The Charlotte News
Thursday, June 27, 1957
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Washington, Government star witness John Cye Cheasty testified this date in the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, Midwest head of the Teamsters Union, and his co-defendant, a Miami lawyer, Hyman Fischbach, charged with conspiracy to bribe Mr. Cheasty to obtain information in advance out of the Senate Select Committee investigating racketeering and organized crime influence on unions and management, that Mr. Hoffa had paid him $2,000 to obtain Committee information on Teamsters president Dave Beck. Mr. Cheasty, a Committee staff attorney, had reported the attempted bribe to the Committee and cooperated with the Committee and the FBI to obtain evidence of the bribe, leading to the charges.
Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn said this date, following a conference with Representative Francis Walter of Pennsylvania, chairman of HUAC, that there would be no further telecasts of hearings before HUAC.
Before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, witness Howard Trautman of New York had invoked the recent Watkins v. U.S. decision of the Supreme Court in refusing to say whether he was a Communist, the first time the decision had been invoked. (The decision is treated in some detail, especially the dissent of Justice Tom Clark, this date by columnist Walter Lippmann.)
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this date upheld the State Department's right to deny passports to persons who refused to sign oaths that they were not Communists, making the ruling in the cases of a Los Angeles psychiatrist and artist Rockwell Kent. (In 1958, the Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 decision delivered by Justice William O. Douglas, would reverse the decisions, holding that in a case where a fundamental right, such as the right to travel, was being limited, the discretion entrusted to the executive branch by Congress under statute, in this case to the Secretary of State to grant or deny a passport, would be construed narrowly when used to curtail or dilute the Constitutional right, not reaching, per se, the Constitutional issues but merely finding that the Federal statutes under which the Secretary had acted to deny the passports did not "delegate to the Secretary the kind of authority exercised here. We deal with beliefs, with associations, with ideological matters. We must remember that we are dealing here with citizens who have neither been accused of crimes nor found guilty. They are being denied their freedom of movement solely because of their refusal to be subjected to inquiry into their beliefs and associations. They do not seek to escape the law nor to violate it. They may or may not be Communists. But assuming they are, the only law which Congress has passed expressly curtailing the movement of Communists across our borders has not yet become effective. It would therefore be strange to infer that pending the effectiveness of that law, the Secretary has been silently granted by Congress the larger, the more pervasive power to curtail in his discretion the free movement of citizens in order to satisfy himself about their beliefs or associations." A dissent was filed by Justice Clark, joined by Justices Harold Burton, John Harlan and Charles Whittaker. Incidentally, for the literalists who might say that they cannot see the "right to travel" in the Constitution, that maybe that was just something the Supreme Court made up, it is deemed a part of the "liberty" interest under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, of which a citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law, not dissimilar to the "right to privacy", inherent also in the Fourth Amendment. You would not really appreciate being without either right. For more on the unenumerated rights included in the Bill of Rights, see the Ninth Amendment.)
An across-the-board increase for some 518,000 postal workers of $546 per year had been approved this date by the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, with the increase to add about 350 million dollars to the Federal payroll.
In Canberra, Australia, it was reported that Britain had sent an upper atmosphere testing rocket, known as the Skylark, 50 miles above the earth in a proving trial at Woomera rocket range in the Australian outback.
Government scientists said this date that an earthquake of a "definite destructive nature" had occurred on the Lake Baikal area of south central Siberia.
In Indianapolis, a grand jury returned two new indictments in its final road scandal report this date and called former Governor George Craig "morally if not legally responsible" for the irregularities.
In Huntsville, Ala., Col. John Nickerson, Jr., testified in his court-martial that in national defense policies, there had been "a gross over-emphasis on air power". The previous day, he had admitted to 15 counts of laxity in handling secret defense data by permitting it to fall into the hands of unauthorized persons, chiefly those he wanted to enlist in his fight to preserve development for the Army of an intermediate range ballistic missile, which included primarily newspaper editors and members of Congress. The ten-man court-martial was presently hearing evidence bearing on his sentence. The maximum punishment he could receive was a dismissal from the service and 30 years imprisonment. In an opening statement in the sentencing phase, the colonel had outlined the now classic feud between advocates of air power as the first line of defense and those who believed the Army needed a balanced striking force of soldiers, sailors and airmen. He argued that the nation's chief enemy was Russia and that in the event of war, there would undoubtedly be Russian air attacks on the U.S. with atomic bombs and U.S. counter-attacks.
In Annapolis, Md., Anne Arundel County police this date reconstructed the murder of a 36-year old Baltimore woman, whose date had told police that she was shot down by a bushy-browed, unkempt man posing as a caretaker. The victim was married and the mother of two children, and had worked as a clerk in the 2nd Army headquarters at Fort Meade, about eight miles from where the slaying had occurred. Her date, a master sergeant stationed at Fort Meade, told police that she was shot the previous day by a man who had asked for a lift and then had drawn a pistol and demanded money. The police took the sergeant to the scene of the slaying, about 12 miles west of Annapolis on a lonely lane, to reconstruct the crime. The sergeant lived at Laurel with his wife and two children, and gave a description of the killer. It was the second "lovers' lane" incident in less than a day within six miles of one another, the other couple having escaped into a wooded area and hidden until daylight after a gunman had bound the man and attempted to force him into the trunk of a car.
In Steubenville, O., five coal miners who had been trapped for more than 14 hours after a cave-in, had been rescued the previous night through a hole dug by a mechanized auger bored 230 feet into a hillside. When the 42-inch diameter auger was pulled from the hole, the miners had followed it out one by one, blinking at the floodlights which lit the desolate strip-mine pit. A great cheer arose from about a thousand persons, including rescue workers, relatives, spectators and newsmen, as the miners rushed to their families who had waited all day in the hot sun and far into the night. Doctors quickly examined the men and determined that they had not been harmed by their ordeal. One miner said that it was cold in the area where they had been trapped—in a small chamber about 9.5 feet wide, 20 feet long and 12 feet high, positioned 300 feet back in a horizontal mine shaft about 150 feet below the crest of a hill, one of seven horizontal "punch mining" shafts which were connected by an air passage, which the cave-in had blocked with hundreds of tons of loose rock, coal and dirt. The air from the other shafts was, however, able to seep through the porous debris, and rescue workers had mounted huge fans in the other tunnels. Late in the day, after other methods had proved unpromising, rescuers started using the huge mining auger, a machine which added nine 21-foot bits in sequence as the auger went deeper through a vein of coal. The first two attempts with the auger had failed when it hit rock, but on the second boring, 180 feet deep, the workers heard voices, and two other bit sections were rolled in by hand and mounted on the machine for the third boring. When the drill broke through into the chamber, the trapped men loaded a cloth hat and a piece of lumber into the bit. When those items came out the other end, the rescuers knew that they had reached the men. One of the men said that he had just prayed and knew that the rescuers would reach them.
In Port Arthur, Tex., it was reported that Hurricane Audrey, which had already taken at least ten lives, had smashed into the Texas-Louisiana border area this date packing winds at some places up to 100 mph. The Port Arthur Weather Bureau said that the hurricane had first hit at Cameron, La., with winds of only 65 mph. The Bureau said that the storm had an eye of about 50 miles in width just before it struck. The 100 mph winds had been recorded at Orange, Tex., and Lake Charles, La., north and northwest of Cameron. Nine of the ten deaths had occurred when a fishing vessel had sunk, and another man had drowned in a strong undertow. The New Orleans Weather Bureau said that winds of 70 mph or greater could be expected the rest of the day along the Texas-Louisiana border. Thousands had evacuated their homes and resort cabins as tides up to 9 feet above normal had hit the shore. At Galveston, Tex., 70 miles southwest and out of the direct path of the hurricane, water had splashed over the sea wall and almost all downtown streets had been flooded. A hurricane in 1900 had struck Galveston and taken 5,000 lives, with some claiming that more had died, in one of the nation's worst disasters, occurring prior to the sea wall having been built.
J. A. Daly of The News reports that the American Cotton Manufacturers Institute had gone on record this date as strongly favoring drastic revision of the Federal Government's cotton policy to assure competitive pricing of cotton in domestic and world markets. The spokesman for the organization had been Charles Cannon of Kannapolis, president of Cannon Mills, appearing before the House Agriculture Committee at a hearing in Washington on proposed farm legislation. The position of ACMI had been anxiously awaited by manufacturers, dealers, futures brokers and growers of cotton, as it was anticipated that it would influence strongly the legislative trend relating to cotton. The Government was having great success in selling its surplus cotton for export at substantial discounts off prices which the U.S. cotton mills were required to pay for their cotton in the domestic spot cotton markets.
Dick Bayer of The News reports of a 14-year old Kings Mountain boy having nosed out an 11-year old boy for the Charlotte Soap Box Derby Championship, steering his car down the 800-foot track in 30.01 seconds. The winner had just won the class-A championship among 13 to 15-year old boys before his final victory over the class-B winner of Mount Pleasant among 11 to 12-year olds. He was sponsored by the Kings Mountain branch of the Liberty Life Insurance Co. The Derby was sponsored annually by the Chevrolet Division of General Motors, The News, and the Charlotte Jaycees. WBT sportscasters "Big Bill" Ward and Phil Agresta provided on-the-spot radio coverage throughout the race, and parts of the race were filmed for WBTV. More than 2,000 spectators and contestants had seen the fastest time of the day recorded by one boy of Charlotte in the first heat. You will have to turn to page 6-A to find out his time. Sorry, but we do not disclose highly classified information here.
On the editorial page, "States Rights and Political Galahads" indicates that for decades, political Galahads had been riding off to Washington to slay the dragon of Federal bureaucracy and bring home the supposedly stolen treasure of states' rights. Few of the triumphant returns had been recorded, and the dragon had continued to grow, "succored not infrequently by the votes of the very knights that were sworn to slay it."
It finds that the increased assumption of state functions by the Federal Government was compounded from a universal mixture of expediency and necessity, but the story of the people back home remained essentially the same, being told that states' rights had been stolen as a result of an evil plot by conspiratorial bureaucrats in Washington and that just as soon as the particular politician speaking would be elected or re-elected, the plot would be smashed and states' rights restored.
It indicates that it would never happen, not in that way, that there was not any plot and that there was no more smoke than fire in most state demands for return of their rights. "With the rights, responsibilities would be returned to the states—responsibilities they are unwilling or unable to shoulder. For while Washington has been taking over state responsibilities, the states have been assuming more and more of the burdens of city and county governments. State budgets for a number of years have been increasing more rapidly percentagewise than the federal budget."
Thus, when the President had challenged the nation's governors during the week at the Governors' Conference in Williamsburg to join him in a revival of states' rights, the applause had been tepid and it was accompanied by much criticism, with some of the Democratic governors dismissing the idea as impossible of accomplishment, while others remarked on the President's advocacy of civil rights and his aid to education bills presently before Congress. Yet, there had been no reason to believe that the President was any less sincere than were the governors, with all of them being prisoners of their own constituencies and the difference in their political actions generally reflecting that difference in the economic and social standing of their constituencies.
It posits that probably a majority of the governors and the President shared a genuine desire to reverse the trend toward big and distant government, but the difficulty was in finding a means of accomplishing it. The President had offered no certain formula with his proposal for a Federal-state commission to study a way to shift responsibilities and tax sources back to the states. But he had stated some political truths which had to be accepted before any scheme could be achieved which had any hope of success. He said: "The tendency of bureaucracy to grow in size and power does not bear the whole blame. Never under our constitutional system could the national government have siphoned away state authority without the neglect, acquiescence, or unthinking cooperation of the states themselves. The founding fathers foresaw and attempted to forestall such a contingency. They reserved to the people, and they reserved to the states, all power not specifically bestowed upon the national government. But, like nature, people and their governments are intolerant of vacuums. Every state failure to meet a pressing public need has created the opportunity, developed the excuse and fed the temptation for the national government to poach on the states' preserves."
It finds that in a growing, interdependent society, hope for full restoration of states' rights appeared illusory, but that an effort to slow or stop the growth of big government was desirable and necessary and urges the governors to accept the President's challenge and study his proposal. "States rights will never be reclaimed by oratory."
"A First-Table Seat for Mecklenburg" finds that when it came to sharing political honors, North Carolina Democrats too often reserved a special place for Mecklenburg residents, at the second table. Thus, when Governor Luther Hodges had appointed Linn Garibaldi as chairman of the new State Prisons Commission, it was doubly welcome, giving Mecklenburg its first top appointment in the Hodges hierarchy since Ben Douglas had resigned as director of the Department of Conservation and Development. It also placed a gifted executive and public-spirited citizen at the head of a vitally important State agency.
The independent Prisons Department, over which the Prisons Commission would preside, was a new and long delayed experiment for the state, with the prospect for introduction of needed reforms and modern penal techniques to the prisons considerably brightened by the appointment of Mr. Garibaldi. As vice-chairman of the old State Prisons Advisory Council, he would be able to draw on a large well of experience in shaping policy for the new Department. He had announced that he would ask the Governor to continue Col. William Bailey, a capable administrator and wise humanitarian, as the executive head of the prisons.
It concludes that given the strong support which Mecklenburg Democrats had given to the Governor, he had not chosen top officials from their ranks too often, but he had, in this instance, chosen well.
"A Salute to the Derby Champions" comments on Charlotte's 12th annual postwar Soap Box Derby, won by Tony Hampton of Kings Mountain. Several previous winners had come from neighboring towns and even neighboring states, with the success of the Derby dependent in large measure on the surrounding trade area.
It finds that the young winner and Charlotte had made a good trade the previous day, as he had contributed a champion's skill, energy and determination, while Charlotte had provided the championship. It finds that the best thing about the Derby was that there were no losers, with every boy who participated having earned confidence and experience in competition which he could put to later use. In building their racers, the boys had learned that much of the joy of life came from the labor of the hands.
It wishes heartiest congratulations to the winner and the "losers".
A piece from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, titled "Of Ladies, Men and Biscuits", tells of a recent Gallup poll in which Northerners had been asked to give their opinions of Southerners and the South. It indicates that for every Yankee who had said that Southern women "go around barefooted", "put on airs" or were "too damned lazy", there were several who felt that Southern women were "real nice and kind, not bossy", or were "round, firm and fully packed". There were a few who did not believe Southern women were better looking than Northern women, such as a 64-year old Indiana farmer who said, "I never saw too many prize peaches in the South." Another person had indicated that a Southern woman was "pretty up to 16, then she starts fading." But she was "not as stuck up as northern women."
Some Northerners believed Southern men to be modern versions of Rhett Butler out of Gone with the Wind, while a smaller number classified them with Jeeter Lester of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road. Those who regarded them in the former category believed Southern men to be "more gallant" or "very sociable, well-mannered and well-bred" and knew more about taking care of a woman. But others in the North believed that Southern males were in all probability a "tobacco-chewer", a "big windbag", drank too much or was "kind of stupid".
Southern cooking received favorable comments in the poll, with about 80 percent liking it, although some found it to be too rich or too greasy, with some saying they did not like black-eyed peas and that kind of thing or that they were not crazy about grits. Southern fried chicken and hot biscuits were mentioned most often by Northerners whose eyes glazed at the thought of the Southern cuisine, with Virginia ham being near the top, though not specifically mentioned in the Gallup poll.
The Southern accent was also popular in the North, liked by two-thirds of the respondents. "Whether it is the accent as butchered and profaned on TV and radio, or the accent 'as she is spoke' down heah—a very different thing—we don't know."
It concludes that Northerners were not preparing to launch nuclear salvos toward the South and seemed to be quite in favor of Southern women, men, accents and biscuits. "What more can we ask?"
Drew Pearson indicates that the President's Commission on Government Security had recommended that a newsman who published secret data would be subject to punishment of five years in prison and a fine of $5,000. Yet, the previous winter when Mr. Pearson had voluntarily sought from the Defense Department advice on what portions of a memo on guided missiles he could or could not publish, the document had been confiscated. The incident had helped to cause the court-martial of Col. John Nickerson at Huntsville, Ala., though he had not been the source of the secret memo and he regards him as a fine officer whom he had never met. It was why Mr. Pearson's junior partner, Jack Anderson, had been called to Huntsville to testify in the court-martial.
He says that the incident illustrated how a newsman was between the devil and the deep blue sea, that if he did not consult the Pentagon, he could go to jail under the recommendations of the Commission, and that if he did consult the Pentagon, his information might be confiscated and a possible source of the information hauled before a court-martial.
He indicates that a newspaperman had a moral obligation to keep the public informed, especially regarding a weapon vital to the defense of the nation when the weapon appeared to be the object of a battle between big business. The public had a right to know when Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson's former company, General Motors, together with Douglas Aircraft and Bell Telephone, wanted to control guided missile production through the Air Force, while Chrysler, a rival of G.M., and Minneapolis Honeywell favored the Army.
The branch which would control guided missiles would tend to dominate defense production in the future and that should not be the subject of a military secret. According to Col. Nickerson, in his secret memo: "The aircraft industry, and particularly the Douglas Aircraft Co., openly oppose the development of any missile by a government agency. High officials of the Douglas Company have stated that Douglas is paying particular attention to the possibility of killing off the operation at Huntsville, Ala."
The previous November 26, Secretary of Defense Wilson had sided with Douglas, the Air Force, and his own former company, G.M., in ruling that the Army at Huntsville had to quit production of the medium-range ballistic missile, putting Chrysler and Minneapolis Honeywell, plus the Army, out of virtually all missile production and concentrating it in the Air Force and their friendly companies, Douglas, the A. C. Sparkplug Division of G.M., and Bell Telephone. Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles had been a former official of a Bell subsidiary. Thus, the battle over guided missiles was one between big business for the control of the future weaponry of the nation.
After the original copy of the Nickerson memo had been confiscated by the Pentagon, a second copy was obtained by Mr. Pearson from sources which he says had to remain nameless. He provides some of the conclusions from the memo which he believes the public had a right to know, including: "The Wilson memorandum [which had banned the Army from IRBM production] is a broad denial to the Army of essential tools for modern warfare. The Army must be kept modern by application of modern technology to weapons. This is particularly important because of the numerical inferiority of the U.S. Army to the Soviet Army. The Wilson memorandum is solely an expression of Air Force views backed up by Admiral Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Secretary of the Army, the Army Chief of Staff, the assistant to the Secretary of Defense for guided missiles, and the assistant Secretary of Defense for research and development all hold strongly to the view that the Army has an urgent requirement for the IRBM. The Secretary of the U.S. Air Force has recently recommended in writing the discontinuance of the IRBM No. 2 [the Jupiter missile] program at Huntsville, Alabama. The present Secretary of the U.S. Air Force, Mr. Donald Quarles, is one of the leading contenders for Secretary of Defense."
Mr. Pearson notes that the memo had been written before Mr. Quarles had become Deputy Secretary of Defense, as he was at present.
Walter Lippmann discusses the Supreme Court decision of June 17, Watkins v. U.S., which held that the power of Congressional committees was not unlimited, that there was no right generally to probe into the private affairs of witnesses, that the probe had to be related to and in furtherance of a legitimate task of Congress and that the Bill of Rights was applicable to Congressional investigations, including the First Amendment, protecting speech, press and the right of assembly, that when First Amendment rights were threatened, the delegation of power to a committee had to be defined clearly in its charter, and that in the case of HUAC, its legislative authorization and purpose was not sufficiently particular to ensure that compulsory process was used only in furtherance of its legislative purpose, that the specific legislative need had to be stated and that no witness could be compelled to testify outside that defined area, that part of the statutory definition of contempt of Congress was the pertinency of the question under inquiry, that in the instant case, the chairman's statement at the outset of the witness's testimony had not provided adequate notice to the witness as to the "question under inquiry" to satisfy due process.
Mr. Lippmann finds that the holding defining the limits of Congressional power was general enough that no one could understand how it would be applied in future situations, that it would depend on how much each particular committee was willing to accept or stretch the limitations and whether the Court was willing to construe the limitations strictly or loosely. But it contained a principle which would influence the conduct of committees, the attitude of witnesses, the actions of the Court and the general posture of public opinion. A witness who believed his or her constitutional rights were being abused could appeal to the courts for resolution of the matter.
Justice Tom Clark had dissented from the majority opinion delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren, contending that the courts should not intervene in the legislative process, considering it to be "mischievous" to "supervise" Congressional investigations. He said: "Perhaps, the rules of conduct placed upon the committees by the House admit of individual abuse and unfairness. But that is none of our affair. So long as the object of the legislative inquiry is legitimate and the questions proposed are pertinent thereto, it is not for the court to interfere with the committee's system of inquiry."
Mr. Lippmann finds Justice Clark's dissent to be a "masterpiece of confusion" because it was not clear whether there was abuse of and unfairness to Mr. Watkins, a labor organizer asked about Communist activities of union members, because the questions were not pertinent or because the object of the inquiry was not legitimate, that the Justice apparently believed that the courts had to assume that the purpose was legitimate and that the questions were pertinent to the Committee's purpose and if they produced abuse and unfairness to a witness, it was none of the Court's business, that such inquiry by the Court was a "trespass" on the separation of powers, which was such an absolute principle that no committee could be called to account for abuses to a witness's rights.
Mr. Lippmann finds Justice Clark's view to be essentially that Congress was a sovereign body, accountable only to itself.
He suggests that the ultimate issue raised by the case was not constitutional but rather whether to combat the Communist movement, it was necessary to encourage or permit Congressional committees to proceed outside the protections of the Constitution. It had been on the ground that there was a desperate emergency that many sober and conservative people had supported or connived at McCarthyism. The Watkins holding was addressed to that particular type of extra-constitutional investigation, to outlaw by exposure and pitiless publicity all behavior which could assist the spread of Communist propaganda, with such investigations not primarily addressed to illegal acts, espionage and subversion, but rather to activities which were not strictly against the law and could not be prosecuted, with the investigations not carried on for the purpose of informing Congress how to pass new legislation but rather to suppress such activities as propaganda, infiltration and fellow-traveling through committee action designed to suppress through intimidation what could not be suppressed by process of law.
He finds that the Supreme Court had waited a decade or more to intervene in the unconstitutional process to which committees had resorted to stop the spread of Communism. He concludes that he did not believe the long patience of the Court was more liberal than the Court during the Roosevelt-Truman era, but rather that "the times have changed. The emergency—if there was one which could not be met by lawful means—is over, and the presumption is now that investigating committees must work within the limits of the Constitution."
Joseph Alsop, in Paris, indicates that the Greek-Turkish aid provided under the Truman Doctrine of 1946 and to Europe generally under the Marshall Plan of 1947, had announced America's intention to halt the Soviet advance in Europe, while in the Korean War, the U.S. had assumed the responsibility of holding the line against Communism in the Far East, that in both cases the electorate had understood what its Government was doing.
But now under the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine, the Government had assumed direct, continuing responsibility for holding the line in the strategically vital Middle East, a new American commitment already taken for granted by Middle Eastern allies. Yet, Mr. Alsop says it was not clear to him that the new American commitment was regarded as solid and final at home, that while there had to be hesitancy by foreign correspondents in judging home opinion, he had seen nothing in reports from home to suggest a general awareness by the public that there had been a step taken comparable in moral magnitude to the Marshall Plan or the response to the Korean aggression, that the seeming lack of such awareness was worrisome, all the more so because the peril in the Middle East was not like the peril which had been resisted in Europe and the Far East, where the peril had been Communism, while in the Middle East, the peril was much more complex.
Communism played a role in the Middle East, but the Communist parties there were small and almost unindoctrinated, though the Arab Communists were at least disciplined and could be therefore effective as agents, political organizers and terrorists. A major role was being played by the Kremlin, as in the decision to provide political support to Egypt and its satellite, Syria, and the subsequent shipments of arms to those two countries, actions which had forced the U.S. reaction in the form of the Eisenhower Doctrine.
But the source of the peril in the Middle East was not Communism but rather the nationalist Arab movement led and dominated by Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser. His type of Arab nationalism was useful to the Kremlin and thus was supported by it because it had an anti-Western twist and if victorious in the end, would destroy all Western interests in Arab lands, where the West had strategic and economic dependence, with the result of weakening the Western alliance, an objective of the Soviets.
Yet, the Arabs did not view the problem in that manner, as all Arabs were first nationalists and anti-Communists only second, if at all. Premier Nasser had been denouncing anti-Communist King Hussein of Jordan as a tool of imperialism because the King's courage had frustrated Premier Nasser's efforts to spread nationalism in Jordan. Despite King Hussein needing U.S. aid, he could not accept it without the usual strings attached and thus was, in his own way, as much a nationalist as was Premier Nasser, as the customary strings on U.S. aid would destroy King Hussein's standing as a free patriot.
In consequence, when Middle Eastern allies needed U.S. help, the U.S. had to trust their friendship rather than trying to govern them as an aid-dispensing nation. The State Department under Secretary Dulles was always asking allies to stand up and be counted as stalwart anti-Communists. But the Arabs did not worry very much about Communism and were quite touchy about foreign influences. Thus, the U.S.-solicited proclamations of anti-Communism did great harm as "proofs of American imperialism."
Mr. Alsop finds that those were only two of the grave complications arising from the fact that in the Arab lands, the U.S. was trying to ward off a special kind of anti-Western nationalism rather than Communism, that there were other complications, not the least of which was the fact that Premier Nasser commanded very strong mass support in most Arab countries.
A letter writer comments on the televised sermon from Madison Square Garden the prior Saturday night of evangelist Billy Graham, which she regards as a wonderful sermon. She finds that many were lost and on the wrong road, following the crowd, and says she would never forget her mother's advice that if one could not stay in good, clean company, one should stay by one's self. She was sure that if the Reverend Graham were preaching for money, he would not last long, that a person had to draw strength from God to preach as he did. "Money won't buy a way to Heaven. But you can be saved and converted and be ready if God calls. For when you are called from this world you don't take anything with you. All you carry is what you have done for others."
She seems to have obtained an advance copy of the second side of "Abbey Road", 12 years before it was committed to tape.
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