The Charlotte News
Monday, October 29, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports from Vienna that Radio Budapest had announced late this date
that an agreement had been reached for the rebels in Budapest to turn
over their arms and for Russian troops to withdraw from the city. At
about the same time in London, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd
had said in Commons that the Soviet Union was pouring more troops
into Hungary instead of withdrawing the units already there, that
some Soviet units in the Hungarian security police had "behaved
with the utmost ruthlessness" in attempting to put down the
Hungarian revolt. The Government-controlled radio in Budapest
announced that Interior Minister Ferenc Muennich had dissolved the
Communist secret police after they had been found guilty of torture
and oppression, which would result in their punishment. Defense
Minister Karoly Janza had concluded the surrender agreement with the
rebels, but it was not announced who had negotiated for the rebels.
The broadcast said that the agreement provided that Russian Army
forces would depart Budapest within 24 hours after the rebel weapons
had been delivered. At the same time, the West German ministry for
all-German affairs announced in Bonn that Soviet conscripts were
reported to be moving into Communist East Germany to join the big
Russian military force there, the ministry stating that it had
received the information from a monitored broadcast to Russian troops
by a Soviet station. It was not made clear whether the conscripts
were supposed to be replacements for troops who had returned to
Russia or for Soviet divisions reported to have been moved into
Poland during the Warsaw crisis which had preceded the Hungarian
uprising the previous week
Dick Bayer of The News tells of a small colony of six Hungarian-American families in Charlotte waiting anxiously for news of their embattled former countrymen. The unofficial spokesman for the group, the oldest of the former Hungarians in Charlotte, had left Budapest in 1913 and was now president of the Colonial Construction Co. in the city. The group was intently reading the newspapers for names of leaders of the anti-Communist revolt, with the scant news of the insurrection bringing only word of violence in familiar places. The spokesman said that for 11 years, he had waited for the rebellion to occur, had not said much but only had hopes. He was both shocked and encouraged by the news of the revolt, indicating that the Communists could not kill nine million people. As a youth, he had lived on Liberty Square in Budapest, inside of the national parliament building, and all of his family had since departed the country, his brother having escaped to Austria where he died after being sentenced to death by the postwar Communist regime. One encouraging report that had filtered across the Austrian border was that students in the capital had held forceful demonstrations. The man said that even when he was a student at the University of Budapest, the student body was a force of thought with which to be reckoned. He drew a parallel between the present fighting and the war of revolution against the Austrians 108 years earlier, a revolt which had finally been quelled when the Austrians called on Russian troops for support. He said that Hungary was not a country which could be "digested", that the Turks had tried it in the Middle Ages and had failed, and that the Austrians had tried it also and failed. Now, the Russians were attempting it. He said that Hungary had always been an entity to itself, but had always looked toward France and England, never to the East. He had returned to Budapest before World War II when Hungarian-Americans had placed a statue of George Washington in Liberty Square, and he hoped, along with other native Hungarians, to return there soon to see the statue.
In Jerusalem, it was reported that Israel had mobilized its reserves and that the U.S. had begun the evacuation of some of its citizens from four Middle East states this date, in the largest Arab-Israeli war scare since 1948. Israel had announced the call-up of reserve battalions in what it termed a "partial mobilization", but denied that it had any aggressive intent. Tension in Israel had mounted since Jordan, which had the longest frontier with Israel of any of the Arab states, formed a joint military command with Syria and Egypt the previous week. A pro-Egyptian parliament had been elected in Jordan a week earlier. President Eisenhower, taking a grave view of the mobilization, had sent two messages to Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion, cautioning him to avoid acts "which would endanger the peace." Reports from Washington said that Israel had mobilized between 150,000 and 200,000 men along its frontiers. On the Israeli side of Jerusalem, regular traffic and business were slowed by a heavy movement of troops, guns, tanks and reserve troops. Between 7,000 and 8,000 Americans in Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Syria were impacted by State Department warnings and orders to leave for points of safety. Tourists, business people and others in the four countries not performing "essential functions", were urged to leave. Dependents of U.S. Government officials would be evacuated as soon as possible by commercial planes, according to what they had been told. Dependents in Jordan were told that the first flight to take them to Beirut, Lebanon, would leave at 2:00 during the current afternoon. There were about 320 Americans in Jordan, 60 of them in Arab Palestine, and about 100 of them were there in official capacities. There were 1,893 Americans in Egypt, many having been missionaries, teachers, newsmen and businessmen. Israeli military authorities this date had announced that three suicide bands of Arab commandos had crossed into Israel from the Egyptian-held Gaza Strip the previous night and that two of the groups had been captured.
In Boston, Adlai Stevenson this date attributed to the President a "do-nothing" attitude of "hopeless defeatism" on "how to save the world from hydrogen devastation." He replied to the President's hydrogen bomb "white paper" of the previous week, saying that even as "a political paper", it had been remarkable for "misstatements and distortions", especially the President's effort to "create the impression" that Mr. Stevenson's proposal to eliminate hydrogen bomb testing would somehow weaken U.S. defenses, that the President seemed insensitive to the danger of radioactive fallout from hydrogen bomb explosions, despite the growing doubts of eminent scientists. He also said that within a short time, Russia would have as many hydrogen bombs as did the U.S., or possibly more, and that the President's exclusive concerns with a possible hot war could not be permitted to blind the nation to the cold war and the contest for the allegiance or at least the independence of those vast areas of the world in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, which wanted to look to the U.S. for leadership, peace and security. He further stated that the Democrats were gaining in the election campaign and that nothing could stop them. He would deliver a speech this night in Mechanics Hall, which would climax his campaign for the 16 electoral votes of Massachusetts, the speech to be telecast nationally by NBC at 8:30.
The President this date opened a two-day air trip into the South, with scheduled stops at Miami, Jacksonville and Richmond. In the meantime, he was maintaining close touch with the tense situation in the Middle East. In his prepared text at a campaign rally at Miami's International Airport, he made no specific mention of Brown v. Board of Education, still being resisted by Florida and other Deep South states. The President had not even used the term "civil rights" in his address, but had stated that four years earlier, he had pledged that as president of all the people, he would use "every proper influence" of his office to promote for all citizens "that equality before the law and of opportunity visualized by our founding fathers." He said that he had promised further to do it "with the conviction that progress toward equality had to be achieved finally in the hearts of men rather than in the legislative halls" and that he had also urged that the handling of the problem ought be, to the greatest extent, on a local and state basis, that there had to be intelligent understanding of the human factors and emotions involved, if people were to make steady progress in the matter rather than simply making political promises never intended to be kept.
Senator Estes Kefauver, in Findlay, O., described the President as lacking in moral courage and as a "front man for Richard Nixon." The Vice-President was in Los Angeles and planned two days worth of motorcades within the state, before moving east for rallies in Detroit and New York City on Wednesday.
Samuel Lubell, in his continuing series providing a report on informal interviews conducted among voters, trying to tap their choice and the reasons for it in the election to come, states that the President should be a fairly easy winner the following week, that the key to his re-election would be found in a virtual political revolution which was cracking the old New Deal majorities in the large cities, which had long been the strongholds of Democratic voting power. Although Adlai Stevenson still would carry nearly all of those major cities, his likely pluralities would be reduced to the point that the President ought sweep all of the key industrial states, except perhaps Pennsylvania. That change in the voting pattern in the major industrial centers was not a passing thing, but represented a basic and far-reaching realignment of the strength of both the Democratic and Republican parties, finding that even after the President would pass from the political scene, the big-city vote would not automatically return to the old New Deal slots. The overwhelming majorities which Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had received in the largest cities were not there anymore for the Democrats and they were not likely to be revived unless there was another depression or war. The hope for victory of Mr. Stevenson lay in the possibility that the President would suffer heavy enough losses among the farmers of Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa to swing those states to him, but should the President reduce those farm losses, he would achieve another landslide victory, as in 1952. He says those were the major conclusions he had reached from his grassroots interviewing of typical voters in several hundred key precincts in 31 cities and 23 farm counties across the country. Only a small proportion of the nation's voters appeared to be shifting from how they had voted in 1952, with some switching outside the farm belt to the President after having voted for Mr. Stevenson four years earlier, with a somewhat smaller counterswing to Mr. Stevenson among those who had voted Republican both in 1948 and 1952. The decisive changes were being registered among those voters who had backed President Truman in 1948 and switched to General Eisenhower in 1952. In almost all of the precincts Mr. Lubell had polled, the President was losing some of his 1952 support. But in the urban precincts, he appeared to be holding at least 60 percent of the one-time Democrats who had switched to him four years earlier. Across the nation, the urban vote ought be enough to offset the quite heavy losses which the President was suffering among farmers. The campaign had been, in part, a personality contest, with Mr. Stevenson clearly on the less popular end of it. Many Eisenhower supporters had said, "I'm voting for Ike, not the Republican Party," and even that "Eisenhower reminds me of Franklin Roosevelt." Still, he concludes, the President's personal popularity ought not obscure the fundamental reshuffling of political loyalties in the current election, with perhaps the best evidence of the strength of the realignment having been the remarkable consistency in the responses of voters all across the country, with the President's support holding best among retired persons and white-collar workers, whether it was in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Minneapolis or Miami, in virtually every city.
In McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, a group of 73 snowbound American occupants of Little America No. 5 had read their first letters from home in eight months this date, as some 500 pounds of mail had been flown in to them the previous day. They represented advance units of America's International Geophysical Year expedition in the Antarctic. The pilot of the mail plane said that the base where the group spent the subzero winter had been so buried in snow that it was barely visible, with only the radio towers showing near the station. The copilot said that as soon as the plane touched down, a half dozen bearded men had rushed up to ask where the mail was. The plane had delivered nine sacks of mail, the first since the prior February.
Ann Sawyer of The News reports that an election which could mean the issuance of 20 million dollars more in school construction bonds had received approval of the County Commission this date, with the election to be held on December 8, provided it would be deemed legal, with the county attorney stating that he believed it could be held at the same time the county voted on the issuance of a five million dollar school bond. The City had $310,000 outstanding from a million-dollar bond issue approved in 1924. The County now handled all school building bonds and could issue bonds up to 5 percent of the assessed countywide property valuation. If the County would assume the City's school bond obligation, the legal limitation would be increased to 8 percent.
In New York, Elvis Presley, present
for an appearance the previous night on the Ed Sullivan Show
On the editorial page, "Waiting for the 'Atoms of Judgment'" quotes from the President at a pre-campaign press conference, saying that he could, as President, never conduct the type of political campaign where he was personally a candidate. It also quotes a White House press release saying that the President would put in a busy week of touring, making six speeches in five states, including a television talk in Philadelphia the following Thursday.
It finds that "never" was always just around the corner in a presidential campaign, that whatever his initial intentions, the President was personally a candidate, causing the demeanor of Republicans to vary only from serenity to the giddiness of delight as election day approached. It posits that FDR would have understood the premise in 1940, running for his third term, having initially stated that he would "not have the time or inclination to engage in purely political debate." Yet, eventually, time was found for it.
It suggests that increasingly, the two campaigns, that of President Roosevelt in 1940 and that of President Eisenhower in 1956, were being compared, as were the candidates, and, while sharing an almost hypnotic influence over the electorate and a desire to reform their parties, the bases of the influence and the images of the two men or their times could not be any more different. Whereas President Roosevelt was a trail-blazer and pioneer in socio-economic revolution, President Eisenhower had consolidated the revolution and become for the time being a caretaker of it, a role for which he was resented by some Democrats who believed he was poaching on programs initiated by Democrats over bitter Republican opposition, and by some Republicans for the same reason. The two men had a mutual gift in being able to achieve victory for their parties. Prior to each of the conventions, in 1940 and also in 1956, each President had been talking occasionally about going back home and assuming a position above politics, even as a careful strategy was being planned to keep them in power. Seemingly major obstacles faced both men, with some of FDR's closest associates defecting in expressed respect for the two-term tradition, such as original kingmaker, Jim Farley. For President Eisenhower, the major barrier was public concern over his health and age.
Toward the end of October in each campaign, there was the realization that Cabinet officials dispatched early in the campaigns to take on the opposition had not done their jobs and so each President gone out on the hustings to correct "distortions of the truth", as President Eisenhower had put it, and "falsifications and misrepresentations," as President Roosevelt had expressed it. The object was not only to dispute the opposition but to show the President waving and smiling to the people, the immediate effect of those appearances having been the same, attracting the largest and liveliest crowds of the campaigns, in both cases applauding generously, although perhaps more intensely for President Roosevelt. "For if both had winning smiles, FDR had tools of language and dramatics to shape crowds almost at will."
Even with the crowds having been clearly on his side, FDR found no confidence in the early returns, sitting alone in the dining room at his Hyde Park estate as the "atoms of judgment", as he put it, came across the news tickers on election night, with ultimately favorable results, although achieving a smaller margin of victory than any candidate since the 1916 election of incumbent President Woodrow Wilson over recently resigned Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes.
In eight days, the 1956 votes would be tallied and polls suggested that the result would be favorable to the incumbent. But nothing was certain until the votes were cast, to strike "some cosmic balance [between] the courageous acts, the forthright utterances, the hard decisions, the great achievements, the compromises and the evasions, the deals and the manipulations, the hopes unrealized, the promises unfulfilled," comprising the records of all incumbent Presidents, as expressed by FDR biographer James MacGregor Burns.
"Reluctant Voters Should 'Settle Up'" tells of it being time to feel good, but not glad, about the sharp increase in voter registration in Mecklenburg County, but reminds that all registered voters would not turn out to vote on election day.
It suggests that almost all
candidates for public office, "even the occasional clowns
It finds it not much to ask and that when people did not vote, the quality of the candidates declined. It urges that if the voter would not do something for him or herself on November 6, then they should do something to pay the debt owed the candidates who had done the hard work to offer a choice between views and enable the voter to express their choice.
"The Library: A Big Bunch of Keys" tells of the problems of moving into a new home, office or library being to match the keys with the locks. Showing off the new library recently to a reporter, a library official resorted to a master key to open various rooms instead of sorting through a bunch of separate keys. But in time, it says, there would be individual keys for certain rooms, the McKnight key for the McKnight room, the Howell key for the Howell room, with their names likely pasted on the keys.
No one wanted to catalogue the library's books, however, as no one could ever tell what door they might open, with one book opening a door for one person and not another. It finds books to be as unlabeled keys, with the reader finding for themselves the books opening the individual's doors. One had to try them, which was why libraries were such nice places, with all the keys present and a place to sit down and sort through them.
But it's liable to get kind of noisy in there rattling through all those keys. Libraries are supposed to be quiet, like the sign says. Perhaps, they will install a soundproof booth as down at the record
A piece form the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Lend That Ear", hearkened to the alma perida, a Canal Zone relative of the North American whip-poor-will. The natives named it the lost soul because its call was indescribably sorrowful, as a woman's voice in hopeless grief. The late ornithologist, Dr. Frank Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History, had said that the call made gooseflesh rise all over him.
It decides to let the alma perida slide, however, as there were too many happy sounds to be heard and everyone would have their favorites, its own being "the laughter of children, the rippling of a mountain stream over rocks, and the employer's voice musically intoning, 'Your salary is being raised 25 per cent, effective at once.'"
Drew Pearson tells of the Atomic Energy Commission, just six days after Adlai Stevenson had made his statement on September 20 advocating ending the tests of the hydrogen bomb because of the danger of radioactive fallout, having told state public health officials to end their survey of radiation levels, at the time being reported as 15 to 25 times the "normal" levels, with ten times being considered by the AEC to be alarming. The AEC was continuing its own monitoring program, but under its procedures, two to three weeks were lost in processing and collecting data, and the information remained secret until published, usually less frequently than once annually. For example, the AEC's last previous report had been August 10, 1956, with the one prior to that having been May 13, 1955.
By contrast, state data was made available immediately for release to interested citizens. Also, weekly reports were sent to the Public Health Service from all over the nation. The original purpose of the state survey was to reassure the public that the 1956 nuclear tests at Eniwetok in the Pacific had been safe, following fallout from the Bikini test of two years earlier having frightened people throughout the world, contaminating fish caught for sale in Japan, such that the AEC had asked the Public Health Service to create a fast monitoring system utilizing the state health departments.
When the column had questioned Dr. Gordon Dunning of the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine regarding the program, he had stated reluctance to release raw data before they had been interpreted, but indicated that they would be published and that there was no dangerous health issue. He said it had not been intended that the stations would provide data daily but only to have it available when requested. He admitted that some figures had shown a substantial rise in radioactivity during and after the Eniwetok tests of May 5 and July 23, 1956 and that between May 4 and July 31, air west of the Mississippi River showed increased levels of radioactivity as much as five to ten times the normal amount in certain areas, that between September 1 and the termination date of the program on September 27, it had increased as high as 15 to 25 times the normal amount.
A letter writer indicates that she believes she had to stop and think before voting this time, that her family had voted for the President in 1952, but his party had always been for the capitalist. She had not, however, voted for the party but for the man. At present, there were high prices which not all people could meet. She says that she did not work in a textile plant but the workers were in decline in those jobs and more people were out of work, conditions which brought on a depression. Several of the plants in the Charlotte area had gone out of business or were sold and quit operating. Conditions had been good at the beginning of the Eisenhower Administration, but were now in decline. She says she did not care for all of the policies of Adlai Stevenson, but felt that she would rather give him a trial than keep things as they were, that people who had good jobs at present should not wait until they were hurt. "Look around in the schools and low-cost housing projects. They are already feeling the high prices. We need a man who considers the working class of people also."
A letter writer from Pittsboro indicates that as a boy on a farm in southern Granville County, he had access to three newspapers, the Oxford Ledger, the Pennsylvania Grit and the tri-weekly New York World, and when he had grown up and was able to do so, he had become a subscriber to the latter newspaper in its daily format, having followed Walter Lippmann since he had become editor of the World, and when it had folded in 1931, remained with Mr. Lippmann as a daily commentator, his favorite in both capacities, as editor and commentator. But, he indicates, he had never seen him "as far off balance as he is in supporting Mr. Stevenson as against Mr. Eisenhower for the reasons he assigns." He had indicated that the President's "great default", which he suggested was the central issue of the campaign, was that he had not provided "carefully and reliably for a successor." The writer indicates that in a representative democracy, there was no place for a crown-prince doctrine, and that ordinarily, Mr. Lippmann would be the first to reject such a doctrine. The same organization which had nominated the President again had also nominated his running mate and possible successor, suggesting that if the President had ditched Mr. Nixon, he would have split the party down the middle and destroyed his last chance of election. Harold Stassen, who had initially sought prior to the convention to derail the Nixon nomination in favor of Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts, before eventually relenting as the convention got underway, was now, says the writer, in the political doghouse because of his futile and abortive effort, unlikely to recover from that status. He finds that the Democrats were lacking in a sense of direction, the worst in history. Mr. Stevenson decried the high cost of living while advocating the adoption of a minimum wage of $1.25 and full parity price support of all farm commodities, which the writer finds to be proof that he had no sense of direction, only one of many such instances. He finds the party to be a conglomerate of political thought and convictions of as many varieties as the famous 57 of the Heinz group of pickles. He says the various factions were held together by pressure groups and chairmanships of committees in Congress, with the South and the North being poles apart in their ideologies. He finds that there were two welfare-state or Santa Claus parties, each vying with the other for the vote of the people, providing little choice in the candidates. The President had prestige among the nations, hated war and knew the futility of its slaughter, and would do his utmost to keep the country out of a shooting conflict if it could be done with honor. He finds that his chances of doing so were much more than those of a mere national figure and that the country should not make a change at the present critical juncture in world history.
A letter writer looks at the Democratic Party's beginnings in 1800, with Thomas Jefferson appearing to have been associated with a Republican for eight years, followed by President James Madison for eight years, also associated with a Republican, followed by President James Monroe for eight years, associated with Republicans, followed by President John Quincy Adams for four years, associated with a Republican. Then, the Democratic Party in 1828 elected Andrew Jackson for two terms and then carried on for four more years under former Vice-President Martin Van Buren, followed by William Henry Harrison, who had run as a Whig, dying in his first months in office and succeeded by Vice-President John Tyler. Then, the Democrats returned to power with James K. Polk through 1948, followed by another Whig, Zachary Taylor, who died in 1850 and was succeeded by his Vice-President, Millard Fillmore. Then had come Democrat Franklin Pierce, followed, in 1856, by Democrat James Buchanan. At that point, the first Republican President was elected, Abraham Lincoln, and, in 1864, the Union Party ticket, with Andrew Johnson as the Vice-President, was the actual party label, running against the Democrat, General George McClellan. After the succession to office of Vice-President Johnson, originally a Democrat, following the assassination of President Lincoln just a month into his second term, had come Ulysses Grant in 1868 through 1876, also a Republican. The contested election of 1876 wound up being awarded to the popular vote loser, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, by a specially appointed 15-man electoral commission which divided along partisan lines in assigning competing slates of electors from four states to Governor Hayes, having made a deal with the three Southern states in the group to end Reconstruction. Then had come Republican James A. Garfield, assassinated during his first months in office by a disgruntled Republican office-seeker, succeeded by his Vice-President, Chester A. Arthur. Then had followed the first Administration of Democrat Grover Cleveland, from 1885 through 1889, followed by Republican Benjamin Harrison for four years, though the popular vote loser in the 1888 election, then followed by the re-election of President Cleveland in 1892 for another term—the reason that the number of men who have served as President is one off the actual numeration of Presidencies followed historically since that time. In other words, President Eisenhower, the 34th President, was actually only the 33rd man to serve in the office, with the rotund Mr. Cleveland being adequate to compensate for two gentlemen anyway, as was Republican President William Howard Taft, who served between 1909 and 1913, followed by Democratic President Wilson for eight years, then Republican Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover for a total of twelve years, then Democrat FDR for 12 years and, upon his death three months into his fourth term, President Truman for just short of eight years, with Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive Republican, having succeeded President McKinley in 1901 following his assassination at the beginning of his second term, TR having served for nearly eight years. (The writer basically goes through all of that but with some errors and omissions in his assignment of party labels, and so we thought we would help him along.) He says that Republicans had put the country on the "wrong side of the street", and despite Republican boasts at present, things were getting increasingly tight economically, as what one purchased, one could not pay for, while millionaires were getting richer and the "big shot" was having it easy. He urges voting Democratic on November 6.
A letter writer indicates that many Republicans and a few "Mugwumps", "so-called Democrats", were claiming verbally and through the press that people said they did not like Vice-President Nixon but never seemed to know why. He says it was because he had an "'oily'" tongue. He indicates that in 1946, Mr. Nixon, "a grocery clerk"—actually a young lawyer—had been urged to enter politics as a World War II veteran and was backed by a committee of wealthy bankers, oil and utilities magnates, real estate lobbyists and industrialists, entering the Congressional race against Democrat Jerry Voorhis. The writer says that he conducted one of the most unscrupulous political campaigns in American politics, accusing Mr. Voorhis of being a Communist, utilizing the same smear pattern in 1950, when he defeated Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate seat. (Actually, he had not directly accused either of being a Communist but only of being supported by groups and aligned with causes which were considered "pink".) Shortly after that campaign was concluded, a group of wealthy supporters in California established an $18,000 fund for Mr. Nixon, which came to light in September, 1952, and almost cost him his place on the ticket, until he gave the "Checkers" speech and earned great sympathy from voters, allowing him to remain as the vice-presidential candidate. The writer says that Mr. Nixon had repaid those men who had sponsored his political career by voting in the House and later in the Senate against public housing, farm housing, slum clearance, the outlawing of industrywide bargaining for labor, excluding of a million workers from minimum wage coverage, and excluding of 750,000 workers from Social Security coverage. He hopes that people would think before voting and that they would restore the Democrats to power, remembering the country's "shameful negotiated peace with North Korea and Red China, when Gen. Mark Clark wept bitterly and which the Republicans boast of; the Western world's retreat in favor of communism in Indochina, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia and the Near East; the desertion of Formosa." He concludes that there was "peace in our time" but achieved at a substantial price, and that he was nauseated with the foreign policy of Secretary of State Dulles, which he regards as "Bluff, Bluster, Backdown and Baloney."
We might note for accuracy, that Mr. Nixon, while appearing at times to hold great respect for the progressive Republican tradition of TR, was also beholden to the extremist and big-business wing of the party for repayment of political debts throughout his entire political career, ultimately, because of trying to walk that tightrope, becoming his political undoing in the end, when he bitterly lashed out at his "enemies", who only sought to expose that two-faced nature, and, eventually, authorized in 1970 covert activities against them, the Huston Plan, culminating in the break-in and attempted bugging of the Democratic National Headquarters in June, 1972.
A letter writer from Lincolnton finds that a number of supporters of Ben Douglas for Congress had written to the newspaper challenging the record of incumbent Congressman Charles Jonas during the previous four years, one having quoted from the Congressional Record regarding his voting record, which the previous writer had decided were wrong votes, despite the rest of the North Carolina delegation having voted likewise. He wants the earlier writer and any other supporter of Mr. Douglas to provide the latter's record.
A letter writer from Rock Hill, S.C., says that there had once been an editor of the News who had one day sat down in his "ivory tower" thinking, but unable to think of anything about which to write, until an inspiring idea had struck him, imagining that there was "a good man" from South Carolina, at least thought of so until he was asked who would win the Big Thursday game between South Carolina and Clemson, to which he had responded, "Who cares?" The writer concludes, "Silly, isn't it?"
The editors note: "Yep."
Framed Edition
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