The Charlotte News
Tuesday, January 13, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Havana that the execution toll was mounting as Fidel
Castro's military courts continued to exact vengeance for violence
attributed to supporters of ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista. At
least 145 persons had been reported executed between January 1 and
the previous night and more speedy trials were underway, including
hearings of possibly 100 prisoners in Oriente Province. The toll had
taken a big jump the previous day when revolutionary firing squads
had reportedly shot 75 persons near Santiago, capital of Oriente,
where Sr. Castro's rebellion was centered and anti-rebel repression
was strongest. Officials of the provisional Government claimed that
all cases were being fully investigated, but otherwise there was no
information on the trials of the condemned men. Apparently, most of
the trials were being held in secret and by military courts rather
than by the revolutionary courts which the new regime had said would
be established to try "war crimes" offenders. Not all of
the defendants had received the death penalty. Two policemen in
Manzanillo had been sentenced to ten years each in prison.
Approximately 3,000 persons were being detained throughout Cuba. In
Oriente, there were about 500, according to Raul Castro, who had been
in military command in that area since his brother Fidel's victory on
January 1. The weekly news magazine Bohemia had charged that
20,000 Cubans had been killed between the coming to power in 1952 of
Sr. Batista and January 1, when he had fled the country to the
Dominican Republic. According to witnesses, 75 men executed in
Oriente had been shot in two groups, one consisting of 14 and the
other of 61, the executions having taken place in a military camp a
mile from Santiago and a mile from San Juan Hill, where Theodore
Roosevelt's Rough Riders had charged the Spanish in 1898. Santiago
military headquarters had declined to confirm the executions, but a
reporter had found a huge mound of fresh dirt, cartridge cases and
tire tracks at the scene. Rebel officers and witnesses had given the
description that the prisoners had been brought in trucks in the wee
hours of the morning and the first group lined up along a freshly dug
trench ten feet deep and ten feet wide. One of four Catholic priests,
head of the Catholic Youth Movement in Oriente, who had heard the
confessions of the condemned, had said that they were mostly young
men, consisting of police guards accused of violence and cruelty,
alleged informers, and members of the private army of former Senator
Rolando Masferrer which had despoiled those accused of supporting the
rebellion. Some of the men had protested that they were members of
the rebel movement. One shouted, "Fidel Castro is an assassin."
Most had stood at attention without blindfolds
In St. Louis, it was reported that a murder mystery was further complicated this date by the reported attempt on the life of a woman and threats against her husband, a dentist, who was the former husband of the widow of the victim in the unsolved murder. The victim had been a utility firm clerk and part-time university student, shot to death in front of the City art museum on December 17. The husband of the woman, who reportedly had an attempt made on her life, had refused a lie detector test during the inquiry. His wife claimed that the driver of a car had tried to run her down the previous evening. A member of her family had telephoned a radio station, indicating that the woman had left the public library where she worked and stepped into the street to catch a streetcar, at which point a black car parked nearby had suddenly started up and sped directly toward her. She leaped to safety, as a woman, standing in the streetcar safety zone, had screamed for her to look out, that the car was coming for her. She did not report the matter directly to the police, but members of the homicide squad had questioned her. Her husband also reported that shortly after his wife had told him of the incident, he had received an anonymous telephone threat on his life. He had twice refused to testify at a coroner's inquest into the slaying and his present wife had refused to answer police questions regarding the slaying. The widow of the slain man was in seclusion at her mother's home in Kansas, and had also refused to take a lie detector test.
In Wadesboro, N.C., the two young black boys, ages eight and ten, who were being held in a reformatory on a charge of kissing a little white girl, had lost their hearing on a habeas corpus petition this date, which had been filed by the NAACP. Judging by their courtroom appearance on Monday, the youngsters could not have cared less, as one of them had fallen asleep on the other's shoulder during impassioned argument in their behalf by an official of the organization. They had appeared neatly attired and on excellent behavior while sitting through the 2.5 hour hearing quietly but with apparent boredom. The Superior Court judge ruled that they had not been illegally taken into custody nor illegally sent to the reform school. But the NAACP lawyer, Conrad Lynn of New York, said that he would appeal the case, in which the State assistant attorney general, Ralph Moody, had accused the NAACP of trying "to make guinea pigs out of them." Just before denying the petition, the judge had shuffled through the records of the juvenile court judge of Monroe, who had handled the original case, and found as a fact that they were delinquent and in need of protection by the State. The Superior Court judge said that the court was bound by the prior judgment and that there had been no evidence offered that the prior findings were incorrect. He took note of the racial furor which had been touched off by the case, saying, "There has been so much publicity in this matter that it might be important that people know they have not been convicted or sent to prison." He read a list of delinquencies from their records, primarily related to theft and breaking and entering, the latest entry being the kissing incident. The boys had been committed to the reformatory because Union County had no other facility which could house them, and the juvenile court had found that there was no one at home who could properly supervise them. Thus, they had become wards of the court.
In San Francisco, it was reported that a rainsoaked landslide at Lands End near Golden Gate Park had buried and smothered a high school youth the previous day as he hiked with his girlfriend up a cliff from China Beach. The 16-year old boy and his 15-year old girlfriend had been taking photographs at the beach after finishing classes at Washington High School, when, according to the girl, she suddenly heard a rumble and a terrible roaring noise. She looked up the hill and saw it coming down and guessed at the same time that she jumped to the right toward the water and her boyfriend had jumped the other way, whereupon the mud and rocks had crashed down over them. She did not know whether she was knocked down or fell down but her foot hurt and she was buried up to her waist, had dug and scraped with her hands, and after about five minutes was able to pull herself out. She looked for her boyfriend but he was gone, completely buried she guessed, and thought at that point she had better get help. A man walking his dog called police and firemen. One of the firemen who dug for hours unsuccessfully reported: "That mudslide is still moving. You dig a hole and it fills right in. We might have been piling mud on top of him. It's just a guess where he is, although we found one big curbstone that had blood on it." The curbstone had been from a street which had slid into the Pacific Ocean years earlier. The firemen said that they had stood on stone because the minute one stepped off stone, they sank into the mud. He said they had stuck shovel handles all over but could not find the boy by probing, even after sticking the handles in all the way. A Coast Guard cutter had lighted the scene with searchlights and flares until police called off the search for the night. Mud was sliding across the narrow beach at the time, endangering the workers.
In New York, it was reported that the father of the infant who had been recovered safe and sound after having been kidnaped 2.5 hours after her birth on January 2, had initially balked at having the alleged female abductor charged with kidnaping. The 28-year old lawyer for the New York Port Authority had changed his mind and agreed to sign the complaint following a prolonged conference in chambers with a Brooklyn magistrate and a subsequent telephone conversation with his wife. Meanwhile, the woman charged in the kidnaping, a widowed mother of eight children, had apparently arranged the kidnaping as a means to trap a new husband, seeking to make him believe the child belonged to her and that he was the father. She continued to claim that she had self-delivered the child as her own, though all the physical evidence was consistent with the baby having been kidnaped from the hospital nursery. When the father of the child had appeared in Brooklyn Felony Court this date, he initially told court officers he had discussed the situation with his wife and that they had decided not to prosecute. But after the lengthy discussion with the magistrate, he emerged and telephoned his wife, then announced that they would go ahead and sign the complaint. Court attaches said that there would have been no case against the woman had the papers not been signed. The woman's defense counsel said that he would seek a complete mental evaluation of his client when she was arraigned. Her bail hearing was postponed until this date. Conviction on the charge carried a possible prison sentence of between 20 years and life.
In Minneapolis, it was reported that ailing evangelist Billy Graham headed this date for an appointment with specialists at the Mayo Clinic. He had been cautioned by Vice-President Nixon to "get some rest", but still planned to pursue his crusade in Australia. He was postponing the start by at least a week and was not sure whether he would be able to go through with other projected visits on a world tour. He might learn during the week the cause of an eye ailment which had left him with only half of his vision in his left eye, described as a "rare and serious condition" by his father-in-law, a doctor. He said that he was sure that he would recover and had every expectation of going to Australia, but that they had definitely canceled a meeting at the Hula Bowl in Hawaii which was set for later in the month and would have to postpone the start of the Australian crusade in Melbourne. He said that doctors had told him that he might be moving too fast, burning the candle at both ends, and that the main purpose for going to the clinic was to find out the exact cause of the ailment. He said he felt fine. The trouble had been described by an associate as a ruptured blood vessel behind the retina of the left eye.
John Kilgo of The News reports that the operating procedures of the controversial Charlotte Police Club would be revealed to City policemen on Sunday, following complaint by some officers concerning the club, many indicating that it was the primary reason for their formation of the defunct police union the prior October. Police Chief E. C. Selvey said that he was sure that there was nothing crooked or corrupt about the way the club was run. Complaining police officers said that they did not know how or by whom the club's money was being spent. Chief Selvey said that they had the right to know that information.
In Aurora, Ill., Mayor Paul Egan, 58, fiery and fat, had lost a one-round brawl to the Aurora City Council's burly sergeant-at-arms the previous day. The usually voluble Mayor, who had spent the night in the hospital, refused to talk about the fight. Hospital officials declined to report on his condition. Earlier, however, a doctor said that the Mayor had suffered a cut on the right side of his jaw and some bruised swelling on his face. The Mayor had also complained that his back was injured. In the fisticuffs of the previous day, the Mayor, feuding with the police chief and his 64-man police force since the previous fall, had been sent sprawling to the floor in a hallway outside the Council chambers from a left to the jaw landed by the 220-pound City building inspector acting as sergeant-at-arms of the Council meeting, having bounced the Mayor from the Council chambers on orders from other commissioners. The fight had climaxed a heated shouting match between the Mayor and the sergeant-at-arms. The Mayor, banging the gavel in the meeting had told the four commissioners that he would consider no business except his order of firing the police chief, but the commissioners had ignored him while he continued to pound the gavel and shout. The commissioners then ordered the sergeant-at-arms to eject the Mayor, who was serving his second four-year term. He pulled the struggling Mayor from his chair and off the podium to a rear doorway, at which point the Mayor, according to the sergeant-at-arms, had yelled, "You goddamn fat slob, you're strangling me." The sergeant-at-arms had told the Mayor that he had had enough and that the Mayor would apologize for that statement, after which the two men grappled and then the sergeant-at-arms floored the Mayor. Four police officers had rushed from the traffic room to halt the fracas. The Mayor ran down the stairs, jumped into a taxi and went to the hospital. The sergeant-at-arms, who was not arrested, left the Council chamber, commenting, "It's a fine way to start a Monday."
In London, it was reported via Moscow radio the previous day that Soviet prospectors had struck three rich veins of gold in the mountains of central Uzbekistan, in southwest Asia. The gold was said to be so thick in some parts that it stuck out of the ground, according to the broadcast.
N.C. State's basketball team was ranked number one in the latest Associated Press top 20 poll. UNC was number three. Of course, at this juncture of the season, as always, it meant nothing. The University of California, eventual national champion, was ranked number 20.
On the editorial page, "It's Done with a Twist of the Wrist" indicates that there was more than one way to skin a fiscal cat in the state. When more state revenue was needed, the legislators could either raise existing taxes or find something new to tax.
A simpler, less painful technique was available in the current year, a pay-as-you-go collection plan for state income taxes. With no increase in taxes, it could mean a 27 million dollar windfall in non-recurring revenue during the ensuing biennium, according to the State Revenue commissioner, James Currie.
It suggests that if the Administration of Governor Luther Hodges failed to recommend a withholding tax plan to the 1959 General Assembly, State Senator Claude Currie had indicated he might propose it himself. It finds it cheering news, as there were two reasons for the withholding system, that it would increase state revenue without increasing taxes by eliminating some of the present tax evasion, and would be a great convenience to most taxpayers who would rather pay a little at a time rather than all at once.
There were also some disadvantages, but that was true of any tax collection plan, and it finds the advantages greatly to outweigh the disadvantages. One potent argument against the withholding plan was that cost to employers would be increased, but most employers already withheld money for the Federal Government and for other purposes, and any additional cost would thus not be significant. A number of states already used the system and reported that revenue had increased between ten and 25 percent, mainly because it made possible more efficient enforcement of revenue laws. It thus finds the pay-as-you-go tax plan to be a public necessity.
"Even Gratitude Has Respectable Limits" indicates that at least credit ought be given to the Governor and his Council of State for good intentions as they had sincerely wanted to do something for the press and so had approved the plan to add a press box to the east portico of the Capitol in Raleigh.
It suggests that it perhaps ought be
appreciative but thought of Ogden Nash's grateful optimist
It finds that the point was that even gratitude had respectable limits and it could summon up no appreciation for what Raleigh's officialdom would stuff down their throats. If the press was cramped, it was too bad, as legislators, themselves, lacked sufficient space to conduct their business, and yet laws were enacted and reported to the people by the press. Nothing much had escaped the taxpayers' notice yet. In 1957, even the number of fifths of whiskey delivered to hotel rooms of various legislators had been faithfully reported, though the press had been operating at the time from broom closets.
It suggests that the Governor's Administration get on with former Representative James Vogler's plan for a new legislative hall with ample room for all without disturbing the extant Capitol. Dean Henry Kampoefner of N. C. State's School of Design had been correct, that it would be like hanging a calendar on the Mona Lisa to try to improve the existing building.
As indicated, the new building housing the Legislature would open in 1963.
"Educational Note" indicates that it liked to keep the readers informed on the progress which U.S. schools were making in meeting successfully the post-Sputnik educational challenge from the Soviets, referencing an item just in from Michigan which told of students at a high school having taken an eight-day course in deer hunting and that those who passed received two days off for hunting. Would they get more than one shot?
"Words Tackle Big Problems in France" indicates that in Washington, there might be "liberals" or "reactionaries", but in France, political vocabularies had such words as "caesars", "princes", "dukes", and "dynasties", all hearkening back to the royal past.
New Premier Michel Debre, who was to be President Charles de Gaulle's handyman in the quest for French fortune, was the type of man who had once popularized that colorful bombast and made it necessary. He was called at age 47 "father of anger" and seemed to like the nickname so well that he published a journal called Courier of Anger for several months before General De Gaulle had come to power, having vented his anger still earlier in an anti-Fourth Republic book titled Princes Who Govern Us, bringing to bear against the Fourth Republic politicians the familiar Gaullist plaint that they were selfish "princes" who guarded their own privileges at the expense of France.
It suggests that anger might well be called the Fifth Republic motif. "Prince" Debre, as with the general whom he had first served in the Resistance, was an angry French nationalist and said to dislike the Common Market and its Little Europe conception because he feared German domination of it. Regarding Algeria, he was not so ambiguous as General De Gaulle, being for "integration", the catchword of the European community who wanted to see Algeria become a full "part" of France. Typically, the tangle of words, from "integration" to "grandeur", lay deep around the new Government, perhaps deeper than its perception of the forces which had caused France's decline. Colorful words alone would not solve tax and fiscal problems, boost exports or pacify Algeria.
It wishes the new "prince" success without caesarism. "France's friends abroad will not care so much about political moon shots, however. For them, wine and impressionism will suffice."
A piece from the Washington Post & Times-Herald, titled "Viva la Muerte!" indicates that it had been estimated, though it could not vouch for the accuracy, that in the old days of Dodge City, Kans., the annual toll of death from gunshot and knife wounds had been an average of slightly more than seven or somewhat more than one every two months, that in Tombstone, Ariz., and Deadwood, S.D., the average may have been a bit higher, but when those figures were compared to the present-day statistics for some of the more populous urban communities, the old Wild West seemed to have been rather tranquil.
It appeared even more staid and well-behaved when compared to the reconstructed Wild West presently appearing nightly for the edification of the public on television screens. On almost any weekday evening between the hours of 5 and 11, the mortality rate was several hundred times greater than for any comparable period of time in the history of the wildest and most lawless of the frontier towns. It suggests that if all of the Westerns presently on the air managed to survive the season, the death toll would run to many thousands, and when to the Westerns were added all of the murder mystery programs, all of the old war-propaganda films, all of the authentic war pictures of aerial bombardments and other exploits in mass slaughter, the death toll would become nearly incalculable.
"Many gentle souls, no doubt,
sleep all the sounder for having consumed this nightly diet of
vicarious slaughter, so that this value may be analogous to that
feeling of katharsis, which is supposed to be the effect of
classical tragedy. Or it may be that this television manslaughter
affords a relatively harmless means of escape for those violent and
destructive impulses that are said to reside subconsciously within us
all. A few moralists have even rejoiced in this incessant
two-dimensional violence, seeing in it an allegory of the unending
war of good against evil; for even though the forces of darkness (the
'bad guys') may be vanquished tonight by the righteous (or 'good
guys') there is the certainty just as in life that a new crop of the
reprobates will turn up tomorrow to renew the battle
It concludes that it was probably true that the largest proportion of those who delighted in the televised violence consisted of highly impressionable boys and adolescents, and it wonders what the effect was on them.
You could probably ask Chuck and
Caril out in Lincoln about that. But be quick about it, as Chuck
won't be around but a few more months to explain it, having already
gone beyond one date set with the executioner while his case remained
on appeal. Caril, however, is still with us even in 2026. We know
about some of their television habits from her statement to the
authorities the prior early February, following her arrest on January 29—at pages 115
Of course, Trump, who was just
entering adolescence in this time, appears never to have gleaned that
latter lesson and now seeks to place the burden on all of us for his
acting out in reality some of those old, repressed memories of
apparent longing for the "good old days" of the Wild West
when, putatively, men were men and solved their differences through
swords
Drew Pearson provides more details, as he had begun the previous day, regarding the political cronies of former Alabama Governor Gordon Persons and how they had set up their tax deal by which they received thousands of dollars from liquor companies and yet paid no taxes on it. The Treasury Department had officially recommended their criminal prosecution, but someone in Washington higher up than the Treasury Department had countermanded the prosecution, as tax officials in the Justice Department had been maintaining in embarrassed silence, while Governor Persons had insisted he had not appealed for help from his brother, General Wilton Persons, who was now replacing Sherman Adams as White House chief of staff. Former Governor Persons had admitted to Mr. Pearson that he did receive some of the concealed money, though claimed they were political contributions.
Mr. Pearson finds the contention strange on its face, as Alabama law did not permit a Governor to succeed himself and therefore Mr. Persons had no need for political contributions after his election and after he had appointed his henchmen to the liquor board, which chose which liquor companies could sell in Alabama. It was estimated that during the Governor's regime between 1950 and 1954, 200 million dollars in cash and 500 million dollars worth of free liquor had been collected from the liquor companies by the Governor's cohorts. The segment of that operation which had come in for intense tax investigation by the Treasury Department had been that conducted by Jimmy Thrower, former Mayor of Dothan, appointed to the ABC liquor board, and Emery Solomon, a leader of the Governor's forces in the Alabama Legislature.
Some others involved, some of whom were possibly innocent victims, had included S. E. Gellerstedt, whose wife was remotely related to Mr. Thrower, and who had been approached by the latter with an offer to make some money, that deal having then been set up and Mr. Gellerstedt placed on the payroll of Berke Brothers Distilleries and Taylor Wines, then mailing most of his salary checks to a post office box under the name of Mr. Thrower, that money then having been deposited in a bank account under the name of Mr. Gellerstedt without his knowledge. In 1952 alone, he had collected nearly $20,000 from the two liquor companies and then proceeded to kick back more than $12,000 of it to Mr. Thrower. He had eventually decided, however, that he was not receiving his fair share and had broken up the deal, cashing one of the larger checks and retaining most of it.
Another person implicated was Dan Sallis, a tenant farmer on Mr. Thrower's land, also hired as a liquor agent and who kicked back most of his salary to Mr. Thrower, money which was also deposited in the same bank under his name but without his knowledge.
In addition, Henry D. Williams, a football coach who lived next door to Mr. Thrower's summer cottage in Florida, had also become an Alabama liquor agent even though he spent no time in Alabama, then coaching football in Florida. He claimed that none of the money he received had been kicked back and that he had invested it all in real estate.
Thomas Hand, once associated with Mr. Solomon in a veneer business, had been hired by the liquor companies and had kicked back more than $12,000 of his salary to Mr. Solomon, though the latter insisted that the money was partial payment of a $35,000 debt owed to him.
Joseph Alsop states the question with which the President had begun his State of the Union address: whether a government based on liberty could permanently endure when challenged ceaselessly by a dictatorship of an economic and military power.
He finds it the most important part of the message and that in it was the essential clue to the central mystery of the Administration, that being the starving of the national defense which persisted even in the current open Soviet threat to Berlin.
As the President was neither a criminal nor a lunatic—unlike the present occupant of the White House in 2026, who is both—there had to be some rational explanation of the seemingly irrational course of action. Parenthetically, what would people have thought if President Eisenhower or any of his successors prior to the current lunatic had suggested even for a moment the idea of taking military action to annex, in true Nazi style, territory of a NATO member on the claim that it was "needed" for the nation's defense? Should FDR have annexed Canada for its aluminum during World War II?
Mr. Alsop indicates that the President's seemingly rhetorical question, when posed in its actual context, had within it the explanation for the mystery, that context having been best summed up by former Secretary of Treasury George Humphrey, who still had more influence at the White House than any other single individual, Mr. Humphrey having once declared in absolute seriousness that "two more years of Truman budgets would have caused this country to go Communist anyhow." That conveyed the basic idea that Mr. Humphrey and the other men of his school of thought succeeded in putting in the President's mind at the beginning of his Administration.
The idea had with it a famous, totally phony quotation from Vladimir Lenin to the effect that communism could force capitalism to spend itself to death for defense, when any real student of Communist theory knew that Soviet economists regarded heavy defense spending as capitalism's best escape from its "contradictions".
Without that baggage, however, the Humphrey idea was simple, that adequate investments in national defense were dangerous to the free enterprise system and therefore more dangerous to the U.S. than the whole panoply of Soviet military might, the same idea which had kept Britain so long disarmed in the face of the rising threat of Hitler's military power.
In Washington at the moment, the doctrine was being proclaimed with special fervor for two related reasons, the first and most tangible being the drop in the gold reserve of more than two billion dollars in the previous year. One had to suppose that the U.S. still had enough in the gold reserve which was still equal to the combined reserves of all the other nations in the world, but the drop had nonetheless caused consternation at the Treasury, not surprising since the similar gold loss between 1953 and 1955 had caused Secretary Humphrey, Herbert Hoover, Jr., and their allies to talk as though the end of the world were probably at hand.
The second reason for the intense feeling was the report by Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, William Martin, to the President upon their return from a recent trip abroad. Mr. Martin had given the substance of the report in a December speech in Chicago, noting that "among intelligent and perceptive men" abroad, there was "a growing distrust of the future of the American dollar." He said that "to the foreigner, the dollar is a symbol of this country's strength," blaming the distrust primarily on the unbalanced budget. Secretary Anderson, taking the same argument a step further, had stated that the alleged distrust of the dollar was the greatest single danger to the Western alliance.
As late as October, a quite insufficient but still substantial increase in the defense budget was still anticipated. But the report of Secretary Anderson and the drop in the gold reserve had caused the decision to place the defense budget below the former total in the face of steeply rising weapons costs.
Mr. Alsop suggests that no one had seemed to have thought of the other way out, ceasing to lie about the national situation and telling the country the plain truth about the danger, asking the country to pay the taxes, including, if needed, a Federal sales tax. In that way, the richest nation in all of history could combine the two absolute necessities, fiscal soundness and adequate defense, though it would be an uncomfortable road to travel.
The Congressional Quarterly indicates that how much help American cities could obtain during the year from the Federal Government would depend on whether Congress or the President would win the "battle of the budget". Insofar as Congress, the outlook was bright for the cities. Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, who had been Mayor of Philadelphia before coming to the Senate in 1956, called the outlook "the best in my lifetime as a politician". The optimism stemmed from the fact that the Democratic leadership was pledged to pass city-type bills and had an overwhelming majority in both the Senate and the House. In addition, the 1960 presidential election was present like a warning finger to both parties, as most of the population lived in cities and the politicians wanted some legislation to which to point when they sought their votes.
All of it added up to the probability that Congress in 1959 would authorize the spending of Federal dollars for city airports, slum clearance, sewage plants, redevelopment of areas suffering from unemployment and construction of such community facilities as water and sewer systems.
The Eisenhower Administration had made it clear that the President thought it time that the Federal Government retreated from many of the city programs, in 1958 having vetoed the airport and depressed areas bills and having also recommended a cutback in the money which the Federal Government gave to communities for sewage plants. He wanted a far smaller urban renewal program than Congress appeared willing to authorize.
The argument for the legislation would be that cities could not raise enough money to do the jobs by themselves. Such city lobbies as the American Municipal Association and the U.S. Conference of Mayors had long contended that rural-dominated state legislatures either would not or could not foot the bills for the programs and so the Federal Government had to come to the rescue to protect the general welfare. The major legislative goals of the cities appeared to have the support of the majority of the House and Senate, but they had to get over the hurdles of the House Rules Committee and the Administration before becoming law. The Rules Committee in the House was the gateway through which most bills had to pass to reach the floor, and the Committee was dominated by the conservative coalition of Democrats and Republicans. Self-styled liberals in the House had talked a lot about reforming the Committee before the opening of the 86th Congress earlier in the month, but Speaker Sam Rayburn had cooled their ardor with a promise to bring major legislation to a vote.
So the major question for city leaders was whether liberal Democrats and Republicans would join forces to override expected vetoes by the President. With everyone voting, it would take 66 votes in the Senate and 291 in the House to provide the necessary two-thirds majorities to override, and the Democrats had a 64 to 34 margin in the Senate and a 283 to 153 margin in the House.
Patrick Healy, Jr., executive director of the American Municipal Association, which represented about 13,000 cities and towns, contended that "the cities are going to have a hard time getting legislation enacted into law because of the President's position on the budget. I don't think it's a rosy picture at all." Several big-city mayors likened their plight to looking through a telescope one end at a time: "From the Congress end, our legislative goals look real close. But from the administration end, those goals look far, far away."
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that sometime during the year, if the armed forces could find time from the interservice competition for self-praise, he wished that they might take another look at the reserves, which occasionally had to be looked to "when the egg hits the fan". The reserves did everything for the same pay that the regulars did and sometimes had done it a little better, some wanting to remain in the service after having spent a good portion of their lives in it and wanted to be recompensed in the same way as if they had graduated from one of the service academies.
He had been reminded recently of the problem when he had seen a reserve lieutenant colonel forced into retirement at the age of 60 after 18 years of service and then re-enlisting as an airman first class. He had been head chaplain for the previous three years at Griffiss Air Force Base. His pay had then dropped to $190 per month, a total in salary and allowances of $540 less than he had been making as a colonel. He was trapped by the Reserve Officer Personnel Act of 1954, which said that any reserve officer below the rank of major general had to have completed 18 years before his 60th birthday to qualify for paid retirement. The colonel had missed by two weeks. He had then re-enlisted so that he could obtain his full 20 years. The fact that as an enlisted man he could not serve as chaplain, for which he was fitted, did not worry the Air Force as he could always be a chaplain's helper.
Mr. Ruark had previously thought that an officer retired at full pay of the highest rank ever served, which turned out not to be true. The officer retired at only half-pay or the number of years of service multiplied by 2.5 percent. Moreover, quarters and ration allowances, which were tax-free, automatically terminated on retirement, making retirement pay actually only about one-third of former active-duty income. Thus, the retired officer almost invariably faced the necessity of finding a job, as very few honest officers had been frugal enough or had sufficient money invested to allow them to retire in comfort.
Congress and the Pentagon, he finds, had kicked around reserves shamelessly since he could remember, moving them around like lead soldiers. The regular officer with whom the reservist shared the same uniform, duties and dangers, was poles apart from the temporary warrior, as the regular was carried, whether or not he was efficient. Conversely, nearly any regular of rank could oil the skids for the reservist-turned-pro with just one single adverse efficiency report. And no matter how much of a record of efficiency the reservist might maintain, a Defense Secretary with one eye on politics could whip the rug from under masses of men, explaining it away as "increasing the level of effectiveness," as had Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson, or "trimming away the fat", as had Defense Secretary Louis Johnson under President Truman.
He finds therefore that a reservist was little better than a sharecropper, unable to depart service without the approval of it, susceptible to being called back to a war in which he was not interested, such as Korea, by a single letter and a physical, but susceptible of termination by the services at any time. He finds it not right, being a one-way street leading to a dead end, and also wasteful.
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