The Charlotte News
Thursday, October 2, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Taipei, Formosa, that a Chinese Nationalist flying boat carrying 11 persons, including four U.S. servicemen, was reported missing this date on a flight from the offshore Matsu Islands to Formosa. The plane had disappeared shortly before sunset the previous day, and almost 24 hours later, Nationalist search planes and two U.S. destroyers had failed to find a trace of it. Officials speculated that the slow-flying plane had encountered bad weather. The twin-engine PBY flying boat had been under radar observation from Formosa when it vanished, and there was no reported sign of Communist fighters in the area at the time. The manager of the Nationalist domestic airline Foshing announced that the plane was last heard from 25 minutes after takeoff from Matsu for the 120-mile flight to Formosa, chartered by the Nationalist Defense Ministry. The four U.S. servicemen aboard were connected with the U.S. military advisory team stationed on Matsu, U.S. officials indicating that there were two Army officers, an Army enlisted man and a sailor. The others aboard had been three Chinese military passengers and four Chinese crewmen. The pilot and the radio operator had been decorated by the U.S. Government in 1954 for helping rescue seven U.S. airmen whose plane had ditched at sea.
Secretary of State Dulles had sent Nationalist Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek a message designed to assure him that the U.S. was standing by its basic policies on Formosa and Nationalist China.
At the U.N. in New York, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had arranged for a hurriedly scheduled speech before the General Assembly during the afternoon to blast Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold's Middle East report made previously to the Assembly.
In Nicosia, Cyprus, air raid sirens had announced the snap introduction of an immediate curfew in the city during the morning, providing the populace 15 minutes to leave the streets. A Government spokesman said that it was a precaution against threatened disorders.
In Algiers, French Premier Charles de Gaulle returned to Algeria this date, expected to deliver a policy statement which would spell out at least some of his plans for the troubled North African territory.
In Beirut, Lebanon, former President Camille Chamoun this date rejected U.S. Ambassador Robert McClintock's plan for a political truce in Lebanon, telling the Associated Press of his stand after meeting with the Ambassador in the mountain village of Bois de Boulogne.
The President this date added an appearance at the National Corn Picking Contest in Cedar Rapids, Ia., to take place on October 17.
In San Diego, Calif., it was reported that differences persisted among California's top three Republicans, Vice-President Nixon, Senator William Knowland and Governor Goodwin Knight, but that they agreed on the belief that Democrats were becoming overconfident about the upcoming midterm elections in November. In their first joint appearance of the election campaign the previous night, each challenged what Governor Knight termed the cocksure attitude of the Democrats. The meeting, at a money-raising Republican rally, had also served to emphasize a lapse in harmony within the Republican ranks. Mr. Nixon endorsed the entire Republican state ticket, as did Senator Knowland, who had mentioned Governor Knight's candidacy for his Senate seat, as he was now running in the gubernatorial race against the Democratic nominee, State Attorney General Pat Brown. Governor Knight's opponent in the Senate race was Congressman Clair Engle. Governor Knight, however, remained silent about Senator Knowland, having refused throughout the campaign to endorse the Senator, whose decision to run in the gubernatorial race had prompted Governor Knight's reluctant switch to the Senate race. Mr. Nixon accused the Democrats of "rot-gut thinking" and playing politics with national security, indicating that if there was a "gap" in American development of missiles vis-à-vis the Soviets, it was the fault of the Truman and not the Eisenhower Administration. Referring to Democratic criticism of the President's defense policies, he told the estimated 5,500 people present: "The grave danger is that the enemy might well believe this clap-trap and make the mistake of launching war against us." (While Mr. Nixon apparently made no direct dig at a likely 1960 opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy, who had made a highly publicized speech in August in the Senate regarding the missile "gap" likely to occur between 1960 and 1964 because of the "missile lag" in development and testing, especially in the category of the ICBM, there appeared at least a subliminal effort to brand the Senator's well-regarded speech as "clap-trap", lending further credence to the suggestion by Walter Lippmann this date that the "old Nixon", given to charging people with whom he disagreed with conduct bordering on treason, was resurfacing.) He said that the Democrats thought that they were headed for a landslide in the midterms, expecting to gain 60 House seats and 10 or 12 new Senate seats, as well as a number of governorships. He said that it could happen if Republicans let it happen, but expressed confidence in a Republican victory, provided the party would get out and wage an aggressive fight. Apparently, the $5 per head fee for attendance of the "Republican Roundup" was not enough, as the Democrats would fulfill their expectations in the midterms in both houses.
The Associated Press reports that a Kentucky school had been closed after an outbreak of violence, while authorities in Arkansas and Virginia studied maneuvers to reopen schools which had been closed by those states' governors in the face of court orders to integrate. The principal of Wheelwright, Ky., High School had planned to meet with parents and officials to determine what to do about the first racial incident since integrated classes had begun at the school three years earlier. Police had broken up a demonstration by white pupils in which bricks were thrown and windows were broken on Wednesday, an outgrowth, according to the principal, of a fight between a white girl and a black girl at a restaurant the day before. Classes had been suspended indefinitely. Five black female students had been among the 650 pupils enrolled at the school, but had been sent home before the rock-throwing incident.
In Little Rock, an attorney for the pro-segregation Capital Citizens Council in Little Rock, said that money would be raised for private facilities "if our would-be federal masters insist on destroying our public schools…"
In Richmond, Va., the vice-mayor said in a letter to the President that he did not consider the court's "recent opinions as the law of the land, but rather as an attempt to change the law of the land… You cannot be fundamentally honest if you ask me as a public official to aid in the conversion of our good schools into the disgraceful mess which exists in your Washington schools." The schools in Washington had been integrated since the 1954-55 school year, the first school year after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the issue regarding the D.C. schools having been separately decided in the companion case, Bolling v. Sharpe, albeit based on the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause, as the Fourteenth Amendment applies only to the states. Virginia Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr., was reported to be considering plans to reorganize Virginia's nine closed schools so that some of the 13,000 pupils could return to classes. Informed sources said that they believed it might be done by eliminating one or more grades which had been ordered to be integrated at the individual schools by the Federal courts. Hell, why do they need twelve? Throw a couple of 'em out. That'll show 'em. If ten grades was good 'nough for old grandpa, why, that's good enough for us. Last two don't do nothin' but prepare you for college, and who needs that?
In Detroit, the UAW this date had struck General Motors after a final 20-hour bargaining session had failed to bring contract agreement covering 250,000 workers. Thousands of G.M. workers had struck well in advance of the official strike deadline during the morning. G.M. vice-president Louis Seaton, head of the company bargaining team, conceded an hour before the deadline that efforts to reach a settlement had failed. He termed the strike "a useless type of thing which will result in loss of wages, losses to our suppliers and dealers, and to everyone from the baker to the butcher." UAW president Walter Reuther, who Wednesday had reached an agreement with Chrysler Corp., expressed disappointment at his failure to achieve the same result with G.M., saying that he was not asking any more from G.M. than he had obtained in the agreements with Ford and Chrysler. The UAW had reached an agreement with Ford on September 17, providing for a new three-year contract and the Chrysler agreement nearly duplicated that of the Ford agreement. Those agreements had provided for increases of between 24 and 30 cents per hour over the life of the new contract and for increases in supplemental unemployment pay and severance pay for workers who might lose their jobs because of plant shutdowns or transfers. Mr. Reuther insisted that G.M. workers "are entitled to some special consideration in matters pertaining to wage inequities and short work weeks." Mr. Seaton said that he saw no necessity for any new offer when they had already made one exactly like that of Ford and Chrysler, which the union said was good for the UAW and for the nation. Both G.M. and the UAW conceded that the G.M. bargaining was the most complicated in the industry because the company had many more plants and thousands more workers than either Ford or Chrysler. Mr. Seaton indicated that G.M.'s output was so diversified, ranging from automobiles to refrigerators to electric locomotives, that there were thousands of pay scales. The union had insisted that the wage rates of an assembler, for instance, ought be uniform in G.M. plants, but Mr. Seaton declared that the types of work were so varied that it would be impossible to adopt a standard rate. It was the first national strike at G.M. since 1945, when the nation's largest automobile manufacturer had been tied up for 113 days in a dispute over wages. The United Electrical Workers, with 20,000 members in G.M. plants, had also gone on strike with the UAW this date.
On the editorial page, "Euthanasia on the Fifty Yard Line" quotes News sports editor, Bob Quincy, as having said, in his column of the previous day, "I make no excuses for coaches." But it decides to shed at least a perfunctory tear for them, and in particular for "Sunny" Jim Tatum, head football coach at UNC, and for Bill Murray, head football coach at Duke.
"From the slings of Davids these days, death comes to football Goliaths. Just ask Sunny Jim and Dapper Bill, who are spending the week on the fields at Chapel Hill and Durham wearing crepe after losing, respectively, to State and Clemson, South Carolina and Virginia."
Both Duke and UNC had been touted as being at least among the Goliaths in the ACC in the current season, but now might conceivably dispute for the booby prize instead of the crown by the time the two schools would meet in November. "What an anti-climax! After years of hot combat between critics and defenders of big-time college football, it looks as if football in the Durham-Chapel Hill crescent has entered a phase of 'involuntary de-emphasis.'"
It suggests that perhaps it was conference-wide, as baffled alumni had to be asking each other in indignation reminiscent of "Silent Cal" Coolidge: "We hired the teams, didn't we?" They had hired the teams, but it was beginning to look as if one could do all the hiring and recruiting one wanted and still wind up in the cellar. It was also beginning to look as if the dispute between coaches and pedagogues would blow over.
Secessionists of the coaching world had cried, "Winning is everything," as Mr. Tatum had been quoted at the time he had taken the job in early 1956. "The pedagogues and assorted academic fancy-pantses cried back, 'You must de-emphasize and play for the sport of it—chaps.'" And the coaches had said in response that they would never de-emphasize at the eraser-point.
It asks who would join in a brief hallelujah over "involuntary de-emphasis", indicating that on the "deep hush-hush", it had an idea that even Jim Tatum and Bill Murray would do so if they could get a few alumni off their backs, especially after one of those recent long, dreary Saturday afternoons.
Former UNC head coach Carl Snavely, who had once turned out fair teams before he had gone to Washington University in St. Louis and found that his charges were working algebra on the bench, had entered a strong plea on the side of the coach, which tended to confirm its guess, saying: "Usually, [the coach] has been in the position of a zealously law-abiding citizen who has taken a walk in a game sanctuary and suddenly has been attacked and is about to be devoured by a grizzly bear. He must decide quickly whether to break the law by killing the bear if he can or to lose his life… His behavior will be guided by the law of self-preservation, but in any case he seems bound to suffer death, injury or punishment."
It finds that in "involuntary de-emphasis", it was in the cards that everyone could beat everyone else, with no massive predictability and no screaming alumni with thwarted rolls of dough.
"What was that about tears?"
Coach Tatum would die in the summer of 1959 of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and would be replaced by one of his assistants, Jim Hickey, who, indeed, would, for the most part, participate in "involuntary de-emphasis", achieving only one winning season out of eight tries, that having been in 1963, when UNC finished 9-2, with a 35 to 0 win in the Gator Bowl over the Air Force, its first bowl game since the Cotton Bowl in 1949 under coach Snavely, having tied N.C. State for the ACC championship after narrowly beating Duke on November 28, 16 to 14, on a last-minute 42-yard field goal, a game postponed from the previous Saturday because of the assassination of the President the prior Friday.
While the rest of coach Hickey's career at UNC tends to blend into a melange of mediocrity, that one season, and especially that Thanksgiving Day game, which we witnessed in person, stands out as one of the more exciting in UNC football history, even if mixed inextricably with darkness from the national tragedy of that November, which also sticks firmly in the memory.
Walter Lippmann indicates that the previous Saturday, Vice-President Nixon had issued a statement saying that he had been shocked when he read the morning newspapers, which had carried a story conveying information that of about 5,000 letters received at the State Department, 80 percent had been critical of the Administration's policy at Quemoy and Matsu. He had been shocked because there was so much opposition and was even more shocked that the bad news had been published. He was so shocked at the publication that he promptly accused the subordinate official who gave it to a reporter of a "patent and deliberate effort … to sabotage" the policy of the Secretary of State.
It was a serious charge and one which could not be passed over lightly, as the Vice-President was denouncing as sabotage what had in fact been a truthful answer to a legitimate question, asked by a responsible reporter in the course of normal and standard newspaper practice. On questions of wide public interest, it was common practice of the press to ask the White House, the departments and the members of Congress what their mail showed regarding public opinion. Yet, suddenly, Mr. Nixon professed to be so shocked at such a news story that he could think of no explanation other than to accuse an official of what would be a high crime against his country.
Thus, he asks whether Mr. Nixon had presumed to say that the reporter had no right to ask the question about the State Department's mail and what he thought the duty of the State Department official was, whether to refuse to answer the question or to have lied to the reporter.
Mr. Lippmann asserts that Mr. Nixon should not make such reckless and unfounded accusations against innocent men, a reminder that the "old Nixon" was still around, the man whom the "new Nixon" was supposed to have outgrown. The old Nixon had a practice of implying that those with whom he disagreed were on the verge of treason.
He agrees that foreign policy could not and should not be conducted through the counting of letters from the public and that the correct policy was often unpopular. Governments which allowed themselves to be governed by opinion polls were weak and very often wrong. But it could also be true that the policy of the government was wrong and that those who criticized and opposed it ought be listened to respectfully and carefully, which he finds true in the instant case. "For no one can pretend that the administration has so clear a policy on the offshore islands that the policy is not open to genuine debate."
He finds that the policy was not yet determined and in the country, especially among those informed and experienced in foreign affairs, the debate was proceeding, with all the signs pointing to a mounting conviction that the Administration had blundered into trouble and that it needed help to extricate itself. Mr. Nixon said that "what is at stake … is the whole free world position in the Far East." While that might be true, if the whole free world position in that area had come to be at stake over Quemoy, then they had much for which to answer from the American people and at the bar of history for allowing the whole free world position to be staked on such an absurd thing as the offshore islands.
Beyond the angry words, the actual situation had for the moment at least been stabilized. There was no evidence that the Communists meant to invade Quemoy and there was good evidence that the U.S. did not intend to allow Chiang Kai-shek to draw it into an attack upon the mainland. U.S. immediate policy was to help Chiang run the armament blockade of Quemoy, which probably meant that there would be no decision on the island for some time to come, permitting time for mediation to work.
He indicates that if so, there was also time for debate in the country on whether and how American China policy should be revised, with the debate turning first on how to disengage Chiang's Army and the U.S. from the offshore islands, and then on what was to be the future of Formosa, once U.S. military and political commitments had been reduced to Formosa, itself, and the Pescadores Islands—per the treaty of 1955. As Formosa was invulnerable to military conquest by the Communist Chinese, it could only be taken through a coup from within, the problem of Formosa, unlike that of Quemoy, being a political problem. It was a problem not for the U.S. alone but for the whole international community.
Marquis Childs finds that the dilemma in which the Republican Administration found itself over Quemoy and Matsu was cruel and helped to explain why the Vice-President, "usually so astute", had gotten so far off base in attacking the State Department.
In the ongoing diplomatic talks in Warsaw, Communist China's Ambassador Wang Ping-nan had been putting before U.S. Ambassador Jacob Beam evidence of lack of support for the Dulles-Eisenhower stand on Quemoy, reading statements of public figures and commentators to show that the U.S. public was not behind the official policy.
At the same time as the midterm election campaign was warming up, the question of possible involvement in war regarding the offshore islands was likely to figure increasingly as an issue. Every indication, including thousands of letters to the State Department from the public, had been skeptical regarding any defense of the islands which would draw the U.S. into a war on mainland China.
The issue in Mr. Nixon's charge of "sabotage" against a State Department subordinate for releasing information showing that 80 percent of the letters to the Department opposed the policy regarding Quemoy, had been more than merely political, involving the right of free expression in a democratic society and whether that right was to be sacrificed in the struggle against Communism, thereby making the country increasingly like the totalitarian enemy.
He reiterates, as had Mr. Lippmann this date, that no sensible person would argue that foreign policy could be based on opinion polls, as often, unpopular decisions had to be made. But at the same time, public opinion had to be a factor in reaching those decisions. As New York Times correspondent James Reston had pointed out in his rebuttal to Mr. Nixon's charge, the Eisenhower Administration had repeatedly referred to the public response in letters and telegrams when the response had been favorable. The Congressional Record showed that at the height of the uproar over General MacArthur's dismissal by President Truman as commander in Korea, then-Senator Nixon had said on the floor of the Senate that he had received 500 telegrams and only one of them had been favorable to President Truman.
He asserts that the responsibilities of power, in a time such as the present and in a democracy such as in the U.S., were grim. But the responsibility was not reduced by attempting to suppress the facts of the current trend of opinion. To try to suppress it was in a sense a confession of failure.
As we have fallen behind, there will be no further notes on the front page and editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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