The Charlotte News
Monday, May 14, 1956
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from London that Prime Minister Anthony Eden had set forth Government strategy for this night's showdown session in Parliament regarding his handling of the case of the missing British frogman and Soviet warships, heading for a sharp grilling in Commons, as angry Labor opposition leaders wanted to know what the retired naval diver, Lionel Crabb, who had been a hero in World War II, had been doing in the icy waters of Portsmouth Harbor near Russian warships which had transported Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev to Britain the prior month. When the question had first arisen in Commons the prior weekend, Mr. Eden said that Mr. Crabb had been operating "without authorization" and that it would not be in the nation's best interest to say anything more about it. The Russians insisted that Mr. Crabb was spying and the British press generally agreed. Mr. Eden said that the retired naval officer had been "testing underwater apparatus" and refused to provide details. In the upcoming debate, Labor MP's hoped to force Mr. Eden to supply details. Mr. Crabb had been seen swimming near a Soviet cruiser and two accompanying vessels on April 19, the day after the two Soviet leaders had arrived, and he had not been seen since. The Admiralty said that he was "presumed dead", but had not explained the presumption. Sketchy accounts had indicated that a "Mr. Smith" had arrived in Portsmouth on April 17 and checked into a hotel, from which Mr. Crabb had written his elderly mother that he was "going on a job, but it's a simple mission," telling her not to worry and that he would be back in about two days. The following day, the Soviet ships arrived in port, and on April 20, the Soviet commander had questioned a British rear admiral about a mysterious frogman whom Soviet sailors had spotted surfacing near the ships, and the rear admiral responded that he knew nothing about it. A day later, a British police official had removed four pages from the hotel register, including the registration of Messrs. Crabb and Smith. The British Admiralty had announced on April 29 that Mr. Crabb had presumably died nine days earlier, providing no details and no death certificate. The British said that they deeply regretted the matter and hoped that the Kremlin would let it drop.
Former South Carolina Governor and
former Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes had stated, in a magazine
article appearing this date in U.S. News & World Report,
titled "Power Intoxicates Men", that the Supreme Court had
to be curbed in its power. He said: "It is never voluntarily
surrendered. It must be taken from them. The Supreme Court must be
curbed." He had been a member of the Court for only one term, in
1941-42, before being convinced by President Roosevelt to resign to
assume duties as the War Mobilizer, referred to often by Drew Pearson
as the "assistant President" during the war. He had been
Secretary of State under President Truman, assuming the position
shortly after the founding of the U.N., at which point Secretary
Edward Stettinius, appointed by FDR months before the President's
death, had resigned. Mr. Byrnes criticized the Brown v. Board of
Education decision as a "usurpation of power", and
hinted that the ostensibly unanimous decision might not have been, as
the Court, prior to the September, 1953 death of Chief Justice Fred
Vinson, appointed in 1946 by President Truman
Well, now, look heya, we got it on good au-thority, right from the ho'se's mouth
White House press secretary James Hagerty promised the previous day that the voters would hear a full discussion of the issues from the Republican side during the campaign for the presidency, stating during a filmed television interview that the "electronics age" would figure prominently in the re-election campaign. It had previously been announced that the President would make five or six television campaign speeches, some possibly originating in other parts of the country. He said that they had lots of plans but that it was too early to announce them to the opposition party. He said that the principal issues from the Republican stance would be prosperity and what he referred to as a transition "from war toward peace more and more."
Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, the 1952 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, stated in an interview that Democrats would not need to emphasize health or the "part-time President" argument to win in November, that the two principal issues would be the farm problem and the "favoritism of this Administration for big business, with its consequent disadvantage to small business." He said he was happy to hear of the favorable medical report on the President's health, issued the prior Saturday, that report having shown no signs of muscle weakness in the heart and finding the President "physically active and mentally alert" with normal blood pressure.
At the meeting in Washington of the Americans for Democratic Action, the delegates found New York Governor Averell Harriman, Senator Estes Kefauver, and Adlai Stevenson all "eminently qualified for the Democratic presidential nomination." It adopted a resolution saying that it had to oppose an Eisenhower-Nixon ticket "with all its resources", criticizing the President for what it called "inordinate delegation of responsibility."
In Portland, Ore., Mr. Stevenson accused the Administration of failing to enact promised legislation, saying it had not fulfilled promises to remove what he called objectionable features of Taft-Hartley or to reorganize the NLRB. Earlier, both Mr. Stevenson and Senator Kefauver had appeared in a May Day celebration in Los Banos, Calif., where both had criticized Administration farm policies. Also in Portland, Governor Harriman told a Democratic group that there were many issues during the year, but that New and Fair Deal principles were the basic ones and that if the Democrats stuck to that, they could win. He had continually said that he was not an active candidate for the nomination.
Weekend tornadoes and violent storms had caused destruction in parts of the country, leaving 13 dead and at least 270 injured, with millions of dollars in property damage. The Weather Bureau said that the threat of violent weather had passed by this date. Windstorms in the Cleveland area had killed six persons and injured at least 69, causing property damage estimated at several million dollars. Northern Ohio reported one other storm death when a youth had drowned in a flooded drainage ditch. Six others had been killed and more than 200 injured by 19 separate tornadoes which hit Michigan, the worst having been at Flint.
In St. Louis, the joint trial
continued of former secretary to President Truman, Matthew Connelly,
former Justice Department tax division head, Lamar Caudle, and
attorney Harry Schwimmer, attorney for a man accused of tax evasion,
the three being charged with conspiracy to defraud the Government for
their own advantage, based on fixing the tax case in exchange for
gifts, providing lenient treatment, and settling the case on the
basis of a fine of $40,000 after the defendant pleaded guilty,
avoiding prison on the basis of his frail health. The Government was
charging that Mr. Schwimmer had provided oil leases to the other two
defendants in exchange for lenience for his client. This date, a
Washington physician returned to the witness stand, the Government
having introduced a psychiatric finding which it contended had been
sought by Mr. Caudle while head of the tax division, the doctor
testifying the prior Friday that Mr. Caudle had asked another doctor
of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington to resolve conflicting
medical reports on the health of the man accused of tax evasion, head
of a shoe manufacturing company in St. Louis. The doctor said that he
served on a three-member board chosen by the hospital to examine
medical reports, the hospital treating nervous and mental patients
In Parris Island, S.C., the Marine Corps recruit depot had announced changes in its training program to take pressure off drill instructors, one of whom was facing a court-martial beginning June 14, on charges of manslaughter and drinking in the presence of recruits, in connection with the forced march through a tidal stream which he had conducted with his platoon on April 8, resulting in the drowning deaths of six of the recruits. Brig. General Wallace Greene, who had been placed in command of recruit training at Parris Island following the incident, said the previous day that the program was being stretched to 12 weeks from its present 10, the shorter program having forced drill instructors to work from dawn to late at night. The new system would provide instructors the equivalent of two weeks of free time and would afford the recruits the same amount of time off from basic training. Vehicles were also being assigned to recruit training battalions for the use of sergeants in picking up platoon laundry and mail—no doubt the result of watching "The Phil Silvers Show"—, whereas prior to that, they had been forced to use their own vehicles for running errands.
In Monterey, Calif., it was reported that a lumber schooner had been cut in two by a large freighter, with the loss of at least two men while four others were missing from the schooner in the predawn darkness this date, about three miles off the central California coast. The captain of a rescue ship said that he understood that the steamship which had collided with the schooner had picked up 23 men from the 55-degree water and that one of the men was dead, while another ship had picked up two other men, one of whom was dead. The collision had occurred in the wee hours, about 2.5 miles off Point Sur, about 20 miles south of Monterey. The area had been the scene of three shipping disasters, in November, 1873, a ship having gone aground there with heavy loss of life, in 1879, another ship having sunk off the point, and the dirigible Macon having wrecked there early in 1935, with two having died.
The Trio, meanwhile, was forming in
the general area, just to the north, not in Jamaica, right about this
time
In Hollywood, Evelyn Venable, an actress who had often supplied the romantic interest of Will Rogers in his movies of the 1930's, had been named to Phi Beta Kappa, the prestigious scholastic fraternity, among 82 other students at UCLA. Now 42 and the wife of movie cameraman Hal Mohr, she was attending classes with her two coed daughters and had earned the Phi Beta Kappa key in her major in Greek and Latin classics. She retired at the height of her career to become a wife and mother, saying that she had returned to college because her two daughters were now grown and she had decided to enter a new field, teaching, that the moment had presented the perfect opportunity to pick up where she had left off many years earlier.
On the editorial page, "The Decline and Fall of Espionage" expresses fear that the art of espionage was beyond the comprehension of the country's allies. Americans had been accused of digging a vast replica of the Holland Tunnel under Berlin's Communist Eastern sector to tap their telephone lines. It was now being reported that a missing British frogman may have been killed while spying on the keel of a Soviet cruiser in Portsmouth Bay.
It finds it enough to make readers of E. Phillips Oppenheim recoil in horror, as there was no delicacy, sensitivity or emotion in such exploits. It quotes the Encyclopaedia Britannica as saying that espionage was "often practiced by persons of undesirable character." It agrees and indicates that the successful spy had to have a silken voice, steely gray eyes, a downward twist of the corners of the mouth and the morals of a mink, regardless of whether male or female.
It finds that in more than 150 years since the Founding, the country had never produced a satisfactory Mata-Hari, and thus was reduced to such things as cave-digging, undertaken with the delicacy and verve of a Machiavellian hod-carrier. "Let's face it. We are too disgustingly pure to indulge in such romantic villainy with flair and enthusiasm."
"First the Mind, Now the Muscle" comments on the experts stating that physical fitness in the country was the "world's worst", suggesting that it had been heard before, quoting Will Rogers in 1931 as having said, "The trouble with us is America's just musclebound from holding the steering wheel; the only place we are calloused from work is the bottom of our driving toe."
Brig. General Refrow, deputy director of Selective Service, had said in 1954, "No one can estimate what the automobile has cost the American people in muscle," warning darkly that soft ways could be the country's undoing.
It indicates a willingness to concede that if the country was ever going to hell, it would not be in a hand basket but in a V-8 convertible with the top down and the accelerator at full throttle.
It finds that it was true that Americans lacked the physical fitness of Europeans, Asians and Africans, but that the doomsayers ignored or did not bother to mention offsetting factors, that Americans were healthier than the inhabitants of most foreign lands, having made great strides in controlling disease and extending life expectancy. It finds it not quite fair to compare draft rejections based on physical fitness to those of other nations, as the country's physical and mental standards for military service were higher than those of most other nations, including Russia.
It also finds that if the gadgetry of the country would prove its undoing, it wonders where the country would be without it, that it probably owed its present reasonable security to supremacy in technology.
It suggests that the case for better mental and physical health could be argued without bombast, that while the country might not be rugged enough, it was neither so soft that it was in danger of being overwhelmed by Eskimos.
"Good Scouts Don't Talk about Teeth" tells of being told by a female member of the household that the writer ought visit the dentist, for it was better to suffer some drilling and recapping at present rather than wind up 20 years down the road with a mouthful of partial plates and cavities, with the writer saying in response that the world situation was uncertain and that it would be silly to be hit by the hydrogen bomb while in a dentist chair. She had also asked why the writer was cracking Brazil nuts, the writer responding that dental research had shown that stress on the teeth was a better preservative than fluorides, toothpaste, sugar-free diets and dental floss acting together. But she had insisted that, despite the research, nut-cracking was no good for little boys over 30.
"That was the fact, all right, but getting trapped like that didn't make us go for the good scouts bit. We'd rather play the surly game. It's easy when your teeth ache."
It concludes that it would go to the dentist when the time was right, maybe during the fall when the six-year olds were getting their preschool checkups, as a man needed to be among friends.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Who Wants To Live in Podunk?" tells of the New York Transit Authority telling the human ants who made up the subway population that they ought to appreciate crowds, according to a poster it was presenting, which implied that there were no crowds in Podunk, but suggested that no one would want to live there.
It finds that the poster was preaching a sound philosophy, encouraging people to see the benefits from crowds, but finds that answering the question of who wanted to live in Podunk entailed some 50 million Americans who lived in places where the population was 2,500 or fewer. It finds that those people lived in their bucolic exile for the same reasons people lived in New York, that some were simply born in Podunk and remained there, some for the necessity of earning a living, while others believed they had achieved Podunk and were grateful for it.
It offers as evidence a recently
introduced bill before Congress on behalf of the Council of
Conservationists to create a new National Wilderness Preservation
System, which would include not only existing parks and monuments,
but also some 26 "wilderness areas" within national
forests, to which access could be had only by foot, horseback
It suggests that those who were most likely to visit such areas would be crowds from New York and other large cities, while those who dreamed of the bright lights and freeway traffic lived in Podunk, but only now and then.
Drew Pearson indicates that now that Senator Walter George of Georgia had announced his intention to retire and become the new Ambassador to NATO, an important, previously undisclosed incident, involving the Senator and the White House could be revealed. The Senator had recently completed the chairmanship of a special committee investigating the $2,500 offered to Senator Francis Case of South Dakota by a natural gas lobbyist on behalf of Howard Keck of Superior Oil. During that investigation, the committee had discovered another check for twice that amount, also from Mr. Keck, provided to the President's dinner, occurring in the middle of the debate on the natural gas deregulation bill, which the President eventually vetoed. Unlike Senator Case, who had returned the $2,500 offered to him, the $5,000 from Mr. Keck was not returned by the RNC or by the White House.
Considerable pressure by the White House had been brought on the committee chaired by Senator George to make that latter contribution public, with some members of the committee believing that since the gift to Senator Case was from the same individual, the larger gift to the Eisenhower dinner ought be disclosed to indicate the general pattern of the gas lobby's efforts on behalf of the legislation. There was also some Senate resentment of the President's veto message, impugning the morality of the Senate while his own fund raisers had received twice the amount offered to Senator Case, all of it occurring in the middle of the debate on the bill.
Fearing that the Senate committee might make public the $5,000 contribution to the President's dinner, they influenced the President's decision to veto the bill. In the end, however, Senator George did not make the contribution public, he and the committee deciding that they should remain close to the issue of the $2,500 offered to Senator Case. The $5,000 check was dated January 10, 1956.
Mr. Pearson indicates that it would be interesting to see whether the new Lobbying Committee, chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, which was supposed to probe all phases of lobbying, would now make public the check from Mr. Keck to the Eisenhower dinner fund.
He finds that it appeared that the Administration had nearly paid its debt to Quaker Oats, which would likely occur by the end of the current week. The executives of that company had been campaign contributors to the President in 1952, and afterward the chairman of the company was for a time Ambassador to Canada, while the president of Quaker Oats served for a time as deputy Undersecretary of State. The President's brother, Milton, was a director of the company.
Vice-President Nixon the previous week paid off another campaign debt by presenting a medal for distinguished dog heroism to "Snooks", a seven-year old mongrel picked as the dog hero of the year. The medal was called the "Ken-L Ration Medal", an idea developed by Quaker Oats, as Ken-L Ration was a product of that company.
Stewart Alsop tells of a leading Democrat having asked, somewhat sourly, "Who's the new genius in the White House?" when he heard of the President's appointment of retiring Senator George to become the President's personal ambassador to NATO starting the following year.
The appointment would be popular everywhere but especially in the South, as a gesture to the admired senior statesman. It would also blunt Democratic criticism of the Administration for lack of bipartisanship. The Senator, in the new role, would also serve as a lightning rod to divert Democratic criticism of Administration foreign policy. It was only the latest in a series of brilliantly timed White House moves, which had kept the Democrats off balance and at a loss for issues for the fall campaign.
The Democrats had hoped that the President would veto their farm bill, to provide such a winning issue for the fall, as some provisions of that bill had been carefully planned to force a veto, such as the high price supports, restoring the 90 percent of parity provisions, which the Republican 83rd Congress had abolished in favor of adjustable price supports, favored by the Administration. But now, in light of the results of the Indiana primary, which showed the President doing well in farm territory, Democrats were beginning to wonder whether the veto would achieve the success they had hoped. The President's explanation via radio and television of that veto had proved effective, and the Administration had abandoned the policy of flexible supports, raising supports on the most politically sensitive crops to within a few points of 90 percent of parity. It had also proposed prepayments to farmers under the soil bank plan, which had been part of the vetoed bill, a part favored by the Administration. That put the Democrats in the bad position of refusing money to the beleaguered farmers in an election year, should the new bill not pass.
The veto by the President of the gas deregulation bill, on the basis that it had been achieved by dishonorable means, from lobby pressure, had also been a brilliant move, placing the Administration morally on the right side, blunting the issue which had been raised by Democrats that the Administration was giving away to big business rights at the expense of consumers. At the same time, the powerful gas and oil interests were put on notice that they would get what they wanted eventually, as the President, in his veto message, had encouraged the Congress to produce another bill in the future, without the pressure applied by the oil and gas lobby to produce it. But that bill would only be signed if the Republicans remained in control of the White House.
On fiscal policy, the budget submitted to Congress by the President early in the year had forecast a close balance, based on conservative estimates of incoming tax revenue, but now a surplus appeared to be in the offing. Budget experts had reported to the Democratic leadership that the administrative surplus ought be around two billion dollars, and that the cash surplus should be about twice that. The more the Democratic leaders debated what to do about that surplus, the more aware they had become that they were boxed in, that if they proposed a tax cut, they would split their own party on the issue and be accused of fiscal irresponsibility, seeking to buy the election, and if they did nothing, they would permit the Administration to take credit for a tax cut. Democrats suspected that the box had been carefully planned in advance by Administration strategists. Whether or not that suspicion was justified, there was no doubt that the White House had shown genius during the session, keeping the Democrats on the defensive and neutralizing their campaign issues.
That achievement was even more impressive when recalling the amateurishness which had so often plagued the first years of the Administration. Some believed that the genius behind the new success was chief of staff Sherman Adams, press secretary James Hagerty, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, or someone else, while others believed that former Governor Thomas Dewey was the real mastermind of the Administration, with another theory gaining ground among both Democrats and Republicans in Congress that the new political genius was the President, himself.
Two or three years earlier, the President had obviously been unsure of himself in politics, but as the years had passed, he had become increasingly acquainted with the reins of power, with perhaps his greatest achievement as a politician having been his ability to continue to seem above politics, his greatest political asset.
Marquis Childs indicates that the role of the President as referee over the forces pulling in different directions had produced startling clarity in the struggle over proposed Federal aid to construct public schools. Considering the serious decline of educational standards, the need was of special urgency. The White House Conference on Education had demonstrated that public opinion was overwhelmingly supportive of constructing new schools as quickly as possible. But if the President did not soon actively intervene with Republican leaders in the House, the probability for success of the program was dubious. Yet, the odds were against such intervention by the President, contrary to his view of the office and his personal inclinations, and the contrary advice he was receiving from different sources.
He was being told by some that if he let things go along as they were, the Democrats would be thrown off balance and the blame for failure of school aid would fall on them, which could be accomplished by providing sufficient Republican support for the amendment being proposed by Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York with the backing of the NAACP, to deny aid to any school district practicing racial segregation in the public schools. If the House voted in favor of that amendment, it would likely produce a Senate filibuster by Southern Democrats, with only two months remaining in the Congressional session, thus essentially meaning the death of the legislation.
According to a careful survey by representatives of the National Education Association from all over the country, there were sufficient votes to kill the Powell amendment and to vote for school aid, but many Republicans were saying that they would have to wait and see what their leaders did. Representative Charles Halleck of Indiana, second in command of Republicans in the House, was believed to be privately opposed to Federal school construction aid, and his colleagues thought he would vote for the Powell amendment, thereby putting forth an example for most of his party to follow. The President could call Mr. Halleck to the White House and tell him that he would like to see school aid put ahead of political considerations. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Marion Folsom, was reported to be advising the President to do that, for his sincere concern over meeting the grave deficiencies in school classrooms.
Even if the three billion dollars being sought by the President, or the 4.4 billion proposed in the House measure, sponsored by Congressman Augustine Kelley of Pennsylvania and Representative Samuel McConnell, also of Pennsylvania, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, were to pass, it would still not actually enable school construction before 1958, and if the present Congress failed to act, it would be 1959 or later before anything could be done to relieve the situation increasingly becoming more critical.
Congressmen Kelley and McConnell were going to a meeting of the International Labor Organization in June as delegates. Without them, the school legislation was likely to fail, and when they returned at the end of June, it would be too late for action, with the political conventions starting in August, by which time the Congressional session would have to end.
There was powerful propaganda being marshaled to defeat Federal assistance, coming from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and state tax organizations, arguing that the Federal Government ought not interfere, that schools should be built only by states and localities. But some of those organizations argued also against new school construction being financed at the local level.
The meeting of NEA representatives had produced the fact that school construction costs had increased by about 20 percent during the previous year and that the latest increase in the rediscount rate imposed by the Federal Reserve System had caused a tightening of the money supply, meaning that school districts had to pay more interest on the bonds they were floating to build schools, in some instances possibly proving prohibitive.
Almost every factor was working against building new schools and there was only one man who could take a positive step to change that situation, the President. Only he could focus the power of the Federal Government on the problem, with the survival of the country into the future directly at stake, as much so as from any of the military issues.
Robert C. Ruark, on Lamu Island in Kenya, tells of an experiment taking place on nearby Manda Island, where hard-core Mau Mau were more or less permanently detained without trial, while a few miles away, a friend of his was risking his life daily for people he would rather shoot for the Game Department, his job being to thin out the marauding elephant herds to make the land safe for resettlement of the Mau Mau as they were released from their permanent detention.
Vast herds of elephants came from hundreds of miles away in May and June to the area until it was flooded with as many as 3,000 elephants, trampling down the native gardens and otherwise inflicting damage to human habitation, coming to stuff themselves with palm nuts. His friend's distasteful job was to shoot 200 elephants, considered enough to split up the herds and send them scurrying hundreds of miles away. If they continued to infest a particular area, he would beat up the stubborn herd, but would otherwise shoot only three or so.
Mr. Ruark says that he had experience with the African elephant, finding it a handful even in the open, but his friend was particularly adept at shooting them, one time having seen him shoot 14, while on four occasions being close to death, on one occasion being forced to shoot four elephants from a magazine of five bullets, hitting the last two with frontal brain shots at close range. He had been left with only one bullet when the others suddenly had dispersed.
During an average day, he would spend 12 hours walking 30 miles, half of which would range from a trot to a dead run, having been with him on one such hunt and having logged ten miles in just two hours, which was too fast for Mr. Ruark.
His friend had been severely mauled by a leopard and tossed seven times by buffalo, but his respect was still for the elephant, saying he did not know why he hunted them except that he was scared stiff every time he came upon a herd and wondered if he would get out alive. He said that the best elephant hunter he had ever known had gotten careless one day, after 1,000 or so had destroyed property, and one old cow had come up behind him and twisted him into a pretzel. He said it made no difference whether "they trunk you, tusk you or step on you, you're dead."
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