The Charlotte News
Thursday, April 19, 1956
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Jerusalem's Israeli sector that U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold had announced this date that Egypt and Israel had agreed to an unconditional cease-fire on their borders, effective at 6:00 the previous evening, "and from that time on." The announcement had simultaneously issued in Cairo, Jerusalem and at the U.N. headquarters in New York. The cease-fire provided that "no military or paramilitary forces, including nonregular forces, may shoot across the demarcation line or pass over that line for any purpose whatsoever." The Secretary-General had conferred in Cairo with Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser and in Israel with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, with the agreement being the major result of his peace mission in the region. His aim was to secure enforcement of Israel's armistice agreements with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, having embarked on the mission under instructions voted by the Security Council on April 4.
The House Public Works Committee had approved a 51.5 billion dollar road construction program in rough form the previous day, and would meet the following day for final approval, with it probably to reach the floor by the following week. The measure had the backing of the Administration and House Democratic leaders. The program called for 14.8 billion dollars in new highway user taxes over a period of 16 years, including an increase from two to three cents per gallon in the Federal gasoline tax, with the program to span 13 years.
A Senate Investigations subcommittee this date was examining a witness, a clothing manufacturer, whom investigators had accused of backing away from an admission he had made that he put up $5,000 to be paid in bribes to Government employees, when he suddenly became ill in the witness chair and slumped after having invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege, refusing to say whether he had given the $5,000 to another garment manufacturer. Robert F. Kennedy, subcommittee counsel, had said that the witness had made such statements to the subcommittee staff in private and asked whether the witness had decided not to give the same testimony under oath in a public hearing following a conference with another man and his counsel the previous day, to which the witness also invoked the Fifth Amendment. He appeared in such distress at that point that the chairman of the subcommittee, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, asked whether he was able to continue, and the witness indicated he was not, whereupon Senator McClellan recessed the hearing and had a nurse take the witness to a first-aid room. His attorney said that he had recently undergone a gallbladder operation and had a heart condition. He had testified that he held Government contracts for the manufacture of Army uniforms and equipment during 1952 and 1953.
In Washington, former Army Lt. Aldo Icardi was acquitted this date on charges of perjury after being accused of falsely denying complicity in the murder during World War II of O.S.S. Major William Holohan behind enemy lines in Italy during an undercover operation for the O.S.S. A Federal District Court judge had directed the acquittal on a defense motion to dismiss the indictment for want of materiality of the alleged perjurious testimony, an element of any perjury charge. An Italian court had convicted the defendant in absentia of murder. The perjury charge had been based on the defendant's testimony before the House Armed Services subcommittee in March, 1953, when he swore that he had no part in the slaying of the major. The judge ruled that the defendant's alleged false testimony before the subcommittee could not have been material to the inquiry by the subcommittee. He said that the subcommittee was "not functioning as a competent tribunal" when the defendant had testified, and that in any event, the alleged false answers "did not relate to a material matter." The defendant's counsel, Edward Bennett Williams, had contended the previous day that the subcommittee's purpose in inviting Mr. Icardi to testify was to "set up" a perjury prosecution if he maintained his denial that he had nothing to do with the death of Maj. Holohan.
In Raleigh, Governor Luther Hodges said this date at a press conference that even well-informed people had misunderstood the Brown v. Board of Education decision, saying he had found misunderstanding at a meeting of the State Congress of Parents and Teachers in Charlotte the previous Tuesday night, that the PTA Congress president, in a "quick and inaccurate" summary of the decision had "said, in effect, that segregated schools must go," also indicating that just what the Court had meant by "with all deliberate speed" in its May, 1955 implementing decision, she did not know as to timing. She had said that the decision did not alter the aims of the PTA, including the objective of protecting the public school system. The Governor said that he had taken the occasion, also speaking to the group, to explain that the Court had "never said schools could not be separated" under a voluntary plan, and that many of the PTA members had thanked him for that explanation. He also said, in commenting on a meeting in Winston-Salem of representatives of public and private colleges of the state, called by the State Board of Higher Education, that in higher education, they had to do a better job of what was taught, with more fundamentals and fewer frills. He said that methods had to be devised to assure that more youth who ought to go to college were able to do so, reiterating that local communities had to take over more of the education burden because the State could never do more than provide minimum standards. He said he had considered but reached no specific formula for encouraging local authorities to do so.
Harry Shuford of The News reports that Federal authorities this date had charged five people, including the postmaster's daughter, with a $1,000 robbery of the Paw Creek Post Office on March 1, and that four of the five defendants were from Charlotte, one of whom had been sentenced in Western District Federal Court the previous week to 2 1/2 years in prison on a white slavery charge. The defendant who was the daughter of the postmaster had worked at the post office during the 1955 Christmas rush and again early during the current year. Four of the five defendants had been charged with conspiracy, and the fifth would be charged by an indictment to be taken before a grand jury. Mecklenburg County police had reported that the post office had been burglarized, according to the postmaster, early on the afternoon of March 31. Police said that $1,089 in cash had been taken and that later it had been discovered that 100 money order blanks had also been taken. Since the robbery, 17 of the money orders had been cashed in Atlanta, Columbus and Macon, Ga., for $100 each. The police indicated that full confessions in the case had been received from three of the defendants.
Emery Wister of The News reports that ground would be broken the following week for the Wachovia Bank's new 15-story building on the southeast corner of the intersection of W. Trade and S. Church Streets. John Watlington, Jr., president of the bank and formerly in charge of operations in Charlotte, was expected to be present from his Winston-Salem headquarters for the ceremony. It would take approximately 18 months to construct the building, with completion scheduled by 1958.
In Andarko, Okla., a minister went into a man's store to purchase a bicycle and the proprietor told him "if you can ride the bicycle out of here, you can have it." The minister mounted the bicycle and rode off.
In Monte Carlo, actress Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III, formally married in a civil ceremony the previous day, were married in a church ceremony this date and afterward cut their wedding cake, then boarded the Prince's yacht for a Mediterranean honeymoon. A crowd of 2,000 people, who had waited for hours for a last glimpse of the couple, cheered as the two boarded the yacht, "God Help Us". A palace source said that they would be away for about 15 days. Pope Pius XII had sent a special blessing to the newlyweds. During the ceremony, Princess Grace gulped and appeared near tears when the Roman Catholic Bishop of Monaco reminded the couple of their responsibilities to each other. The Prince twiddled his thumbs and fingers and once had briefly to untangle himself from the sword which hung from his powder blue and yellow-striped Napoleonic pants. The Princess maintained her icy calm even when the 3 1/2 yard long train to her dress caught in her chair, and when the six-year old pageboy had dropped her ring at the beginning of the ceremony. Whether Alfred Hitchcock might be along on the honeymoon is not reported.
On the editorial page, "Baxter Plan: Defeatism & Disinterest" tells of official disdain for the plan of City Council member and former Mayor Herbert Baxter, to hold town meetings on city limits extension, finding the disdain unbecoming and inappropriate, as the meetings offered a reasonable and effective means of getting the City's case before the people who lived in the areas subject to annexation.
It concludes that force, or an elaborate form of legal coercion, might result in annexation, but not in friends, that honest talk could win both.
"'Million Dollar Doodle' in Perspective" tells of City Manager Henry Yancey, during an informal conversation with News reporter Dick Young, having picked up a pencil and made a rough sketch of an expanded City Hall, big enough for a number of additional municipal offices. In so doing, he had spawned the idea of a "quadrangle plant" in the City Hall Square, which had now been accepted by the City Council the day before.
It suggests, however, that the proposed new Health Center, which had been suggested for one of the new wings to City Hall, be instead added to the plans for the proposed City-County office building.
"Hirsute Hedges" finds that one of spring's minor blessings was the trimming of a hedge at the corner of Selwyn and Pinehurst, that until it had received a haircut, motorists entering Selwyn were well advised to cross their fingers, being unable to use their eyes to any advantage, as the hedge had been head-high all winter, although now trimmed, rendering the corner safe.
It commends the member of the City Council who brought the matter to the attention of the Council, which had ordered that all such hazards be trimmed and blind corners thus eliminated.
"K&B: Ruthless Amiability in London" indicates that Russia's appeal for peace in the Middle East had been analyzed succinctly by Londoners welcoming Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, by jeering, cheering and laughing, with Drew Middleton of the New York Times having indicated that the two men, beginning a ten-day visit to Britain, were "practitioners of ruthless amiability", the piece indicating that only the Londoners who had laughed at the two leaders had been off-base, as there was nothing humorous about a Russian pledge to support a U.N. program for peace in the Middle East, or about their call for an Arab-Israeli peace. It finds there was much to cheer for the simple fact that Russia could guarantee peace by withholding the support from Arabs which they had to have to gamble on war and win, and that the Russians' statement had temporarily staved off war.
It finds that the jeers of Londoners greeting the two men were applicable to their motives, as experience suggested that Russia would not move to prevent war for the sake of peace, that they wanted oil and warm-water ports, which the British controlled in the Middle East, as well as a dissolution of the free world alliance. It appeared that the Soviets were thus seeking to bargain for oil and ports in return for not encouraging war.
The piece suggests that it was a major task for British-American solidarity and of allied efforts to keep Russian influence out of the Middle East. It also finds that the shrewd "conquest by smile" strategy had made a mockery of the contention by Secretary of State Dulles that the Soviets had changed their approach because their policies had failed.
It finds that the British could be counted on to reject the Soviet effort, but the alternative was that they might then shortly thereafter provoke a war, and even if there was no war, there would be a resumption of the discord in which the British economy, tied to Middle Eastern oil, would continue to be unbalanced.
Joseph Stalin had made it easy for the allies, as they had to oppose him, but his heirs sought to make opposition appear unreasonable and silly.
It concludes that there was room for cheers and jeers by Londoners, but no laughter and no light-hearted claims by Secretary Dulles of "Soviet failure".
Drew Pearson tells of the Soviets having finally found good use for the two British spies, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, formerly of Britain. It was no secret that the two had been disappointed with their lot since they had deserted the West, having been given minor jobs working on English-speaking propaganda and maintained under constant surveillance. Recently, they had been called in to advise on the important question of what Premier Bulganin and Secretary Khrushchev should do during their visit to England to best endear them to the British public. According to diplomatic advices, the two were reported to have come up with certain recommendations, to pat children on the head, get photographed as much as possible with pretty girls, and to quote Winston Churchill and William Shakespeare frequently.
Thomas Dewey now went in and out of Washington as quietly and efficiently as he once had moved from the Hotel Roosevelt in New York to the Governor's mansion in Albany, and in the process got things done. With three of his own men in the Eisenhower Cabinet, Secretary of State Dulles, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, and Secretary of Labor James Mitchell, plus one of his appointees on the Supreme Court, Justice John Harlan, as well as his one-time press secretary, James Hagerty, at the White House, Mr. Dewey ought be able to get things done in Washington. But when it came to foreign affairs, he had a record of laying a great egg. When the Turkish Government had hired him for a fee of $150,000 to get them a 300 million dollar American loan, he had managed only 25 million.
Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey had tacitly admitted that he had played politics by exempting farmers from the Federal gas tax. In the past, he had opposed the exemption for farmers, which would cost the Treasury and save the farmers an estimated 60 million dollars per year. But since it was an election year, he had suddenly changed his mind and was actively campaigning for the exemption, which had been passed by Congress and signed by the President a few days earlier. Meanwhile, the Secretary's testimony behind closed doors before the House Ways & Means Committee had never been made public. Virginia Congressman Burr Harrison had asked the Secretary why he suddenly wanted to lift the gasoline tax on farmers. Mr. Humphrey had started to reply and then stopped abruptly, smiling and beginning to laugh, whereupon the Congressmen, seeing the politics in his smile, joined him in the knowing laughter.
Joseph Alsop, in Cairo, tells of the U.S. still carrying weight in Egypt, as the President's message to Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser had probably been decisive the previous week in preventing a renewal of the Arab-Israeli war, after tempers had run very high in Cairo following the Israeli shelling of Gaza. Mr. Alsop says that he had never seen any national leader in a grimmer mood than Premier Nasser on the day after the Gaza incident, that the Egyptians did not want war, at least not at the present time before their armed forces were ready. Yet, a full-scale war against Israel might have been triggered but for the timely plea of the President for peace, which had also been communicated to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
Mr. Alsop, however, regards it as just about the last chance to avert such a war, that the next time, if American policy in the Middle East did not change, the U.S. would have no standing in Egypt. He indicates that part of the reason for that forecast was inherent in the situation which had been emerging in the region for the previous six years. The creation of Israel as an independent state had immediately stimulated and even inflamed the new Arab nationalism, and the Soviet offers of arms and economic aid had increased the self-confidence of that nationalism.
The impulse in the region was to cast off the past and move into the modern world, it not mattering much whether the past was King Farouk and his Pashas, as in Egypt, or the colonial rule of the French in North Africa, or the neo-colonialism which had been symbolized by Gen. John Glubb in Jordan, who had recently been removed from command of the Arab Legion in Jordan by King Hussein. That tendency to cast off the past and build a modern state was most developed in Egypt, and the Egyptians pictured themselves as the pacesetters for all Arab lands.
The primary question for the Western policymakers was not what to do about the Arabs and Israel or the Arabs and the Soviets, but rather what to do about the new Arab nationalism. Any Middle Eastern policy which was not based on a positive answer to that question was "a cheap fraud and a feeble delusion." Thus far, however, the U.S. had only presented a policy of amiable, empty generalities, while the British had responded by opposing and attacking the new Arab nationalism wherever they could, as had the French.
Every wise Arab leader, especially Premier Nasser, understood that it was not in the interest of the Arab people to break with the West and thus be left alone with the Soviets, but the Arab irritation with the West had reached an acute stage and the Soviets were taking advantage of that irritation. Thus, the Egyptian leaders were reluctantly but increasingly tending toward an all-out anti-Western, pro-Soviet policy. He concludes that it was why in Cairo, one got the strong sense that it was really the last chance to avert war, but adds that there was still that chance available to be taken.
Marquis Childs indicates that in the election year, the charge that there was a part-time President resulting from the President's heart attack the prior September, was bound to grow, but that a look at the record showed that his heart attack had made comparatively little difference in his approach to the office, with his conception of it differing markedly from that of his predecessors.
President Eisenhower followed a chain-of-command concept under which broad authority was delegated to subordinates responsible for the success or failure in their particular departments, as demonstrated most clearly by the record of the President's public addresses during his first three years in office. Unlike his predecessors, he had failed to do a part of his duty in going directly to the people with policies he wanted to promulgate to Congress, as had Presidents Roosevelt and Truman repeatedly, irrespective of political campaigns. But President Eisenhower had rarely gone to the public in that manner, that aside from the 1954 midterm campaigns, he had been on the radio and/or television only 40 times during his first term, including brief recorded greetings to special groups and remarks on the annual lighting of the White House Christmas tree, plus participation in Back-to-God rallies, and also including some talks with an avowed political objective not delivered during a campaign. Of the total, about 17 or 18 speeches had actually dealt with issues.
The appeal to public opinion through persuasion and exposition had been raised acutely by two present controversies, the President's farm program, brushed aside by Congress in favor of the rigid price support system, and then vetoed by the President, and the President's foreign aid program under which he wanted the power to make advance commitments for up to ten years. In neither case had he gone before the public, even if, in the wake of the veto, he had made a nationwide address during the week indicating what was wrong with the present farm bill. There was evidence of considerable public support for expanded foreign aid and for the ten-year commitments, and a Presidential address explaining the effort might focus that support, even if the President had already probably waited too long.
Before General Eisenhower had become President, he had made many eloquent speeches. As the first NATO supreme commander, he had preached the cause of European unity with a vigor and forcefulness which contributed much to his reputation as a politico-military statesman, speeches which helped to propel him into the White House. Yet once there, he appeared to suffer from inhibitions, and the caliber of his speechwriters had not been high, with few willing or able to spark discussion of the great issues. The mechanics of television may also have had something to do with his infrequent public speeches, as he was not at ease before television cameras.
But given the proper setting and theme, he had demonstrated that he could rise to the occasion. In December, 1953, he had flown from the Bermuda conference to the U.N. to propose his "atoms for peace" plan before the General Assembly, speaking with a conviction which had impressed the audience before him and the larger viewing and listening audience at home. It had been one of the rare instances in which the President had gone outside the conventional mold to strike a new and dramatic note.
Too often, his speeches had consisted of well intended platitudes, and one of the obligations of the President was to articulate the needs, aspirations, hopes and ideals of the people. In the words of former President Woodrow Wilson, he had to be "the spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country." Mr. Childs finds that President Eisenhower had not accomplished that task, that it appeared alien to his experience and background. In the chain-of- command format, an order was an order and there was no need to persuade anyone to carry it out.
A letter writer, who chooses to remain anonymous, indicates no hatred for any race or nationality, saying that his great-grandfather had been a Baptist minister and a practicing physician, that having been baptized in the Baptist Church, he had since moved to the Methodist Church. The writer takes issue with Dr. C. C. Warren and his committee regarding black people, the writer asking to be shown where in the Bible God had intended the mixing of whites and blacks socially or in any other way. He says that he was a Southern man by birth and blood, finds blacks the most fortunate people on earth, having made "wonderful progress since being released as slaves", stressing that he did not believe in slavery. He believes that most blacks in the nation had no desire to attend white schools, churches, lodges, parks or to live in white sections of the community, wanting good schools, churches, good homes in which to live, with reasonably good streets. He believes they should have those things, including good hospitals. He says he had been raised up around "colored people" all of his life, and that he found they had no desire to force themselves on white people, realizing they were a different race "and a long ways from culture, for the white race is 2,000 years old, and the white race in a few hundred years has made the Negroes in America what they are today. Sure there are mean, low down colored people, and there are mean, low down white people living in the South. They are only a small majority [sic], just like they are in Yankeeland, good and bad in all people, all nationalities." He assures he hated no people on earth and wanted to be the friend of all people. "Let the good colored people meet with the good white people if necessary and work out a solution as to the future of both the white and colored races in peace. It can be done."
He was a friend to everyone except the mean, low down "small majority" of people.
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