The Charlotte News
Monday, May 11, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed, Note: The front page reports from Geneva that the Big Four foreign ministers conference had been called into session this night 3 1/2 hours late after delay for some period of time regarding the question of how the East German government would participate. The first session of the conference had been scheduled for the Palace of Nations to start at 2:30 p.m., but instead, Secretary of State Christian Herter and his Soviet, British and French counterparts had gotten together informally at a British villa. From that meeting, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had emerged with the announcement that the formal session was rescheduled to start at 6:00 p.m., indicating: "There has been a complete agreement on all procedural and administrative matters." He included the question of German participation. Mr. Gromyko had left the informal parley first and was followed by Secretary Herter, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville and British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, the latter having been designated to preside over this night's opening session, leading the efforts to resolve the dispute involving the whole issue of the status of the East German regime. The formula decided on for the formal opening session was that the East and West Germans would sit at separate tables and the Big Four foreign ministers would sit at a round table, all on one side, leaving one side vacant. The West German table was closer to the seat occupied by Secretary Herter, and the East German table was closer to Mr. Gromyko. The two German delegations were separated by a third small table for the conference secretariat. Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Berding held up a diagram of the seating arrangement for reporters, saying, "We haven't given way on anything."
Belgium's bachelor King Baudouin had arrived in Washington this date to begin a 21-day tour of the U.S. The President, flanked by Acting Secretary of State Douglas Dillon, had been on hand to greet the 28-year old monarch as he arrived amid full military honors at National Airport shortly before noon. The King would be a guest of the President during his three-day stay in Washington. His visit was the first official trip to the U.S. since 1919 by a Belgian monarch, when the current King's grandfather, King Albert, had visited with Queen Elizabeth.
The number of employed had risen by over a million in April to a record total of 65 million and unemployment had declined by 735,000, both figures double that which was expected seasonally in April, according to a joint statement issued by Acting Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss and Secretary of Labor James Mitchell, both indicating that a rapidly accelerating job recovery was taking place. The rise in employment was 2.1 million greater than in the previous April of 1958 and unemployment had declined to 3.6 million, 1.5 million fewer than in the same month a year earlier. The 1957 figures for April had been 64.2 million employed and 2.7 million unemployed. During the first four months of the year, unemployment had dropped by over a million. The monthly job report attributed the April improvements to an unusually large increase in construction and brisk hiring in hardwood manufacturing, together with the spring expansion in agriculture. The seasonally adjusted rate of unemployment in the labor force dropped to 5.3 percent in April, compared to 5.8 percent in March and about 6 percent during the winter. Secretaries Strauss and Mitchell said in their joint statement: "This April, one year after the turning point in the recession, the rate of unemployment was about two-thirds of the way back to pre-recession levels. The strong improvement in the last two months was in contrast to the lag in job recovery during the past winter." Both the manufacturing work-week and earnings had increased in April. The manufacturing work-week had risen to 40.3 hours, two hours more than a year earlier, with more than half the gain representing increased overtime. Average weekly earnings of factory workers had hit a record of $89.87 in April, an increase of 63 cents from March.
The Government this date abandoned its historic policy of collecting liquor and cigarette excise taxes through the sale of tax stamps. Starting June 24, the industries would pay the tax by filing returns twice per month. About 4 billion dollars was presently collected each year through the sale of those stamps. The industries had long lobbied for elimination of the stamp system, complaining that large amounts of working capital were tied up because they had to purchase the stamps in advance of bottling or packaging their products. Under the new system, distillers and tobacco manufacturers would file returns twice per month, covering shipments during the preceding 15 days. Taxes would be paid when returns were filed. IRS officers said the details of the procedure had not yet been worked out. James Richards, president of the Tobacco Institute, Inc., said that the action would save the Government money and lift part of the industry's financial burden at the same time. It was estimated that the Government had been spending at least 5 million dollars per year in printing, handling and distributing the blue stamps.
Wind storms had reached into Michigan and Illinois this date, killing one person at Ann Arbor and causing severe damage, also hitting Monticello in central Illinois. The storms followed weekend tornadoes which ripped into six states in the plains and Midwest, killing five, injuring 21 and causing heavy property damage. The small tornado at Ann Arbor had reportedly ripped a part of the roof from Yost Fieldhouse at the University of Michigan and had blown press box windows out.
In Mexico City, it was reported that 16 persons had been killed and 29 injured the previous night in the collision of a train and bus crowded with women and children returning from Mother's Day outings. The mishap had occurred 8 miles north of Mexico City and had completely destroyed the bus and had scattered bodies along both sides of the train track. Most of the victims had been women and children, with the driver also having been killed. Police expressed the belief that the bus had crashed into the tender of the locomotive, with the train having been en route from Mexico City to Veracruz.
In Sydney, Australia, it was reported that a 36-year old hotel chef was charged this date with murdering his wife and wounding two other women in a room of the church at Katoomba while the congregation had been listening to a relay of evangelist Billy Graham's closing sermon in Sydney. According to the prosecutor, the man had gone to St. Hilda's Church with his 18-month old son the previous day to view the evangelist's last broadcast. An argument had developed in an adjoining room with his estranged wife and the man had stabbed her in the chest with a knife, the other two women having been wounded when they had tried to assist the man's wife. The man was refused bail when he appeared in court this date. The biggest crowd of Dr. Graham's career, 150,000 people, had packed into two adjoining arenas for the last sermon of the Sydney crusade.
In Cincinnati, it was reported that a onetime German Wehrmacht officer sought by the FBI for the previous 14 years had said that he had never been a Nazi and never wanted to return to Germany under any conditions. Now 52 and still an expert linguist, he said that he had faded into anonymity in Chicago and stayed there after escaping in August, 1945 from a prisoner of war camp at Camp Butner, N.C. He had finally surrendered to the FBI in Cincinnati the previous day and the Immigration and Naturalization Service had held a hearing this date on his status in the country. At a German-American club in Cincinnati where he had spent the previous night, he told of his wanderings since the 1940's. He said he had just returned from a Dutch East Indies plantation when he had entered the German Wehrmacht in 1941. He was told that it was the safest place to be and was working in Holland when the Nazis had taken over the country. He had gone into the Wehrmacht as a private. He said he was on kitchen police duty when a sergeant overheard him translating a conversation between a Russian and a Czech and the next thing he knew, he was transferred to a language school in Berlin, a short time later, having been commissioned as a second lieutenant. That had led to duty as an interpreter in North Africa with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, where he was captured. He was at a POW camp in Mississippi for five months from October, 1943 and then was transferred to Butner. When the war was about over, he said, he had decided that he did not want to return to Germany. He had received $20 per month as a POW lieutenant and had earned 80 cents per day doing extra work, thinking that he would use that money to escape. He was wearing dark glasses and a mustache when he had escaped from Butner and made his way to nearby Danville, Va. He then bought a new set of clothes, shaved off the mustache and ditched the glasses—with the remainder on an inside page.
Dick Young of The News reports on the inaugural ceremonies at City Hall for the new City Council members, amid laudatory remarks from many spectators who had overflowed the Council chamber to observe the taking of the oaths. After the speeches were concluded, the first order of business was to name Herbert Hitch, who had received the largest number of votes in the election, as Mayor pro tem.
In the following day's edition of The News, readers would learn of the 29 Charlotte and Mecklenburg County high school students who made up the year's All-Star Scholars, with indications of where they rated, where they planned to continue their education and what they planned to do after college. It indicates that the selection of the scholars had begun in 1956 when an All-Brains Team had been named. The 29 scholars represented the academic leaders in their respective schools and had been chosen by the schools.
Charlotte traffic engineer Herman Hoose had been bragging all spring about his six beautiful tomato plants, but the previous day, had noticed some green bugs crawling on the vines. He had gone to his garage and filled up his spray gun and sprayed the plants, but in the current morning, found that all of the plants were dead. He said he got mixed up and used the floor cleaner on the plants, but at least no longer had any bugs.
In Las Vegas, it was reported that singer Eddie Fisher had bought a $68,000 house for his bride-to-be, actress Elizabeth Taylor. He said that he and Ms. Taylor had fallen in love with Nevada and wanted to make it their permanent home. The house, painted pink and charcoal, faced the third tee of the Desert Inn Country Club golf course and had three bedrooms and three baths. Mr. Fisher said that he had been looking for a house ever since he had arrived in Las Vegas six weeks earlier for an engagement at the Tropicana Hotel and to establish his six-week residence so he could obtain a quick divorce from his former wife, actress Debbie Reynolds. Ms. Reynolds had obtained a divorce in California, but it would not become final for another year. Mr. Fisher wound up his show this night and planned to file and obtain his divorce the following day, and if all were to go according to plan, he and Ms. Taylor would be married the following afternoon. The wedding ceremony would be performed by a rabbi of Los Angeles, who had recently converted Ms. Taylor to Judaism, and by another rabbi of Las Vegas. The couple planned to leave immediately for Europe, where Ms. Taylor would be engaged in making a movie—albeit one which was sort of smelly.
On the editorial page, "The Court Chips a Mossy Cornerstone" regards a split decision the previous week by the Supreme Court, which had held, 5 to 4, that public health authorities might probe private homes without a warrant.
The case had come from a civil action in Baltimore wherein Aaron Frank had been fined under a City ordinance because he would not allow public health officers to cross the threshold of his home looking for rats.
The court was of three minds. Justice Felix Frankfurter, writing for the majority, was a voice of public indignation more than law, saying that the right to search a home for health purposes was consistent with the strides of "American government" to maintain "the essentials of civilized living".
Justice Charles Whittaker had concurred, but as a lawyer, argued that public health inspections were not, under the Fourth Amendment, "unreasonable".
Justice William O. Douglas had spoken for a vigorous four-Justice dissent, arguing that granting health authorities the right to search without a warrant violated the ancient concept that a man's home was his castle. He said: "One invasion of privacy can be as oppressive as another. Health inspections are important. But they are hardly more important than the search for narcotic peddlers, rapists, kidnapers, murderers and other criminal elements."
It finds that despite the powerful claims of "public conscience", Justice Douglas had made an irresistible case for the dissent's position. It concludes that the majority had erred. Shortcuts to secure health could be dangerous, as much so as procedural shortcuts to protect the public against criminals. Justice Douglas was on the side of warrants as against shortcuts, noting that the person who, like the man in Baltimore, would bar his door to duly constituted health authorities was rare and not worth chipping away at the ancient citadel of the home to bully the rare dissenter.
For residents of Charlotte, the majority decision was likely to be distant and academic. Although the City Code, as in Baltimore, allowed the chief health officer the full right to enter "places of abode, either public or private" and it was unlawful to resist, Mecklenburg authorities adhered to a strict policy never to go in a residence unless invited, and they were unlikely to change that policy.
It finds that the Supreme Court had let its zeal for the institution of public health outrun its zeal for a mossy and magnificent cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon law. Its mossiness dated to its painful growth in the private Englishman's struggle against the intrusion of absolutist kings, such as the growth of habeas corpus and the provision in the Third Amendment prohibiting the quartering of troops in homes in time of peace. Its magnificence resounded in the rhetoric of William Pitt the elder, whom Justice Douglas had quoted: "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter, the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter—all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."
In 1973, during the course of the Senate Select Committee hearings on Watergate, Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia would challenge former presidential aide John Ehrlichman on this point, after the latter had suggested that there had been quite a large amount of erosion of the "castle" concept through time, such that he apparently now believed that it was quite all right to have the King issue a fiat which would allow operatives of the executive branch to evade surreptitiously and through burglary the Fourth Amendment on the pretext of "national security" to obtain the confidential psychiatric records of a man suspected of providing classified information to the New York Times, thus also, by extension of the same principle, seeking to justify the other operations of the Plumbers Unit within the White House, including the surreptitious entry of the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate in June, 1972 to plant bugs.
In any event, the case of Frank v. Maryland would be overruled in 1967 by the Court in Camara v. Superior Court, holding 6 to 3 that the Fourth Amendment does apply to inspection for and abatement of a suspected nuisance. That case would be affirmed again, 7 to 1, in Michigan v. Tyler in 1978 in the context of a warrantless search conducted for the cause of a fire.
Thus, the editors' position and that of Justice Douglas and the minority was ultimately, and quite correctly, sustained. Not considered by the editorial was the notion, as became the focal point of the Watergate hearings, of a purely pretextual entry to someone's "castle" on the basis of some claimed false "national security" interest or "community health" interest, just to get inside someone's dwelling or other private place. That sort of rationale would render the warrant requirement a hollow statement and gut the Fourth Amendment of all meaning, as entry to private premises at will could be effected with impunity by public officials without any judicial process to determine the merits of the claimed basis for entry. Such claims can be the result of improper bribes of public officials by a noisome neighbor with a mental illness and some private and baseless obsession with their neighbor, or by others with an adverse economic interest, for instance a corrupt mortgage lender, in harassing a particular homeowner with frivolous complaints. "Well, some ol' boy said they's rats over 'dere. Reckon we gotta go in 'ere and check that out double-quick as you knows what happens when dem rats start into reproducin' like rabbits."
"Dubious Democrat from North Dakota" indicates that a confusion of pronunciation had led to the New York Times persistently referring to Senator Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina as "Irwin".
Now, the most mystifying error of all had been the Washington Post identifying him as "Sen. Sam J. Ervin, Jr. (D-N. Dak.)"
It wonders whether the Dakotas could have suddenly produced a Senator who talked with equal authority about the law and scuppernongs, concluding that they never had yet. Nor could it think that North Dakotans were known by anything but the plainsman's twang.
Furthermore, at the 1956 Democratic convention, Senator Ervin had put North Carolina on the pronunciation map, as Massachusetts, during roll calls, amid a throng of states which simply passed, always "pahsses". Not to be outdone, Senator Ervin, as the North Carolina delegation's spokesman, said that they "pice". "In short, linguistically there is not a thread of reason why he should come from North Dakota." It concludes that it must have been a misprint.
Not to beat a dead horse or a dead
puppy, but nowadays the distinguishing factor might be whether or not
he killed a goat and a puppy on the same day because the puppy was a
dog which would not hunt, even if the latter phrase was more
attributable to Senator Russell Long of Louisiana in the time of
Senator Ervin. But, to our knowledge, Senator Long never executed his
young dog for not being able to catch a rabbit. (We knowingly confuse North with South, just as many do with the Carolinas, usually much to the consternation of North Carolinians. But in the veiled reference to a certain South Dakotan, we find the confusion apt, for being every bit as problematic, regarding another still-current Cabinet member in 2026 from the North, even if, to our knowledge, he has never executed a goat or a puppy. The night is still young... The confusion for us is understandable though as, outside Bismarck, one bitterly cold November night some 51 years ago, our car's thermostat on the rotor to prevent overheating kicked in unexpectedly causing the air-cooled engine to shut down in the sub-zero weather, after which the starter would not work, prompting us to summon an old stray dog over across the highway to accommodate the interface between our mind of the moment and a tale from Jack London we had read in high school—even if, in fact, there was no dog in the vicinity, nor any adequate downhill grade, and we had not any desire to build a fire in any event, at least save in the combustion chambers, and, subsequently had the starter, much superior to a crank, to ignite the fuel injectors to push the pistons to motivate the wheels replaced at the nearest dealership for our auto, in Rapid City next afternoon, as it was mighty cold out to warrant crawling underneath the auto with a screwdriver to light its fuse whenever we needed motivation to continue
"The First 50 Years Are the Hardest" indicates that Isaac London, former owner and editor of the Rockingham Post-Dispatch, had said that for the first year he had set every line of type which went into his newspaper, but had gotten along okay, now having done so for 50 years.
His career had started as a boy in his father's office in the Chatham Record, where he learned to stick type when he was eight and was envied by the boys of Pittsboro when he was allowed to stay out of school on Wednesday afternoons to fold 500 copies of the newspaper.
On May 12, 1909, he had bought the Siler City Grit, saying, "And for the first year I myself set every line of type by hand. No linotype, and a George Washington hand-press. But I got along okay. Siler City was a good town."
In November, 1917, he had sold the Grit and bought the Rockingham papers, the Post and the Dispatch, and combined them into the present newspaper on December 6, 1917. He sold the paper on April 1, 1953 to a couple, but remained as editor.
He had made the Post-Dispatch a unique and distinctive North Carolina newspaper. Everything in it was local and every line was documented by the editor's filing cabinets of index cards and his fabulous memory. Every issue, for instance, carried birthday listings. There was no need for an editorial page, for everyone knew that the editor wrote nearly every line and they were reading him, not the Post-Dispatch. He did not mind speaking his sprightly mind.
He reported the previous week: "Charlotte's barbers give no quarter, but they're asking another one a haircut now." The local angle was that the barbers in his town were also charging the same.
His weekly column, "Glimpses—On the Cuff", was a must for Richmond County readers. During the current week, noting his own anniversary, he said: "In looking back on fifty years of newspapering, I am minded of 'Antony and Cleopatra': 'Though it be honest, it is never good/ To bring bad news: give to a gracious message/ And host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell/ Themselves when they be felt.'"
A piece from the Richmond News
Leader, titled "Torture on the 'Telly'", finds that
whatever else might be said of the British, they were an intensely
practical people. "A cool passion for tiredness, extending even
to entertainment, pervades their orderly little island." The
average Briton, as with his American counterpart, loved his "telly",
but disdained to mix business with pleasure regarding the commercial
But before they would embrace the British programming method, it recommends inspecting the other side of the commercial coin, for on British television, 15-minute segments, called magazine programs or shopping guides, were devoted to a single sales message. A popular format found the hucksters seated in a cheery pub, quaffing ale and dabbling with a dartboard, while they regaled each other with pointed anecdotes about their sponsor's products. Such an approach in America, it finds, would be a ghastly prospect. "Our own American two-minute trips down the alimentary canal are in a class with earthquakes, pestilence and flood. Yet the British, mindful of order and place, reportedly suffer 15-minute commercials and even enjoy them. Is it any wonder that these remarkable people endured the Blitz?"
Drew Pearson indicates that now that some Senators were opening their financial records to public scrutiny, his column could report at least one who had cut off all outside income and was living exclusively on his Senate salary, that being Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. When elected to the Senate in 1954 as the first write-in candidate in history, Mr. Thurmond had dissolved his Aiken, S.C., law partnership which had been bringing in $200,000 per year to three partners, also giving up a $1,200 per month income from an interest in the Aiken Federal Savings and Loan Association and also selling what few stocks he owned. He still owned two homes, both under mortgages, found it a struggle to keep his bank account balanced from month to month on a Senator's salary, but was doing it. He had offered in jest to trade incomes with any employee in his office who would assume his obligations. A rough calculation indicated that the Senator's secretaries and clerks wound up with more in net income at the end of each pay period than he did.
Mr. Pearson notes that Senator Thurmond accepted fees for speaking engagements but endorsed them over to a loan fund to help needy students at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, S.C.
Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, one of the ablest chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in years, had been explaining his laudable desire to obtain fewer politicians appointed as ambassadors and more career diplomats. Meeting with Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban recently, the Senator noted that the new U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Ogden Reid, former publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, would be confirmed depending on his qualifications. Ambassador Eban observed that the previous two ambassadors from the U.S. to Israel had been career diplomats and could not speak a word of Hebrew. Mr. Reid, a political appointee, was now learning Hebrew, according to Mr. Eban.
The public seldom knew what was behind political contributions and their aftermath. Listed in the Republican contributions to Secretary of Interior Douglas McKay, who had run against Senator Wayne Morse in Oregon in 1956, was the name of Henry Luce, publisher of Life, Time and Fortune magazines. Mr. Luce had contributed $500 to defeat Senator Morse, but had failed. The previous week, Senator Morse had managed to defeat Clare Boothe Luce indirectly as Ambassador to Brazil, after she resigned her post following a controversy over her nomination shortly after her overwhelming confirmation vote in the Senate, a controversy prompted by Senator Morse. Also among the contributors to defeat Senator Morse had been Maxwell Gluck, who had contributed $2,000. As a reward, Mr. Gluck was made Ambassador to Ceylon, though he could not recall the name of the Prime Minister of that country.
The rule of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson that the Senate ought follow unwaveringly the vote of the committee did not hold water, largely because Senators were so busy that they could not be around to hear committee testimony. Though the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had voted 16 to 1 to confirm Mrs. Luce, only two Democrats, Senator Frank Lausche of Ohio and Senator Fulbright, had been present to hear all of the evidence as to whether FDR had, according to Mrs. Luce in October, 1944, "lied us into war"—the source of the controversy, along with other uncomplimentary statements about President Roosevelt at the time, pointed out by Senator Morse to try to dissuade his fellow Senators from voting to confirm her.
Marquis Childs, in Geneva, indicates that in the hundreds of hours of negotiations of the Western allies preparatory to the foreign ministers conference beginning this date in Geneva, one small item on which they had agreed, which might prove useful, was that as soon as the Russians could be persuaded to do so, the four foreign ministers would hold private sessions with only interpreters present, moving from an atmosphere dominated by propaganda to meaningful negotiations as free as possible from publicity. Whether the Russians would agree might show early the extent of "progress" which could be achieved at the conference.
The feeling among almost all Western diplomats about the session was that they were nearly useless, that the temptation to propagandize and counter-propagandize was too great.
He indicates that at the plenary sessions each Foreign Minister at the conference table was backed by a great number of aides and advisers, perhaps 39 to 40 experts and specialists ready to supply facts, figures, suggestions and any additional rhetoric which might be in furtherance of the propaganda. When such a session would end, each delegation had its briefing officer provide the delegation's own version of what occurred at the session, which might have an extra coloration of propaganda, as frequently was the custom with the Russians, or might be an effort to present factually what had come from each side, as customary with the Americans. In addition, each delegation would give more or less frequent private briefings for each country's own correspondents, with stress on national views and objectives. Through that filter, by way of a thousand or more correspondents, news of the conference reached the world.
He regards it as small wonder that the picture which came through the distortion was one of a race ridden by furious jockeys, each striving for the best position. While leaks might come out of the private sessions, there was at least a better chance that serious negotiation could take place in private. That opportunity was not likely to occur in the first week or two of the current conference. The opening sessions would likely be concerned with whether and when and how Poland and Czechoslovakia would be seated at the conference table and whether, when and how the two Germanys would participate. Regarding Poland and Czechoslovakia, it appeared inevitable that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had to make a great propaganda bid, called for if only to prove Russia's loyalty to its "allies". That would especially regard the German problem related to Poland's borders but would also concern Moscow's professed unhappiness regarding the fact that the Soviet delegate at the conferences sat facing three Western delegates. Thus outnumbered, the Russians raised the question of "parity" and should they press that issue to the extent of demanding full presentation for Poland and Czechoslovakia, it could mean a very long delay.
The West was prepared to allow Poland and Czechoslovakia to sit in when matters directly concerned their interests, but they would not yield on full representation by those countries. Such a demand would be met with the counter that Italy and perhaps other Western allies ought also be present.
France was prepared to press the cause of Italy to the limit. French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville was predicting that the conference would last at least four or five weeks and also that it ought last longer since one way to convince the Russians of the West's determination to stand firm was to be willing to go through with a tough and long drawn-out talkathon. Secretary of State Christian Herter was more optimistic, guessing a three-week duration for the conference. However long it would last, and he regards a month to be a fair estimate, the proposal at the level of the foreign ministers was for a maximum of propaganda and a minimum of agreement. The agreement was likely to cover little more than the subjects which the heads of government would have to determine in August at a summit meeting. That would be taken as justification for the summit conference, which might well have been inevitable from the moment that Premier Nikita Khrushchev had precipitated the crisis regarding Berlin the previous November.
A letter writer comments on Frank v. Maryland, indicating the opinion that it struck a death knell to the basic inherent rights of privacy of Americans in their dwellings. "It has long been one of the proudest boasts of Americans everywhere that their home was their castle and no one but them had a right to enter it of their own free will. Is it too much to ask that this last bastion of freedom and liberty be kept intact? Already our protection from double jeopardy has been removed, and National Guardsmen can arrest private citizens. Is the time of autarchy just around the corner for the United States? This land that we so proudly call free is fast becoming just another common police state." He proceeds to suggest that Communism was an all-powerful state in which individual rights were unimportant, and questions whether the U.S. was not going down the same road, finding it was high time for a reversed trend to return rights to the individual, not to take them away.
The editors refer to the lead editorial of this date.
Incidentally, speaking of the exception to the Fourth Amendment for exigent circumstances when the police are in hot pursuit of a suspect in a crime and the suspect has not reached a place of safe haven for any appreciable length of time or other similar emergent circumstances where it is necessary to preserve evidence from destruction by a suspect, Mr. Gunn, while obviously a private detective par excellence, should perhaps attend night school to bone up on criminal law, as in this episode
We suppose that it is all in the service of dramatic effect and to provide a symbolic ending within the time limitation of thirty minutes less commercials, even if potentially misleading people in reality to rely on such artificially abbreviated dramatic presentations to their great peril. The wind chimes, however, in the first scene provided a nice, foreshadowing effect, especially for television. And, of course, the double-entendre
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C.,
indicates that after too many years of fumbling the affairs of state,
in keeping with "the usual Republican way of doing things",
Mr. Dulles had retired, and almost immediately, "a bunch of
lame-brain politicos decide to award him a medal, just as though he
had fought with the 101st at Bastogne. Then, when this little deal
exploded due to well-founded opposition from Democrats in Congress,
Mr. Eisenhower quickly stepped in and 'created' a completely
unnecessary $20,000-a-year position for the exiting Secretary of
State." He finds it ironic given Republican howls for economy
in government. He indicates that a pension would have been more
legitimate. He says that he sympathizes with Mr. Dulles regarding his
cancer but did not think that any Republican deserved any sort of
reward for the general political bungling of the previous six years,
including the President. They had already cost the taxpayers more
than any other administration in the country's history and the damage
they had done in American prestige abroad he finds incalculable. He
wonders how long it would be until someone suggested the erection of
a Sherman Adams statue on the White House lawn, though he thinks it
might be just the thing to symbolize the present political set-up in
the country.
A letter writer indicates that some
months earlier he had read a letter in one of the Charlotte papers
describing the poor services rendered to patients at Memorial
Hospital, whether by the nurses or other attendants. He says it had
seemed unbelievable to him because he had been a patient in that
hospital about 4 1/2 years earlier, sharing a room with five other
patients, and all seemed to find the attention and services
exceptionally satisfactory, all having been very ill. He says he had
become ill about seven weeks earlier and was again confined to
Memorial Hospital for six weeks with six others sharing other beds on
the ward, and every one of them believed the attention they received
had been excellent. He thinks that a private nurse day and night
could not have performed equivalent services which he had received in
the hospital. Even the teenagers who came in in the late afternoon
and early evening had been wonderful. Framed Edition
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