an agreement which had been reached after seven weeks of talks in Geneva. The informed source indicated that a U.S. announcement of a temporary suspension would come from those East-West technical talks. White House press secretary James Hagerty said the previous night that, as the President had indicated the previous day at his press conference, the results to date of the technical talks at Geneva had been encouraging, but the experts had not yet rendered their report and thus no conclusions based on the report had been or could have been made. His statement did not rule out the possibility that the U.S. would announce such a temporary suspension of testing, possibly within the ensuing few days.

In London, it was announced by the British Foreign Office that it had authorized the delivery of some light military equipment to the Iraq regime.

Also in London, it was reported also by the British Foreign Office that Sudan had banned flights over its territory by British aircraft carrying troops or military equipment.

In Amman, it was reported that a Jordanian military court this date had convicted five young Arabs of exploding bombs in the city and sentenced two of them to death. One of the defendants was a 19-year old young woman who received a 7 1/2 year sentence commuted to three years.

In Nicosia, Cyprus, leaflets were scattered in the streets this date calling on Greek Cypriots to be ready for the "great battle against the new [British] plan" for Cyprus.

In Hong Kong, a newspaper stated this date that it was Communist Chinese-made jets and not Soviet MIG fighters which had shot down two American-made Chinese Nationalist F-84 Thunderjets over Kwantung on July 29.

Before the Senate Select Committee investigating misconduct of labor and management, Robert Baker again testified this date, saying that he did not use Teamster money to support a convicted slayer in luxury in Miami in 1955 and could not remember exactly where he got the money. Mr. Baker was a $125 per week Teamsters organizer at the time and he said the funds that he had expended on Ruth Brougher, who had testified previously, were nothing like the $20,000 to $25,000 to which she had testified had been spent on her. He said that the figure was more like $7,000 to $8,000. Pressed by the investigators to provide the source of the money, he said that he could not remember and did not wish to perjure himself. Mr. Baker, an ex-convict described by police as a one-time muscle-man on the New York waterfront, said that he had no recollection of threatening to kill Mrs. Brougher's attorney or trying to strangle a Chicago hotel man who had complained about his bill. But he did not flatly deny those allegations by other witnesses. He did deny giving money to her lawyer in an effort to fix her appeal from a manslaughter conviction, on which she was presently serving a 15-year sentence for the July, 1954 Miami parking-lot slaying of her boyfriend, whom she claimed had been pistol-whipping her and was shot in a struggle over the weapon. Mr. Baker said that he could determine the source of only $4,000 of the money he had spent on her in less than a year while she waited for her appeal to be determined while living in plush surroundings. He said that he had borrowed that much from one individual who was described by him as a "boss" at a nightclub in Hollywood, Fla., operated by Frank Costello, Joe Adonis and other mobsters. He said that the rest of the money had been borrowed from a few people, whose names he could not recall. He vaguely remembered borrowing some money from a St. Louis bank, but then could not recall the details. He had initially denied asking Mike "Trigger Mike" Copola, a notorious Miami mobster, for money to help Mrs. Brougher.

In St. Louis, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals had granted a stay this date of its decision which reversed the District Court judge's order to delay by 2 1/2 years further integration at Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., and had ordered integration to proceed again forthwith at the start of the school year.

In Little Rock, Governor Orval Faubus this date placed the Arkansas Legislature on standby for a possible call on Monday to hold a special session to deal with the integration situation at Central High School. It appeared that the Little Rock School Board had failed the previous night to convince the Governor that it was doing all it could to delay the re-entry of seven black students to the high school, which would begin its school year on September 2. Riots had broken out the previous fall when nine black students had first enrolled at the high school, prompting President Eisenhower to send paratroopers to restore order with bayonets. He had also federalized the Arkansas National Guard, deployed by the Governor to prevent the admission of the black students following the disturbances on the first day of registration for classes. The Governor this date said that he planned to send messages to every member of the Legislature but did not yet want to make the official call for the special session. A member of the Legislature said that it was his understanding that it would convene at noon on Monday. The legislators presumably would be presented with bills designed to halt integration. A pupil assignment law already was in effect, but the School Board had not yet used it. The Governor refused to indicate what form any new bills might take. He met with the School Board and the superintendent for nearly two hours the previous night, but in a subsequent press conference, refused to say what had been discussed. The school superintendent, Virgil Blossom, the previous night had announced that the Board had petitioned the Circuit Court of Appeals for the stay, pending submission of a petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court, which Mr. Blossom said would take about ten days to prepare.

In Pasadena, Calif., recent Supreme Court decisions had raised doubt that the country had a government of laws and not of men, according to chief justices of nine state supreme courts. They accused the U.S. Supreme Court of assuming the role of a policy-maker without proper judicial restraint. They represented both Northern and Southern states, presenting a 36-page report the previous day to the annual Conference of Chief Justices, with delegates from all 48 states, plus Hawaii and Puerto Rico. A resolution offered with the report urged the Supreme Court to exercise judicial restraint in differentiating between Constitutional rights and powers, and local self-government. A vote on the resolution was to occur the following Saturday. The report said in part: "We believe that strong state and local governments are essential to the effective functioning of the American system of federal government… It is strange, indeed, to reflect that under a Constitution which provides for a system of checks and balances and of distribution of powers between national and state governments, one branch of the government—the Supreme Court—should attain the immense and, in many respects, dominant power which it now wields. It has long been an American boast that we have a government of laws, not of men. We believe that any study of recent decisions of the Supreme Court will raise at least considerable doubt as to the validity of that boast. At times, the Supreme Court manifests, or seems to manifest, an impatience with the slow workings of our federal system. That impatience may extend to an unwillingness to wait for Congress to make clear its intention, to exercise the powers conferred upon it under the Constitution. In the light of the immense power of the Supreme Court and its practical non-reviewability in most instances, no more important obligation rests upon it, in our view, than that of careful moderation in the exercise of its policy-making role…"

In Charleston, S.C., North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges had declared this date that the nation's colleges and universities had to raise the quality of education and limit student bodies to "qualified" students. In a speech prepared for delivery to the annual Southern Conference on the Financing of Higher Education, the Governor said that instruction ought be improved irrespective of what some other nation or international neighbor had been able to accomplish or might be able to do in the future. He said that taxpayers and voluntary contributors to education were "entitled to insist that the institution admit only those persons who have demonstrated reasonable qualifications and a reasonable degree of interest in obtaining a higher education." He said that major needs of institutions of higher education were an adequate physical plant to house and educate the students and teaching personnel who could be adequately paid. He suggested that the Conference re-examine the issue of how many pupils a single instructor could adequately teach, indicating that some classes ought not have more than a dozen students while other classes could be effectively taught with ten times that number. He also believed that colleges were likely not doing a sufficient job in informing prospective students of available scholarship funding, including loans.

On the editorial page, "Eisenhower Refuses To Face Facts" finds that the President's "sermon on integration" had badly missed its mark, suggesting that he was not reading the newspapers, answering a call for leadership with platitudes and empty threats, not coming to grips with a worsening social crisis.