Site Ed. Note: The front page tells a story which would be repeated in later history, between 1966 and 1972, the Allied bombing of Haiphong Harbor in Japanese-occupied French Indochina. The editorial page begins with a review of a message to the American people the previous week from Pearl Buck, warning, with a good deal of perspicacity, that “in this war, are already being sown the seeds of the next war”.

The next war would be the Cold War, embracing, or--to eschew such evocation of tender feeling--sucking into its whorling maelstrom, the primary ensuing hot wars involving America, Korea and Vietnam.

And the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly the immediate seed for the hot war to end all hot wars, the simple expedient of mutually assured destruction brought to visible manifestation in a flash, was itself precipitated by the Soviet Union as a bartering device by which it hoped to achieve favorable sway in the tenuous balance of power struck between East and West with equally tense opposing tugs at the ever-tauter rope stretching across the newly erected Wall which stood as the visible barrier between the two socio-political hemispheres, locally between the halves of the city of Berlin, its less starkly pronounced boundary having been struck at the Brandenburg Gate at the end of World War II.

Of course, the probable accuracy of Ms. Buck’s prediction was foretold quite adequately by history: by World War I and the Versailles Treaty in its aftermath, the American rejection under the Harding Administration of membership in the League of Nations, stripping it of its potential for unanimous moral force, the failure to implement Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the failure to heed the warning signs in Germany in the 1920’s and even into the rearmament era after Hitler came to power in 1933; by the Franco-Prussian wars which had preceded World War I by nearly 50 years; by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, and the aggression and desire for empire it thus betrayed of the Japanese.

These wars, their suspicions and internecine racial and ethnic hatreds which both produced and was exacerbated by them, had inexorably led to World War II. There was no great optimistic reason showing itself in 1942, especially judging by the daily press rhetoric, especially the unrestrained racial prejudice displayed consistently against the Japanese, even if diminished considerably from the angry reaction in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, to believe that anything much different after this war would allow or demand transcendence of these darkly xenophobic inter-tribal traits so seemingly prevailing in humanity at large.

But, then, Ms. Buck had not yet seen the palpable terror aroused in man’s breast by the ultimate weapon, vaporizing in a blink a whole city once vibrant and teeming with life; young and old, gone to some other place in time and space, within the shut discourse of a nanosecond. That was the only difference in the end, this new Beast upon the stage, combined with its threat of mutually assured destruction if deployed by any of the major players in the post-war world who controlled its harness.

Was it the striving for peace and the desire to live as one in an idyllic world under some moral code recognizing right which brought the post-war world to conceptualize that which the ages had failed to create, a lasting rapprochement? Or, was it not the simple expedient, the simple mutual threat, communicating in silence to one and all the realization that any further active warfare fought between the major civilized nations would result, post-haste, in their complete destruction, and with them, the world at large?

Raymond Clapper echoes the words of Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles from the New York Herald-Tribune a few days earlier, to the effect that “nothing is more fatally dangerous than the common American fallacy that the formulation of an aspiration is equivalent to the hard-won realization of an objective.” In other words, the path to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Mr. Welles had cited the failure of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 to prevent World War II, despite its laudable effort to obtain agreement in treaty form to ban war as a means of resolving international disputes between its signatory nations--including among them each of the Allied and Axis nations. As with the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, Mr. Clapper points out, it was, after all, only a scrap of paper, with no force behind it other than the temporal willingness of its subscribers to honor it.

Kellogg-Briand was proved dead aborning by 1931 when Japan first entered Manchuria, then reaffirmed in its fecklessness when, without provocation in 1935, Italy attacked Ethiopia, both signatories to the Pact. By September, 1938 and the Munich Pact, Kellogg-Briand, everyone of sense understood, was no longer worth mentioning in serious discourse, as was, instanter, the Munich accord itself, a document still-birthed at its signing by its viability being dependent on the signature of a barbarian who came to power advocating not only German Empire, but the Big Lie as the method by which that Empire’s creation and maintenance would be effected.

Last night, incidentally, we happened to view a History Channel presentation from some time ago regarding the North African invasion, stressing Patton’s 34,000-man force landing near Casablanca. By nightfall on November 8, stated one of the interviewed soldiers who participated in the landing, it was bitterly cold along the beaches; blankets were stored in supply transports which were strewn along the beach in the darkness out of sight and out of reach. So, the men plundered their ample rations of Kellogg’s Cornflakes, setting side by side the cartons to form mattresses, utilizing the cardboard shipping boxes for blankets. Eventually, by November 10, ship-to-shore shelling by American Navy vessels silenced the fusillade of the French guns firing from the coastline defenses and the strafing aircraft above.

The memory thus conveyed tends to breathe historical meaning into the cryptic cipher, “Sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come.” Especially so, since it was on a beach, after all, that the Carpenter had his discussion with the Walrus about the Oysters which they had invited to dinner.

Paul Mallon suggests that a sense of the Congress, asking that the eight states still possessing them to abolish their poll-tax requirements, might have been a more sensible method of attacking the restriction than introducing Federal legislation, encumbered with all of the baggage inherent in force bills, attracting thereby the states’ rights advocates to inveigh bitterly in opposition.

Mr. Mallon finds the whole proposal disingenuous. He reports that several states had alternative bars to voting beyond the poll tax, erecting even stronger barriers to the free exercise of the franchise than did the $1.00 or $1.50 tolls imposed on the right. Literacy tests in some Southern states were prime example. In Tennessee, there was an effort to end the poll-tax as an impingement to voting, but, cynically, only because Boss Crump in Memphis had been forced to pay too much to provide the tax to African-Americans to vote for Crump-favored candidates.

Mallon concludes that the proposed legislation was little more than cheap politics in play, a lukewarm attempt to shore up support of African-Americans for Northern Democrats, while enabling by equal and opposite measures Southern Democrats to solidify their white segregationist constituencies.

Yet, he found that the sum of the tawdry show boded only ill tidings for the future unity of the Democratic Party. If not in some of his other assessments on the issue, in that one, he was certainly correct. By the mid-1960’s, the Democratic Party was so bitterly splintered by various issues, central among which was civil rights, that to call it a party was a misnomer. It presented itself more often than not as a domestic war zone.

“Well Named” discusses the death of 47 patients at the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane resulting from the substitution of roach powder for powdered eggs in the preparation of a breakfast. The editorial agrees with Oregon's Governor Sprague that the incident was the equivalent of mass murder, then goes on to hypothesize that North Carolina’s state hospital at Morganton might have ended with as bad a tragedy had the practice of having patients prepare meals, the inmates running the asylum as it were, not been halted pursuant to the State’s investigation of the abject conditions, prompted by former patient, former News reporter Tom Jimison’s series on the institution in late January and early February, 1942.

It was, incidentally, the Oregon state hospital which formed the setting of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, even if the actual inspiration for the book came from the author’s stint as an orderly at a mental facility in Menlo Park, California.

And, for the second edition of The News in succession, Mr. P. C. Burkholder offers yet another salutary view of the world, this time criticizing another letter writer of the previous week who had found editorial prejudice in the preference of the war press for “Yanks” as referential nomenclature to be applied to Americans fighting abroad in the war. Mr. Burkholder inveighs against the notion by indicating, appropriately, that it was the Yanks who preserved the Union and kept the United States united. More befitting therefore the nature of the thing were one to say “Damnrebels” than “Damnyankees”, he opines.

True enough. But, we’ve a feeling that the prior letter writer of November 18, Mr. Phillips, was not altogether intending his little objection to be taken quite so seriously as perhaps Mr. Burkholder assumes. (Just how it was that Mr. Burkholder converted Louis Phillips into a "her", we do not exactly understand, but maybe the "u" was omitted in his obviously too quick read of the letter, one thus becoming pregnant with a negative stereotype, failing to accentuate the positive which he, himself, claimed to champion. Or, maybe he left out the "is", or added an "e".)

Well, we leave it to you to tie it all up smoothly into one bundle. We assure you that it does so tie together in perfect unity.

Whatever the case, if you step from the theater into the night air, just at the moment the noise of the smogged-in fluoridation finally smacks you dead in the face, after the solution in which it is soluble activates the roach powder poured as salt over your popcorn laced by the concession vendor, who ought instead have long ago been cured by the wind of the idiot in the asylum, but now stands before you as a case saying, "Who is that man?" as he bends, fidgets, and beguiles them while holding the chicken salad between his knees, but only after he escaped down a 400-foot cliff without keys from the castle imprisoning him by tying together threads into a rope he cabbaged from "La Grande Illusion", or perhaps "The Great Escape" backwards, a fanned noise you'll lie darning, with socks in the night of intrusion, then placed second in charge of all French forces in North Africa by General Eisenhower, albeit with Troy's dual tri-warning, or at least sitting astride the goods, in ephemeral guise of power snarling charm's song, while unlatching the bomb bay doors about to de-polish the lore from the B-52 headed irrevocably for Russian terra, always irrevocably for Russian Tara, the recall codes on fail-safe, the engine sputtering from a trail's strafe, dipping his hands in the goo of the gore which once was the face of Yossarian, standing with back to the flag in puffed pants of religion at Fort Bragg, saluting, giving his speech, yet facing the end of his numbered days in print of Gregorian, only to beseech a collision of circumstance in fields of Elysian, in memoriam, perhaps then you may understand the whole of it.

In any event, contrary to the view offered up by the piece from the The Christian Science Monitor suggesting examples of appropriate battle prayers, we venture that there is no battle prayer which may be heard other than one which prays for the speedy end of any present war and all its causative agents, and all others and their causes which might follow it.

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