The Charlotte News
Tuesday, May 14, 1957
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence within unions and management, this date, hoped to learn in its hearings whether Teamsters president Dave Beck had provided favored union treatment to trucking firms which had helped him to obtain a $200,000 personal loan. Committee counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, said that he expected to ask Alfons Landa, the Washington counsel for the Fruehauf Trailer Co., about a series of office memos written by Arthur Condon, another lawyer for Fruehauf. Copies of the latter memos, with Mr. Landa marked in as counsel, had been given to reporters the previous day after Roy Fruehauf, president of the firm, had said that he did not know anything about them. The memos related that other trucking firms involved in a 1955 New England area Teamsters strike had been critical of Mr. Fruehauf, Mr. Beck and Bert Seymour, president of Associated Transport, a large New York trucking firm. Mr. Condon was general counsel of the Independent Advisory Committee of the Trucking Industry, a trade group designed to promote trucking interests, a committee headed by Mr. Beck, with Mr. Fruehauf and Mr. Seymour as members. Mr. Condon had been Mr. Beck's lawyer at Mr. Beck's earlier appearances before the Committee, but since had severed connections with him, as had former Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania, also a member of the law firm with which Mr. Condon and Mr. Landa were associated. Mr. Condon's memo, dated August 11, 1955, had said that a letter circulated among New England truckers had criticized the three men on the grounds that the strike settlement had been the result of a deal engineered by them. Another memo from Mr. Condon had indicated that union pickets were being withdrawn from the operations of Associated and other large trucking firms south of the New England area during the strike, indicating that it would save Associated a strike loss of $200,000 per week. Mr. Fruehauf said that the strikes had hurt his business because trucking firms would not purchase equipment and held up payment for trailers which had already been purchased. In his testimony the previous day, Mr. Fruehauf had told of a series of complicated deals with Mr. Beck occurring just before the New England strike. The upshot had been that Mr. Beck had received a $200,000 personal loan about a year after the latter had let Mr. Fruehauf have a 1.5 million dollar loan from Teamsters funds. The loan to Mr. Beck was made by the Brown Equipment Co., a subsidiary of Associated, but Mr. Fruehauf's company had provided $175,000 of the total, according to the testimony. The union loan to Mr. Fruehauf had helped him win a proxy fight and retain control of his Detroit company, the nation's largest manufacturer of truck trailers. Mr. Beck, according to the Committee, had used the $200,000 to help pay off part of the union funds which the Committee contended he had taken from the Western Conference of Teamsters, being investigated by Federal tax agents. Both the Teamsters loan to Mr. Fruehauf and the $200,000 loan to Mr. Beck had been fully repaid, according to the testimony of Mr. Fruehauf. The Committee also heard from Mr. Fruehauf that he had paid out $1,600 to $1,800 to provide Mr. Beck's niece and a party of her teenage girlfriends a car and a chauffeur to haul them around Europe the previous summer.
In Lampasas, Tex., it was reported that the ten-foot high flood of the prior Sunday night notwithstanding, merchants and housewives of the town were now cleaning up, with an employment office having been established, while relief workers were sorting through problems and making plans to help people get back on their feet. Engineers were doing such things as moving houses, which had been dislodged from their foundations, from the streets. A woman who operated a beauty parlor said that she was going to have a special on mud packs, as she shoveled mud from her place of business. A commander of the 46th Engineers Construction Battalion at nearby Fort Hood said that with good weather, it would still be three weeks before they could clear the debris, open streets and put the town of 5,000 people back into working order. A levee had broken on Sunday evening and the wall of water had swept through the town, virtually destroying much of the business district, consisting of 86 establishments, and had damaged 310 homes, 38 of which had been demolished, while others had floated blocks away. Four persons had drowned or were killed during the course of the flood. The Red Cross had listed 25 as missing.
In Greensboro, N.C., a 23-year old textile worker had been arrested this date after allegedly kidnaping and shooting a 20-year old woman. A police captain said that the man was arrested at his apartment building in the wee hours of the morning, several hours after he had allegedly forced a woman and his brother-in-law to leave with him. The woman was found shot in the stomach at a motel near Asheboro the previous night and immediately had been taken to an Asheboro hospital, where surgery was performed and she was reported to be out of danger. The man had been taken into custody without incident after a stakeout by the police had been set up around his apartment. It was alleged that he had walked into the apartment building and threatened several persons with a gun and then forced the woman who was later shot and his brother-in-law to accompany him. He allegedly had told several other persons in the apartment, including another brother-in-law, that the latter's five-year old daughter, the two-year old daughter of the woman who was later shot and the other brother-in-law's one-year old son were going to call the cops and that they had better wait a few minutes. At that point, the woman who was later shot screamed and left the apartment. She and the man's brother-in-law had then left with the man, and police had been notified to be on the lookout for them, receiving a telephone call from a home near the motel within an hour that someone had been shot. The man who had allegedly shot the woman was arrested shortly afterward. A police official said that the man had been drinking and his brother-in-law said that he had accused the woman, whom he had been dating, of dating the other brother-in-law. Police said the man had a record of minor offenses but never had been charged with any serious crime.
Julian Scheer of The News reports from Albemarle regarding its centennial celebration the previous day and the previous night. It had begun with a parade, a speech or two and a coronation and pageant. The celebration would continue this date. Governor Luther Hodges was on hand, along with Edward Barry, president-elect of Lions International, and Charlotte radio personality, Grady Cole. Mr. Scheer provides additional details of the celebration.
In Oakland, Calif., a retired Navy officer told police that he had shot and killed a physician, the past president of the California Tuberculosis and Health Association, because his wife had committed suicide after the physician had raped her. A cab driver had followed the man after the shooting the previous day, using radio to direct police, who quickly closed in and arrested him. The 61-year old doctor, an internationally known chest specialist, had been killed by six bullets. An attorney for the physician said that the doctor had paid the man who shot him $30,000 in 1955 after the man had prepared a civil suit charging criminal assault against his wife, resulting in the suit never having been filed and the money having been paid, despite the doctor's attorney having counseled to the contrary, as the attorney believed that the charge was "too ridiculous to jeopardize the integrity of the doctor." Authorities said that they had not prosecuted the charge against the physician because of lack of evidence. A coroner's jury had ruled the man's wife to have committed suicide with a .22-caliber rifle because she was despondent over ill health, after having been the physician's patient for eight years. The admitted assailant had become a jeweler after leaving the Navy. At the time of the shooting, the doctor was crossing a lawn on Oakland's "Pill Hill" area, on his way to lunch at a hospital. Police said that the arrested man had fired twice with a special seven-shot automatic pistol in the presence of a number of witnesses in the complex of medical buildings. The physician, struck in the back by one shot, had staggered up a sloping lawn, screaming, "No, no." Witnesses said that as the doctor then fell, the man fired four more bullets into him, and he died almost immediately. A taxi driver said he had observed the shooting from his parked cab and followed the man as he drove away afterward, alerting police via his radio. He said that he chased the man for 11 minutes, reaching speeds up to 60 mph in downtown traffic, before squad cars closed in. A police lieutenant said that the assailant surrendered quietly, saying: "This is it. I did it. I've been waiting a long time to do this. He's a rapist." A police captain said that the circumstances surrounding the death of the man's wife would be investigated. She had shot herself on August 24, 1954. After her death, the husband had sought redress for her alleged rape with the deputy chief of police, the Alameda County District Attorney's office and the State Attorney General's office, but they could not find any evidence to back up the assertions.
In Chicago, three police detectives had walked into a plush Lake Shore Drive apartment the previous day, interrupting a small party for Perle Mesta, the famed hostess and former Ambassador to Luxembourg during the Truman Administration, who was being honored by members of Chicago's social set. The detectives announced that it was a raid, explaining that they had a complaint that a private slot machine club was being operated. There was a moment of silence, followed by an outburst of laughter from the 50 guests as the hostess explained the purpose of the gathering. The police retreated and admitted that they had fallen for a gag. Mrs. Mesta had just arrived from a vacation in Reno, and wondered aloud if they thought that she had brought some slot machines with her. She remarked that it was the first time that the police had ever paid a call on her and found it exciting.
In Los Angeles, a woman who had been a concert violinist, playing at the Hollywood Bowl at age 6, and had made her New York debut at Carnegie Hall at age 7, was now facing a narcotics charge at age 24, having to appear in Superior Court on May 27 for allegedly providing a codeine preparation to her escort. She had been arrested on May 3 with four other persons in a raid on an Hollywood apartment, telling newsmen that she had dropped her concert work in 1952 and turned to jobs in nightclubs and on television. She said that she had purchased the codeine under a prescription and was using it to keep her weight down.
Also in Los Angeles, actress Veda
Ann Borg, who had testified the previous week that her husband told
her that he did not care how she got a divorce, as long as it was
cheap, was granted her divorce the previous day from director Andrew
McLaglen, son of actor Victor McLaglen. The judge had confirmed a
settlement which would give the actress slightly more than $4,000 to
complete payments on her new home, plus $390 in alimony and $100 per
month for support of their two-year old son, plus 15 percent of her former
husband's earnings over $1,400 per month, to be paid into a trust
fund for the child, plus 15 percent of any gifts or inheritances, also to be
paid to the trust fund. Her most recent role of consequence had been in "Naked Gun", released the prior December, shot in five days, and his most recent directorial effort in the can, to be released in July, was "The Abductors"
In Detroit, a man had been driving his wife's car since shortly after Easter because of a three-foot garter snake which was loose in his car. His wife was not afraid of snakes, but he was. The snake had gotten into his car on Easter Sunday, when the man had driven his family from their suburban home to Ann Arbor for a dinner with relatives. Meanwhile, their two young children had gone to a park where companions made them a present of the garter snake. The boy then put the snake in an uncovered can in the car and when the family got home, the can was empty. The father had forgotten all about the incident until several days later when he was driving down a busy street and, without warning, the snake suddenly appeared before him, whereupon he called home and told his wife to bring the other car to him, at which point they traded cars.
On the editorial page, "The Smiting of Smut in Tarheelia" quotes from a spoof of Senator Reed Smoot of Utah regarding his campaign against smut in 1930, penned by Ogden Nash, at a time when "s-x" was a two-letter word.
It finds that 27 years had changed little or nothing among would-be censors, as the latter-day Smoots were still smiting smut, with the same loose logic. "Smut, when smitten, just enjoys a brisker popularity."
In Raleigh, the State House had approved by voice vote a measure aimed at removing "indecent" literature from the newsstands of the state, but had established no standards by which "indecency" could be judged, leaving it to the courts and juries, whose views could be expected to vary from place to place, as a popular magazine or newspaper might be considered "indecent" in Rockingham while being perfectly acceptable in Charlotte.
It finds censorship always to be dangerous, indicating that pornographic literature was beyond the pale of toleration, but that there were already laws dealing with that matter, and, it opines, they ought be enforced.
It indicates that great care ought be taken by legislatures when increasing the scope of censorship in a free society, and that the State House had not exercised that care. It finds nothing wrong with newsstand operators exercising their own discretion in not selling particular material, but that the use of police agents to enforce censorship was wrong. It finds that while the motives of the legislators had been conscientious, the danger was that in trying to put an end to one evil, they were creating a larger evil, akin to burning the house to roast the pig.
Harvey Breit of the New York Times had written a few months earlier: "We do not mean to minimize the problem that confronts public-spirited citizens who are worried about the morals of our youth, but we think they are going about it in the wrong way. We think they are No Sayers. We are frankly weary of those police chiefs who ban books because they don't want their daughters to read them. It is the dreariest kind of No-Think and more scary than the problem they propose to solve… In a brilliant essay, Father John Courtney [Murray] wrote that 'in society constraint must be for the sake of freedom.' What freedom does the indiscriminate finger, tabooing books by Hemingway and Faulkner, Dos Passos and O'Hara, serve? …We would like the No Sayers to be Yea Sayers. We would like them not to ban (which is to create a potential Banquo), but to initiate our youth into the pleasures of literature, or what they conceive to be a fruitful literature, even if it isn't. Let them say yes. Let them say no to no."
The piece concludes by asking where were North Carolina's Yea Sayers.
A principal case on obscenity, insofar as mailed material, banned under Federal criminal statute, and material kept for sale, subject to a state criminal statute in California, would be decided the following month in Roth v. U.S., finding the determination of obscenity to be adjudged by "whether, to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest", the problematic catch-phrases being "applying contemporary community standards" and "prurient interest", but we shall wait until we get there to discuss that complicated briarpatch of the law, which has largely been thrown out for all practical purposes as an unworkable standard in practice, too vague for realistic application on a consistent basis across communities and states—just as the editorial above suggests.
"Eisenhower Program Needs a Leader" indicates that Sherman Adams was an invaluable assistant to the President, but that his weekend effort to play the "give-'em-hell" role had been woefully weak.
For starters, he was a hired man, and no one, in the view of the Senate, was worthier of disdain than a non-elected official who undertook to judge the work of Congress. Thus, any effective boost from the White House for the Eisenhower program would have to come from the President, even if he would first have to establish that he actually believed in the program. The President's early remarks on the budget, displaying indecisiveness and a desire to have it cut, had given Congress plenty of reason to doubt the President's sincere belief in his program.
In his television and radio broadcasts to come on the matter, he would presumably become an advocate for the program. But another obstacle to its passage would still remain, the lack of support from his own party, which Mr. Adams had attributed to having a Congress controlled by Democrats, obscuring the fact that the real opposition had been bipartisan.
The Administration's leader in the Senate, William Knowland of California, was noted more for opposition than for sympathy to the President's proposals. The ranks of "modern Republicans" were thin and the complaint of Mr. Adams regarding Democratic obstruction had been somewhat misleading.
It finds that the central fact behind the failure of the Eisenhower program to move along was the failure of the White House to push it with conviction and energy. It suggests that the President, in his forthcoming broadcast, would perhaps regain some lost ground, and that if the program was to be salvaged, he would have to lead the fight, as Mr. Adams could not push Congress.
"Gettysburg" comments on the piece appearing on the front page of the previous day in which it was reported that President Eisenhower and General Bernard Montgomery of Britain, both of whom had been leaders in the Allied victory in World War II, had met at President Eisenhower's farm adjacent to the Gettysburg battlefield, where they had occasion to assess the battle, both criticizing the maneuvers by General George Meade of the Union and General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy.
The piece indicates that Abraham Lincoln, on November 19, 1863, in the Gettysburg Address, delivered at the commemoration of the national cemetery for the dead of the battle, had stated: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here."
It regards that statement as having settled the question of second-guessing the battle decisions.
"Curtains for a Most Convincing Villain" finds that the death in Paris of Erich von Stroheim had cost film another durable villain and a fine artist, that coming so soon after the death of Humphrey Bogart, presented a double shock to movie fans who found a fascination in convincing portrayals of hard-heartedness.
With the departure of both men, the cast of believable villains was almost totally depleted. Boris Karloff was having fun and making a new career with recordings of gentle stories for children, while Peter Lorre showed up occasionally, but was too fat and too tired to be feared, and Sidney Greenstreet was long gone.
"To find a real villain at the movies nowadays, one has to look at the newsreels. And that isn't any fun—because those villains aren't acting."
Never fear, the template for some
coming fearsome and loathsome characters had been cast three years
earlier on "Climax" when "Casino Royale"
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "The Departure of the Male Soda Clerk", indicates that, for better or worse, the drugstore cowboy was rapidly approaching the extinction of the squeeduck, no longer standing beneath the multi-colored awning as "an unpolished Edward R. Morrow seeing it all now and shaking up with the loose change in his pocket the expedients, vexations and heart-throbs of his constituents. Golf and warfare and the price of steak probably didn't run him off his nest. The corner drugstore, which now sells everything but whaling harpoons, isn't the gregarious place it once was. The male soda clerk, the incubator, is gone, a casualty of the fruit-basket-change of World War II."
It indicates that the old-time soda jerk, especially in smaller towns, had been a cross between an Irish bartender, the town crier, and a psychiatrist, not only knowing if a customer wanted lemon in their Coca-Cola, but also knowing who was pitching for Chicago, where fish were biting, what time Joe would return from Durham, how much fire insurance there was on the burned house, what was good for the summer complaint, and why old Johnson contemplated suicide the prior fall. "The soda clerk was the tree of fact and information and the cowboys in front of the store were leaves flashing his radiance. True, often service was slow, but you got a lot more than a Coca-Cola for your five cents."
Now, the ladies had taken over and made the best banana splits one had ever tasted, "but they don't even know who is on the jury the next term of court."
Drew Pearson offers to the Senate Select Committee, probing racketeering and organized crime influence in labor and management, that they should look into the cancellation of the Parmalee bus contract in Chicago, that after 102 years of hauling passengers and baggage between railroad terminals in the city, that company had suddenly lost out to a Chicago trucker named John Keeshin, who, despite not having bus or taxi drivers working for him, had been able to satisfy the railroads that he could take over the transfer operation.
He indicates that on page 469 of the House investigation of welfare funds and racketeering from November, 1953, Jimmy Hoffa, head of the Central States Conference of the Teamsters, had testified that he had borrowed $5,000 from Mr. Keeshin without interest, collateral or a promissory note, as they had been good friends. Mr. Keeshin had taken Parmalee bus drivers both away from Parmalee and away from Mr. Hoffa's Teamsters Union, signing them up with an independent union, the Chicago Truck Drivers, Chauffeurs and Helpers Union, Local 705.
Mr. Hoffa was not one to allow drivers to leave his union easily and did not tolerate raids or like to lose union membership. But in that case, he had let his men join the independent union formed by his friend. The contract which Mr. Keeshin had signed with the independent union called for about 20 cents per hour lower pay than the Teamsters scale in Chicago, and for about 15 cents per hour less than the men had been getting from Parmalee. But Mr. Hoffa did not fight against that inferior contract for his men.
In the files of the Northwestern Railroad, the McClellan Committee would find a memo dated July 29, 1955, from C. F. Steward, assistant general passenger agent, advising that Mr. Keeshin had a six-year labor contract before he had engaged a single employee and two months before he had started to haul baggage and passengers for the railroads.
In the files of the Santa Fe Railroad, they would find a letter dated June 28, 1955, from E. W. Saylor, director of Santa Fe personnel, stating: "Mr. Keeshin again assured the committee that both Ed Fenner, head of Drivers Union Local 705 [the independent union] and James Hoffa … had assured Mr. Keeshin of their cooperation … and further stated that they would be glad to meet with the railroad committee and give them their personal assurance."
In the files of the New York Central Railroad, they would find a letter dated January 15, 1955, from Mr. Keeshin, stating that Mr. Hoffa had assured him of "every cooperation to maintain complete harmony in order to have a satisfactory service available at all times."
He concludes that the railroads had been looking for stable labor relations and Mr. Keeshin had assurances from the most powerful labor leader in the Midwest, Mr. Hoffa, that relations would be stable, despite his Teamsters joining a different union and working for less money. He indicates that the railroads probably did not know that Mr. Hoffa was such an intimate friend of Mr. Keeshin that he had borrowed $5,000 without security, or that if they had known that fact, it would have meant increasing evidence that Mr. Hoffa would carry out his no-strike pledge.
Stewart Alsop questions whether the President's belated decision to defend his proposed budget against attack suggested that Congress trusted the foreign policy of former President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson more than that of President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles. Despite the President's intention of going soon to the people with a couple of radio and television broadcasts to explain the budget, most observers agreed that the chances were still high that the Congress would make significant cuts to the Administration's foreign program, particularly foreign aid, the foreign information program and the State Department budget.
It would be considered a miracle if the President held the foreign aid program, which had originally been budgeted at 4.4 billion dollars, to much over 3 billion dollars. In contrast, the Truman Administration, in fiscal year 1948-49, had sought 6.8 billion dollars for foreign aid and received from Congress an appropriation of 6.4 billion. In 1950, it had sought 5.5 billion and got 5.2 billion; in 1951, 7.8 billion and got 7.4 billion; and in 1952, sought 7.5 billion and got 7.3 billion. Thus, he finds that the Truman Administration foreign aid program had been cut by only small amounts of around 5 percent, which budget-makers always allowed for as potential cuts in any event. But the Eisenhower Administration program had been cut by almost a quarter the previous year and could be cut by as much as a third during the current year. Moreover, the Eisenhower foreign aid program was lower than that of the Truman program by between one and three billion dollars, depending on the year. Former President Truman, in addition, had been far from a universally popular President during the Korean War, the beginning of the era of Communism and for his Administration's corruption. Secretary of State Acheson had been a primary political target of Republicans and had very few defenders even among Democrats.
In contrast, President Eisenhower had been re-elected only six months earlier by the second largest majority in the nation's history, second only to that of FDR's victory in 1936 over Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. While Secretary Dulles was not universally well-liked, he had never become a central political target and received far more positive treatment by the press than had Secretary Acheson. Yet, the Truman Administration had received almost what it sought on matters impacting foreign policy while the Eisenhower Administration struggled.
Mr. Alsop indicates that there were many reasons for that discrepancy, starting with the new budget-consciousness among voters, which had impacted all of Congress. There was also economic isolationism occurring in the South, one of the most important political phenomena of the Eisenhower years. Foreign aid had been with the country for a long while and the postwar attitude of saving the world, which had accompanied the Marshall Plan, was now gone. It was also true that the President and Secretary Dulles had been hoist on their own petards, starting with their 1956 campaign of "peace" propaganda, which undoubtedly had been effective politics but had also persuaded many voters that the time had come to shrink back into what Time had called "the new normalcy", and stop worrying about matters overseas.
The Administration had managed its foreign aid program in the first four years by cutting it down to around 3 billion dollars in the name of economy, but the "savings" had largely been phony, surviving off prior appropriations not used. Now that the surplus was almost gone, the Administration had been forced to ask for a sudden sharp increase in foreign aid, both irritating and inexplicable to Congress and the people.
Also, President Truman's partisan belligerency, while often doing harm, had its uses, as he defended his budget with the same ferocity in which a mother bear defended her cubs. But in the Eisenhower Administration, Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey had said that "there are a lot of places in this budget that can be cut." The President had initially agreed with him, inadvertently causing problems for his foreign aid program and other important parts of his program. He was now attempting to undo that damage, but it would be difficult. It still appeared likely that Congress would do to President Eisenhower, despite his popularity, what it never dared to do to President Truman, despite his unpopularity, cut the whole foreign policy program with a meat-axe all along the line.
The Congressional Quarterly indicates that Philadelphia had planned to spend $12,000 for seats in the lobbies to reinforce its former Mayor presently in the Senate and its six Representatives in the House. It was believed that Philadelphia was the first city to hire an outside firm of registered lobbyists, an action which might alter the responsibilities of members of Congress should other cities follow suit.
Philadelphia Mayor Richardson Dilworth, a Democrat, contended that the city's members of Congress were "just too busy with committee work and other responsibilities to take care of the details important to the city's interest." Philadelphia's Congressional delegation, rather than feeling obsolete about the proposal, responded enthusiastically when the Mayor explained his plan to them. Even Representative Hugh Scott, the only Republican in Philadelphia's delegation, had endorsed the idea heartily, saying it was "very desirable" because lobbyists could pursue things for the city such as urban renewal. Representative Kathryn Granahan, the only woman in the delegation, found it an "excellent idea. We'll be able to accomplish a great deal more. We just don't have time now to follow up all these things concerning the city. And sometimes things were unwittingly neglected."
Mr. Scott and Mrs. Granahan were the only members of the six-person House delegation who maintained residences in Washington and usually remained in the city all week, while the other four Representatives commuted between Washington and their Philadelphia homes, normally spending only part of the work week in the capital. When someone had mentioned to Mayor Dilworth that perhaps the city would not need to hire lobbyists if its Representatives remained in Congress during the entire week, he had laughed and stated that he loved the Congressional delegation and that they would not get him to say anything which would get him into trouble with them.
The Mayor said that the idea had originated with Senator Joseph Clark when he had been Mayor of Philadelphia between 1952 and 1955, and that talks with Mayor Robert Wagner of New York had reinforced the idea, as New York already used lobbyists in Washington—though a spokesman for Mayor Wagner had denied it.
Patrick Healy, executive director of the American Municipal Association, said that he knew of no other city in the country which had hired an outside firm to represent it in Washington over an extended period of time. San Francisco had a legislative representative in Washington, but he was attached to the City and County of San Francisco as well as to the port of San Francisco.
A representative of the firm hired by the City as its lobbyist in Congress said that they would go to work before the contract was officially approved by the City Government, but would not register with Congress as lobbyists for the city until after the contract was approved. The contract stipulated that the firm would receive from the city $12,000 for the balance of the current year, and that yearly salaries would total $157,500.
A letter writer suggests that the newspaper appeared hard-pressed to defend its position on the late Senator McCarthy, as he had been reading the "grassroots" defense of the Senator in the letters column, and believed that, with the exception of the newspaper's "thoughtless editorial", the first opposition had been from the "bottom of the liberal barrel" columnist Drew Pearson, "whom even self-respecting liberals (and I hear they do exist) looked down on." He finds that the next "defamer" they had presented against the renowned "watchman of the citadel" had been the "egghead" CBS commentator, Eric Sevareid. He says that without discussing the distortions and misstatements in that article, in 1946, publisher Alfred Knopf had published a book by Mr. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream, in which the author had stated that while at the University of Minnesota, he had taken what he had called the American version of the "Oxford Oath", which was that he would not bear arms for flag or country, an oath which the letter writer finds to have reflected adversely on Mr. Sevareid's character and showed "the bent of mind of a man who has the audacity to criticize a patriot like Joe McCarthy, who would and did defend his country's flag against enemies." He concludes by wondering what "liberal journalist or commentator" the newspaper would next present to "defile the name of the gallant 'fallen warrior,' Joe McCarthy."
He might have noted, for complete accuracy, that the war record of Senator McCarthy showed only that he primarily had a desk job as an intelligence officer in the Pacific theater, being bored with which and needing favorable press back home, took off on several "bombing" missions, which in fact were only practice runs bombing and shooting at coconut trees on deserted islands, and that his claim of a "war wound", actually germinated from a fall from a ladder during a hazing ritual aboard a Navy ship when the ship passed the equator.
The Senator was simply a self-promoting liar who sought to tear down the reputations of good people for his own political aggrandizement, a drunken lout who had to earn his "reputation" through vicious slander at a time when branding someone a "Communist" was tantamount to accusing them of treason and often resulted in that person, at least for a substantial period of time, becoming persona non grata, unable to obtain employment, and contributed to a mounting atmosphere in the country of virtual hysteria over anyone with the Red taint, hysteria begun with HUAC at least three years before the Senator began his crusade in February, 1950. That he wound up, as Mr. Pearson had chronicled, out of his mind and living his last days on a diet of whiskey, was probably apropos to his smear career between 1950 and his final censure in late 1954, with his exit from the national stage thereafter, himself becoming persona non grata socially in and around Washington, until his death on May 2. Mr. Pearson, having known the man personally, if anything, pulled punches in sympathetic deference to his recent death, expressing genuine pity and sorrow that he had to go out the way he did, without ever being able to make a comeback by undoing much or all of the damage he had caused during that nearly 5-year reign of terror he brought to the country.
Speaking of Mr. Sevareid and his consistent journalistic integrity through time, we have to comment that we have never seen such an incredible display on Thursday night and on Friday of chicken-littleness among supposed adults in the print and broadcast press. We expected no less, and would have been considerably disappointed and, indeed, somewhat trepidatious of what it portended, had Fox Propaganda and its Tass cousins from the land down under not so responded in horror and apoplexy, but for the rest, we must say that responding to the President in such manner for his having had a simple cold, declaring, in consequence, that the Democrats must move to replace him immediately as the presumptive party nominee, and prompting even some bozo Republican in the House to demand that the Vice-President and the Cabinet convene and exercise their duty under the 25th Amendment to declare him incapable of governing, appears as a wee bit of an over-reaction. We are by no means certain, and have not been certain of many of the loudest of the House Republicans for some time, as to whether these people are non compos mentis or not. But now, we find ourselves wondering the same about most of the press and commentariat.
This is, obviously, the worst cold ever known to man, sparking international concern over our President's well-being, even eclipsing the recent cold here in 1957 of President Eisenhower, of which the press had become a little concerned because of his 1955 heart attack and 1956 ileitis.
When a person whom you have heard speak publicly many times before suddenly appears with a low, raspy voice, and some occasional momentary lapses of attention and minor confusion before correcting course and remaining quite alert to questions being directed for 100 minutes, but appears less than completely energetic and vibrant in doing so, rather than jumping to all kinds of crazy presumptions and pronouncements simply based on the chronological age of the person and the bile flowing from the propaganda machines on the other side for the past four years, it might be wise simply to analyze the substance of what he said, rather than becoming fixated on style points apropos to a college debate or a beauty contest, and compare it to what the other guy on the other side of the stage was saying from opening to closing, never making one whit of sense to us, as long as "sense" is defined as being grounded in reality and not sheer fantasy of what he wants you to think took place between 2017 and 2021. Anyone can stand up and simply begin talking mindlessly of all of their wonderful accomplishments, when not constrained by any boundaries of propriety or adherence to fact, and even sound wonderful in doing so, as that person does not have to worry about the niceties of fact and detail. Many disingenuous, fast-talking hucksters pushing merchandise which is not worth the candle do so every day on the tv or the radio, until you cannot stand to hear them anymore and turn it off.
A common cold... And, by miracle of miracles, the cold had dissipated enough the next day in Raleigh
Now, we know that the people generally who support fervently the other guy do not believe in science, think it is evil, something wicked and ungodly. Perhaps, that is why they jumped to such absurd conclusions, as it probably takes several months for them to recover from a common cold. But the only thing we are able to glean from the fact of nearly the entire press, at least for awhile, holding forth with this Ragnarok-imminent view of the matter is that they have become so inured to the Fox Propaganda, that they, themselves, have begun to second-guess their own critical judgment.
Whatever the case, it was a cold. Get with the program, and, perhaps, start doing a true service for the American people who are still undecided, and explain point for point the incessant lies which the other guy told, and get off the topic of the President's transitory cold, now pretty well past apparently. For last we heard, this modern miracle called antihistamines knock those things out pretty quickly, but also, in the meantime, tend to diminish somewhat mental acuity, as the labels indicate, recommending caution even at such a mundane task as driving an automobile, as everyone who has ever taken them for a cold or flu, knows. That is not, however, a sign of general mental decline. And anyone who says that it is needs to check their dipstick and their radiator, as they are running low on oil and probably water also, and might, in consequence, throw a piston through the top of the crankcase or blow a head gasket, and wind up kaputsky, stuck on the road in the middle of the desert.
For a saner look at the substance of the debate, who evocated the better accuracy, a key component to the effectiveness of any Administration based on leadership, not salesmanship, borne out by the fact of administrative continuity in the Biden Administration, with only two Cabinet-level officials having departed, compared to 14 under Trump, by far the highest number of any single-term or first-term administration during at least the past 44 years, not to mention the latter's substantially higher departure rate for senior-level advisers, start here, bearing in mind that but for the incompetent mismanagement of the pandemic—, with Trump repeatedly having sent mixed signals to his science-denying core supporters, urging from the start reopening of the economy by Easter, etc., enough so that those masses of climate-change denying, science-challenged students only of emotion eschewed with a vengeance masks and social distancing, just as snake-handlers in the lesser endowed religious cults, eventually carrying over to their refusal to be vaccinated in spring, 2021 when the vaccinations first became generally available, thus initially spreading the pandemic to others with increasingly arithmetic fatal consequences in 2020 and then continuing to spread it unnecessarily well into 2021, carrying with it the adverse consequences the while to the economy, until finally "herd immunity" was reached, despite the persistent efforts of the Trumpies to kill by infection, and the spread of the virus dramatically subsided, with the seriousness of cases brought to a minimum by the early months of 2022—, the United States would not have suffered the worst per capita death toll of any industrial country and the worst absolute death toll of any nation on the planet, including those who still believe in witch-doctor prescriptions. Indeed, Trump even lied during the debate about the death toll, claiming that his Administration had it under control and that most of the deaths occurred after January 20, 2021, ignoring the facts underlying the raw statistics, that he actively encouraged people to mingle during the initial stages when there was no vaccine, the mentality among his supporters then carrying over to the time period under the Biden Administration, as well as the inevitable impact of people being infected by others irrespective of politics, thus leaving behind the impact of his career of mendacity just like the smell of an alley cat. Once begun, there is no hard cut-off point by date of viral infection, any more than it respected international or state boundaries, the key point being that it should never have been allowed to obtain a foothold with such a vengeance in the most highly developed country in the world, would not have but for the daily wildly variant ukases issued from the mouth of Trump to his loyal retinue of subservient sycophants lapping up every word he says to this day as if incontrovertible gospel, as that is what they are greatly accustomed to being reliant upon for their world view, no matter who the delivery agent, whether scribe, pharisee, philistine or prophet.
We also have to question why the moderators of the debate did not address to Trump at least one question as to how in hell he could even hope to govern the country as a convicted felon, a truly outrageous potential circumstance, not only unprecedented in the country's history but one which the country's founders never thought even remotely possible and so provided, unfortunately, no prohibition to it other than by the Article II provision of impeachment, especially, with more serious felony cases against him pending, facing, therefore, almost certain impeachment based thereon on day one of a potential presidency, and facing additional obstruction of justice counts should he seek to sidetrack the two Federal cases by getting rid of the current special counsel, if the House, as anticipated, should have a Democratic majority. How? It would have been nice had the corporate management at CNN let up their grip just a little, doing in our estimation a particularly lousy job with its news division, converting it increasingly to stupid, lightweight, jabber-jabber infotainment over the past two or three years, bowing obeisantly to the complainants in the extreme right-wing, the trollosphere, in competition for viewers from that part of the political spectrum, to their shame and disgrace. It was a bad night for CNN if you ask us, probably the worst since that ridiculously loaded hypothetical question asked in a debate in 1988 of Governor Michael Dukakis regarding a potential rape and murder of his wife.
Journalistic integrity? We did not see it too much in evidence on Thursday night, and have seen and read precious little of it since. Such can occur with Klieg-lits seeking to control public opinion and then producing "instant" polls seeming to echo and validate their Klieg-lit pronouncements.
The real question to be asked, of course, is why Republican leaders at every level of government, Federal, state and local, are not gathering to force Trump off the ticket, and, for the most part, have not been doing so for the past year. That is actually an existential question which tells the tale of the party these days and its constituency.
Framed Edition
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