The Charlotte News

Saturday, September 20, 1958

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Taipei, Formosa, that the top U.S. commander in the Pacific, Admiral Harry Felt, had said this date that considerable progress had been made in getting supplies to Quemoy during the previous two weeks. As he spoke, the Nationalists announced that another supply convoy had gotten past the Communist artillery blockade. The Admiral had flown to Formosa for conferences with Nationalist Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek, at the start of the fifth week of the Formosa Strait crisis. The Admiral described the situation as serious, but said, "I am not discouraged." When asked whether the U.S. had sufficient forces in the Pacific to deal with any situation, he replied, "The forces are very, very strong and quite adequate." He declined to comment on whether the U.S. military build-up on Formosa would continue. The Nationalist Defense Ministry did not say how many cargo ships had reached Quemoy this date or how much cargo they had discharged. The Communist shore batteries had fired 1,034 shells while the ships were at the beach, but the Nationalists said that they had withdrawn safely back to base. Earlier, the Nationalists claimed a naval victory over Communist torpedo boats. Two Nationalist gunboats had engaged with three Communist torpedo boats shortly before midnight the previous night, according to the Defense Ministry. It claimed that one torpedo boat had been sunk in the action, 35 miles south of Quemoy, and that the other two had fled. One Nationalist gunboat had incurred slight damage, but suffered no casualties, according to the Ministry. Foreign newsmen were presently barred from the Quemoy area and were unable to confirm the claims. Earlier in the evening, Communist anti-aircraft guns had fired at Nationalist planes dropping supplies to Little Quemoy but did not hit any, according to the Ministry. The Communist bombardment of the Quemoys continued with 1,401 shells reportedly hitting the islands between midnight and 6:00 a.m. this date. Communist guns had also fired 18 shells at tiny Kaoteng Island, 160 miles northeast of Quemoy in the Matsu group of offshore islands. The Matsus had not been under bombardment in the current Communist attack, which had begun August 23—the same day we heard that damned air raid siren for the first time seering into the centrality of our brainpan, emanating from atop the pharmacy about a block away. Have we arrived in the Formosa Strait, or perhaps in Oriente Province? as Buena Vista is nearby. Where is this place? We must learn how to read a map.

The President was expected to reject promptly and firmly Premier Nikita Khrushchev's tough warning that the U.S. abandon Formosa or face "expulsion" by Communist China. In a new letter to the President the previous day, the Soviet Premier had spurned a Presidential bid to use his influence with the Chinese Communists to end the present Far Eastern crisis. Mr. Khrushchev said that Formosa belonged to Communist China and if the U.S. did not abandon Nationalist China and pull out American forces, "no other way will be left to Peoples China except expulsion of armed forces hostile to it from its own territory." The letter, handed to Richard Davis, the ranking U.S. diplomat presently in Moscow, had replied to a letter from the President of September 12. In that letter, the President had told Mr. Khrushchev that if he was really interested in working for peace, he would use his influence to get the Chinese Communists to stop aggressive acts in the Formosa area. The Communists had been bombarding the Nationalist-held offshore island of Quemoy for four weeks and they had also been threatening broader military action aimed at eventual capture of Formosa, the Nationalist stronghold, about 100 miles from the Chinese mainland. The 13-page letter of Mr. Khrushchev had been translated at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow before transmission to Washington. A summary had been broadcast by Radio Moscow even before the State Department had time to notify the President, who was still vacationing in Newport, R.I., that the new message was in transmission. At Newport, there was no immediate comment from the President regarding the note. Pending study of its full text this date, the State Department had also withheld comment. Secretary of State Dulles, returning to Washington from the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, had nothing to say about the letter the previous night. But officials noted privately that the U.S. had long been committed to the defense of Formosa against Communist attack and was supporting the Chinese Nationalists to some degree in their present efforts to stand firm on Quemoy, and the U.S., according to those officials, had no intention of abandoning Formosa under threat from Moscow. Western diplomats in Moscow said that they did not consider Mr. Khrushchev's letter to be an ultimatum, but rather a strongly worded reply to match the tone of the President's note of September 12. In that note, the President had placed full blame for the current crisis on the Chinese Communists.

General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, speaking the previous night in Washington to the Defense Orientation Conference Association, an organization representing industry, business, labor and the professions, contended that it was wrong to assume that Russia would gain an overwhelming weapons advantage over the U.S. in the coming years. He also expressed "full confidence that we are militarily superior overall to the Soviet Union today." The General took issue with critics of the Administration's military policies who contended that Russia was outdistancing the U.S. in war capacity. He said: "I do not for one minute deny that the Soviets have made great progress in the development of long-range missiles and strategic bombers. However, undoubtedly, they have had their problems in developing completely operational ballistic missiles, just as we have had. I believe that it is erroneous to compare what the Soviets might have in 1962 with what we feel certain we will have at the same time. We are still only at the threshold of the missile age. No one can predict today with accuracy what we will have tomorrow." Regarding relative U.S.-Russian strength at present, the General said: "The Soviets outnumber us in divisions and submarines. They are probably ahead of us in development—and I stress the word development—of long-range missiles. But relative military strength does not depend on numbers alone or on developmental progress. Considering our superior strategic retaliatory power, our flexible and mobile tactical power, our industrial prowess and our economic strength, I say in full confidence that we are militarily superior overall to the Soviet Union today." He was responding to previously published statements of General James Gavin and others that the U.S. was facing inevitably, because of budgetary restrictions and the failure to put forth plans which would be operational in time, a "missile gap" for the years between 1960 and 1964, as it would take that long to plan, test and put into operation the missiles necessary to meet the Soviet missile strength, especially in the ICBM category. Senator John F. Kennedy had recently made a speech on the Senate floor, which had garnered national attention, pointing out the critical gap and the danger it posed to U.S. security in the long-term.

In Paris, it was reported that Premier Charles de Gaulle had stumped through southwest France in support of his proposed new French constitution this date, while Algerian Nationalists continued a terror campaign against it.

Also in Paris, it was reported that the former French colonies of Morocco and Tunisia had placed Premier De Gaulle's Government into a diplomatic quandary this date by backing the new Algerian rebel Government in its war against France.

In Berlin, the tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung reported this date that a Russian Army lieutenant colonel had been shot down as he sought to escape from East Germany to West Berlin.

In St. Hubert, Québec, U.S. Strategic Air Command bombers had begun mock attacks on the U.S. and Canada without warning this date, in the first large-scale exercise for the new North American Air Defense System, NORAD.

In Beirut, Lebanon, Premier Sami Sohl slipped quietly out of the country this date, after two attempts had been made to kill him during Lebanon's insurrection of the prior four months.

In Detroit, General Motors, the object of a September 30 strike deadline by the UAW, this date offered the union a new three-year proposal which it said would contain 19 specific improvements. The UAW, which the previous night had announced that it also would strike at Chrysler if no contract agreement were reached soon, got the new contract offer from G.M. as negotiations resumed this date. The union had already made a new agreement with Ford. G.M. said that the new contract would be effective retroactively as of September 1 and would carry three annual pay increases totaling at least 21 cents per hour during the life of the contract. The first increase would be effective retroactively to July 1. G.M. also proposed an additional eight cents per hour for skilled trade workers and an increase of three cents per hour in the cost-of-living allowances to compensate for cost-of-living increases during the previous four months when G.M. workers had been without a contract.

Understandably not yet in the newspapers, during the afternoon of this date, at around 3:30, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while signing copies of his new book, Stride toward Freedom, at a store in New York City, was stabbed in his left chest with a letter-opener by a black woman, who was said by police to be mentally ill. She indicated that she had been after Dr. King for the previous six years and was glad that she finally got him. Just before stabbing him, she had asked Dr. King, as he autographed the books, if he was Mr. King, and after he had said that he was, she immediately produced the letter-opener and lunged at him. The minister, who had successfully led the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, was immediately transported to a Harlem hospital where he underwent surgery, and his condition, while critical, was said to be stable. When Governor Averell Harriman of New York arrived at the hospital, immediately after hearing of the news, Dr. King, himself, told the Governor that he would be all right. When arrested moments after the stabbing, the woman was found by police to have a loaded gun in her dress. The incident prompted Dr. King, a decade later, in what would turn out to be his last speech, given in Memphis on the evening of April 3, 1968, to make comment on the stabbing under the theme, "If I had sneezed…", referring to what his attending physicians had told him would have been the fatal result, had he so much as done so while the letter-opener remained in his chest, with its tip poised against his aorta. It remained in his chest throughout his transport to the hospital, until emergency room physicians could undertake the surgery delicately to remove it without making the wound worse or it becoming fatal.

We find it interesting as a commentary, perhaps, on the changed stance of The News, that in the newspaper on the following Monday or subsequent days, despite the news having been on the front pages of most newspapers of distinction in the state, including the competing Charlotte Observer, had appeared scarcely a single mention of the stabbing incident, either in the news reports published from the Associated Press or on the editorial page, save a short inside-page piece the following Monday and a scant incidental mention the following Wednesday in conjunction with a brief inside-page story that the Reverend Ralph Abernathy had spoken instead of Dr. King, who had been scheduled to speak, at the Park Center in Charlotte at an event sponsored by the NAACP, as well as two mentions in advance of that event, on Monday and Tuesday on inside pages. (Perhaps being too picky, it is worth noting that the locally written latter piece had referred twice to Dr. King as "Mr. King", while referring to Reverend Abernathy as "Dr. Abernathy", despite the latter having received no formal doctoral degree, while Dr. King had both formal Ph.D and Doctor of Divinity degrees.) While The News did not publish on Sundays, such a potentially fatal assault on a major civil rights leader in the country should have received, it seems, more than five single-column inches of type, even a day after the fact, especially given the broad coverage of general crime, near and far, on the front page on a typical day, and the fact that he was scheduled to speak in Charlotte the following Wednesday, giving local interest to the story. The News had consistently editorialized in recent years against "radical" integrationists as well as against "radical" segregationists, tending to put the two groups in relative parity, most usually placing under the "radical integrationist" category, either expressly or by implication, the NAACP and other organizations working for integration of public facilities, stressing initially the public schools, only seeking, after May, 1954, that the Southern states undertake to do what the Constitution prescribed in the 14th Amendment, as determined by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. The effort had also spread to other public facilities, such as municipal buses, municipal swimming pools, municipal parks and other such public facilities.

But there were still a lot of people in the South, and elsewhere in the country, who simply could not read, apparently believing themselves to hold a type of royal prerogative which excused them from the chore associated with the process, as well from any thought which might be stimulated by it. There was a time, as we have suggested, when we could not read, including here in 1958, but we had enough sense to understand, as we were taught properly, respect for the rights of others, regardless of their heritage, skin color, socioeconomic level, or other such distinguishing factors, as long as they were part of the human race. We were also taught that a dog is a dog is a dog. A dog does not have the same rights as human beings. That is why we sometimes are forced to leash them in the backyard without stirring too much backlash, at least among those who can think rationally, whether or not they might be able yet to read.

On the editorial page, Joseph Alsop, in Taipei, suggests that if one knew the answers to three questions, it would be easy to predict the future development of "this baffling, immensely dangerous offshore islands crisis." The first question he posits was whether Communist representatives at the Warsaw diplomatic-level conference would agree to an informal cease-fire in the Formosa Strait. He suggests that U.S. policymakers faintly hoped for a cease-fire, for if it were realized, the artillery blockade of Quemoy would be automatically lifted and the immediate problem would be solved, and the crisis would then subside into another interminable, probably fruitless, round of ambassadorial talks, as had occurred after the first crisis in 1955 involving the offshore islands.