The Charlotte News
Thursday, October 23, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had returned to Washington this date from his cross-country trip, campaigning in the midterm elections for Republican candidates, while Democratic Party leaders shouted "demagoguery" after him and claimed that Republicans were split, as the President had charged of the Democrats. The President appeared pleased with his six-day, 5,300-mile effort, telling Republican leaders, after his plane had landed in Washington following a flight from Chicago, that he had not run into any pessimism or apathy during the tour. Adlai Stevenson said the President had joined Vice-President Nixon "in a desperate, intolerable, demagoguery type of campaign." Former President Truman, talking with reporters in New York before heading to Boston to continue campaign efforts, said of the President's statement that the Democrats were badly split: "The only split I know of is in the Republican Party," suggesting that it was between "Eisenhower Republicans and old-line economic royalists." The Vice-President, campaigning in New York for Republican candidates, challenged Mr. Stevenson and other Northern Democrats to get such Southern Democrats as Governors Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Marvin Griffin of Georgia and J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia in line behind Brown v. Board of Education, pledging that Republicans would broaden the field of civil rights. In Washington, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson criticized "left-wing" Democrats, whom he said wanted to socialize agriculture, telling a press conference that Mr. Truman had caused corn prices to go down by a dime per bushel with "scare talk" about the prospects of declining farm prices were the Republicans to win the midterm elections. The President carried on his battle to have his party regain control of Congress on Wednesday night in Chicago with a renewed attack on "radical" Democrats and Democratic economic policies. His repeated use of the word "radical" during his tour brought heated criticism from Mr. Stevenson, who said to a meeting of Democratic precinct chiefs in Chicago: "The old Nixon has been joined by the new Ike—or a new speechwriter—in a desperate, intolerable demagoguery type of campaign." Mr. Nixon told New England audiences that radical Democrats would go to Congress if Republican Senate and House candidates were defeated in the North and West. At a party rally in Providence, R.I., he said that the Administration had managed to curb "the runaway inflation it inherited from the Democratic Party." In New York, Mr. Truman voiced disagreement with DNC chairman Paul Butler on the issue of Southern Democrats who opposed the party's stand on civil rights, after the latter had said during the weekend in a television interview that those who disagreed with the position of the party in its platform plank on civil rights at the 1960 presidential convention could find a new home either in the Republican Party or in a third party. The former President said: "I am not reading anyone out of the Democratic Party. I want all the people in the Democratic Party."
In Havana, it was reported that Cubana Airlines and the Cuban Government declined to confirm reports that a missing DC-3, with a crew of three and eleven passengers, had been seized the previous day by rebels under the command of Fidel Castro.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., the Army
early this date had called off a sky search for the mysteriously
missing balloon satellite which it had launched the previous night
from the Cape. Camera tracking stations had been ordered to cease the
search for the satellite two and half hours after the apparently
successful launch at 10:21 p.m. The head of the team of launch
scientists said during a morning press conference that his team had
been unable to determine precisely what had gone wrong, but there had
been some difficulties with the upper stages of the Jupiter-C rocket
and that the attempt to place a 12-foot diameter sphere into orbit
had been "less than successful". He said that the satellite
vehicle was tracked by radio for seven or eight minutes after the
launch, but that they could not say what had occurred because they
did not have the necessary information, as their tracking data showed
that the Redstone first-stage had gone to the right position at the
right time and at the right velocity, and that the propulsion and
booster system and guidance had been functioning normally. He said
that any conclusion at the current time as to what had happened would
be entirely unwarranted. He conceded that the satellite-bearing
missile might have burned up in the atmosphere or might have dropped
into the ocean, discounting any likelihood of orbit. An official said
that the Army space program still had three more announced projects
to complete, two lunar probes and one more scientific satellite. The
failure had been a disheartening end to an ambitious project for
hurling into an 18,000 mph orbit around the earth an object which
would be visible to the unaided human eye at distances up to 1,500
miles. By tracking it from observation points in many lands,
scientists had hoped to learn much about the mysteries of the remote
area where the earth's atmosphere ended and interplanetary space
began. And they had hoped to gain experience to help with an even
more spectacular undertaking, a 100-foot balloon satellite, from
which radio, television and radar signals could be bounced. You might one day be able to watch this program
On the editorial page, "Force: The Intruder on World Serenity" finds that a malaise attended the celebration of the U.N. anniversary during the week, as much of the old verve was gone. Both friend and foe seemed to have mellowed, with reserve replacing reverence and silence replacing the tirades of the detractors who had once designed to batter the U.N. down with a barrage of ugly words.
It finds that perhaps the answer lay along obvious lines, that the U.N. had not "failed", as its mark was to be observed in the activities of UNESCO, in police work, and its role as a sounding board where more than one offended nation had echoed its grievances before the world. The malaise, it suggests, might be explained by the patent truth that the U.N. had not quite fit the idealistic blueprint its postwar draftsmen had set forth. It had not become the focus of any noticeable international comradeship or binding political arrangement. Nations were still themselves and still had territorial ambitions, still warred over governmental ideas, still enlisted hosts of satellites to create power blocs which would do their bidding, and did not air their ambitions or their vendettas with other nations in the U.N. unless it was convenient.
It thus finds the U.N. sick at its own birthday party. France would not submit its Algerian troubles to U.N. mediation. The Russians continued to use the propaganda possibilities of the body more than they did its possibilities for arbitration. Britain, troubled about its oil supplies from the Middle East, did not really trust the organization which presented it with censure when it had sought to seize the Suez Canal two years earlier when it was nationalized by Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Although the U.S. prated reverently of U.N. ideals, it did not care to consult with it before sending Marines to Lebanon under the "phony cloak" of a U.N. Charter holding action against nationalist forces. The young nations of Africa and Asia, rife with the insolence of centuries-old European political ideas, were in the U.N. to get what they could from it. All of that had taken place just in 1958.
It wonders whether the draftsmen who had worked from the World War II-produced Atlantic Charter to create the organization in 1945 would have labored so valiantly had they foreseen that their labors would be, just 13 years later, so soundly mocked. It finds the fundamental error of the spirit of 1945, for which no blame could be apportioned by those of good will anywhere, was that by an effort of will, mankind could dispense with every political and national habit which centuries of troublesome sophistication had taught. There had been those who questioned that it could be done at the time of its creation, but it was unfashionable to question, and those who had done so had been immediately cast as being full of malice. Some of them, the super-nationalists, had been men of malice, but even so venerated a statesman as Winston Churchill had been blasted for suggesting initially that "an iron curtain has descended across Europe," when he first uttered the claim in Fulton, Mo., in early 1946, suggesting in the post-war world that ambitions east of Berlin would cause trouble.
It finds that even at present, the common claim was that the U.N. would be rendered useless by an absence of international morality. "If men were not men, if nations did not differ as to their territorial and ideological destinies, if politicians did not become intoxicated with power, that claim would be valid. Unfortunately, and unhappily as it may be for reflective people, force is the unreckoned-for intruder on the serenity of the world. People must believe the best of other people, for without that faith living would not be tolerable. But it is the element of power back of any demand, however reasonable or humane that demand, which makes sense in international politics. That is the unpleasant but not intolerable reality with which the United Nations must make its peace."
As we have fallen behind, there will be no other comments on the front page or editorial page of this date, as the notes will be sporadic until we catch up.
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