The Charlotte News

Saturday, October 8, 1955

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Notes: The front page reports that Vice-President Nixon had left Washington in the rain this date for a bedside visit with the President in Denver, riding in an Air Force plane along with White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, the President's son, Maj. John Eisenhower, and the President's Boston heart specialist, Dr. Paul D. White. It would be the Vice-President's first visit with the President since the latter had been stricken by a heart attack two weeks earlier. The President had requested that Mr. Nixon come to see him. Whether the Vice-President would be wearing a raincoat over his head is not indicated.

Former Governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson and former President Truman had lambasted the Republicans during speeches this date, with the former having told a Wisconsin Democratic Party convention at Green Bay that the present Republican farm policy of flexible price supports was not working, that instead of eliminating surpluses, as had been claimed, it was eliminating farmers, and that export subsidies and import quotas sharply conflicted with the Administration's declarations about freer world trade. He said that there was still indefensible discrimination between different commodities and that the burdensome surpluses were still burdening the country, with the result that the problem of effective control remained. He cautioned Democrats against promising that the farm problem would be eliminated should they be returned to power, that the farmers could not expect the Democrats to perform miracles. Former President Truman had responded vigorously to shouts of "Give 'em hell, Harry" from an enthusiastic crowd of about 2,000 people at an Albany, N.Y., rally of Democratic candidates for local offices in New York. Mr. Truman said that he was "very anxious" to see that the Government was "restored to the people", saying that there was a class of people who believed that government should make the rich richer and let some benefits "filter down to the people below." He said that Democrats did not believe that the people who controlled the Government ought control it for a special interest purpose, that instead the Government ought be controlled for the welfare and benefit of all people, that he believed that the present Government was a "special privilege government and nothing else".

Meanwhile, Republican Senator George Bender of Ohio had predicted that the President "can be and will be" a candidate for a second term, despite his recent heart attack. He said that if the President did decide not to run, "the country would want him to indicate who he is for".

In Bournemouth, England, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, speaking to 4,000 delegates of the Conservative Party's annual conference, called this date for a big power agreement to stop the flow of arms into the Middle East, saying that the risk of war between Israel and Egypt would be intensified should "a great power from outside" step in with supplies for one side or the other. He did not mention any power by name, but was obviously referring to Russia, as Egypt had announced a pact whereby it would swap cotton for arms from the Soviet satellite of Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile in London, the Foreign Office accused Egyptian Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser of giving out falsely attributed information which "grossly exaggerated" the extent of British military aid to Israel, charging the Prime Minister with misrepresenting the source of his information as being an intercepted secret official French document regarding figures on arms deliveries to Israel. The statement said that the information had actually come from a commercial Paris newsletter. Prime Minister Nasser had said on October 7 that he had decided to purchase arms from Czechoslovakia because Egyptian intelligence had intercepted a French intelligence document indicating that Britain and the U.S. had given Israel, among other things, 120 planes, 115 tanks and 100 armored cars. The British Foreign Office, however, said that the true facts were that no Mustang aircraft and no Churchill tanks had been supplied by the United Kingdom to Israel, that 20 tanks in a demilitarized condition had been sold to Israel for "cannibalization", to acquire parts. Mr. Eden also said that his Government hoped to reduce the strength of the armed forces of Britain by about 100,000 by April, 1958, to a total of 680,000 men and 20,000 women, and that Britain would continue its national service period of 24 months. The conference had buzzed with speculation for three days that Mr. Eden was preparing to make sweeping Cabinet changes, but Mr. Eden said that he had asked the Cabinet members to remain at their posts for the present.

In New York, the Navy launched the 60,000-ton super carrier U.S.S. Saratoga, calling it the world's heaviest and most powerful warship. The wife of Navy Secretary Charles Thomas smashed a bottle of champagne on the hull of the ship to launch it at the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn. The ship would still require six more months of construction before it was ready to join the fleet, even after leaving its present drydock berth. The previous Saratoga, the famed fighting carrier of World War II, had been sunk during the Bikini atomic bomb tests. The Navy stressed the habitability and comfort of the new ship and soft-pedaled or said nothing about its battle capabilities, it being the second in a series of five vessels able to strike anywhere in the world with nuclear weapons. The ship was slightly heavier and had a completely new and more powerful propulsion plant than its sister ship, the U.S.S. Forrestal, which had been commissioned a week earlier. The Navy did not indicate whether the ship would eventually be switched over to atomic power. It would carry 100 or more jet planes capable of handling nuclear weapons and its principal armament would consist of 14 five-inch guns aimed and fired by radar, just as with the Forrestal.

In Miami, General Thomas White, vice chief of staff of the Air Force, hinted this date in a prepared address to the Aeronautics Committee of the American Legion's National Security Commission, that the Air Force was possibly planning to adopt as an atomic-powered bomber the Navy's new giant jet seaplane. It would represent a marked switch for the Air Force, since it traditionally had frowned on any new move by the Navy into the field of aeronautics. While General White did not specify the Navy jet, it was obvious that he referred to the XP6M-1 Seamaster, a plane which had a top speed of 600 mph, powered by four jet engines built by Glenn Martin Co. of Baltimore, and which had been undergoing flight tests which the Navy said were "unusually promising", with the Navy claiming that the plane could operate anywhere there was water, even from comparatively rough seas, and could be refueled from tanker ships or tanker submarines. The General said that they knew they could build a nuclear-powered airplane and that it would be flying sometime within the ensuing decade, that the atomic plane had been given priority by the Air Force. A major problem, however, had been the shielding of plane crews from radiation from nuclear reactors aboard, as existing reactors required bulky shielding, turning attention to large planes, such as land-based bombers and the Seamaster. (They would also need to build them crash-proof.)

In Laramie, Wyo., investigators sifted through the wreckage of the United Air Lines DC-4 four-engine plane which had crashed on snow-covered Medicine Bow Peak the prior Thursday, trying to discern an explanation for the crash, which had taken the lives of all 66 persons aboard, the worst commercial airline crash to that point in the nation's history. The president of the airlines indicated that the plane was 25 miles west of the established airway when it hit the 12,000-foot peak, 40 miles west of Laramie in southern Wyoming and that it was not yet known why the plane was off course, that it was being investigated by the Civil Aeronautics Board and by the company. Leaders of a group of 150 experienced mountain climbers said that it would take several days to retrieve all of the bodies of the other 59 adult passengers and three crew members, after they had recovered the bodies of two women and two infants the previous day. The bodies were being lowered hundreds of yards by ropes and winches to trails where they were then transported six miles to a summer science lodge of the University of Wyoming, where medical experts were attempting to identify the remains. Only expert mountain climbers were allowed to attempt to go the final few hundred yards up a nearly perpendicular cliff to the crash scene, about 75 feet away from the summit.

In Detroit, the uncle of murdered 14-year old Emmett Till, Mose Wright of Money, Miss., said to a reporter in an interview the previous night that he had spent the night of September 23 in his car in a church cemetery in Money for fear that he would be harmed if he returned home, after the acquittal that afternoon of the two half-brothers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, whom he had identified to law enforcement and during the trial as the kidnapers of Emmett during the wee hours of the morning of Sunday, August 28. The following morning of September 24, a friend had told Mr. Wright that he had seen two men go to his home during the night "flashing a light around". Mr. Wright said that he had been tipped the night before that a group of men were coming to his home, prompting him to leave along with his children. On the night of the kidnaping, Mr. Wright had testified, the two co-defendants, accompanied by a third man whom he could not identify but thought might be black, and a fourth person in an awaiting automobile who might have been a woman, had flashed a flashlight in his face, that of his wife, and those of his sons and nephews visiting him, including Emmett, before taking Emmett from the home, never to have seen Emmett alive again. Since the acquittal by the all-male, all-white jury, following only an hour of deliberation, based primarily on their determination that there was no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River on August 31 was that of Emmett, a conflict had arisen between newspapers in Chicago and Mississippi, with the Chicago Defender and the Jackson Daily News in Mississippi on opposite sides, the latter saying, in a copyrighted story of October 5 by reporter Bill Spell, that Mr. Wright and two other black witnesses, Willie Reed, who had testified to hearing screams of pain in the early morning of August 28 coming from a barn or shed owned by another brother of the two co-defendants and that he observed J. W. Milam walking to a well and taking a drink of water, while carrying a pistol in his pants, and then returning to the same shed from which the screams were emanating, and Amanda Bradley, who had confirmed that she had met Willie Reed that morning when he came to her house near the barn and reported having heard strange sounds emanating from the direction of the barn, were all "captives" of the NAACP. The Defender quoted Mr. Wright and Mrs. Bradley as having denied any such affiliation. The NAACP had picketed the U.S. Customs House in Chicago the previous day during the course of a Senate Internal Security subcommittee hearing there, charging that the verdict had demonstrated that human rights were denied to blacks in Mississippi. The two co-defendants still faced kidnaping charges in Mississippi, with the matter scheduled to go before the LeFlore County grand jury in November. (To avoid confusion from the afore-linked clip, a grand jury can but does not normally hear witnesses from either side of a case or from the defense counsel, but only a summary of the evidence presented by the prosecutors sufficient to show probable cause that a crime has been committed against the named victim and that the defendant is the perpetrator. While in some jurisdictions, an information drawn by the prosecutor charging a crime is sufficient without an indictment, other jurisdictions, such as North Carolina, require, by the state constitution or statute, grand jury indictments for felonies absent a waiver of same by the defendant. No judge or magistrate is present and rules of evidence are not applicable.) The two half-brothers, according to the trial testimony of the LeFlore County sheriff and his deputy, had admitted during the afternoon of August 28, pursuant to questioning about their knowledge of the disappearance of Emmett, that they had taken him, as Mr. Wright had contended, from the home at around 2:30 a.m., but claimed that they had let him go in Money after Mr. Bryant's wife had indicated that it was not Emmett who had been "doing all the talking" inside their country store on the evening of August 24. Kidnaping at the time in Mississippi carried the potential for life imprisonment or the death penalty. Mr. Wright was visiting with his brother-in-law in Detroit and had been in Chicago and Detroit since the end of the trial.

In Raleigh, the first official indication as to what Governor Luther Hodges meant by his "local option" plan had been divulged by his Advisory Committee on Education the previous day, the Committee announcing that it was studying "abolition of the public schools and the organization of private schools perhaps by local option in specially troubled communities." It said that it regarded that as the final step, only if all else failed to produce "a tolerable situation". The Governor had mentioned at two news conferences the notion that a "local option" plan for dealing with the segregation problem was being studied, but had refused to explain exactly what he meant. He had said to the press that if his plea for continued segregation of the public schools on a voluntary basis did not work completely in all communities, the Legislature and the people might be called on to consider some form of "local option", which the press had interpreted to mean that communities would be given the right to decide whether they would desegregate their schools. State Attorney General William Rodman, who had been working closely with the Governor on the segregation issue, contended that the Durham Morning Herald had misinterpreted the Governor's views in that regard. Speaking before a pro-segregation group, the Durham United Political Education Council, Mr. Rodman said that he was certain that they would appreciate the misinterpretation of the Governor's reference to the local option plan, that he was authorized by the Governor to say that the idea was designed primarily to permit communities sometime in the future, faced with the integration problem as a result of court order or otherwise, to close their public schools if they wished to do so and try other methods of educating their children. Mr. Rodman had, on August 23 in a talk in Asheville, indicated that he had "grave doubts" that any plan involving closure of the public schools and having segregated private schools in lieu thereof would pass muster under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, as interpreted by Brown v. Board of Education—similar to attempts to privatize the primary system of voting to allow primaries to be open only to voters deemed acceptable to the parties for membership, as a private club.

In Asheville, the National Park Service said that the peak of the fall color season in the western part of the state would be October 14-22 and that it would be an unusually beautiful fall season in the Southern Highlands.

There were wet spots in parts of the Eastern quarter of the nation and along the Pacific Coast, but the weather was generally fair in most areas this date. Light rains had fallen in Washington and along the Pacific Coast southward into Northern California. For most other parts of the country, it had been nearly ideal football weather, with temperatures in the morning generally in the 40's and 50's, with higher temperatures in the 60's and 70's confined to the Atlantic and Gulf Coast States, the Southwest and parts of the northern Rockies.

In Charlotte, by noon, it had rained .42 of an inch but the skies were predicted to be clear for the afternoon and through Monday.

In Salisbury, England, royal artillery men admitted this date that they had lost a field gun, then found it perched on the highest ledge of Stonehenge, the ancient Druid monument in Salisbury Plain. The 250-pound gun had disappeared at night from outside a guard room door and at dawn was seen glinting in the morning sun, with no indication of how it had been lifted to the 15-foot high stone ledge. The gunners hinted that a certain neighboring regiment should keep a double guard on its trophies for the ensuing few weeks. Little did they reck of the notion that the Druids have magical powers and still exist by way of heirship.

In London, a Russian fashion expert, Mrs. V. G. Kaminskaya, admitted this date that the Soviets were far behind the rest of the well-dressed world when it came to corsets and girdles, saying that they were "bringing up the rear" and that they knew it, that it was one of the reasons why she was visiting England, to study Britain's achievement in that field. The U.S.S.R., whose population of 200 million was comprised of a majority of women, had no corset factory. A Soviet official had once told the daughter of former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Averell Harriman, that they did not need girdles because they liked their women "big and broad".

On the editorial page, "What Nixon Has That Ike Didn't Have" tells of RNC chairman Leonard Hall having been told by the President at their last meeting before the President's heart attack, "to be optimistic and keep smiling", which Mr. Hall had followed so faithfully that even following the President's attack, he had told a party meeting that they were in their best shape in 25 years.