The Charlotte News
Tuesday, October 14, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Taipei, Formosa, that indications mounted this date that the U.S. would have a hard time getting Chiang Kai-shek to reduce his garrisons on the offshore islands. The Nationalists reportedly would not consider any significant withdrawal unless the U.S. gave them unequivocal guarantees of immediate intervention should the Communists attack the weakened outposts. The U.S. had not been willing to do so thus far, and, reportedly, the Government was to provide Chiang's forces more firepower and better weapons so that they could defend the islands with fewer troops. That presumably had been urged by Defense Secretary Neil McElroy in two conferences with the Nationalist President on Monday, but local newspapers in Taipei, including semi-official organs, continued to denounce the idea of a reduction in the offshore garrisons. Mr. McElroy had visited military installations in the Pescadores Islands this date, between Formosa and the Chinese mainland, and then had joined the U.S. 7th Fleet en route to Manila. Nationalist officials continued to insist that the Communists would resume hostilities when it suited them, contending that the Communists had extended their originally set seven-day cease-fire for two weeks because they had lost the battle of Quemoy, and that any reduction of the garrisons on the islands would convert a Communist military defeat into a political victory. Both the Communists and Nationalists continued to strengthen their installations in the Quemoy area. Associated Press correspondent Gene Kramer had reported from Quemoy that the Nationalists were rushing a crash program to improve their fortifications and artillery positions, and the sound of blasting had filled the air. Mr. Kramer reported that the defenders appeared to be preparing more emplacements for mobile artillery batteries from which to mass a concentrated bombardment of selected targets if the cease-fire were broken. Mr. Kramer also reported that at least 1,000 troop reinforcements and two shiploads of 155-mm. artillery and ammunition had arrived during the previous few days. The Nationalist Defense Ministry reported from Taipei that the Communists also were busily working on military installations in the area threatening the Quemoys and Matsus, 150 miles to the north.
In Atlanta, it was reported that a man, who said that he might be killed for speaking, had signed a statement that the dynamiting of the Jewish temple on Sunday morning had been planned the previous May at a meeting of an anti-Semitic organization in east Atlanta. Police said that the informant had dictated the statement in the presence of three officers late the previous night, but asked that his name be withheld because his home might be bombed if the underground group were to learn what he had done. A police sergeant quoted him as having said he attended the meeting at which plans had been made for the bombing, but that he objected to the use of dynamite and was not invited to attend subsequent sessions. Between 40 and 50 sticks of dynamite had been set off early Sunday against the wall of the temple on Peachtree Road, with damage estimated at $200,000. The informant said that one member of the group who had worked as an architect, had drawn plans of the temple showing exactly where the explosives were to be placed. He said that the dynamite was to have been obtained from Harlan, Ky., and set off by a man brought from Birmingham, Ala. Police said that the informant's statement might prove to be the first real break in the investigation of the bombings of Jewish structures in the South. FBI agents joined with state and Atlanta authorities and with police from neighboring states in probing the man's statement. The name of the anti-Semitic organization was not made public, but police said that they were told it had several members in every major Southern city. A detective said that four persons had been picked up on holding charges of suspicion of vagrancy and were still being questioned. In New York, Henry Schultz, national chairman of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, said that a list of anti-Semitic extremists would be turned over to Atlanta police. He said that the League's investigations of similar incidents in Nashville, Miami, Fla., and Jacksonville, indicated that the bombings "may be the work of a group of old-line anti-Semitic agitators who have drawn in younger and more daring recruits." Dr. Maurice Eisendrath of New York, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, called on the President to convene a special White House governors conference "to dramatize the disastrous national and international effects of continued defiance of lawful processes."
In Peoria, Ill., it was reported that a crude bomb hurled at the annex of a Jewish temple early this date had fallen into an outside stairwell, exploded and shattered several windows in the three-story structure. Damage to the rear annex of Anshai Emeth Temple was said by Rabbi Joseph Ginsberg, who served the 700-member congregation, to have been "very small". No one had been in the temple or annex at the time and there had been no injuries. The Rabbi said that nothing like it had ever happened there before. "The local situation with regard to our relations with the community has always been very good." Police said that the bomb had been fashioned from a two-inch pipe several inches long with a two-foot fuse attached. The stairwell where it landed led into the annex basement. Police reported that the bombing had occurred at around 12:30 a.m. Robert Briscoe, former Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin, had been scheduled to address a gathering at the Agudas Achim Synagogue in Peoria this night, but Rabbi Ginsberg said he did not see any connection between that appearance and the bombing. Police, however, had immediately thrown a guard around that synagogue, which had been dedicated the previous June.
In Accra, Ghana, it was reported that a homemade bomb had exploded this date in the private chapel of the Roman Catholic bishop of Kumasi, the fifth such attack on the chapel.
In Vatican City, it was reported that requiem services for Pope Pius XII had continued this date before a symbolic coffin in St. Peter's Basilica, as more cardinals arrived to elect his successor. The late Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church had been buried the previous day in the grottoes beneath St. Peter's, and the empty coffin had been placed in the church for mourners who continued to file past, to be placed there until the following Sunday, at the end of the official nine-day mourning period. The titular bishop of Adana, Msgr. Diego Venini, had stepped before the empty coffin in the Chapel of the Chorus and celebrated this date's mass. Only the Sistine Chapel Choir, members of the Council of the Basilica, and a small number of priests were admitted to the chapel for the mass. Outside the chapel gate, in the main section of the huge Basilica, were only a few hundred visitors, in contrast to the millions who had filed through the Basilica since the prior Saturday to see the Pontiff's body and to attend the funeral services. Most of those this date had been groups of pilgrims or tourists from abroad. Later in the morning, the entire diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See had been received by the congregation of cardinals in the Vatican's consistory hall. On Sunday, when the nine-day mourning period would end, the cardinals would receive special envoys of foreign governments paying their respects to the late Pope, with the U.S. envoys to be Secretary of State Dulles, former Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce and John McCone, director of the Atomic Energy Commission. About a dozen cardinals had been expected to arrive this date to join the 28 already in the Vatican. All except two of the 55 Cardinals would likely be present for the conclave which would begin on October 25 to elect a new pope, with only Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac of Yugoslavia and Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary absent.
In Bremerhaven, West Germany, it was reported that 1,000 U.S. Army troops had returned to Germany this date from emergency duty in Lebanon, the first group to leave Lebanon by ship.
In Tananarive, Madagascar, the local assemblies of the French island possession off Africa this date proclaimed Madagascar a republic, but decided that it would remain a member of the new French community.
On the editorial page, "A Day of Jubilee at Cape Canaveral" finds it easy to picture the jubilee which had gone from Cape Canaveral to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow when the Pioneer lunar probe had launched the previous Saturday morning. "We see scientist and technician clambering up in stupor from the gadget-lined dimness of pill-boxes, numb from the long countdown, listening to the sharp withdrawing beam of its signal until the lunar probe should come to grips with gravity and pass beyond it."
It indicates that work remained to be done and further calculations to be made, but the work had pierced the boundary of ages, defying the gravity of the earth as never before, reaching to a distance of about 80,000 miles, about one-third the distance to the moon.
"In the ancient world perhaps it would have been different, but then of course the ancients did not have science in our sense. They were astrologers, moon-watchers, star-gazers, but out of a different impulse. The principles of their science, as when Archimedes found in "a bathtub of water in Syracuse how to find alloy in the king's gold crown, or as when Pythagoras pondered geometry in the sand with a stylus, were pedestrian to say the least."
It suggests that if the ancients had managed to defy gravity, it would not have been a time of jubilee. In the lanes of Palmyra or Ecbatan, doors would have been shut and barred and wise men would have searched the entrails of birds for divine portents. "They were watchers of the skies, for birds and for the opposition of planets, but they were not scientific enough to watch in jaunty boasting. When they dared to take a secret from the air, they did it, we imagine, with trembling."
It wonders what it might have been like had Archimedes been able to walk the sands of Cape Canaveral the prior Saturday, as Pioneer launched into the ether. "Could he believe it when they told him? Perhaps. But what when they would tell him, hoisting still more suds against the blackness, that beyond the moon there were planets, and beyond that the sun and beyond that stars and beyond that galaxies, hundreds and hundreds of them, where a thousand light years is like a mile, bent back into graceful curves and spirals upon themselves?"
It suggests that it would have been too much for the unscientific sensibility of the ancient, who would have choked with awe, fear and something which told him pride was not quite seemly. "And the night air of Cape Canaveral would ring with laughter as the retreating figure was lost to sight over the dunes."
Did the ancient exhibit conscience
As we have fallen behind, there will no further notes on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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