It indicates that the three cities presently comprised a triangle, the greatest distance between any two of the cities being 28 miles, that between Winston-Salem and Greensboro, and that the urban populations of Guilford and Forsyth Counties presently exceeded 225,000.

It suggests that if Mr. Gibson's prophecy were to come to pass, and if medical science were to enable those presently living to continue to live and be active in community affairs despite chronological aging limitations, certain predictions could be made about the year 2005: That the community would be known as "Guilsyth", with a population of 1.5 million persons, not including mechanical men; Holt McPherson, presently of the Star, would control the McPherson News as sole proprietor, and, pointing to the progress made by Guilsyth, would, in an editorial in his newspaper, proclaim:

"When co-Presidents Richard Nixon and Adlai Stevenson arrive by stratoplane at the Norfleet-Cone Airdrome today, they will be witnessing a half-century of advancement. The co-Presidents will speak in unison tonight at the High Rock Lake Park Hotel, introduced by Marshall Kurfees, [Mayor of Winston-Salem in 1955], now serving his 20th term as mayor of Guilsyth.

"Prior to the banquet, a parade was conducted 40 miles along a rolling sidewalk, the floats and exhibits featuring products of the community, one of which is typical: a Bur-Mil-Hanes-Reynolds smoking jacket that can be worn, smoked, eaten or used for decorative purposes.

"'The next task remaining before this city,' editorialized McPherson, 'is the annexation of Charlotte to the Guilsyth city limits.'

"Guilsyth has attempted to annex Charlotte before but court action has prevented the reasonable merger, and the matter is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, presided over by Chief Justice Pete McKnight."

Mr. McKnight, of course, had been editor of The News before departing the prior summer for his job with the Education Reporting Service in Nashville, keeping newspapers and other press affiliates aware of developments in the desegregation of public schools in the South in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, initially having taken only a leave of absence from his position at the News, but eventually deciding not to return, about to take a job in July as editor of the competing Charlotte Observer. Mr. McPherson had not explained, of course, how that translated into an appointment along the way to the Supreme Court, or when, during that interim, he had obtained his law degree. But we should not quibble with the historical record thus established in unerring prophecy.

We do know, of course, that it is quite preposterous to have suggested that Messrs. Nixon and Stevenson would become "co-Presidents".

It would be the case, however, that Mr. Nixon would run in 1956 instead of President Eisenhower, who would retire to his farm in Gettysburg, Mr. Nixon beating Senator John F. Kennedy for the presidency that year, going on to enjoy unprecedented success and popularity in his eight peaceful years as President, while Senator Kennedy would finally announce in 2005 his retirement from politics in 2007, after serving 54 years in the Senate, albeit with very few legislative accomplishments to his credit, having served honorably and honestly but in relative obscurity as Senator after his loss in a popular vote and electoral vote landslide to Vice-President Nixon in 1956, the two men having been very close to one another in the polling data throughout the campaign, until Senator Kennedy made one of the all-time political blunders in presidential politics at the end of a speech in mid-October, 1956, referring to the Vice-President as "the most corrupt individual ever to come anywhere close to the Presidency, richly earning the moniker tagged to him by former Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, which, for the sake of decorum, I shall not echo here, but, should you elect him as your next President, will be sure to disgrace you, probably leading to a scandal which will make the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding years look like a tea party—and not the type we had once in Boston, but rather one where the elephant will substitute for the Mad Hatter."

The weak attempt at humor at the end of the nationally televised address had fallen flat and the personal dig at Mr. Nixon had badly backfired, as the latter had exhibited, throughout the campaign, only magnanimity and brotherly affection toward Senator Kennedy, referring repeatedly to him as "the young and diligent Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts, whom we all love and adore, but who needs additional seasoning before becoming President, and, in that event, one day, I sincerely hope and expect to be his faithful adviser as a former President, and would be honored and happy to make my knowledge and experience available to him in that capacity, but cannot, in good conscience, at the present time, recommend him, summoning all of the objectivity at my command gleaned from my years of Congressional and executive branch service, for the role as your next President, as there are just too many important issues at work on the world stage to entrust to someone who has less than four years experience in the Senate, such as Senator Kennedy, and without the foreign policy expertise of someone such as myself, which I have been fortunate enough to accumulate in my nearly four years as your Vice-President working closely with President Eisenhower on every major decision of the Administration, meeting with world leaders on a regular basis, especially during my Good Neighbor trips to our friends in Latin America, who, I believe, love me and respect me with the full devotion perhaps offered to no one else in the history of the executive branch of this great country of ours. I say that not out of hubris, of course, but with the greatest level of humble respect for our Latin American friends for extending such warmth and, yes, even reverence, to me while down there. And, by the way, Pat still wears her cloth coat and I still drive my 1950 Oldsmobile, and we still love and cherish our little black and white cocker spaniel, the one we call Checkers. That brings to mind that I should disclose, for the sake of full hang-out, as the young people say today, that we have, in fact, in just the last few weeks, been honored with the gift of yet another cocker from the same loyal supporter in Texas who presented us with the first one four years ago, this one all black and, according to the donor, is the little brother of Checkers, causing the children, of course, to come up with a name which, I must tell you, I thought was kind of cute and clever—King Me. And, you see, because both of the cockers have Irish tempers and just don't like it when their masters are in any way ridiculed, regardless of what they say about it, we're going to keep that one, too."

That speech, repeated throughout the campaign in different forms and in different time zones, had been given for the last time in Alaska at 3:00 a.m. EST, before a group of only 20 Eskimos huddled around a fire built inside a communal igloo, just prior to the 1956 election, but, nevertheless, was widely covered by the press and, indeed, received a delayed television broadcast worldwide later that day over all of the major networks, and was greeted, astoundingly, by the American people, and those of many foreign lands, with such unprecedented approbation, possibly not so uniformly provided to any man of politics since one of the orations of the great Caesars of old, that it is considered by most presidential historians as the primary reason that the polls suddenly flipped heavily in favor of Mr. Nixon on just the eve of the election, similar to the impact of President Truman's late whistle-stop campaign across the country during the closing weeks of the 1948 campaign, such that Mr. Nixon wound up winning 49 states, all save Massachusetts, and won the popular vote by a margin of 60.7 percent to 37.5 percent over Senator Kennedy, the worst defeat in a presidential race since FDR had beaten Governor Alf Landon of Kansas in 1936.

In the wake of that election, there were rumblings on the part of the embittered Democrats in both the House and the Senate, that they would insist on an investigation, to be headed in the Senate by Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina, into alleged corrupt practices on the part of the Nixon campaign, which, according to Democrats, had the private slogan, "Elect the Veep, not the Creep", while publicly campaigning under the seemingly milquetoast but quite humorous expression: "We know you, Silent Majority, and have your back, while the Honorable Mr. Kennedy, a laudable man, but without the necessary experience to lead you, will do fine, henceforth, in the U.S. Senate serving the good and honorable people of Massachusetts."

It was rumored that the Vice-President's campaign had bugged the Democratic National Committee headquarters during the summer prior to the election and had obtained thereby crucial information which enabled the campaign to anticipate every move by the Kennedy campaign and present Mr. Nixon as someone on par with Nostradamus in his ability to predict the future, playing well among a certain segment of the electorate. But the allegations were never proven, and because Republicans had recaptured both houses in the 1956 elections, the efforts by the desperate Democrats to promote an investigation fizzled prior to liftoff, Senator Ervin, because of his leadership role in promoting the need for the investigation, having been defeated in the 1962 Democratic Senate primary by former Governor I. Beverly Lake, who, on the strength of his prophetically brilliant oral argument before the Supreme Court re the Brown implementing decision in 1955—which had finally said that the states which presently had segregated schools could take until 1975 if they could show a "genuine need" for that time to accomplish desegregation, dropping a footnote that it had been Mr. Lake's profundity which caused the Court to realize the need for deference to the states in implementation of the 1954 ruling to avoid the prospect of riots in the streets from too speedy implementation, absent "all conscientious deliberation in this gradual rebirth of a nation"—, had gone on to win the 1956 gubernatorial race after defeating Governor Luther Hodges in the Democratic primary.

As a postscript, as everybody knows, both men, it so happened, died peacefully in their sleep on the very same day, just hours apart, Mr. Nixon, at rest in San Clemente, Calif., and Mr. Kennedy, at rest, in his family's compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, Mass., on July 4, 2026, exactly 200 years after Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same day, 500 miles apart, the one in Charlottesville, Va., and the other in Quincy, Mass. It was rumored that Mr. Kennedy's last words, emblematic of his long, but obscure, service to the country, were: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, and what together we can do for the freedom of man." Amazingly, the words attributed at the last to Mr. Nixon ran, similarly, but with a differently nuanced implication: "In our own lives, let each of us ask—not just what will government do for me, but what can I do for myself, not just how government can help, but how can I help."

Likewise, Mr. Nixon had contributed 13 Crises, his six-volume Presidential memoir, which was a runaway nonfiction bestseller in 1974, winning the National Book Award for that year and named the Best Book of the Year by both the New York Times and the Washington Post, earning kudos from both publications for having brought back to mind "one of the cleanest eras in American politics in the country's history, during the Nixon Administration, known simply by his adoring masses as 'Richard's Wonder Years'", especially noted for its memorable and touching chapter on Senator Kennedy, in which he lauded the Senator for being a good sport following the crushing 1956 defeat, after which the Senator had reportedly asked his fellow Democrats, privately, not to pursue the investigation of the Nixon campaign as it could "tear the country apart for decades to come", with Mr. Nixon revealing in the memoir that in 1969, he had become aware, for the first time, through a deathbed confession of an informant whose name discretion, he said, prevented him from revealing, that rampant hanky-panky had been engaged in by some of his campaign operatives during the 1956 campaign and again in 1960, in the campaign against Senator Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee that year, and that he had made sure, through the RNC leadership, that those individuals were no longer ever working in political campaigns thereafter, and that, henceforth, his Senate campaigns had been and would continue to be "as clean as a hound's tooth", having learned his "profound political and moral lessons from those earlier surreptitiously dirty and amoral campaigns"—an assessment with which most historians fully agree to this day.

And the rest, as they say…

We note, parenthetically, that it was by an amazing stroke of serendipitous fortuity that President Nixon, while stopping in Guilsyth during the 1960 campaign, had befall him a fate which may have saved his life. A child of seven was viewing the President from afar and the President, for unknown reasons, locked eyes suddenly with the child, then momentarily stumbled as he was re-entering his jet-powered limousine, causing him to injure his knee against the car door, which made it necessary for him to miss the ensuing two weeks of the campaign. But it was during that period that the alert work of the FBI uncovered a plot within the CIA to assassinate President Nixon on September 14, 1960, finding that the operatives involved, strangely enough, had met in Guilsyth two weeks earlier during the President's visit there when he injured his knee, though none of them were from that area. Had the President not been knocked off the campaign trail during those two weeks, things might have been very different, in ways which no one could now say. So the nameless seven-year old, it might be said, saved President Nixon's life that day in Guilsyth, so that he could serve the country, not only for another term as President, but, moreover, for that additional time, not retiring to a life of ease as an ex-President, filled with the further, fervently dedicated service to his country during 36 productive and glorious subsequent years in the United States Senate. Thus it is to the nameless one of Guilsyth...

Drew Pearson again discusses Representative Graham Barden of North Carolina, chairman of the House Labor and Education Committee, indicating that by virtue of his chairmanship, was able to block the construction of new school facilities needed by several million young students, as well as the bill to increase the minimum wage for several million underpaid workers. He had developed a system of holding hearings on school construction in a way that only delayed the Committee's recommendations. He did not like the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of the previous year, appearing to be the reason why he was seeking to delay the Federal aid to the schools. He also opposed a higher minimum wage because low minimum wages brought more factories from the North to the South and because he was from a farm area with constituents who did not care for high wages. Republicans were helping him in his efforts and Mr. Barden was placing the blame, in return, on Democrats, possibly alienating part of the labor support which previously went to Democrats. The Republicans could swing two votes to the Democrats to out-vote Mr. Barden on the Committee, thus obtaining action on both bills, but would not do it because of their secret agreement with the chairman.