The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 24, 1959
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Havana that an appellate court had considered this date the death sentence given to former Army Maj. Jesus Sosa Blanco, 51, in a circus setting of the first public war crimes trial before the 17,000-seat Sports Palace, filled initially to capacity with shouting Cubans on Thursday afternoon and night. Foreign correspondents who had been invited to observe the trials had criticized the carnival atmosphere. After the first defendant had been found guilty and sentenced to death, an aroused crowd had threatened the next two defendants on Friday, their trials having been postponed until Monday. Revolutionary leader Fidel Castro reportedly had suggested a radio and television blackout on the other trials in an apparent effort to avoid too much public excitement. A sampling of opinion among the 322 foreign newsmen reportedly in Havana indicated, however, agreement with the legal procedure used. Better understanding of the provisional Government's aims had been foreseen as a result of the public trials. Sr. Sosa Blanco had been convicted on charges of murdering at least 25 persons in Oriente Province, the scene of the bitterest fighting in Sr. Castro's two-year rebellion which had resulted in the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista on January 1 and his fleeing to the Dominican Republic. The three-man military tribunal which had convicted the defendant had sentenced him to death before a firing squad. The tribunal president, Maj. Humberto Sori Marin, had announced that a five-member Superior War Council had agreed to hear the defendant's appeal. There was no indication when the appellate court would reach its decision. The condemned man's wife had visited him on Friday and said that she could not believe everything which had been said about him at the trial. She said that she wanted to ask through the press for more time to find witnesses for her husband and to find out if all which had been said against him was true. The defense had not called any witnesses at trial while the prosecution had called 45. Maj. Sori Marin had announced the postponement of trials for former Lt. Col. Ricardo Luis Grao, 45, and former Capt. Pedro Morejon, 38, also career Army men, and the trials had been finally set for the following Monday afternoon after first being delayed for 24 hours. They were accused of assassination, homicide and robbery and would be the last defendants to stand trial publicly. They were also scheduled to be tried in the Sports Palace. The initial postponement had reportedly been because defense counsel was ill. The tribunal president, who was also author of the revolutionary legal code, had praised defense counsel as having handled the defense well in the trial of Sr. Sosa Blanco.
Devastating floods had left water-weary Ohio in a state of emergency this date while neighboring Pennsylvania rallied to untangle new problems, including the plight of 12 trapped miners in the wake of severe rains. Damage was estimated in the millions of dollars following the mid-week storms which had loosed floodwaters in the Midwest and Northeast. Thousands had been rendered homeless and more than 8,000 residents had left their homes at Chillicothe, O., another 2,000 in Meadville, Pa., and another thousand in Wheeling, W.Va. Ohio, alone, had a preliminary damage estimate of more than 83 million dollars, reported by Governor Michael DiSalle, who declared a state of emergency for the state on Friday, indicating that damage could exceed 100 million. Ohio had recorded 14 flood-connected deaths and the Governor said that 25 to 30 deaths might ultimately result from the floodwaters.
In Monroe, La., it was reported that an explosion had hurled a railway tank car filled with chemicals 200 feet into a cotton field on Friday night, killing three men and injuring at least 52, five of whom were in critical condition. A search was being conducted for other possible dead and injured and several persons were believed to be missing.
In New York, another intense search for a kidnaped baby, the second abduction during the month, had centered this date in The Bronx, where a woman answering the kidnaper's description had sought lodging. Meanwhile, detectives searched for a cab driver who had driven the kidnaper and the mother of the missing child, a 25-day old boy, from a hospital on Wednesday afternoon. The hunt for the infant had shifted to The Bronx on Friday night after an apparently pregnant woman, carrying a child in her arms, had inquired about quarters in a rooming house. The baby, suffering from a cold, was taken Thursday from the cramped West Side apartment of his parents by a one-day acquaintance of the mother. The woman had duped the mother into leaving the baby with her as she was sent on a wild goose chase in search of a "good" apartment recommended by the woman to replace their cramped quarters. The kidnaper was described as Puerto Rican or Cuban, pregnant, in her 30's, standing 5'2" tall and weighing about 160 pounds. An anonymous telephone caller had told police on Friday night that she had seen a woman resembling the kidnaper entering a rooming house in The Bronx. Police had raced to the scene and had begun a house to house search. A tenant had said that a pregnant woman, carrying an infant, had inquired about a room. The woman was directed to the landlady's home around the corner, but she had never appeared at that residence. Police had set up a special telephone to receive calls from anyone who might have information about the missing child. A tip phoned in on a similar line had led to the recovery on January 11 of the kidnaped girl who had been taken from a hospital 2 1/2 hours after her birth, recovered safe and sound, and the woman alleged to have taken her caught and arrested. The parents of the latest kidnaped child made an appeal to the kidnaper to return their baby.
In Gastonia, N.C., it was reported that a five-year old girl, who had been snatched from the sidewalk in front of her home, had been taken to a rural area and sexually molested by a former mental patient on Friday, according to police. The convicted sex offender, 26, who had been released from a mental hospital on Wednesday against medical advice, had been arrested shortly after the incident. A police captain said that the arrested man had admitted taking the child and molesting her. He was charged with kidnaping, but no assault charges had yet been filed, pending laboratory reports. The child had been released by the man, who told police that he became scared. At about the same time that a State Highway Patrolman had arrested him in a Gastonia residence, a couple in an automobile had found the little girl crying beside a rural road. A doctor had examined her and said that she had a bruised face, a cut upper lip and a bruised shoulder, "and damage suggesting the possibility of criminal assault." He said that she would recover rapidly. The arresting Highway Patrol officer said that the man had expressed sorrow at having done the deed. He had been convicted two years earlier of assault on a 15-year old girl with intent to commit rape and had received a suspended sentence, shortly afterward having entered the Veterans Administration Hospital in Durham, from which he had been discharged the previous April. On December 2, he had entered the Veterans Administration Hospital in Salisbury. A doctor of the latter hospital staff said that the man was declared competent but needed hospitalization, but added that the man's mother had signed a statement requesting his release and that the hospital then could not legally hold him. The little girl's father, a textile worker, said that he was in the home with his wife while the little girl and her young brother had been playing outside. The little boy had then come running into the house, crying, telling the mother that the little girl had gone. The father had then gone up the street and called police. An employee of a wrecker service had been listening to the police radio in one of the wreckers and heard a description of the kidnaper's car, then saw a car of that description traveling at high speed and noted the license number, reporting it to police. The patrolman saw the car parked in front of a house, knocked on the door, and the arrested man had answered, the officer having confronted him about the little girl who had been kidnaped, at which point, he admitted having done it.
In Atlanta, a 35-year old industrial engineer had been acquitted on Friday night of dynamiting the Atlanta Jewish Temple, but his defense attorney had been sentenced to jail for contempt. The defendant left the courtroom free for the first time in three months, after the jury of 12 men had acquitted him following deliberations lasting two hours and eight minutes. His attorney was led to jail to start serving 40 days for the contempt citation following numerous clashes with the judge during the 11-day trial. The defendant's first trial had ended in a mistrial the prior December after the jury had hung, split 9 to 3 for conviction. The defendant contended that he was innocent and that he had been with a woman when the Temple on Peachtree Road had been bombed prior to dawn on Sunday, October 12, resulting in damage estimated at $96,000. No one had been injured. The prosecutor had made no immediate announcement about the trial of the four others accused in the bombing. The defendant found the sentencing of his lawyer to be "the grossest miscarriage of justice", indicating that his own acquittal had been expected. After the verdict had been announced, the judge had called the attorney before the bar and accused him of willfully making numerous inflammatory and prejudicial remarks during the trial, indicating that his conduct had been intended to be contemptuous of the court and that the attorney had refused repeatedly to yield to the court's instructions. He sentenced him to two consecutive 20-day jail terms. Defense counsel's behavior had been aimed at discrediting various state witnesses, including the wife of the Temple's rabbi and an undercover informer for the FBI.
In Riverside, Calif., it was reported that a 71-year old woman had brought her disabled plane in for a successful belly-landing at March Air Force Base on Friday. The woman of Palm Springs and a passenger had been unhurt in the skidding landing of the light plane. The woman, who had received her pilot's license when she was 65, said that the plane's landing gear had failed to lock in place as she had come in for the initial landing.
In Charlotte, the sale of WSOC Broadcasting Co. to the James M. Cox radio and television interests had been announced this date, with the transfer subject to approval by the FCC. The agreed sale price was 5.6 million dollars. The Cox organization presently owned WSB-Radio and WSB-TV in Atlanta, associated with the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, WHIO-Radio and WHIO-TV in Dayton, O., associated with the Dayton News and Journal-Herald, and held part ownership of WCKR Radio and WCKT in Miami, Fla. The president of WSOC, Larry Walker, had said that the sale had been prompted by the desire of WSOC's principal stockholder, Eddie Jones, to minimize his responsibility in his financial interests.
In Lexington, Ky., a judge had
inquired of a 12-year old boy as to why he had stolen three dollars,
and he replied that he needed the admission cost to see the film "The
Ten Commandments". At least, he, apparently, had only violated the one
On the editorial page, "The Pied Piper of American Pundits", an editorial book review of The Communist World and Ours, by Walter Lippmann, indicates that Mr. Lippmann embodied the austere, even ascetic overtones of the originally Hindu word "pundit" in the field of journalism, being a "learned teacher or critic". His exercises in cool logic often placed the most severe requirements on his readers, and yet the readers relished it and followed him even on bad days, as a kind of political Pied Piper.
In his previous book of four years earlier, The Public Philosophy, he had analyzed what he interpreted as the "derangement" of the capacity of Western democracies to govern, uncompromisingly having demanded that citizens and democracies had to become miniature Burkes, accepting the "mandate of Heaven" that leaders were elected to lead. It had been a challenging order for the factious democrats of the 1950's.
In the new book, there was another ultimatum: "We must learn to keep ourselves armed without working ourselves up into a frenzy of threats and of fear. This is not easy for a democracy to do, but it is necessary. And, once the reason for it is understood by the leaders of American opinion, it can be done."
It suggests that seeking contemplation while shooting rockets into the air was as necessary for the U.S. as to return to the "mandate of Heaven" for democratic governments. The country understood that need in its rational moments, but the tragedy was that life was not lived in a 24-hour world of rationality, as Mr. Lippmann often appeared to suppose. The globe was trembling with anxieties and clashes.
The new book had come out of a trip which Mr. Lippmann had taken to Moscow, its object having been to visit the wellhead of Russian policy "in relation to the U.S.", to interview Russian policymakers and editors, and, in particular, Premier Nikita Khrushchev. He had returned to the U.S. to interpret what he had heard and seen in four syndicated columns, appearing in The News the prior November 11, 13, 15, and 17, and the present book, with slight additions, included those columns.
Mr. Lippmann's most important interview with Mr. Khrushchev had been a masterpiece of reporting in political theory. His object had been to question "Mr. K" on the principles and assumptions giving rise to Kremlin policy vis-à-vis the U.S., finding Mr. K more than willing to talk, if not specifically, and if not on points of negotiation. He had found him wholly devoted to the Leninist dogma, a man who took it as literal destiny of "history" that it was "one world" and that Communism was foreordained to rule it. He also found a man convinced that such a destiny would be achieved short of war, who took it for granted that no political boundary would be altered by the use of military force. Mr. K had told Mr. Lippmann that America refused to acknowledge a very special kind of "status quo" which was ardently acknowledged by the Kremlin, that being the continuing Communist revolution in the world and particularly in the Soviet Union and China. The Communist brain trust had seemed to Mr. Lippmann equally convinced that, after the word of their gospel, the "capitalist" powers would be driven into utter frustration to fight a war against the successes of the Communist example. Mr. Lippmann had continuously cited that "force of example" as the most dangerous challenge to the U.S. position.
It finds that Mr. Lippmann had not been prepared to brand Mr. Khrushchev's exposition as a tissue of pretense designed to lure the U.S. into a trap, but rather the burden of Mr. Lippmann's argument was that hard discrimination was needed to be applied by those in the West who would understand the "truth" which animated Soviet foreign policy.
For instance, Mr. Khrushchev took it as "truth" that the Western military and industrial communities had a vested interest in the arms race. It asks whether it was wise or necessary to question that assertion as falsehood when so many Soviet tactics flowed logically from a belief in its truth. It indicates that the truth was that in every Soviet "truth", there was a half-truth for those in the West. "In every scrap of ideological rubbish which the Soviets peddle so effectively to the so-called 'neutralist' or uncommitted countries, there is an element of reality. Too often, lacking Mr. Lippmann's vast powers to sort and discriminate, we miss the importance of this point. In his study of Chinese Communist indoctrination of American prisoners of war in Korea, Eugene Kinkead probes about this same point. The deadliness of the conversion technique often lay in the inability of American POW's to discriminate between 'truth' and 'falsehood' and the resulting failure of their argument. The prison camp instructor holds up a map, showing Russia and China ringed with American bases. 'Who is the aggressor?' he asks; and the undiscriminating mind is at a loss to answer. The beginning would lie, at a minimum, in recognizing the half-truth which gives rise to Soviet assumptions."
As Mr. Lippmann and others had said, the secret of Soviet power lay not in the grand strategic lie or deceit but in fanaticism which could seize upon a grain of fact and make it a mountain of Marxist dogma, and the planned and deadly ingenuity of Communist tactics. Yet both strategy and tactics had been touted for years. The military methods by which the Communists had partitioned Indochina with inferior forces had been set down years earlier by Mao Tse-tung and the indoctrination methods had been foreshadowed on the German front in the 1940's, where the Russians had already been more interested in indoctrination than in military intelligence. Former Secretary of State under President Truman, Dean Acheson, had written, "In this context, 'sincerity' is a silly, and, indeed, a very dangerous word."
The austere challenge to the West, which Mr. Lippmann derived from his insight into the awesome "sincerity" of the Soviet mind, was less fresh and distinguished than the insight itself. It finds that most people in placid moments realized that the challenge was to remain strong while ceasing to fear the West's own image of the Communist threat. Most people realized that in the face of the psychological and economic assault of Communism on unmined, overpopulated, underindustrialized countries, India could become the workshop of development under free institutions, as Mr. Lippmann proposed. But first, with the rationality which Mr. Lippmann urged, it suggests that the West should understand the psychological orbit in which the Communist mind turned, in lonely and fanatic dedication.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Now, the Pious Snow Man", indicates that the abominable snow man of the Himalayas bobbed up with almost monotonous frequency. But there was variety in the explanations of what it was, whether a strange bear, an apelike creature, a hoax, or something else. The newest had come from a German missionary who said that nine years earlier in the Chinese province of Chinghai, he had seen one of the creatures and photographed it at close range, claiming that they were native priests who, as an act of piety, lived outdoors in the rigorous climate without clothing.
It finds it improbable as anthropologists believed that primitive man had first invented clothing, not for protection against the weather or for reasons of modesty, but as adornment. When Europeans found the Yagans of Tierra del Fuego, the aborigines had neither invented clothing nor copied that of their neighbors. They had put out in small canoes to fish and hunt the tempestuous waters around Cape Horn, whipped by frigid, almost continuous gales, "clothed" in a coating of grease and wood ashes, huddled in the lee of shields provided by untanned hides. Yet, they had survived for untold centuries.
The Himalaya peoples, it posits, had invented the fur coat, and perhaps those ascetics among them knew that they were simply dispensing with "adornment".
Drew Pearson indicates that Congressman Francis Walter's HUAC had been bombarded with letters urging an investigation into the "pink" background of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. Mr. Faubus had been student body president of Commonwealth College when it had been run by the Communists. He had already assured Arkansas voters that his name had not appeared on the list of Commonwealth student leaders exposed in 1935 by a Joint Legislative Investigating Committee in Arkansas. That had been true, but that Committee had also concluded its investigation in February, 1935, and Mr. Faubus had been elected to office on the "United Front" ticket two months afterward. Significantly, the May Day, 1935 edition of Commonwealth College Fortnightly had reported: "Orval Faubus, young farmer schoolteacher from Combs, Ark. … [was] elected to two offices. Faubus is both student body president and member of the Disciplinary Committee." So he had become student body leader after the Arkansas Legislature had exposed Commonwealth as a Communist front.
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been trying for six months to coax Senator Theodore Francis Green, the chairman, to move to fancier quarters in the new Senate Office Building, but the 91-year old Rhode Island Democrat had stubbornly refused to budge, as he liked to walk to work in the morning and also liked his old headquarters. When new quarters had been offered the previous summer, he had said that he was content with the old rooms and instructed the Rules Committee to give the space to some other committee. At that point, his fellow committee members almost started a mutiny. Senator Green, however, refused either to listen or to let them vote on the move. Afterward, other Senators went behind his back and persuaded the Rules Committee to hold the space for them until January. The previous week, they had approached Senator Green again regarding the move but he declared that it was too late, that the rooms had already been released. When they told him it just so happened that the option remained open, the Senator fussed and fumed, indicating that the old rooms were hallowed by tradition, that great Senators had occupied them, including William Borah of Idaho and Key Pittman of Nevada. Finally, he agreed to appoint a three-man subcommittee to "consider" the move and promptly named himself chairman, with authority to make the final decision.
A 35-year old Washington antique dealer who was Korean, had put on his Homburg recently and picketed the White House all alone in 20 degree weather. He had locked up his Connecticut Ave. shop which catered to such people as Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Justice William O. Douglas, and Mrs. Allen Dulles, to protest South Korean President Syngman Rhee's latest police-state security laws. More than 20 of the laws had been railroaded through the Korean congress the night before Christmas, though only after opposition politicians had staged a six-day sitdown strike in the parliament building until forcibly ejected by the President's police. The man found it "a terrible thing for the American government to be a party to the maintenance and perpetuation of an aged tyrant in office. To call Rhee a democrat and to say that Korea is part of the free world is as false as anything the Communists are saying up north. To say that Rhee is protecting Korea against communism is equally false."
Washington attorney Bill Roberts commented to a member of the former law firm of Secretary of State Dulles upon the "improvement" in the Secretary of State, saying: "Dulles seems to be waking up. It's about time." The Secretary's former law associate had replied, "He'd been asleep for 20 years!"
Secretary Dulles had sent word to Fidel Castro in Cuba that the U.S. was ready to help the new Cuban Government with economic aid. Milton Eisenhower had urged Secretary Dulles to rush that offer to Havana. As a result, Sr. Castro had given his assurances that American investments would not be confiscated.
Former Ambassador Earl Smith reported that Sr. Castro was by no means a Communist but that his brother Raul was well to the left. The overwhelming majority of Sr. Castro's followers, according to the former Ambassador, were sincere anti-Communists, but there were some Communists supporting him.
The Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, who had once stood up against Benito Mussolini in the League of Nations, was now standing up against another dictator in Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Emperor had warned Premier Nasser to keep his agents out of Ethiopia or he would place the matter before the U.N.
Marquis Childs indicates that as a result of what looked like a political deal, the Administration was again placed in the position of seeming to repudiate the oft-proclaimed principle of encouraging trade with U.S. allies to build up the economy of the West.
The prior November 1, on the eve of the midterm elections, Representative Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania had announced that a 1.75 million dollar contract for two hydraulic turbines for a dam in Arkansas would go to a Pennsylvania company instead of to the English Electric Co. of London. In a close race against former Governor George Leader for the Senate seat, Mr. Scott was looking for any crumb of comfort for the jobless and the depressed areas of his state. What had made the announcement especially significant was that he said that the word had come directly from the White House. The President's veto of the depressed area bill had caused wide resentment and Mr. Scott may have hoped that it would be a small offset to the veto. He announced that the contract represented more than 207,000 man-hours of employment for the company in question and an additional 80,694 man-hours for suppliers of the company. The original bids for the turbines had been opened on September 4 and the English company had bid 19 percent lower than the lowest domestic bid, that of the company to which the contract was awarded in Pennsylvania. Presumably, therefore, it was mandatory to accept the English bid, as the law specified that in a depressed area any bid which was more than 12 percent below the domestic bid received priority. But an interdepartmental committee had been set up to determine whether in the interests of "national security" all imports of turbines and generators ought be cut off. Three weeks earlier, the director of defense mobilization and civil defense, Leo Hoeg, had said that he could make no decision on the turbines for Arkansas until the larger question had been resolved. Then ten days earlier he had reversed himself and found that in the interests of "national security", the contract ought be awarded to the Philadelphia firm because it was one of the limited number of companies possessing the requisite machine tools.
During all of the intervening weeks after November 1, representatives of the English company had been going through an elaborate bureaucratic process to try to establish their case. While Mr. Hoeg was empowered by the White House to make recommendations in the matter, his office said now that he knew nothing of an earlier decision. A spokesman for Mr. Scott was unable to recall who in the White House authorized the announcement.
British Ambassador Sir Harold Caccia had gone to the State Department to lodge a strong protest, saying that if the rules were not to be accorded, then British firms ought know it so that they would not go through the costly process of entering bids and trying to push their case through the Pentagon and State and Commerce Department bureaucracies.
In three prior instances, 1953, 1954 and 1955, the English Electric Co. had the same experience, the last time having been on low bids for generators for the Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River in Washington. Then-Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had ruled in favor of Westinghouse on the basis of employment, followed by angry protests from the British press.
The present instance, the Greer's Ferry Dam in Arkansas, had been the first time that "national security" had been provided as a reason for rejection. It raised the larger question of how meaningful the Administration's declared policy was as long as depressed areas existed and unemployment remained over 4 million. The question was also being asked as to what part Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon, supposedly in charge of foreign economic affairs, may have played.
Mr. Childs indicates that the trend appeared to some critics to be increasingly in the direction of shutting the door to foreign goods. The quotas imposed on lead and zinc continued to be applicable and to permit the pressure of local interests to determine worldwide economic policy was not the way to win the cold war and might prove to be the way to lose it.
Walter Lippmann indicates that in the debate on the President's budget, the underlying issues turned on different theories about the rate at which the productive capacity of the economy could and ought to grow. He notes that over the previous 50 years, the average annual rate of growth had been 3 percent, that during the postwar period of 1947 through 1953, the rate had been nearly 5 percent, and during the previous six years, had dropped to not quite 2 percent. He believes it fair to say that the difference between the Administration and its critics was that the Administration hoped to reach the 50-year average of about 3 percent and would not be happy if that average reached 5 percent, while the critics of the Administration, including most Democrats as well as liberal Republicans of the Nelson Rockefeller type, believed that the economy could be induced to grow at an average rate of about 5 percent, an indispensable rate if the country was to provide an adequate national defense and meet the needs of its rapidly growing and increasingly urbanized population.
He finds it misleading and even demagogic to pretend that the issue between the two schools of thought was between "spenders" and "savers" or between "radicals" and "conservatives". The real question was how much the American economy could produce, that if it could produce more, the country would be able to afford a better defense and better provision for the needs of the civilian population, and if it could produce only at the current rate, the country could not, within the existing tax structure, afford more than the present budget which the President proposed.
The budget assumed that there would be some additional recovery and that the amount of unemployment and short use of plant capacity would diminish. But it did not assume that the nation could or should work its way to a much higher rate of economic expansion.
At the center of the debate between the schools of thought lay the most difficult and agonizing question of a free and capitalistic economy. The President's economic advisers appeared to be quite conscious of that question, whether it was possible to bring about a much higher rate of productivity without creating a boom which inflated all prices, including wage costs, faster than productivity increased. The opposition economists believed that a boom without inflation was possible, believing that if the economy expanded, inflation could be maintained low, slow, salutary and under control.
The economists to whom the President had committed himself believed that an economy which was expanding rapidly, with full employment and full use of capacity, was bound to be inflationary. They had begun to wonder whether the orthodox devices against inflation, restriction of credit and a balanced budget, could prevent inflation in a booming economy. Thus, they preferred a quieter tempo with a certain amount of unemployment to act as a brake on wages and a certain amount of excess plant capacity to act as a brake on prices.
The debate on the grand scale was between the bulls and the bears, with the bulls willing to accept a certain amount of inflation because they regarded deflation, meaning unemployment and the restriction of public services, as the greater of the two evils. The bears thought that inflation was the greatest of economic evils and to avoid it, were reconciled to a certain amount of deflation. He finds it to be a great debate and urges rising to the importance of it.
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., finds the newspaper's inconsistent outpourings on communism, Communists and Communist influence in the country more tragic than enlightening, referring to an editorial of January 21 in which he finds that the newspaper was "hotdogging" the fact that radio station WBT was rebroadcasting on Sunday evenings through its shortwave receivers Radio Moscow. He finds sensible the editorial's urging of listeners to have a new and healthy respect for Soviet cunning and to do what was necessary to combat it, but that the newspaper had recently editorially opposed inclusion of the question of Communist affiliation on UNC job application forms, and thus finds the words of the January 21 editorial hollow. He says that the editors must never have thought about "Soviet cunning" being utilized at UNC. He suggests that they leave the subject alone until they comprehended "the tyrannical and hideous nature of the many tentacled communist octopus".
Mr. Cherry, we remind, in 1948-49, had alerted then-Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina to the fact that an outspoken Communist leader on campus at UNC was a graduate student in the physics department studying under a scholarship provided by the Atomic Energy Commission, leading eventually to the withdrawal of that scholarship, despite the fact that there was no indication that that he had any access to classified information. Mr. Cherry had no problem with free speech as long as the speech agreed with his ideological stance, that being solidly in favor of HUAC and Senator McCarthy, among other extreme right-wing propagandists in the country at the time. But let a person express views which were different from his own and he was ready to cancel them and press them into a corner. The graduate student in question was German and not Russian.
It is a significant issue in 1959, the tension between free speech in a democracy and the concern, ultimately an over-concern, with security, as The News had regularly inveighed against in its editorial columns through time, with the Cuban revolution and the forces of Fidel Castro claiming outright that they were not Communist and wanted no Communist affiliation. But, because they would also not go along with everything Washington would want them to do, as had El Presidente Fulgencio Batista before the revolt, the go-along to get-along approach, the Administration policies effectively drove them into the hands of the Communists, at least an argument to that effect could be reasonably made in any debate on the issue of why the revolutionary forces of Sr. Castro turned toward Moscow finally for solace out of a concern of the need for defense of the island against a counter-revolutionary revolt orchestrated by the CIA, ultimately leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 following on the heels of the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of April, 1961, planned during the Eisenhower Administration and carried over into the Kennedy Administration at the behest of the Joint Chiefs and the CIA. But we get a bit ahead of ourselves.
If nothing else, Mr. Cherry consistently displayed a knack for crystallizing the contrary sides of that tension, but without any apparent recognition of the gray areas in between the two sides to avoid any final reckoning and enable peaceful coexistence. Rather than trying to understand the graduate student's position and to learn from him and come to some mutual understanding in the middle, Mr. Cherry viewed the situation as an unending threat to his existence which had to be extricated or else, running home to papa to tattle on his fellow student, the type of uncompromising position which, if maintained at the top, would have led to World War III in time, certainly in 1962.
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