The Charlotte News
Wednesday, May 20, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that West Germany and France had been reported this date to be putting the brakes on the U.S.-British enthusiasm for a prompt end to secret talks with the Soviet Union regarding the Berlin crisis and prospects for a summit conference. Some cautious moves were apparently transpiring in the Big Four foreign ministers conference concerning the start of secret negotiations. When those talks did take place, they would almost certainly determine whether a summit conference would be held during the summer. French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville and West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano had appeared less anxious to get quickly into secret talks than their two Western colleagues, Secretary of State Christian Herter and British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, who believed that since the Soviets had created the Berlin crisis, they ought take the lead in finding a solution for it. M. Couve de Murville and Mr. Von Brentano were not opposed to secret talks, according to diplomats, but insisted that the Western allies had to enter into such discussions with great care. Debate over the rival and mutually rejected Soviet and Western proposals for German peace settlement would continue possibly until the end of the week, meaning a delay in the schedule which Secretary Herter had tentatively anticipated the previous week, that private talks with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would commence either this date or the following day. Mr. Von Brentano saw Mr. Herter for half an hour during the morning and indicated that the secret phase of the Big Four talks probably would not begin for several days. A conference source said that Mr. Gromyko had told Mr. Lloyd on Wednesday night that he would make a new attempt at getting Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia admitted to the conference. The Western foreign ministers had rebuffed his earlier attempt to seat those two delegations. The Western and Soviet foreign ministers were to continue their debate on their rival plans for Germany at another formal session this date. But Western diplomats said that the debate had reached a dead-end of disagreement, and the obvious objective of both sides in continuing the discussion was to produce more propaganda. While press and public were barred from the conference sessions, everything which happened inside the conference room was immediately reported to correspondents by press officers for the delegations—as further elucidated by Doris Fleeson in her column of this date.
House Republicans, backed by conservative Southern Democrats, lined up this date against passage of what they assailed as a budget-busting 2.1 billion dollar housing bill. With Government spending overshadowing housing as an issue, the House neared a vote in its annual housing battle. After a morning caucus of the 153 Republican members, Minority Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana told newsmen that the impending vote would be "close as hell". He said it would be a key vote and there was no doubt that it was "a budget-busting bill". His statement came a few hours before the House was to start preliminary voting on two housing measures, one being the Democratic bill approved by the House Banking Committee and the other a substitute drafted by Representative A. S. Herlong of Florida. Republicans plugged for passage of the less costly Herlong bill, claiming that it had a 50-50 chance of success.
Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia said this date than in at least 70 military housing projects, Government-insured loans exceeded the construction costs of the projects. The total insured by the Federal Housing Administration, according to Senator Byrd, was 11.9 billion dollars on the 70 projects. The loans totaled 190.5 million dollars. The Senator said in a statement that the practice of taking FHA-insured loans in excess of construction costs in Federal housing projects was generally referred to as "mortgaging out" and that windfalls were usually the result. But he made no charge that any of the private builders had pocketed the difference between the FHA-insured construction loans and the lower cost of construction. The 70 projects which the Senator mentioned were among 267 military housing projects constructed by private builders under the Wherry Act of 1949.
Vice-President Nixon would decide after his July trip to Moscow on the scope of the active campaigning he would begin during the fall for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. He had added a veteran campaigner to his staff on Tuesday, Herbert Klein, editor of the San Diego Union. A knowledgeable operator in the field, Mr. Klein would serve as a special assistant in charge of press relations, having filled a similar function when Mr. Nixon had campaigned for Congressional candidates in the 1958 midterms and was an assistant in the 1956 presidential campaign. Mr. Klein was understood to have enlisted for the duration of the drive for the 1960 nomination and afterward, if Mr. Nixon were elected. (Mr. Klein would serve as director of White House communications during the first term of President Nixon, from 1969 to 1973, thus in that role during the initial stages of the Watergate scandal and through the Senate Select Committee hearings of the spring and summer of 1973. The press secretary during that time was Ron Ziegler.) Mr. Klein would accompany the Vice-President on the Moscow trip, which was being viewed by Mr. Nixon's associates with some cautious political optimism. If he were to have an expected meeting with Premier Nikita Khrushchev and something tangible came from it, there was speculation that the Vice-President might give the nation a televised accounting on the prospects of some agreement with the Soviets to ease world tensions. While they believed that what happened in Moscow might go a long way toward shaping Mr. Nixon's fall campaign, the Vice-President's associates also were keeping a wary eye on the activities of Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. At the current time, they were convinced that Mr. Rockefeller's acceptance of an invitation to be honored guest at a June 11 picnic in Washington sponsored by the Capital Hill Club indicated that he might become more active as a potential rival for the 1960 nomination.
The President had the previous day conferred the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest award to civilians, on John Foster Dulles, the former Secretary of State, who was critically ill with cancer and pneumonia. He presented the medal at Walter Reed Medical Center to Mrs. Dulles who then presented it to the former Secretary on behalf of the President. In a note accompanying the medal, the President wrote: "It is an honor and a privilege to award you this Medal of Freedom. Inadequate though it is to express my gratitude and the gratitude of the nation you have served so well, it does stand as a small token of the affection and esteem that the people of America and of the world hold for you and your tireless efforts on behalf of freedom." Pain-relieving drugs were keeping Mr. Dulles generally comfortable as he clung to life. He was sleeping much of the time in his hospital room.
In London, it was reported that a boy had died this date after undergoing a new type of deep-freeze operation to mend a hole in his heart. The 16-year old boy, son of a schoolmaster, had undergone the surgery on Tuesday. The operation at first was pronounced a success, but the boy's condition had then worsened. The deep-freeze technique involved cooling the body to 39 degrees below normal by pumping the blood through stainless steel refrigeration tubes. At 59 degrees, the heart could be drained and stopped for more than 45 minutes, allowing surgeons more time to work.
In Louisville, Ky., Southern Baptists this date took a look at the seven-league strides by which they had advanced from a regional group to a nationwide denomination. From a geographical belt confined primarily to 16 Southern states in the early 1940's, the denomination had mushroomed through 45 states, including Hawaii and Alaska. There were 9.2 million members in 31,498 churches, second in size only to the Methodists among America's Protestant denominations. It was a multi-million dollar operation, with contributions the previous year totaling more than 419.6 million dollars. Those and other figures on its growth were provided by the executive secretary to the convention during its first day of business sessions.
In Moab, Utah, veteran river-runners guided a rubber boat through some of the Colorado River's most perilous rapids this date, looking for a missing boater last seen clinging to an overturned cabin cruiser. But members of the family of the man, who had survived the boat capsizing Sunday, refused to believe the 65-year old Californian was not safe, after their hopes had been buoyed the previous day when a helicopter had rescued his 65-year old wife. The man and his family had been tossed into the churning rapids of Cataract Canyon, a deep gorge which sometimes cut hundreds of feet into the granite rock country 40 air miles southwest of Moab. His son and daughter-in-law had been found and rescued on Monday. His wife had been unhurt except for some sunburn and a bruise on her right leg. She said that she had just about given up but had never lost faith, after hiking 8 to 10 miles upstream after being washed ashore by a strong wave after the boat had capsized and washed her and her husband downstream. She spent a total of 48 hours along the rocky banks of the Colorado before being rescued. She said she had last seen her husband hanging onto the back of the boat as it was going downriver and he told her not to panic. The son and daughter-in-law expressed confidence that the father would be found safe. He said that both his mother and father were outdoor people, but did not have much experience with water, suggesting that after the experience, they would not ever want to take a bath again. Airplanes had spotted wreckage of the boat in the canyon the previous day but there was no sign of the father. He had cataracts in both eyes and could barely see without his thick glasses. He had been wearing a life preserver when the boat capsized. His wife did not discuss the possibility that he might have drowned and no one had the heart to suggest it to her.
In Baltimore, an explosion had racked the hull of a seaplane being cleaned with a commercial solvent in a Martin Co. hangar this date, killing five workmen and injuring at least five others. A spokesman for the company said that a dozen or so men had been bathing the hull of a two-engine seaplane with a cleaning fluid using pressure hoses when a muffled explosion rocked the interior of the hull. The hangar had quickly filled with smoke, but there was little fire after the first flash. An inquiry was begun quickly by the Maryland deputy medical examiner. The company said that the cause of the blast had not been determined.
In Boston, it was reported that two Federal judges had ruled that Massachusetts laws requiring kosher markets to close on Sundays were discriminatory and unconstitutional. The judges also issued an injunction barring the state from enforcing the Sunday laws against kosher markets. The opinion said that the laws "put an economic penalty on a person observing as his Sabbath some other day than Sunday, by depriving him of the productive use of one further day of the week."
John Kilgo of The News reports that a spot check of seven Charlotte schools this date revealed fire hazards in six of them. The six schools had doors leading from stairways to halls propped open. Fire regulations required that the doors be kept close. A Fire Prevention Bureau captain said that open doors created a major fire hazard. Fire officials said that in case of a fire, an open door would greatly increase the chance that lives would be lost. An open door could create a draft which would quickly fan flames throughout a building. Only the Plaza Road school of the seven checked this date, had all the doors leading from the steps into the halls closed. The fire captain said that they had made a survey at Harding High School recently and had found that 14 doors had been taken down. The building inspector had written the principal a letter with instructions to get the doors back up during the summer vacation.
In Hollywood, it was reported by friends of actress Audrey Hepburn that she was expecting her first child the following January.
On the editorial page, "Charlotte Eyes New Judge Hopefully" welcomes Judge Howard Arbuckle, Jr., to the City Recorder's Court bench with cautious optimism. He was a respected citizen, an able attorney and a student of the law who had served for nearly 6 years as judge pro tem of the County Recorder's Court, and thus ought be able to perform the new duties with appropriate prudence and competence. His performance in office would be subjected to critical scrutiny from alert and interested citizens, vigilant not to allow the administration of justice again to fall into a state of disrepair.
The community's unhappy experience with the Recorder's Court in 1958 had served one purpose, shocking the public into an awareness of the fine points of judicial administration. The administration of justice remained the bulwark of all of the institutions and had to be above suspicion. If it were not, then it had failed the ultimate test of responsible government.
"The Trimmers Win (Again) in Raleigh" indicates that the State House Education Committee had killed the incentive fund plan of Governor Luther Hodges, designed to encourage greater local support of the schools. The plan was for matching funds based on the ability of individual counties to pay. and the Legislature had authorized the committee to study school finance, a plan which the Governor had supported relentlessly. Yet, in the Education Committee, the plan had died. Thus the schools were left to the possibility of a meager average handout without benefit of the special effort at financing which was so desperately needed.
The plan would have merely scotched the perilous poverty threatening the schools and not eliminated it, enabling the state to offer up to $10 per pupil for each county. The counties, in proportion to their per capita incomes, would have put up enough per pupil to get the State's $10. For Mecklenburg County, it would have meant another $10 from the county. Smaller, poorer Caswell County could have had the $10 from the State for putting up $3.59, and Pender County could have had it for $2.27. It would have been a bonanza therefore for the poorer counties, but they had been the greatest voices raised against the plan.
Some public educators had opposed the plan as an attempt by the State to absolve itself of its duty to support the schools, though that had been denied by the study commission and supporters of the incentive fund. Many of them had in fact advocated for more basic state support. Primarily, the death of the bill was a victory for the counties whose support for schools was only mediocre in proportion to their ability to pay.
The incentive fund idea was only part of the sad scene, with the Consolidated University's budget also in grave trouble. But that, among all the educational tragedies presently being staged in the state, led squarely back to the same old source, too little revenue. There had been truth in what Representative Watts Hill had charged, that the failure of the incentive plan was a failure of the property tax system, or rather, failure of the counties to change it. At present, the property tax rates and the methods of valuation in most counties would come as near to paying educational bills "as a Roman general's coin bag to paying the bills of the U.S. Air Force." It suggests that perhaps people liked it that way.
"Bell's Dream Is Still Fat and Sassy" indicates that State Senator Spencer Bell's campaign for reform of North Carolina's judicial system was still alive at present after surviving the peculiar alchemy of a legislative subcommittee. Compromises had been made and whole segments of the Bell committee's plan for rule-making and administration had been rewritten, but in essence, the vision of a unified, fair and efficient system of state courts remained intact.
The proposed judicial article presently was quite a bit better than might have been expected a few weeks earlier when opponents of court reform had seemed to be gaining strength. Senator Bell pronounced the latest version "a good working document" and had promised to support it to the best of his ability.
The subcommittee had refused to endorse the recommendation that lower court judges be appointed, leaving the question to the General Assembly for decision, but insisting on uniformity in its application. At present, some magistrates were elected and some were appointed.
The subcommittee would place the general administrative authority and rule-making powers in the hands of the State Supreme Court, subject to a veto by the Legislature, which it finds a logical compromise between two adverse points of view. The subcommittee had also recommended that the vicious fee system for paying magistrates be abolished.
In all, the basic principles for which Senator Bell had been battling remained, that being unity of organization, competent management, careful supervision, efficiency of operation, and fairness of application. It was not quite the same utopian dream which had begun to emerge a year earlier, but was still a worthy ideal and worth fighting for in the final stages of the 1959 legislative session.
A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "Maul, Stun, Stagger, Thump", wonders why baseball, ordinarily the most placid of team sports, so often was painted in such belligerent terms. Robert Coard of the University of Alabama had asked the question in the month's Word Study, a publication of Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
It offers examples: "Chisox Punch Yanks", "Cardinal Nine Batters Dodgers", "Yanks Slug Tigers for Ninth Straight". Other pugilistic terms which Mr. Coard had set forth were "maul, wallop, stun, stagger, thump, bob, bash, slap down, sock, whale and knock out." He had also found that from time to time Cleveland stabbed, the Cubs grabbed, and Warren Spahn cuffed.
It finds that Mr. Coard might unintentionally have explained the vicarious bloodletting in the tribute he had paid the copy reader: "The headline writer has a problem of word choice as exacting as that of a sonneteer. The copy-reader who composes the sports headline must write a clear, vivid, and brief sentence in the scanty space of a few minutes—requirements surely as inflexible as those of meter and rhyme."
It indicates that it had never thought of the sportswriters as epic poets and that the idea took a little getting used to, but that lyrical explanation might suffice for the sanguinary nature of the sports page, "and if the Virginians would only maul, rip, clip, clobber and slay Havana this week, we might try a few heroic hexameters ourselves."
Drew Pearson indicates that at center stage of the Capitol Theater in Washington had fluttered the fragile form of Galina Ulanova at the climax of the "Dying Swan"
Beyond the approval and the record-breaking $37,000 box office receipts, topping the Metropolitan Opera's $29,000, and beyond the ballerinas' quick tour of the Lincoln Memorial and Congress, had been something more important than art and its appreciation, the fact that art could form a bridge between people. Thus far, diplomats had not been able to bridge the gap between the political animosities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union; nor had the scientists sitting in Geneva or even the heads of state meeting at the summit conference of July, 1955. But Ms. Ulanova and the suppleness of Susanna Zvyagina
They had helped Russian and American people understand each other. For the Americans who applauded the Bolshoi had begun to understand that a determined, cultured people had produced it, dating from 1773 when a dancer from the St. Petersburg court theater, Filippo Beccari, had offered to teach children in a Moscow orphanage how to dance.
The Americans had begun to realize that a ballet so beautiful could not have come from a nation of state policemen and Communist criminals, but from one which had achieved great beauty and which now, by finally lifting the "iron curtain", wanted to share it.
Likewise, the Russian ballerinas who had toured Washington by bus before their performance knew that they were not visiting a nation of hate-mongers and wicked capitalists, that when they wanted to stop rush-hour traffic near the 14th Street bridge to take pictures of the Jefferson Memorial because it was so beautiful, they probably did not know that it had been erected in honor of the first and foremost teacher of American democracy. They had just known that the memorial in honor of Mr. Jefferson was beautiful and they wanted to photograph it.
When they had become so fascinated with the radios which described the portraits at the Mellon art gallery, they had not appreciated the fact that the founder of the gallery had been an oil and aluminum millionaire, Andrew Mellon, architect of the Coolidge-Hoover policy that the country have no contacts with the Communist world. They only thought it a wonderful art gallery, beautiful with real art on display.
"Even the relentless anti-Russian heart of old Andy Mellon might have melted had he heard the ecstacy of these modern-day Russians over his gallery."
Speaking of memorials in Washington and art bringing nations together, what would Russian tourists have thought today about seeing "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts" had not the Federal judge judiciously intervened and ordered the Trump name removed? It could have been quite unsettling, prompting rumors that some impostor was in the White House. It is, after all, much too early in the evening for Trump to have any memorial, always reserved for the deceased. Is Trump deceased?
While not a legend in his own time
Doris Fleeson, in Geneva, finds the press arrangements for the 1,200 correspondents covering the foreign ministers conference to be "appallingly clumsy", but revealing of the tactical picture. The West had fresh ideas prepared more to meet complaints at home regarding lack of leadership than with any real notion that they would be acceptable. The Soviets offered old provisions already rejected by the West with the explanation that they had considered their proposal so good that they did not change anything. What had emerged was much the same thing extant before the conference. Experts in that type of debate had remembered the resemblance to old maneuvers and, "with a persistence worthy of Sisyphus", searched for signs of real change.
The basic truths behind the conference apparently had not changed and the fact that the Russians had been merely wordy, unrealistic, trite and humorless instead of wholly arrogant and insulting was taken to mean that Premier Nikita Khrushchev was determined to have a summit meeting, preferably within the U.S. But Secretary of State Christian Herter had privately repeated to the Russians that progress in Geneva was essential before the President would consent to attend the summit. The Secretary naturally reflected the President's view, but the U.S. delegation was described also as being impressed by the hardening attitude of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee toward them and all of their works. They wanted to talk turkey in Geneva because they were afraid that Senator Fulbright would insist that they do so when they got home.
The reason given for keeping reporters at arm's length from that phase of the debate was that there was no room for them at the old League of Nation's Palace, where the sessions were being held. Instead, four briefing officers from the U.S., Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union were thrown to the herd in separate meetings, but all at the same time, after the sessions were concluded.
Those officers were supposed to tell the truth about what had gone on, but most reporters rotated their attendance at the dreary third-hand resumes and prudently checked on the other three with trusted friends, just in case of a tie. Thus far, they had not caught anyone fibbing, though the emphasis and the choice of adjectives differed.
She finds that, nonetheless, even the best reporters had to fight against a wooden quality in their dispatches or spoken expositions. "Gunpowder is known to be dangerous, but to describe the scent one must smell it." She finds that the Russians were the least hurt by the rigidity, as all reporting was to them only an exercise in propaganda—very much like Fox Prop today.
Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, discusses an incident which had occurred at the Stamford, Conn., railroad station on a Sunday evening at about 10:00, when some two dozen persons, among them several young men in uniform, had been waiting for the express train to New York. The door to the waiting room had flown open and a woman, shrieking hysterically, had burst into the room pursued by a mad man just a few steps behind her. The woman screamed that the man was trying to kill her and cried out for the people to save her. Mr. Cousins was standing nearest the door and the woman had grabbed him, still shrieking. He tried to protect her by shielding her but the man following her tried to sweep him aside, rushing at Mr. Cousins, catching the woman's wrist with one hand, tearing her loose and pulling her through the doorway. The woman fell to the ground and was dragged by the wrist just outside the waiting room. Mr. Cousins tried to free her wrist from the man's grasp but the man had broken it off, grabbed the woman's pocketbook and fled on foot.
Mr. Cousins and others had carried the woman inside the waiting room, sat her down and telephoned the police. The woman's eye was badly cut and she was moaning. Mr. Cousins looked around the room and except for three or four persons who had now come to her, the people in the room seemed unconcerned. The young men in uniform were still standing in the same place as previously chatting among themselves.
He was not sure which was greater, the shock of the attack which had just occurred or the shock caused by the apparent detachment and unconcern of the other people, especially the men in uniform.
The following morning, Mr. Cousins had read in the newspaper of another attack by a gang of teenagers against a young boy, occurring in broad daylight, as a number of people stood around and watched.
He supposes that it would be possible to take the view that those were isolated instances and that it would be a serious error to read into them anything beyond the fact that the bystanders were probably paralyzed by the suddenness of the violence. Yet, he was not so sure that the instances might not actually be the product of something far deeper.
He suggests that what was happening was that the natural reactions of the individual against violence were being blunted. The individual was being desensitized by living history. He was developing new reflexes and new responses which tended to slow up the moral imagination and relieve him of essential indignation over impersonal hurt. He was becoming casual about brutality. He made his adjustments to the commonplace and nothing was more commonplace in the present age than the ease with which life could be smashed or shattered. The range of the violence swept from the personal to the impersonal, from the amusements of the crowd to the policies of nations. It was in the air and had lost the sting of surprise. "We have made our peace with violence."
He finds that no idea could be made more untrue than that there was no connection between what was happening in the world and the behavior of the individual. Society did not exist apart from the individual. It transferred its apprehensions or its hopes, its fatigue or its vitality, its ennui or its dreams, its sickness or its spirituality to the people who were part of it. "Can the individual be expected to retain the purity of his responses, particularly a sensitivity to the fragility of life, when society itself seems to measure its worth in terms of its ability to create and possess instruments of violence that could expunge civilization as easily as it once took to destroy a village? Does it have no effect on an individual to live in an age that has already known two world wars; that has seen hundreds of cities ripped apart by dynamite tumbling down from the heavens; that has witnessed whole nations stolen or destroyed; that has seen millions of people exterminated in gas chambers or other mass means; that has seen governments compete with one another to make weapons which even in the testing, have put death into the air."
People were horrified that teenage boys should make or steal lethal weapons and then proceed to use them on living creatures, but showed no sense of horror or outrage at the cheapness of human life which was exploited throughout the day or night on television. He finds it almost impossible to watch television for 15 minutes without seeing people beaten or shot, or punched, kicked or jabbed. It was also almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without finding someone in a position of power threatening to use nuclear explosives unless someone else became more sensible.
He finds that the young killers did not read the newspapers, but did not have to, as they read the picture-story pulps which dispensed brutality as casually as a vending machine dispensed peanuts. He finds that the heart of the matter was that the young killers did not live in a world of their own. They belonged to the larger world and they might magnify the imperfections of the larger world but did not invent them.
He indicates that the desensitization of 20th Century man was more than a danger to the common safety, representing "the loss or impairment of the noblest faculty of human life, the ability to be aware both of suffering and beauty, the ability to share sorrow and create hope; the ability to think and respond beyond one's wants." There were some things people had no right to become accustomed to, one of which was brutality. The other was the irrational. Both brutality and the irrational had now come together and were moving toward a dominant pattern, which, if it was to be resisted and changed, a special effort had to be made.
The piece reminds of the subsequent story of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in Queens, New York, in March, 1964, as she was returning home one night while several neighbors observed or at least heard the attack from their windows overlooking the street and did nothing. After first stabbing her, the assailant fled the scene initially, but then returned some minutes later, stabbed her again and then returned a third time to issue the coup de grace which ended her life as she had screamed that she was dying, all while observers continued to do nothing during the span of 35 minutes between the three attacks. The assailant was a few days later caught, admitted the crime, prosecuted for murder, found guilty and eventually died in prison.
A letter writer from Gaffney, S.C., indicates that Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois had recently suggested that the White House set an example in economy by cutting down on presidential expenses. He finds that there was more wisdom than sarcasm in the suggestion, finding that a full investigation of the President's extravagances might disclose facts which would cause more red faces among Republicans than the 1958 midterms had. The expenditures for limousines and helicopters, as set forth by Senator Douglas, barely scratched the surface. The overall picture, he finds, was one which made it obvious that the President had no equal when it came to playing fast and loose with the taxpayers' money. One example was the fact that the President had ordered everyone else to cut expenses while boosting his own budget by $332,000. There were 298 employees on his office staff, 153 more than President Truman had. He had hired nine additional employees for the White House work crew, making a total of 71. Some of their important duties included hunting for lost golf balls and keeping squirrels off of the Presidents putting green. In 1952, President Truman had spent a little more than 6.7 million dollars on the executive office, whereas President Eisenhower's 1959 budget had called for 52.7 million. The President also wanted 91.9 million for 1960. He had taken 22 vacations in 1957 at taxpayer expense, and 16 more in 1958. No other President in history could claim 38 vacations in a two-year period, which the writer finds extravagant. "The nepotism business was a horse-before-the-cart caper."
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