The Charlotte News
Monday, June 24, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that proposals for overhauling Government anti-subversive programs had won praise from some members of Congress this date, but there was also strong criticism of a recommendation for criminal penalties for publishing "secret" information. The bipartisan commission's proposal for a sweeping revision of the Administration's loyalty-security program and for sealing gaps in the nation's defenses against subversion had drawn praise, with the commission indicating in its recommendations that they were designed to offer "increased safeguards for the rights of individuals". Criticism had occurred with respect to a proposed law under which newspaper reporters could be fined $10,500 and sent to prison for five years for publishing secret information. Some members of Congress also criticized a proposal to legalize the use of wiretap evidence in court cases involving national security. The 12-man commission, set up by Congress, had made its recommendations of the prior Saturday in an 800-page report to Congress and the President. The commission had been established in 1955 to make an objective, nonpolitical study of loyalty-security problems in Government service and the defense industry. Senators John Stennis of Mississippi and Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, both of whom had served on the commission, said that there was little prospect of any action by Congress in the remaining weeks of the present session on the recommendations, which included that loyalty cases would be separated from those involving employees regarded as security risks only because of undesirable personal habits, a limited right to confront accusers, and creation of a new agency designed to assure improved administration of the program.
In Huntsville, Ala., one of the Army's top rocket experts, Col. John Nickerson, Jr., who had deliberately courted a court-martial, would get one beginning the following day. The West Point graduate and World War II hero, 41, was scheduled to appear before a ten-man general court-martial board the following morning to answer 18 charges of espionage, perjury and disobedience of orders. The espionage charge stemmed from the Army's accusation that he had distributed secret information to unauthorized persons which, if it had fallen into the hands of an enemy agent, could have damaged the nation's security.
Three atomic energy scientists told the President this date that the country now could produce a hydrogen bomb approximately 95 percent free of radioactive fallout. Three University of California physicists, visiting the President along with AEC chairman Lewis Strauss, reported the progress on producing a "clean" hydrogen bomb, with Admiral Strauss telling reporters that studies had been made since January 5, when the President had reported that fallout had been reduced by 90 percent from that of the earliest hydrogen bombs, such that by the time that statement had been made by the President, they had gone about halfway further toward complete reduction, in other words to about 95 percent elimination. The three scientists with him were Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, Dr. Mark Mills, and Dr. Edward Teller, all of the University of California radiation laboratory. Dr. Lawrence had nodded in the affirmative when asked whether it was possible to make a "clean H-bomb", but later, when the question was posed on the basis of whether the country now was actually making clean fusion weapons, Admiral Strauss had intervened, saying that the question should not be answered for security reasons. He had also interrupted an inquiry of Dr. Teller as to whether a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing would hamper progress toward producing weapons which would not harm civilian populations with fallout, indicating that to answer it might hinder disarmament negotiations presently in progress in London. One of the arguments which had been made for halting weapons testing was that accumulated fallout might rise to the level where it would cause bone cancer and effect genetic changes in the human population. Some of the experts believed that there were already dangers from radioactivity which had been released from tests conducted to date. But the three scientists present at the meeting emphatically indicated that the tests to date had produced harmless and only "negligible" quantities of radioactivity.
At the atomic test site in Nevada, the fifth shot of the current nuclear test series had occurred in the morning over Frenchman Flat. It had been well above the nominal size of such blasts, the largest thus far in the current series, and observers watching it through high-density goggles from 40 miles away reported it as appearing as a second sunrise. It had been originally scheduled for the previous morning but had to be postponed because of unfavorable winds. It was exploded from a balloon about 700 feet above the desert floor, with more than 850 military observers and a number of Civil Defense officials in attendance, with the military men positioned in trenches about 4,500 yards from ground zero. The exact size of the blast was not disclosed, but the Atomic Energy Commission had said earlier that it would be above 20 kilotons or more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end the war. Among the active participants had been 835 pigs, some of them covered with material used in military clothing as a test of how radiation impacted it, the pigs arranged at varying distances from ground zero. They would also be examined to learn about treatment of injuries resulting from heat, radiation and pressure. Bomb shelters had been set up for testing and food had been exposed to learn how it would be impacted by a nuclear blast.
In Williamsburg, Va., Republican governors attending the 48th annual conference of governors expressed strong opposition this date to any action by the President to designate the 1960 Republican presidential nominee. The President would address the conference this night, in what was billed as a nonpolitical address, dealing primarily with relations between the Federal Government and the states. Governor Goodwin Knight of California told a press conference the previous day that if the President believed it would be in the best interests of the party and the country to indicate his support for a successor, then he would welcome such a statement. But Governor Theodore McKeldin of Maryland, who had nominated General Eisenhower in 1952, said that he did not believe the President would or should do anything like that, as it would not be in his nature. Governor McKeldin, who had been suggested as a possible candidate in 1960, had proposed General Alfred Gruenther, General Eisenhower's successor as NATO commander in 1952, as a possible nominee, with General Gruenther presently heading the American Red Cross. The Governor said that he doubted that Vice-President Nixon would obtain an affirmative nod from the President for the nomination in 1960. Governor William Stratton of Illinois said that he did not believe the President should or would attempt to pick his successor, saying that he doubted that any of those presently mentioned prominently for the nomination would survive the ensuing three years of political maneuvering. He regarded the Vice-President as the "leading" candidate at the present time. Governor Robert Smylie of Idaho said that he did not believe the President could dictate the party nominee, and Governor Vernon Thomson of Wisconsin agreed.
The White House stated this date that the major radio networks would record the President's address this night at the governors' conference at Williamsburg for broadcast later, but that there would be no telecast of the speech.
In Taipei, Formosa, the Nationalist Defense Ministry announced that Chinese Communist artillery had fired more than 9,000 rounds of ammunition at the offshore islands of Quemoy and Little Quemoy this date, the heaviest bombardment yet.
In Manila, a typhoon skirted the northern Philippines this date and headed toward Formosa, picking up strength as it moved, packing winds at its center, increasing from 150 to 180 mph. Ships and planes were warned to stay away from its path.
In the Israeli sector of Jerusalem, an Arab infiltrator had been killed the previous day in a Negeb Desert clash between an Israeli Army patrol and infiltrators, with an Israeli Government announcement stating that the Israelis had suffered no losses.
In Washington, the Army this date issued a draft call for 11,000 men for August, 2,000 lower than the previously announced quotas for the four months beginning in April, and the lowest draft call since April, 1956.
In New York, Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi said this date that Japan would like to increase trade with Communist China to a total of 200 million dollars per year in peaceful goods only.
In London, it was reported that Radio Moscow had declared this date that the overwhelming majority of Hungary's workers had welcomed the Soviet action in crushing the anti-Communist rebellion the prior fall, with the broadcast bitterly attacking the U.N. report on the revolt.
In Rovigo, Italy, flood waters of the Po River had threatened this date to submerge Ariano Island completely and convert it into a no man's land for a long time. Half of the 70-square mile island in the Po delta had already been submerged under three feet of water.
In Brisbane, Australia, a plane had crashed and burned on a beach at the tip of Cape York Peninsula this date, killing all six persons aboard, including a woman. The plane was being used for a photographic survey of far north Queensland State.
Irish Donnelly of the Associated Press reports that Dr. Daniel Poling, editor of the Christian Herald Magazine, had stated that criticism of the Billy Graham Crusade in New York from within the Protestant faith had disregarded "both the facts and the rules of fair play." He said that the records indicated that in great numbers, the converts of the Crusade did stand fast. He said that he and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, pastor of Marble Collegiate Church, strongly supported the Reverend Graham and his associates because "the united effort they have organized with prayer and consecrated service around the world have produced results that honest criticism can neither deride nor ignore." His remarks had been contained in a sermon provided the previous day at Marble Collegiate Church, where Dr. Peale was absent, on vacation. He indicated that 22 of 56 new members of the church had made "decisions for Christ" during the Crusade. The previous night, the Reverend Graham had addressed 18,300 persons in Madison Square Garden regarding the subject of hell, taking as his text Luke 16, verses 19 through 31, the story of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus. The Reverend Graham said that not only should mankind "love our God with all our hearts," but also that "we should love our neighbors as ourselves." He said that the rich man was guilty of neglecting his neighbor, Lazarus, and that many people at present were guilty of the same sin of willful neglect of those in need. Of hell, he said: "We should like to ignore it, but it is a reality and we have to face the fact. The Bible teaches there is hell to which everyone goes who deliberately rejects the offer of salvation through Jesus Christ…" The total audience thus far attending the Crusade had been 689,300, with 22,099 "decisions for Christ", including 616 the previous night. The evangelist had announced the previous day that two follow-up programs would be conducted in New York after the Crusade ended at the Garden on July 21, that a large group of counselors would continue working with the persons who had made "decisions for Christ" and then in October, there would be a tremendous "visitation crusade as a sort of follow-up during which volunteers will persuade people to go to church." He also told of plans for an appearance on the WCBS-TV program "Way To Go".
Emery Wister of The News reports of a 26-year old Danish aerialist who had plunged 35 feet to the cement floor of the Charlotte Coliseum the previous day before 5,000 horrified spectators, as part of the afternoon performance of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. She was now on a ward with three other persons in Memorial Hospital, had spoken slowly but evenly, sounding more like a person tired from a hard day's work than a woman who had broken several bones in a near-fatal fall. She said she was not suffering, that they had given her injections. She and her husband had been high above the center ring when the accident occurred, working without a net from what was known as a bar and casting set. Her husband had been dangling upside down by his knees holding her by her ankles, at which point she was to swing forward and he was to grab her wrists. But she had then suddenly blacked out and instead of grasping his hands firmly, her fingers had slipped through his and she fell to the floor. She said that she could not remember what had happened, that it had been hot up in the heights of the Coliseum, where there was no breeze as there was at floor level. She said the accident would not keep her out of the act for long, no longer than demanded by her doctors, and hoped to return within three weeks. It had been her fifth fall as a trapeze artist, but the first in the U.S. and the first in which she had been really injured. Once or twice before she had broken several bones, but nothing very serious. Her husband had come to the hospital to see her early in the morning and then rejoined the circus, which had traveled overnight to Winston-Salem. She said there would not be a trapeze act until she returned as she had taught her husband the act seven or eight years earlier in Copenhagen when he was an animal trainer. After she had taught him the act, they became engaged. He still had his trained horses, which had been on display in Charlotte. Hurry up and return, as Corky and Bimbo are anxiously awaiting…
In Stockholm, the 16-year old daughter who had sought to run away with a Senate page in the U.S. and had been returned home by her mother, was in seclusion, and her diplomat father said that he had "no hard feelings" against the page boy with whom she had eloped and gone on an 18-day sojourn until finally found after she was caught speeding along with her betrothed by a highway patrolman. Her age had prevented the couple from obtaining a marriage license without parental consent. The girl was wan and tight-lipped as she left the plane on her mother's arm the previous day, but had lifted up her chin as she faced a barrage of press photographers. Her father said he planned no legal action against the page boy, 18, that he had been punished enough already by losing his job. The boy, however, might have some complaint for interruption of their honeymoon.
Not on the front page, the Supreme Court this date, in Roth v. U.S., upheld, 6 to 3, the constitutionality of two criminal obscenity laws, one Federal, banning obscene materials from the mails, and the other, a state law out of California, making it a misdemeanor to keep for sale or advertise obscene materials, holding that obscenity was not protected speech under the First Amendment and that the statutes did not violate due process. Justice John Harlan concurred in the result in the state case but dissented in the Federal case, and Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black dissented in both cases. The case would be circumscribed and its standard altered in subsequent cases, notably Miller v. California, a 5 to 4 decision in 1973, with Justice William Brennan, who delivered the majority opinion in Roth, dissenting, joined by Justices Thurgood Marshall and Potter Stewart, with Justice Douglas providing a separate dissent. (Both Justices Black and Harlan had by then retired from the Court, shortly before each had died in 1971.) In 1977, Smith v. U.S., a 5 to 4 decision, further refined the application of the "community standards" concept for determining what "obscenity" is, and yet again in 1987, in Pope v. Illinois, 5 to 4 in part and 6 to 3 in part. Along the way had been Justice Stewart's well-known line in concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio, in 1964, that criminal laws against obscenity were limited constitutionally to outlawing of "hard-core pornography", which he admitted might never be successfully defined but "I know it when I see it..." While Federal and state obscenity laws remain on the books, the area has proved so hard to define and regulate without infringing on speech and sweeping up non-obscene but unpopular or misunderstood material and speech into the ambit of the laws that, except for restrictions on obscene matter accessible to minors, attempted enforcement of the laws, as a practical matter, has virtually disappeared as unworkable—perhaps because in attempting to define it, the courts unwittingly challenged producers of movies, magazines and other media, hedging toward the limits of obscenity, to press the boundaries of the stated definitions and deliberately inject "socially relevant" material or that with "artistic merit" in an attempt to meet and offset what was otherwise puerile nonsense fitting squarely within the stated definitions, making it the more difficult to discern, in any legally acceptable manner, fairly articulated standards by which society could govern itself in advance of being prosecuted under the law, and thus avoid deprivation of due process for want of adequate notice of what particular conduct and representation was being prohibited, that is rendering statutes void for vagueness or overbreadth, embracing protected speech with unprotected speech. Given the generally accessible matter of all types on cable television and in movies through time in virtually every community in the country, what can be called, with a straight face, "patently offensive" and said to "appeal to prurient interest", based on "contemporary community standards", which take into account the national standard and not just an individual community? Would a reasonable person find serious value in the challenged work, taken as a whole? The answer to the latter query in the negative could apply to most of what we see on television and in movies, but that does not render it enforceably obscene, even if virtually all of prime-time tv falls within that category from our point of view, including much of the "news" programming, at least the infotainment, yellow-journalistic variety, and for the past 50 years or more. And it is certainly patently offensive. But...
On the editorial page, "A New Tail for the Governor's Kite" finds that when Governor Luther Hodges had appointed N.C. State professor W. F. Babcock as the new director of highways, there were mutterings over his lack of experience in State Government, with questions arising as to whether the professor's political antennae were long enough to keep him in tune with Raleigh's political atmosphere. But when the Governor had named Harold Makepeace, an amiable man skilled in the political arts, as the public contact man for secondary roads, the old pols remembered grumpily that the Governor had said that it was to be a "non-political" Highway Department.
"Clearly, the department is becoming the tail on the governor's own high-flying political kite." Its degree of success would figure largely in the Governor's own future success, which it finds to be as it should, as the final responsibility for the Department was on the Governor as the reorganization had been his idea and the appointments his own, as would be the record of the new Department.
It finds the appointments to be good in the key posts, with the new Highway Commission having an able chairman in Col. William Joyner, well-versed in government and law and warmly regarded for his integrity. Mr. Babcock would bring the Department scientific knowledge of increasingly complex traffic problems and successful experience in solving some of those problems as a consultant to several North Carolina towns and cities. The political background of Mr. Makepeace would be an asset, at least until it proved otherwise, as the Department could not be isolated from politics in the state and it appeared desirable to have such a man in the position regarding secondary roads, who would understand from political experience such pressures and how to deal with them.
A "non-political" Highway Department, it finds, had been a misnomer, with the Governor actually wanting a Department which would build roads on the basis of need, utility and long-range planning rather than on the basis of political gain and political power. It could do so and still be political in the sense that it was serving the legitimate highway needs of the state's cities and counties.
It concludes that the Governor had to be credited with an excellent start toward his announced goals.
"Ike Tees Off New-Style Diplomacy" tells of reporters having appeared at the Burning Tree Country Club golf course the previous week in coats and ties, while the public figures at the course were wearing sport shirts and slacks, as the President and Japanese Premier Kishi had used the golf club as a tool of international diplomacy. It had appeared to work very well, with the official record showing that neither leader had won the game, that it was a tie, according to the White House press secretary.
Thus, while overt tension between the two countries had probably been higher than at any time in a decade, the two heads of state were able to demonstrate friendship and equality between the countries. The President had presented Premier Kishi with a set of golf clubs, despite the latter having brought his own set from Japan, and the Premier had used the gifted clubs.
The pending case of William Girard, accused of killing a Japanese woman on an Army firing range, trying to scare her away from scavenging scrap metal, along with the U.S. occupation of Okinawa, Japanese trade with Communist China, and the reduction of U.S. forces in Japan, all seemed problems a little closer to solution. The fact that the two nations had been at war 12 years earlier and that the now-Prime Minister had been purged for political activity by U.S. forces, had receded further into the background. It observes that appearances were particularly important in diplomacy.
"The President, who uses golf to relax himself, seems to have used it in this instance to relax a new wave of hostility between the U.S. and an indispensable ally in the Far East."
"Reality Can't Be Sweeter Than Dreams" finds that there was wanderlust in the staidest man which would sometimes goad him to dream of a far-off isle in the South Pacific, where pretty Polynesians hung flowery leis around his neck, where food fell off the trees in cocoanuts and the only thing he had to do was comb the beaches. Robert Louis Stevenson had found his Shangri-La in the Samoan Islands, where the natives had called him Tusitala, "the teller of tales", and when he had died, 60 of them had carried his body to the top of Mount Vaea for burial.
Paul Gauguin had left fame and family in Paris to travel to Tahiti, to transmit the color and calm of his own Pacific isle via canvases which now adorned art museums throughout the world.
Most people in present times never saw far-off Pacific islands except in daydreams and it suggests that it was probably better that the unattainable remained unattained, as there were never mosquitoes, sunburn blisters or sand flies within the dream and the Polynesian girls never drew their leis tight enough around the necks of the daydreamer to become halters, the cocoanut never hit the daydreamer on the head as it fell from the tree and never induced a stomach ache from overeating, and the friendly natives never decided to put the daydreamer in the pot for dinner.
James Michener and A. Grove Day, in their recent book about the South Pacific, Rascals in Paradise, had told what might happen if a person really landed on such an island, telling of an Australian gentleman who, during the 1930's, had seen that war was impending in Europe and concluded that it would very probably run over into Asia and Australia, deciding that the best way to avoid it would be to discover some obscure Pacific island where the insanity of war would never reach him, leaving Australia for the sought refuge in the South Pacific, unfortunately choosing the then nearly unknown island of Guadalcanal.
A piece from the Amarillo Globe-Times, titled "The Modern Way", indicates that the office bachelor had his editorial say, urging young women to spend "a few hours with mother during high school days" to become "more than adequately" prepared for the basic household responsibility of cooking, and that "only the heartier specimens (of young husbands) survived the 'read-while-you-cook' system" of learning from cookbooks.
It finds it more sentimental than realistic, as the bachelor did not understand that a few hours was not enough to spend in the kitchen with mother or that mother had grown up in a kitchen helping grandmother cook and bake and broil delicacies for a large family, learning to cook without realizing that she was an apprentice in an important art. As a result, the "mothers" now cooked scrumptious meals but could not explain how they had done it. They could tell by glancing at the oven when a dish was "done to a turn" without ever noticing the clock, could beat batter by hand until it "felt" right, could make the world's best gravy, adding just enough seasoning, water and milk to provide a nice consistency, and their oven was turned only to "fairly hot".
It thus challenges the office bachelor to master those mysteries within a few hours. The cookbooks told exactly how long to keep a roast in the oven at exactly the right temperature, dealing in exactitude and specific measurements, and so it defends the cookbooks, with "a few hours" attempting to fathom the mysteries of mother's kitchen possibly producing "an indelible trauma, a defeatist attitude, and inferiority complex, ulcer-growing anxiety—and a starving husband."
Drew Pearson indicates that for the first time in the four years he had been in office, the public had a chance to look at the stocks owned by Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, about to resign to return to the private sector. Those stocks had been inserted into the record the previous week by Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, showing an amazing income for the Secretary, owning 67,555 shares of common stock in the M. A. Hanna Co., founded by the famous Mark Hanna, the Ohio political boss who had put President William McKinley in office in 1896. The financial report of the company, issued for 1956, showed its best profits in its history. Intended only for its stockholders, the report showed that the consolidated net profit was $19,491,884, an all-time record, exceeding by 25 percent the 1955 record of $15,602,703. Dividends of three dollars per share paid on both classes of common stock had amounted to $9,274,176, according to the annual report. The three dollar dividend paid on Secretary Humphrey's shares thus amounted to $202,665 for 1956 from just that Hanna stock, not including the profits from the tremendous holdings he had in affiliated companies.
Thus, Senators wanted to know whether Secretary Humphrey had profited from his own fiscal policies and whether he had used undue influence to benefit his own companies while being the most potent member of the Cabinet. When he had entered Government in 1953, he had handed the reins of his company largely to his son, Gilbert, and then became director of the World Bank, the dominant figure on the Export-Import Bank, a director of the Foreign Trade Zones Board, and chairman of the National Advisory Council on International Monetary and Financial Problems. In 1953, Brazil had needed 300 million dollars from the Export-Import Bank, and the State Department had approved the loan, but Treasury had balked, with Assistant Secretary Randolph Burgess telling the Brazilian Ambassador that his boss did not like Brazil very much and that the Hanna Co. had been negotiating for a manganese concession in Brazil when Bethlehem Steel had instead gotten the concession. Thereafter, Brazilian National Steel, 85 percent owned by the Brazilian Government, had canceled a longstanding arrangement to purchase coal through Eastern Fuel and Gas, though it was satisfied with the arrangement for the previous decade. It then contracted for its coal from Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal, a subsidiary of Hanna, purchasing only low-volatile coal from Eastern. Thereafter, Brazilian National Steel had borrowed an additional 35 million dollars from the Export-Import Bank. Secretary Humphrey, according to the Senate record, owned 20,000 shares of Pittsburgh Consolidation.
At the beginning of 1953, when Mr. Humphrey had become Secretary, Pittsburgh Consolidation stock had a market value of $126,160,704, and on March 12, 1957, it had a market value of $368,306,250, thus increasing its value by more than 242 million during his tenure as Secretary.
Joseph Alsop, in Florence, Italy, finds, following his long tour of the Middle East, that the U.S. had now assumed full, direct responsibility for protecting the West's vital interests in the Arab lands, which he believes to be the most important historical development of the President's second term. He indicates that for two reasons, it had been unavoidable.
First, the decline of British power left U.S. allies without the strength to protect their own Middle East interests, which had begun during the Iranian crisis, precipitated by Dr. Mossadegh, and had finally been proven to the whole world in the Suez "fiasco" of the prior fall. The President's special handling of that fiasco had made it necessary for the U.S. to take up the burden immediately, effectively telling the trans-Atlantic allies that his way of safeguarding their interests was better than theirs. By helping Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser to transform his humiliating military defeat in the matter into a great political victory, the President had also increased the threat to Western interests in the Arab lands to the point of extreme, immediate danger. That had been acknowledged by the President when he abruptly proclaimed the Eisenhower doctrine, driven to do so primarily by the shaky post-Suez situation in Iraq. Even the President's phrase about needing to fill the Middle Eastern "vacuum" appeared to have been borrowed from the warnings of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri Pasha, transmitted to Washington the previous November through the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. It spoke volumes about the way the U.S. policymakers had proposed to discharge their new responsibility in the Middle East, as Nuri Pasha had always, until the Suez crisis, been much more closely linked to Britain than to the U.S. He had been, in the eyes of Britain, the prize "good Arab", as former Prime Minister Anthony Eden had unfortunately described him.
In effect, the U.S. was presently playing the "good Arab" game, with American power and influence being used to rally, draw together and strengthen the Arab leaders friendly to the West, while also weakening the Arab leaders, such as Premier Nasser, who showed themselves to be the enemies of the West. The U.S. was much better equipped than its allies for such a game, as it was not afflicted with the baggage of diplomats and Middle East policymakers left over from the days of British imperialism in the Middle East, backed by the Indian Army. The U.S. was also not afflicted with a long history of past actions in the Middle East which had generated Arab resentment. The U.S. share in the creation of Israel was remembered with extreme bitterness among the Arab nations, but it did not represent a long and bitter record, as had the British past.
The U.S. also had two Arab friends of great importance, King Saud of Saudi Arabia and young King Hussein of Jordan, not the friends of U.S. allies. For that reason and the others Mr. Alsop had noted, the new policy on which the U.S. had embarked was not inherently impractical and could succeed. But it nevertheless ran counter to the Nasser-style brand of Arab nationalism, the strongest popular force in the Arab lands at present, and was also a policy of an inordinate complexity and delicacy, necessarily involving secret diplomacy and many accurate judgments of character and situation, calling for inordinate tact intermingled with occasional extreme boldness.
"Altogether, it will afford an interesting but rather desperate test of American ability to rise to a quite new kind of political challenge."
Doris Fleeson tells of a rare silence occurring in the Senate as the civil rights debate had opened, with the experienced politicians realizing that the struggle this time promised to be over the whole shape of national politics for the foreseeable future. The Republican Party wanted to use the issue to recapture the black vote, the pivotal states and at least eight more years in the White House following the 1960 election.
Vice-President Nixon and Senate Republican leader William Knowland had submerged their personal rivalry to coordinate the effort. They would split on many issues in the ensuing three years as they vied for the 1960 presidential nomination, but on civil rights, they were agreed that party survival was involved.
It was not clear yet whether they could carry with them the Republican Senate minority of 47 members. Twenty years earlier, that minority had become part of a coalition with the Southern Democrats, enabled by the late Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and former Senator Eugene Millikin of Colorado, with the Southerners providing their votes to the tax and fiscal policies important to business and bankers supporting the Republicans, while Senators Taft and Millikin kept their word to provide enough Republican dissenters on civil rights measures to prevent action.
For the first four years of the Eisenhower Administration, no Republican leader, including the President, had made any serious attempt to upset that arrangement, and Ms. Fleeson ventures that it was likely only the soaring ambitions of the Vice-President which were now upsetting it. Mr. Nixon intended to be President and the present strategy had largely been formulated by him. Senator Knowland, the personal choice of Senator Taft to succeed him as leader, had been sticking with the coalition, but he had no choice after the Vice-President had abandoned that coalition, as both men would need the big national convention delegation from their native state of California to obtain the nomination, and in California, the minority vote was decisive.
Significantly, the senior Republican Senator and pillar of the conservative coalition, Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, was absent as the debate on the civil rights bill had begun, being in the hospital undergoing treatment for "exhaustion". If he accepted the new strategy, the Southerners would have a problem. As it was, for the first time in about 25 years, they were fighting on two fronts, against the liberals of their own party and against the Republicans determined to stay in power. The Republicans had the votes and if they were in earnest, as they said that they were and appeared to be, the civil rights measure would prevail over any attempted filibuster, with only the final roll call giving the actual answer.
Robert C. Ruark says that he had a peculiar talent, involving no effort on his part, stumbling onto talent. As an example, he says he had seen Carol Burnett on her first night at a popular club called the Blue Angel in New York, and imparts that the reader would be hearing of Ms. Burnett, "possessed of a vicious sense of humor, and who can sing real good, too", at least to become well-known by the time he was old and possibly gone.
The Blue Angel had produced Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, Judy Holliday, Andy Griffith, Yul Brynner, Eddie Mayehoff and many others, when no one had known them outside their families and Mr. Ruark.
Ms. Burnett was from Texas originally, raised in California, and had gotten into show business by guess, luck and a borrowed thousand dollars to come to New York. The money had come from a loaded gentleman who caught her final exam at a private party at UCLA given by her professor in the Opera Workshop. She and her husband had done a couple of scenes from "Annie Get Your Gun" and the man with the money had advanced it for the trip eastward on the basis that his name would not be disclosed and that they would repay it by 1959. She had made a splash in New York and so the money would be paid back by the end of the current year.
While she had been starving at the
Rehearsal Club in New York, she and some other kids had hired a hall,
put on a revue, and she suddenly found herself signed by Martin
Goodman, one of the better known agents, who immediately put her on
television, on such programs as the "Garry Moore Show"
In her act, she did a thing which she called, "The girl with the wet teeth," in which she sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", in the manner of Lena Horne. She had managed to make it sound sexier than Ms. Horne singing "I Love To Love". She did it so well, he suggests, that Ms. Horne ought sue.
She also had a satire on the current
"hillbilly nonsense" with a song called "Puppy Love"
She had also taken female weather
forecasters and reduced them to shreds, including the Tennessee
Williams fan who did not know why the sun had to sink and why
everything had to end that way. She had assassinated the musical
comedy stars who sang in high, low and overdrive, such that all they
could do was smile, even when singing "The Man Who Got Away".
She had wrecked the movie star
He urges the reader again to remember her. "If a truck doesn't scrag her crossing streets, she will adorn a lot of theater marquees and magazine covers as time wears on."
A day in the life or two went on with us and sometimes without us, and as to the latter
Framed Edition
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