The Charlotte News
Tuesday, September 23, 1958
TWO EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports that after the announcement the previous night by Sherman
Adams made via television and radio that he was leaving his post as
White House chief of staff, the political warfare regarding him
nevertheless was continuing, as had been apparent this date in the
wake of his statement the previous night that he had done no wrong
but was leaving in "consideration of the effect of my continuing
presence on the public scene." DNC chairman Paul Butler would
address the nation this night regarding "the other side of the
Adams case". The television and radio networks had granted free
time to Mr. Adams for ten minutes to announce his resignation the
previous night and Mr. Butler had contended that the announcement had
been partisan and political and so requested equal time. CBS said
that it would carry Mr. Butler's statement over its television and
radio networks for ten minutes during the evening and the Mutual
Broadcasting System said that it would carry the speech at the same
time it carried the speech of Mr. Adams the previous night. NBC said
it was ready to telecast and broadcast by radio Mr. Butler's remarks,
but that it had not yet received a direct request to do so. Most
Republicans endeavored to dismiss the matter of the relations of Mr.
Adams with Boston textile magnate Bernard Goldfine as one cleared up
by the exit of Mr. Adams, and to present Mr. Adams, himself, as a
victim of smears. The Democrats continued talking about "corruption"
and gave every sign that they would keep on reminding the voters of
the costly favors which Mr. Adams had accepted from his old friend
Mr. Goldfine at a time when Mr. Adams had intervened or made
inquiries to Federal regulatory agencies on behalf of Mr. Goldfine
whose companies had matters before those agencies, the Federal Trade
Commission and the Securities & Exchange Commission. Even some
Republicans had expressed the view that the departure of Mr. Adams
had taken so long that it would not do them much good at the polls in
the midterm elections in November. Mr. Adams had not given any hint
as to how quickly his resignation would become effective and neither
had there been any indication from Administration sources about a
successor as chief of staff. The political enemies of Mr. Adams had
charged that he was effectively running the Government. General Alfred
Gruenther, president of the American Red Cross, stood near the top of
potential candidates as the successor, having served as General
Eisenhower's right-hand man previously in the military. The President
had accepted the resignation of Mr. Adams "with sadness",
but Congressional Republicans facing re-election gave a collective
sigh of relief
In Lexington, Ky., it was reported that the Southern Governors Conference found the governors this date confronted with confusion and conflict regarding a positive stand, for the record, on integrating schools. At least two governors had said that they would introduce opposing resolutions for consideration at the conference. A formal expression on integration had emerged as an issue when Republican Governor Theodore McKeldin of Maryland had proposed a resolution which, in effect, would put Southern governors on record as favoring school integration. Georgia's Democratic Governor Marvin Griffin had responded with a proposal urging the Conference to protect the government "of the several states against all Federal encroachment." There was no indication when and if those resolutions actually would come to a vote of the 14 governors present. But one of them, Governor A. B. Chandler of Kentucky, saw no chance of a majority agreeing one way or the other on integration. The South's most pressing issue, absent from the business agenda, had become hotter the previous day when Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, chairman of the Conference, said that it ought be resolved by the new Congress as its first order of business the following January, telling the opening business session that the current pattern of integration conflict, if continued, could lead to a national catastrophe. Elaborating at a press conference, he said that the President could organize commissions of local citizens with authority to resolve the problem at that level and that Federal courts "simply are not equipped to determine local problems. When integration injures racial relations, I don't think it should be coerced upon any community." One function of the proposed commissions, he said, would be to serve in an advisory capacity to the courts. Meanwhile, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus said that he expected to reopen Little Rock schools the following Monday, or possibly later in the week, after a city special referendum on September 27 regarding the question of whether to reopen the schools on an integrated basis or leaving them closed. The Governor, who wanted the schools to reopen on a private, segregated basis, said: "We don't anticipate any legal difficulty, but there could be litigation brought by the Federal Government. If they want to tie everything up and keep the schools closed further, that will be their responsibility." He had closed the four high schools in Little Rock following the Supreme Court's September 12 reversal of a District Court's order for a 2 1/2 year delay in further integration of Central High School. High school pupils in Norfolk and Charlottesville, Va., had signed petitions urging that their public schools be opened so that they could get an education, having been closed by Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., recently, required under state law when they were to be integrated, as had been ordered by a U.S. District Court.
In Paris, it was reported that police this date had discovered a crude time bomb hidden atop the Eiffel Tower, the bomb having contained about 5 pounds of dynamite, powerful enough to have blown off the entire top framework consisting primarily of recently added television installations. The bomb had been discovered as the French police force redoubled its efforts to stem the wave of Algerian nationalist terrorism sweeping France in opposition to Premier Charles de Gaulle's referendum to establish a new constitution. During the morning, France's worldwide airline, Air France, had ordered its representatives throughout the world to search all freight placed aboard its airliners to prevent any possible sabotage.
In Beirut, General Fuad Shehab had been sworn in this date as the third President of independent Lebanon and had immediately pledged withdrawal of U.S. troops, which was already taking place.
In Nicosia, Cyprus, a 19-year old Greek Cypriot mother, standing in the court with a baby cradled in her arms, was sentenced to 12 years of imprisonment this date on a charge of having under her control a large quantity of bombs. The bailiff better check the kid as it may be explosive, too.
In Naples, Italy, it was reported
that former King Farouk of Egypt had a new American sports car, a
Ford Thunderbird, but was not driving it. The car had arrived in the
U.S. a few days earlier, but ever since, it had been sitting in a
garage, the possible reason being that the Italian news agency, Ansa,
had reported this date that portly King Farouk found that he did not
have enough room in its streamlined driver's seat. Well, as the 1958
model, as would be the new 1959 model, were now four-seaters, there
was a simple solution: remove one side of the back seat and extend
the front seat backward. There would, however, probably remain the
problem posed by the intermediate console, which perhaps would be
insoluble without tearing up the car beyond recognition. For without
the console and the bucket seats, there was really very little sporty about the new
generation of Thunderbirds
On the editorial page, "Old Diplomacy: Too Silly for Our Age?" indicates that as the U.S. position abroad deteriorated, the style of U.S. diplomacy deteriorated with it, finding example in the Formosa Strait situation.
The fact that the U.S. was negotiating with the Communist Chinese at Warsaw gave way in news play to back-and-forth messages between the President and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, with the President accusing Communist China of a stratagem little better than Hitler's rape of Czechoslovakia following on Munich, in 1938-39. Mr. Khrushchev, in a note the President had rejected, had made equally ridiculous remarks about the U.S. position.
Old-style diplomacy, which had been rejected after World War I for having led to it, had nevertheless never mistaken name-calling for policy and was carried out quietly between seasoned men with a high sense of personal honor and public responsibility, governed by a code of seemliness and courtesy, faked, if necessary. It finds that to have been "'style'", for which Sir Harold Nicolson, British diplomatic historian, had been longing.
The notable practitioners of that old diplomacy, such as Metternich and Lord Palmerston, and some early U.S. diplomats, had received everlastingly bad press because they were sometimes unscrupulous in pursuit of national interests. But it suggests that they were no more unscrupulous than the Communist leaders or Secretary of State Dulles, even if their lapses had opened the way for President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister William Gladstone before him to preach "open covenants, openly arrived at."
Thus, since World War I, there had been the democratic era in foreign policy, with "open covenants" in plenty, but also name-calling better befitting small boys shooting marbles in a dirt ring, with huge grandstand plays for the home folks and no inkling of style.
One of the features of Mr. Khrushchev's technique was that when he wanted to throw another fastball at the U.S., the Russian people were not consulted, and it was common knowledge that Mr. Dulles had left the U.S. professional diplomats to molder in obscurity since he had installed the State Department in his private plane.
It finds that the nation was fooling itself, that not only did present diplomacy lack the virtues of old-style diplomacy, it was a flat mockery of "'democracy'" and "'open covenants openly arrived at'". Regarding the China policy, the column had recently observed that Mr. Dulles was drafting a public statement of policy to which he and the President had subscribed and then it had become anonymous as the product of "a high government official", changing it rather radically in the process.
It finds the frustrating results in China to be a good example of a method which replaced policy with denunciation and the responsible diplomat with a vaporous firehoser, giving reason to the skeptics who questioned the ability of the democracies to carry on effective foreign policy. It finds it significant that the Western European allies, more nostalgic than the U.S. for some of the old diplomacy, found themselves squarely in the middle of the offshore islands feud.
It questions whether it was too ludicrous for words to suggest that the U.S. ought return somewhat to the old diplomacy to the extent, at least, of having a policy. As former Secretary of State under President Truman, Dean Acheson, had said in his Power and Diplomacy, the nation's troubles arose not from taking the Russians too seriously, but from not taking them seriously enough. When the Russians spoke of world conquest by Communism, they had not been joking, but were speaking of economic collapse and psychological persuasion, not of military warfare. They had their troubles and they would be as tempted by good deals as the U.S.
But the country's style of diplomacy had made no attempt to find out what deals might be possible.
Drew Pearson indicates that he was returning to work in Washington after sitting on his farm in Maryland for a couple of weeks, and had the impression that the country was skating dangerously close to the brink of war abroad, was torn by racial bitterness at home, and that not much was being done about either condition.
He suggests that recent history showed that the Chinese Nationalists had always wanted a world war to save Chiang Kai-shek's regime and that the Chinese Communists, having a surplus population which they could not feed, had publicly boasted that they could afford to lose half of their 600 million people in war and still have plenty remaining. In view of that situation, Secretary of State Dulles's policy of skating close to the brink might be more dangerous than the Secretary thought.
He presents the backstage diplomatic developments in the Formosa Strait crisis, the most serious which had confronted the Dulles strategy of brinksmanship.
The President had become quite upset the previous week regarding a series of confidential messages from friendly Western European leaders warning that if the U.S. were to get into a war over Quemoy, it would have to fight it alone. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, attached to General Eisenhower's staff during World War II, had been the most blunt, warning that the British people would never fight to have an island less than 4 miles from the Chinese Communist mainland, which he compared to Britain trying to hold Staten Island against American artillery blasting it from Manhattan, only a few miles away. The only allied leader who supported the President's tough Formosan policy was West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who believed that a tough policy toward the Communist bloc might help German unification. After getting those telegrams, the President had put pressure on Secretary of State Dulles to work out some type of deal with the Chinese Communists at Warsaw.
But even if Mr. Dulles were to succeed in such a deal for the neutralization of Quemoy, he would have a hard time getting a deal with Chiang Kai-shek. The latter, who had allowed a Formosan rabble to sack the American Embassy in Taipei two years earlier and steal the secret U.S. code, had been threatening to fight alone if the U.S. made a deal at Warsaw. He had vowed to American diplomats that he would order his troops to fight to the death rather than allow Quemoy to be neutralized. The slaughter of his troops, Chiang said, would disgrace the U.S. before the eyes of the world and make it clear that an American promise to help was only a scrap of paper. Chiang might not be bluffing, for he had nothing to lose from a world war and a lot to be gained.
Intercepted Chinese Nationalist telegrams, which Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon had read to the Senate sometime earlier, showed that Chiang's Government had instructed U.S. diplomats on December 5, 1940: "Our hope of world war so as to rehabilitate our country is unpalatable to the American people." Another telegram, dated July 14, 1950, near the start of the Korean War in late June, read: "the war in Korea will be extended… We must be patient at this time."
Chiang had met with U.S. commander, Admiral Roland Smoot, on the Pescadores Islands a few days earlier, at which time he had sought to force a showdown, demanding the right to bomb Communist artillery on the mainland, which had been shelling Quemoy. Secretary Dulles complained at the U.N. that the guns being used were Russian-made, which was true. Chiang wanted to bomb them with American-made jets. Admiral Smoot, however, refused to provide permission because bombing the Chinese mainland would lead to atomic retaliation from the Communist Chinese and might bring in Russia, as Premier Nikita Khrushchev had warned that his country would enter if the Chinese mainland were attacked—thus, presumably providing the Chinese Communists the means to fight with nuclear weapons. Chiang had also demanded that American warships convoy supplies right up to the Quemoy beaches under Communist shell fire. At present, the convoys were stopping at the three-mile international limit to avoid entering disputed territory, as the Communist Chinese claimed the offshore islands as their own.
Joseph Alsop, with the Seventh Fleet, tells of the Fleet being ready for any task the Government might assign to it, but it had been told in this instance to avoid any of the things it might conceivably accomplish in its alleged mission to defend Formosa's offshore islands, resulting in a sense of frustration and aimlessness.
The Seventh Fleet and its leaders were not angrily seeking a nuclear showdown. Under the "bigger bang for a buck" system of defense planning, the Fleet had been made heavily dependent on nuclear weapons and yet the talk in the wardrooms and staff messes concerned the ways to break the artillery blockade of Quemoy without using nuclear weapons, with the consensus being that it could be done. The Fleet only wanted a decision from Washington either to do the job which the President and Secretary of State Dulles had promised to do, or to end the empty charade of "infirm firmness and impotent power".
Mr. Alsop suggests that the time ought be soon when the decision had to be taken, for the converging factors which would force a decision were plainly visible even in the wide blue of the sunlit Pacific. The word had just reached the Fleet of Communist China's public rejection of the informal cease-fire which would lift the Quemoy blockade. The only small chance for a cease-fire was to do everything possible to impress the Communist Chinese Government with American force and resolution at the outset. Instead, for instance, Admiral Wallace Beakley, commander of the Fleet, had received a Washington warning not to be "provocative" because he had gone into the first Quemoy convoy of supply ships with a couple of cruisers and enough other force to make the convoy appear threatening, with the result that the chance for a cease-fire, if it ever existed, had been thrown away.
If there was to be no cease-fire, then the talks in Warsaw were meaningless, and there was nothing left which could put off the evil day, except, perhaps, one of the Government's parades before the U.N. But the U.N. could not defend Quemoy and the Matsus, any more than a convoy by the Seventh Fleet's destroyers could break the artillery blockade of the beaches, strangling Quemoy.
Within the Fleet, there were no illusions that Quemoy could be indefinitely defended by any variant of the convoy system as long as all supplies had to be landed on open beaches under heavy enemy fire. The tonnage could be considerably increased, but not without heavy losses by the Nationalist Chinese. The tonnage presently being convoyed was little more than that necessary to feed the Quemoy garrison and its people. There was no possibility of providing the garrison with any real means to fight back against the Communist attackers. Already, the garrison could not return the enemy's artillery fire because ammunition stocks were reduced to the reserve needed to repel a possible enemy landing, and there were no replacements available. No military position anywhere could be held forever under such a bizarre system, and Quemoy was no exception.
Thus the rejection of a cease-fire meant that there was no cheap, easy, comparatively painless way out of the dilemma. Meanwhile, there was the likelihood that before too long, Chiang Kai-shek might abruptly send his air power to attack the mainland targets, having only been holding his hand thus far because the U.S. Government had pleaded with him to wait to see whether a cease-fire was obtainable.
There was also the virtual certainty that soon the U.S. Government would have to make the grim choice that the President would use the Seventh Fleet to break the Quemoy blockade in earnest, without regard to the consequences, or break his own solemn promise to defend the offshore islands, "with all the ugly consequences that this will produce."
Marquis Childs indicates that Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy had announced a decision recently that could have far-reaching consequences, indicating that he had issued orders to keep both of two competing and quite expensive missile programs. Confronted with the political pressures of a midterm election year, it seemed to some observers that the Secretary of Defense had taken the easiest way out. His decision ought at least quiet for the time being the bitter feud between the Army and the Air Force which had its roots deep in service politics.
Having had one of the longest honeymoons in the experience of Washington, Secretary McElroy would soon have been in his job for a full year. "Vigorous, attractive, with a determination to hew to the line," he had succeeded Secretary Charles E. Wilson who had been battered by five years of almost continual controversy, as the Defense Establishment was cut back repeatedly. Almost everyone wanted to believe that Secretary McElroy could fight his way through the Pentagon jungle and come out with a reasonable budget for a secure defense. He had even been talked about as a potential presidential candidate. His critics, for some time, had been saying that he was fenced in, as were other Secretaries, by the military-industrial powers having so much control over the spending of the 42 billion dollar military budget. They took the decision to keep both the Bomarc and Nike-Hercules defense missiles as evidence of a costly compromise, believing that it could mark a kind of watershed in the career of Mr. McElroy.
The Secretary had told reporters that both missiles were necessary to defend the U.S. from bombers, while at the same time he said that he was ordering the Army and the Air Force to end their feud over whose antiaircraft missile was the better. His champions insisted that he had taken the advice of scientists and experts free from political pressures, but no matter how hard a Secretary of Defense might try, it was difficult or impossible to divorce the vast and costly programs from politics, of an election, of the service, or of the big industries dependent for survival on Government contracts.
Bomarc was made by the Boeing Aircraft Co. in Seattle and Washington State was the setting of a Senate race in November, pitting incumbent Senator Henry Jackson, who had gone all out for the Bomarc, against William Bantz, a former U.S. Attorney, who naturally wanted to keep employment as high as possible in the state.
Army spokesmen insisted that the Bomarc had enjoyed only one successful test, and that having been against a World War II B-17 at a range of 80 miles. They said that it was an air-breather which would be obsolete in two years, although it would not be installed anywhere until late 1959. Already, according to Senator John Sparkman, between 600 million and a billion dollars had been spent on the missile, and on the Senate floor, Senator Sparkman had challenged it after Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts had given it high praise.
Mr. Childs indicates that it was a phase of the feud between the Government-developed Nike-Hercules out of the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and the aircraft industry, which took into account the Thor and the Jupiter as well. Secretary McElroy had settled the latter dispute by ordering the two combined under the command of the Air Force, although the Army had developed the Jupiter which far outclassed the Thor.
The politics of the Pentagon had also entered the picture, as the Bomarc was authorized by Donald Quarles when he had been Secretary of the Air Force. Now, as Deputy Secretary of Defense to Mr. McElroy, he was the Bomarc's chief defender, and in a recent briefing, had given it the highest of marks. Secretary McElroy relied heavily on Mr. Quarles as a channel for scientific counsel.
A year earlier, Mr. McElroy had been on a 30-day tour of major defense installations and development projects, preparatory to entering the job as Secretary, finding out for himself what lay before him. But the Pentagon was very large and for many months, the Secretary had been wrestling with the old familiar problems as they came onto his desk.
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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