The Charlotte News

Saturday, April 2, 1955

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Tokyo that a radio broadcast intercepted from Peiping charged this night that 18 U.S. planes in four groups had violated Communist China's boundaries the previous day and that the Chinese people were "watching with serious consideration the progress of such provocations." The propaganda broadcast said that Chinese warplanes had pursued the four American planes which had flown over Shangtung Province, but that they had escaped eastward. It said that such military provocations by the U.S. showed its intention to increase tension in the Far East. A U.S. Far East Air Force spokesman in Tokyo said that no information was yet available on the report but that it would be checked. The story indicates that a recent broadcast of similar charges by the Communist Chinese, claiming U.S. air intrusion of Chinese territory, had turned out to relate to planes from Nationalist China.

The State Department announced this date that 76 technically trained Chinese students had been granted permission to leave the country, after they had been barred from doing so for the previous four years in some cases, the decision having been made jointly by the State, Justice and Defense Departments. About a half dozen more cases would be determined shortly by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the expectation was that they would also be cleared to leave. It was hoped that the decision would result in the release of 15 American airmen and 41 U.S. civilians being held by the Chinese Communists, but the State Department stated that there had been no deal on their release. The Chinese students had been refused departure visas because it was feared that technical knowledge acquired in the U.S. would be used at home to aid the Communist Chinese.

From Dansalan, Mindanao, in the Philippines, it was reported that an earthquake the previous day had caused the death of at least 327 persons, with most of the dead having occurred in the Lake Lanao region of northwestern Mindanao. The earthquake had caused a tidal wave which had submerged an entire village on the west shore of the lake. Provincial officials stated that there were also 254 injured and estimated crop damage of five million dollars worth, with additional damage to churches, public buildings and homes, resulting in an estimated 10,000 persons being rendered homeless. Makeshift tents were provided to afford temporary shelter.

Senator Kerr Scott of North Carolina, in his first major Senate speech the previous day, had attacked the President, saying that he was "the master architect of confusion—not the tool of confusion." He said that there could never be real leadership as long as the President tried to handle the tough decisions "by putting them off, by passing the buck to others or by ducking responsibility for the acts of his subordinates". He said that he had observed a long series of acts and statements which, taken together, constituted a dangerous threat to national security, to the nation's prestige and standing in international circles and to the domestic economy. He said that it was time to stop criticizing the bat boys and begin to see what kind of a job the pitcher was doing, referring to the President. He asserted that there had been a period of dangerous drift and confusion with regard to whether the U.S. would defend Nationalist-held Quemoy and Matsu islands off the coast of Communist China in the event of an attack by Communist China, which had brought the country "dangerously close to the brink of war." He said that it was best that the President not reveal his precise intent with regard to those islands but that it was to be hoped that he had made up his own mind about what he intended to do and that it would be a firm position from which he would not be pressured or tricked into conflict by war-minded leaders within the Republican Party.

The New York Times reported that the Army had raised the secrecy rating of official documents pertaining to General MacArthur's wartime views on the need for Soviet assistance in the battle against Japan. General MacArthur had said repeatedly that had he been asked at the time of the Yalta conference in February, 1945, he would have advised President Roosevelt against bringing the Russians into the Pacific War at that late date. The Washington Post and Times-Herald, in an editorial of March 25, had disputed the statement, saying that General MacArthur was known to have sent messages to the Joint Chiefs during the war pleading for concessions to Russia to engage them in the Pacific War. The General's chief aide, however, retired Maj. General Courtney Whitney, denied that claim again the previous day in a letter to the newspaper, saying that he had reviewed the file of General MacArthur's most important messages to the Joint Chiefs and that there was no entry regarding Soviet Russia coming into the war against Japan. The Times, in a dispatch from Washington signed by correspondent Anthony Leviero, stated the previous night that it had asked the Army to release the wartime documents which would clarify the dispute, indicating that the documents it sought had originally been graded "top secret" but had been downgraded to "restricted" late in 1945 so that Army historians could write their histories. The Times said that the Army had agreed to release pertinent parts of the documents but that a hitch had developed in that the classification had been changed from "restricted" to "confidential", upgraded, according to the Times, to keep the press from having access. The newspaper sought two documents cited on page 308 of the Army history volume titled, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, which had indicated that at a conference on February 25, 1945 between the chief of the strategic section of the war plans division of the War Department general staff, General George Lincoln, and General MacArthur and his chief of staff, General MacArthur had discussed the planned invasion of Japan and urged that "as many Japanese divisions as possible should first be pinned down on the mainland, principally by Soviet forces." The discussion was alleged to have occurred two weeks after the Yalta conference, at which Russia had already agreed to fight against Japan, though not declaring war on Japan until August 9, 1945, three days after the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped and the same day that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, three days after which Japan had surrendered. In a letter to the Post and Times-Herald managing editor J. R. Wiggins, General Whitney said that the file pertinent to the dispute ought be opened to the public, and that it would disclose that if anyone was trying to rewrite history, it was not General MacArthur.

In Atlanta, it was reported that there was a new wave of cable cuttings as the Southern Bell Telephone Co. workers' strike entered its 20th day. Two men had been indicted for shooting a cable splicer sent to repair severed cables and four men had been fired by the company for engaging in such acts of sabotage. Five cables had been cut in Atlanta the previous day, bringing the total to 115 such incidents since the start of the strike on March 14. Four cables had reportedly been cut in the Miami area, bringing the total to 28 in that location, and two had been damaged in the vicinity of Greenville, Miss. Spokesmen for the Communications Workers of America union assured again that their members had not taken part in the damage to company property.

In Cleveland, O., defense attorneys for Dr. Samuel Sheppard, convicted the prior December for the second degree murder of his wife and sentenced to life in prison, filed their brief in the Ohio Court of Appeals this date, positing that Marilyn Sheppard had been hacked to death during a sexual attack by a left-handed intruder, whom she had probably bitten on the hand when he sought to stifle her cries. Dr. Sheppard was right-handed. William Corrigan, who had been the chief counsel for the defendant at trial, released the brief to the press the previous night. (While appellant's opening brief does not appear to be available online, his Reply Brief to the State's opening brief would be filed on June 1, 1955.) Some of the points were believed to have been developed by Dr. Paul Kirk, a criminologist of the University of California hired by the defense team to investigate the case following the trial, though his name was not mentioned in the brief. (A subsequent brief, to be filed at the end of May, would expressly rely on the "newly discovered evidence" of Dr. Kirk, appealing, in a collateral proceeding, the denial by the trial court of defendant's motion for new trial based thereon.) The brief hypothesized that a "peeper or sex deviate" could have peered in at Mrs. Sheppard from an apple tree near the house and then entered the house by the unlocked back door, gone to her bedroom and then killed her. The doctor had claimed that he had encountered a bushy haired intruder in his wife's bedroom, after being awakened by her cries from his location on the downstairs living room couch, where he had fallen asleep at around midnight as his wife and a visiting neighbor couple watched a movie on the television in the living room, some four hours before Mrs. Sheppard was killed. The doctor had said that the intruder had twice knocked him unconscious, once briefly in the bedroom, after recovering from which, he gave chase, and was again knocked out on the lake shore beach adjoining the house, that when he regained consciousness the second time, he had returned to the house, gone upstairs, and found that his wife was dead, then called his neighbor who was mayor of the village. Since the murder weapon had never been found, the brief suggested that the intruder had brought it into the house, that it could have been a heavy object useful to the entry, such as a flashlight. The brief also underscored the fact that there were two tooth fragments found under Mrs. Sheppard's body, although there was no external injury to her mouth, concluding that her teeth were probably broken when she had bitten her killer's hand prompting him to jerk it from her mouth. The doctor had no injury to his hands. The brief also ascribed 37 errors of law to the trial court during the case, the trial of which had transpired between October 18 and December 21, 1954. As indicated, while the conviction would be affirmed on direct appeal, it would eventually be reversed on habeas corpus by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 because of the "carnival atmosphere" surrounding press coverage of the trial and pretrial proceedings, preventing the defendant from having a fair trial guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. On retrial in 1966, with Dr. Sheppard represented by F. Lee Bailey, who had handled the successful habeas corpus petition, he would be acquitted.

Near Lake Waccamaw, N.C., seven automobiles filled with people bound for the Wilmington Azalea Festival had become involved in a pile-up resulting in the deaths of three persons, two of whom were teenagers, after three of the cars had burned. Two other teenagers who were passengers in the car in which the two teenagers had died, had been injured, one seriously. The area had been enshrouded in smoke at the time of the accident, emanating from the Green Swamp forest fire which had raged during the week and reportedly was under control.

In Charlotte, an unidentified man had held up the office of Belvedere Homes late during the morning, taking $675 without use of a weapon. The manager of the office said that he handed over the money despite the man not drawing a weapon, because he did not want to take any chances, as the man kept his hand in his jacket pocket. As soon as the man departed, the manager called to his assistant, oblivious to the robbery, in an adjoining office and asked that she call the police.

In Yvoy-le-Marron, France, actress Olivia de Havilland, 38, and French film writer and Paris Match editor Pierre Galante, 45, were married this date in a little red brick schoolhouse of the village, the bride and groom arriving 15 minutes late from a hunting lodge two miles outside the town. It was Ms. De Havilland's second marriage and Mr. Galante's first. Ms. De Havilland had been divorced in 1952 after seven years of marriage to screenwriter Marcus Goodrich, author of the 1941 novel Delilah, about a destroyer operating in the Philippine Islands on the eve of World War I—from which W. J. Cash had made reference, regarding a "short, incidental section on the defense of the Alamo", at the start of his June 2, 1941 commencement address at the University of Texas in Austin. The marriage, incidentally, took place three days after "On the Waterfront" had tied the record of eight Academy Awards presented to one film, set by "Gone with the Wind" in 1939, for which Ms. De Havilland had been nominated as Best Supporting Actress, the award won by Hattie McDaniel for her role in the film.

On the editorial page, "Segregation: No Fist-Shaking, Please" states its belief that the North Carolina General Assembly, in proposing to place on the record its policy on segregation in the public schools, would not engage in the silliness of other Southern states, which had "waved Confederate flags insolently in the face of the Supreme Court" for its decision the previous May 17 in Brown v. Board of Education, holding continued segregation in the public schools unconstitutional pursuant to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The piece finds that there should be no serious objection to a declaration of policy on the subject and that any resolution passed by the Assembly ought be temperate and reasonable, free of any fist-shaking defiance.