The Charlotte News
Thursday, August 6, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that Secretary of State Christian Herter had flown home this date to tell the President that despite the failure of the Big Four foreign ministers conference, West Berlin was probably safe from Soviet pressure for many months to come. The conference, one of the longest high-level international sessions in more than a century, had recessed indefinitely the previous night without agreement on either of the two major problems discussed, the German peace settlement and the future of West Berlin. But Mr. Herter had gone home convinced that the danger of any overt Soviet action to force the Western powers from West Berlin had been suspended, and that a new period of decreased tension in East-West relations appeared opening. British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had expressed a somewhat similar view upon his arrival in London the previous night. Recalling the tension which had flared when Premier Nikita Khrushchev had issued his first threat the prior November to drive the Western allies from West Berlin, Mr. Lloyd said that the Geneva conference had succeeded in creating "the kind of atmosphere in which you can negotiate." Mr. Herter's view was based primarily on two developments, the agreement by the President and Mr. Khrushchev to exchange visits and hold informal talks beginning in Washington in September, and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's repeated statements at Geneva that his Government preferred a negotiated settlement for Berlin rather than a decision forced by unilateral Soviet action. As one Western diplomat had put it, Mr. Khrushchev would rather try to negotiate the Western powers out of Berlin than to try to squeeze them out at the risk of inciting a war. The Western ministers believed that they had impressed Mr. Gromyko and Mr. Khrushchev with a determination to protect West Berlin and its 2.25 million inhabitants even to the extent of waging war.
The end of Vice-President Nixon's historic trip to the Soviet Union and to Poland, had touched off this date an intense appraisal of its impact on the cold war. The President and Mr. Nixon had banked on the latter's tour and the forthcoming swap of visits between the President and Soviet Premier Khrushchev to help thaw a dangerous East-West freeze. The Administration's policy had been admittedly a gamble, taken against the advice from some U.S. strategists, who favored continued isolation of the Communists as the surest way to promote the free world. The hope was that the exchange of visits would impress Mr. Khrushchev with America and keep East-West discussions going in the face of the collapse of the Geneva talks regarding Germany. But Mr. Nixon's trip had brought no expectation of any immediate turnaround in Kremlin policy in the cold war, which the Administration believed could last another 25 to 50 years. Mr. Nixon, who had already cabled back lengthy reports during his two-week tour of the Soviet Union and Poland, had made a personal report to the President during a 75-minute conference at the White House the previous day. He would review the trip again at a Cabinet meeting on Friday. There was no immediate plan for a public address to the nation, but Mr. Nixon had spoken informally on a national radio and television broadcast after his jetliner had arrived from Warsaw on Wednesday. He told of the friendly receptions he had received among the people of the two countries and said that they wanted peace. He urged also that Mr. Khrushchev, when he would visit the U.S. in mid-September, ought be received courteously and without hostile demonstrations. The Vice-President had hurried to the White House after a considerable airport welcome. The President was not at the airport, but among the police-estimated throng of 3,500 greeters had been Administration and Republican leaders and the ambassadors from the Soviet Union and Poland. Republican boosters waved a big sign which read: "All America is proud of Pat and Dick". The first welcomer had been ten-year old Julie Nixon, who had raced up the airplane ramp to hug her father and mother. Her sister Patricia, 13, was at home with a sprained back, suffered while playing. Mr. Nixon, looking fit despite his arduous travels, responded that the "demonstrations of friendship" from the Russians and Poles had been accorded really not to him but to the American people. He said, "They desperately want peace just as the American people want peace."
The President this date would enter the battle for labor reform with a divided and quarreling Congress regarding the future shape of legislation to curb labor racketeering and abuses. With the labor controls issue coming to a head in the House the following week, the President had arranged to go before the nation at 6:30 p.m. this night over major radio and television networks, and was expected to urge stricter controls over labor unions than the House Labor Committee had proposed and the Senate had passed. Announcement of the plans had immediately stirred demands among some House Democrats for equal air time to voice their disagreement, but the networks were reserving a decision until they heard what the President would say. Not since the tumultuous days of 1947, when the 80th Congress had enacted the Taft-Hartley Act, had Congress been so bitterly at odds regarding labor legislation. With tensions mounting, the House Rules Committee had opened wide the door on Wednesday to a free-for-all battle when the issue would reach the floor the following Tuesday. The Committee, which decided how legislation was to be handled, had decreed no limits on the amendments or substitute proposals which could be offered or on parliamentary moves which could be made. Rules Committee chairman Howard Smith of Virginia commented, "It's going to be a donnybrook."
In Fort Madison, Ia., it was reported that torrential rains had inundated much of the town of 15,000 this date as the climax of a severe storm which had swept southern Iowa during the night. It had received 9.42 inches of rain in just six hours, which had sent the water of three creeks racing over the town. Water-choked storm sewers had backed up in the basements of houses and stores and about two dozen families had been forced from their homes. The heaviest rainfall, 11 inches, had hit at Lineville, just north of the Iowa-Missouri border 125 miles west of Fort Madison. No lives had been reported lost, but one woman, 63, had been carried by floodwaters from the porch of her home and swept two blocks down a creek. She had been sitting in a chair when the water broke around her. Several Santa Fe Railroad workers had heard her cries and rescued her. Inmates of the State penitentiary at Fort Madison and units of the Army Reserves and National Guard had aided in the evacuations. One police official said that it "was possibly the worst storm in Fort Madison history." A good portion of the town had been flooded, but, according to a police captain, the worst appeared to be over.
In Hinesville, Ga., it was reported that the State had dropped murder charges against five members of a Savannah Negro sandlot baseball team after the Saturday heart attack death of the sheriff. Murder charges against a sixth player had also been dropped the previous day, but he had been charged with simple assault and was scheduled for trial. The five players against whom charges had been dropped were all in their twenties. Two witnesses had appeared at a hearing before a justice of the peace and indicated that the black players had been passing through Midway, near Hinesville, en route to Savannah after a baseball game, when one of their cars had been involved in a minor accident. They admitted fault and decided to pay the damages, but argued the amount. The sheriff, 57, had intervened, saying that he was the sheriff of Liberty County and wanted to do the talking. The player accused of assault had remarked, "There's the sheriff of Liberty County," whereupon the sheriff slapped the man, who clenched his fists and moved toward the officer. The man's teammates had restrained him and placed him in one of the cars. Then the sheriff said, "I'm going to get the keys to the car and take him in." As the sheriff had leaned in to take the keys, the man accused of assault, in the backseat, cursed the sheriff again, whereupon the sheriff had slumped to the ground, dead.
In Philadelphia, it was reported that a madman had fired repeated shotgun blasts into a crowded dining room of a home for the aged this date, killing two of the residents and wounding four others. He was then wounded and captured in a battle with expert police riflemen. The 42-year old gunman, an unemployed carpenter, had been placed in an institution earlier during the year after sending threatening letters to President Eisenhower. He had been released in April. He babbled incoherently following his capture and police were unable to determine what had caused his outburst. About 150 residents of the home had gathered for breakfast in the first-floor dining room when the gunfire began from the adjoining home where the gunman lived. Shotgun pellets shattered the windows and sprayed the residents. Several had fallen to the floor and others ran in wild confusion, with some of the more elderly and infirm sitting stunned. Killed had been two men, ages 79 and 84. Wounded residents of the privately operated home for Jews had been four men, ages 74, 77, 85 and 66. An employee of the home, 50, had arrived for work at the height of the shooting and he had become another target of the shooter, but had escaped unharmed and called police. Police exchanged several volleys with the gunman who was in a second-floor window and then they decided against further street shooting, fearful for the safety of residents of nearby homes. They charged into the shooter's home, smashed down the door to his apartment and shot him several times. He apparently had been wounded and stunned previously. Other occupants of the same home had been ill for the previous two days. During the morning, they said, the gunman had begun walking through the building, muttering and banging on the doors of tenants, with several having seen him carrying a shotgun, causing them to flee. He had gone to a side porch on the level with the dining room of the home for the elderly next door and started blasting. He had then gone upstairs and continued shooting from a window.
Dick Rigby of The News reports that the County police had a women's auxiliary working for them on Woodhaven Drive in Charlotte. The previous afternoon at about 4 o'clock, members of the Dirt Daubers Garden Club had put down their gardening tools and taken up a stopwatch. The women had decided that it was time to do something about the cars which sped along the street, and four of them had stood an hour's watch in front of the home of the club president. They timed cars coming through their "trap", jotted down the license numbers of the speeders, and were planning to get to work again this date writing notes regarding the offenders. One woman said with a smile that they would be nice notes. The idea of setting up their own speed "trap" in an effort to slow down drivers had developed from one man, an insurance agent and a resident of the street, who had figured out the mechanics of the "trap" for the women. At a recent Dirt Daubers Club meeting, one woman had suggested the plan and a new project was born. The woman had staked off a 200-foot "trap" and two women had been stationed at the head of it, equipped with a towel, a pad and a pencil. At the other end, were two other women with a stopwatch, another pad and pencil. As a car crossed the starting line, the towel was dropped, the license plate number written down and the stopwatch started. A punch of the watch at the end of the trap showed the women whether the driver was going over the speed limit of 35 mph, which should have taken no less than 3.9 seconds. The women wanted the drivers to slow to 25 mph. Anyone who was traveling through the trap faster than 5.45 seconds, that being the equivalent of 25, would probably receive a note from the Club the following week. The County police had endorsed the idea and provided the women with the name of the driver whose registration had been caught in the trap.
In Washington, it was reported that a woman from the Animal Protective Association had asked a woman how her cats were, to which she responded that she did not have any cats. The 85-year old lady, whose cats had brought official complaints from neighbors, looked at her questioner and explained: "Since the neighbors got so down on them, I got rid of them. You have to get along with your neighbors." When asked about the cats in back of her house, the Association woman saying that she had counted at least seven going in and out of the basement window, the elderly woman replied: "Oh, I don't have anything to do with them. They just go where they want to go." The woman from the Association indicated that she had just seen two cats run right by the woman and instructed her that the court had told her that she had to get rid of the cats by the following Tuesday or she would be in trouble, wanting her to sign a paper authorizing them to take the cats and help her. The elderly woman then insisted again that she did not have any cats. A policeman interrupted and spoke gently, indicating that if she would let them, he was sure they would find a good home for the cats where they would be well fed. The woman again insisted that she did not have any cats. A worker from the Animal Rescue League had peeked into the woman's basement and counted 14 cats. The elderly woman sighed, gave up and signed the paper. The worker from the League and the woman from the Association had gone after the cats, but the cats continued to hide and scurry away, and only one had been caught. The worker and the woman took the one cat and gave up on the others. The elderly woman said it was one of the smartest ones of them all and wondered aloud why they were taking away her cats.
On the editorial page, "Charlotte City Council Has Key Role in Making Urban Renewal Successful" indicates that urban renewal would be a colossal failure in Charlotte unless Mayor James Smith and the City Council informed themselves better on some of the more obvious aspects of the program.
It indicates that the absence of members of the Council from the demonstration staged Tuesday by the Urban Redevelopment Commission had been regrettable, as they were to have been the Commission's honored guests, along with members of the City-County Planning Commission and a citizens committee on urban renewal. But not one member of the Council had shown up.
The Mayor's explanation had been anything but reassuring, indicating that he did not urge members of the Council be present because he was unaware that Council participation was necessary. It finds it an unfortunate misunderstanding as Council participation was not only advisable, but was required.
The final fate of urban renewal would largely depend on how individual members of the Council reacted to the urgency of the problem. It was a unified effort between the community, private and Federal partnership, but each party had to hold up its own end of the bargain. Urban renewal had to begin with the community itself. Federal assistance was used to help the community carry out key parts of the plan when local and private resources alone were inadequate to perform the task.
It indicates that there was a tremendous job to be done in Charlotte. A careful tour of the Brooklyn section slum would yield the raw facts about its dimensions. But a tour did not supply the cure for the "unclean, unfragrant, uncapacious, unbeautiful and frightening collection of shabby rookeries." That was what the Urban Redevelopment Commission had been exploring on Tuesday for the benefit of the City Council, the citizens committee and the Planning Commission. Eight preliminary proposals for the elimination of the blight of the Brooklyn section had been presented, illustrating a concept which was broad and full of promise for better city living.
Mayor Smith, it finds, was to be commended for reserving a special period of time on August 31 for the Urban Redevelopment Commission to make its report again, and it hopes that every member of the Council would be present. It urges that the Council should assume active leadership in the venture, but first had to develop the vision to see what the renewal of Brooklyn could mean in terms of human safety and happiness, social progress and property values. Then it could stir up the type of understanding and enthusiasm in the public which alone could make urban renewal successful.
"A Ribbon of Pavement to Progress" finds that the route which had been approved on Tuesday for the North Carolina segment of the proposed Charlotte-to-Canton, Ohio, superhighway represented a triumph of engineering over politics. Two years earlier, attempts had been made by pressure groups to twist the roadway completely out of shape to serve several transportation-hungry communities. Charlotte's claim on the road appeared to be in danger during the fall of 1957. Fortunately, the efforts had been rejected in favor of national needs and traffic studies painstakingly carried on over long periods of time.
Approval of a route did not mean that work on the North Carolina link would begin immediately. The fate of the Federal interstate highway program would depend largely on what funds Congress would make available during the current session. A proposal presently before the House Ways & Means Committee would cut North Carolina's expected share of Federal funding by 75 percent.
It indicates that regardless of the outcome of the legislative fight, the state's portion of the Charlotte-to-Canton superhighway ought be assigned high priority by the State Highway Commission. If there was any chance that other states would go ahead with construction of their own segments of the new interstate route, North Carolina ought not hesitate to begin work at once.
It indicates that it was not merely a question of benefiting Charlotte or other North Carolina towns, as the road would benefit the whole state. It would give every businessman in the state a swift, easy trade route to the heart of the rich, industrial Midwest. The importance of such an artery for the movement of goods and people and for the production of wealth and enrichment of lives was obvious. It would not only sustain the state's present growth but would contribute to a new burst of economic progress. It was the kind of project which would be worth a few temporary sacrifices, and the state, it urges, had to be prepared to make them if necessary.
"We Have a Question for the AP" wants the Associated Press to answer what a schoolteacher looked like, after it had the previous day been explicit on the subject. In a report from California about a teacher who was in some kind of trouble, the news service had said: "Dark-haired and blue-jowled, [the teacher] at 37 is tall and lean. With his dark horn rim glasses and quiet pin-stripe suit, [the teacher] looks more like a doctor or a lawyer than a teacher."
It wonders in consequence whether all school teachers were short, fat, bald-headed and sallow of complexion, and suggests that perhaps they all looked like James Hilton's "Mr. Chips".
It indicates that while it was waiting for the answer, it would tell what an AP reporter looked like. "He is terribly rumpled, a little potbellied, wears his hat on the back of his head while he types and, if we're not mistaken, that's a pint of cheap bourbon protruding from his back pocket. You'd know him anywhere."
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Afternoon of Summer", indicates that Henry James had thought that the two most beautiful words in the English language were "summer afternoon". Summer afternoons became progressively more beautiful in the afternoon of summer. As August arrived, the season had passed its high noon and the morning's pleasant chores were over, the remainder of the midday meal being cleared away from the table where on sunlight and shadow laid a damask of leaf pattern.
If James Russell Lowell was to be believed, June had rarer days. "They are piquant with promise. But they lack, for that very reason, the poignancy of midsummer hours bounded by the inexorable dimensions of 'nowness'—boundaries dismissing past as mere preparation and future as irrelevant."
It finds that one touch of sudden unexplained contentment, such as a flight of birds wheeling around in "the brazen sky, their wings catching and shedding the sunlight and making the mass seem like a shimmering cloud borne on a veering wind," made "the whole jumble of human calculations, misgivings, possibilities, merely the overwrought and impertinent frame for 'Summer Afternoon.'"
Drew Pearson indicates that a prominent American newspaperman, having lunch with the son of Winston Churchill, Randolph, the day after the elder Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Mo., in February, 1946, had commented that the British wanted to tie up the U.S. as allies in their struggle with Russia. The indiscreet Randolph had replied, "We've dragged you into two wars, and we'll drag you into another."
Since that time, Winston Churchill had completely deserted the Fulton speech policy which he had so firmly sold to President Truman. Mr. Churchill was the first to propose a summit conference, hammering away at the idea until President Eisenhower had reluctantly gone to the Geneva summit in 1955, chiefly to please the British. During that time, the British had gone into a dither at even the faintest intimation that the U.S. and Russia would sit down together in a separate bilateral summit.
But the previous weekend, the British had done a complete reversal, with British diplomats in Geneva expressing delight at the idea of a Khrushchev-Eisenhower meeting. Instead of being suspicious that the U.S. and the Soviet Union might get too close together, the British now appeared to be in the position of a man who had been stuck with one woman for a long time on the dance floor and finally had a chance to say, "You go on and dance together."
Mr. Pearson notes that the reason for the British reversal was the dread specter of atomic war between Russia and the U.S., in which the British Isles would be caught in the middle.
He indicates that it would not be announced officially but that President Eisenhower had reversed himself on the Tennessee Valley Authority bill, which previously he had planned to veto. A face-saving device was now being rushed through Congress which would enable him to sign the bill the following Friday. What happened had been that two of the President's own TVA commissioners, whom he had appointed for the purpose of limiting the giant power project which had so aroused the enmity of the big utilities, had reversed themselves. They had become boosters of TVA, and the previous week, General Herbert Vogel and A. R. Jones, both Republican commissioners, had called at the White House and argued with the President that he ought sign the TVA bill, permitting it to float its own bond issues to finance new TVA plants. Since then, Bob Merryman, former candidate for mayor of Chicago, presently deputy assistant to the President, had been going to Congress to work out a face-saver for the President, that being a bill sponsored by Senator Francis Case of South Dakota, which would cut two relatively unimportant paragraphs from the TVA bill already passed by Congress. Still in the bill, however, would be a section to which the President had objected, which took away from the Budget Bureau control of the sale of TVA bonds.
Congress and the White House would have until Friday to act, on that date, the original TVA bill, already passed, to be killed by pocket veto should the President not sign it. Both Republicans and Democrats, however, were rushing Senator Case's face-saver through Congress by Friday so that the President would be able to sign the original bill. Mr. Pearson indicates that it would take some lightning-fast legerdemain, but that was how things sometimes operated in Washington.
Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had confided to Senator John F. Kennedy that he might go to Russia after Congress adjourned. Mr. Pearson notes parenthetically that it seemed to be the place to campaign for votes in the U.S.
Joseph Alsop indicates that the President's invitation to Premier Khrushchev was the latter's latest and most substantial dividend from the Berlin crisis. Everyone was rejoicing over the great things to be gained by exposing Mr. Khrushchev to U.S. charm and might and thus one did not want to be a spoil-sport. But the fact had to be faced that Mr. Khrushchev had gotten the U.S. Government to do what he had long wanted, although the U.S. Government, until recently, had not wanted to do so.
From the beginning of the Soviet agitation for a second summit meeting, Mr. Khrushchev had made it almost comically clear what type of summit he was going to have, a face-to-face meeting with the President, with no lesser nations represented. The official Soviet pressure for a second summit meeting had started when Nikolai Bulganin had still been Premier. Officially, with one eye on the so-called neutrals such as India, Mr. Bulganin had repeatedly proposed an enormous and impossibly unwieldy rally of a score or more heads of state. Unofficially, Mr. Khrushchev, who already had most of the actual power in Russia, was telling all a quite different story, saying that the only way to settle anything was for him and President Eisenhower to get together alone. Mr. Khrushchev had first put that proposition to certain eminent foreign personalities, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Aneurin Bevan of Britain, both of whom had been visiting Russia. They had been expected to pass the word to the State Department and they had done so.
When there was no response to those feelers, Mr. Khrushchev had come out into the open at the Kremlin reception on New Year's Day, 1958, and in a toast, in the presence of the whole diplomatic colony, had urged a bilateral meeting between himself and the President. Even that blunt, overt approach had elicited no answer from Washington. Mr. Khrushchev had not even been informally asked what he wished to discuss. Secretary of State Dulles was then unshakably opposed to any summit meeting and disliked the idea of a bilateral meeting even more. At that time, the President fully shared those views, as he had continued to do until recently.
It remained the official Government position that a summit conference was desirable, but first had to be "justified" by progress at the foreign ministers meeting. But at Geneva, there had been no progress at all in the latter meeting. The second meeting of the foreign ministers had been worse than the first, if anything, and if the meeting dissolved in frustration a second time, no one could tell what would happen in Berlin.
Under those circumstances, when all hope was fading at Geneva in mid-July, the idea of a White House invitation to Mr. Khrushchev had become very attractive. It would insure the Berlin position, at least for the time being, and would provide Mr. Khrushchev what he had always desired, a bilateral meeting with the President. It would avoid the appearance of any American retreat from the position that a summit had to be "justified", because the invitation could be presented at a personal, informal level, devoid of summit overtones. In that way, Mr. Khrushchev had received his dividend.
Sober realism required all of the foregoing facts to be borne in mind, Mr. Alsop indicates, when the American Government abandoned its long-held views under Soviet pressure. It was an event worth noting. At the same time, those facts did not necessarily mean that the original position of the President and Secretary Dulles regarding a second summit meeting had been correct, even in 1957.
There was no way of determining what the new approach would entail but there were many wise observers who believed that if Mr. Khrushchev had something special he wanted to communicate to the President, it was worth hearing. That alone, he concludes, justified what had presently happened.
Walter Lippmann indicates that Vice-President Nixon's trip to Russia had proved to be more important than many had expected and in fact had produced a diplomatic breakthrough, not only because he had handled himself skillfully and with poise, but because he had taken with him to Moscow a large and unexpected concession to Soviet policy, the acceptance of the idea that peace could be maintained through direct discussion at the highest level between Moscow and Washington. That had been a major departure from the previous U.S. position. Mr. Nixon was no longer insisting that there could be no discussion at the highest level until there were some substantial agreement by the foreign ministers.
Most important, Mr. Nixon had negotiated the multilateral foreign ministers and the multilateral summit meeting itself through bilateral contacts between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Thus, Mr. Nixon had not induced Mr. Khrushchev in Moscow to make concessions regarding Berlin and Germany which Secretary of State Herter had been unable to obtain from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko at Geneva. Mr. Nixon had proposed to Mr. Khrushchev something more interesting and attractive than the deadlock over Berlin, opening the way to direct negotiation on global problems with the U.S.
That had long been a prime Soviet objective and in making the objective attainable, Mr. Nixon had been assured of a good reception not only by the Soviet Government but also by the Polish Government. The exchange of visits arranged by Mr. Nixon was a far-reaching and sensational event, representing a change in diplomatic strategy by the Administration, shown by the fact that the Western allies had been consulted and their blessing obtained before Mr. Nixon had opened the door to a visit by Mr. Khrushchev. The Western allies and the U.S. had come a long way since the prior May.
The reason, he posits, was because the U.S. had learned at Geneva that it could not get an agreement at the price which, collectively, the Western allies were willing to pay. At the same time, neither the Russians nor the Western allies had any appetite for a showdown regarding Berlin. They were ready, therefore, to try something else and were supporting the new strategy arranged by Mr. Nixon, which was to change the subject and allow both sides to back away from any showdown.
Everyone had backed away into a round of popular diplomacy which drew its energy from the popular feeling everywhere that a nuclear war had to be avoided. For the time being at least, the professional diplomats and the old chieftains abroad had been pushed aside by the politicians who were far more "flexible" than the diplomats had ever dreamed of being. He suggests that perhaps if the diplomats had been allowed by the old statesmen to be flexible enough to negotiate effectively, they would not have been pushed aside by the young politicians.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French Premier Charles de Gaulle had deflected British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and they had held Secretary of State Herter in an unnegotiable position. But they had been unable to hold the Republican Party in an election year. For their pain, they had Mr. Nixon to deal with, and the latter was not only running for the presidency but was running on a very popular line, which was to avoid war by seeing a lot more of the Russians.
In most respects, he suggests, Mr. Nixon's television address in Moscow had been self-respecting and well directed to the Russians who heard it. But on one important point, his exuberance had taken him into soft and dangerous ground, that being the implications of what he said regarding coexistence, that coexistence was not good enough and that there should be one world and not two. The implications of that passage were that Mr. Khrushchev would or could detach the Soviet Union from its interest in and support of the great revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. That was not possible and would not happen. The Soviet Union would not provide direct military support to any of the various revolutionary movements, but would help them by measures short of war, and because of that, there would not be "one world" of like-minded nations but at least two worlds of coexisting but competing rival nations.
He finds it unwise to allow exuberance to create illusions, and to let the best, which would be universal harmony, become the modest good which might be practicable.
Incidentally, the foregoing ascription to Mr. Nixon of the opening to Mr. Khrushchev to visit the President in Washington flies directly in the face of that stated by the President, himself, at a special press conference the prior Monday, as reported the same date by the Associated Press on the front page, that the President had suggested the visit to the State Department sometime earlier and had, himself, initiated the correspondence to bring about the visit in early July, and that he had informed the Vice-President of same on the day before his departure for Moscow. Make of it what you will. Was Mr. Lippmann being fed conflicting information by Mr. Nixon's faithful press aide, Herb Klein
A letter writer responds to a letter writer who had written on July 30 about foreign cars looking like poodle dogs or cockroaches darting in and out of traffic, indicating her sympathy for the writer. She said she had also been a victim of the "ridiculous, monstrous, overgrown American-made auto jet. Being of sound mind, I finally wised up, but I'm not as old and set in my ways as the chap who owned a 1932 Austin. He could probably do better with a nice walking cane—and I'm wondering if the 'Mayflower' he is driving at this time is paid for as was the 1932 Austin he disliked." She indicates that her car was European-made and was beautiful, muddy or not, and she had to laugh at the ignorance and foolishness which people displayed with those "big, gullible autos that wind up in the finance company's used car lot. Small cars are lifesavers—but most of the time, gas-savers."
Query whether the previous writer's comment regarding poodles related to the Renault Dope Fiend
A letter writer indicates that few citizens appeared to realize the seriousness of the current steel strike, which if it were not settled soon could create a chain of events which could affect adversely nearly every American. If there were no sheet-metal for the production of tin containers, the can manufacturers would shut down. In turn, the beer manufacturers would have to shut down, as well as the beer joints, without beer to sell. The county police, with no drunks to chase, would have to reduce their forces drastically and the road gangs, with no empty beer cans to litter the roadsides, would have nothing for the prisoners to do, and the prisoners would have to be paroled, and the parolees, with no beer available, would need psychiatric treatment, thus overworking the psychiatrists, who would soon go crazy and overcrowd the mental institutions. "This thing could run all of us crazy. Somebody ought to do something about it."
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