The Charlotte News

Friday, May 22, 1959

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano had called on the Western powers this date to refuse any summit meeting unless the Russians first guaranteed the free world's rights in West Berlin. He told a press conference that the Russians also should display a "genuine readiness for a solution of the German question" before the U.S., Britain and France agreed to the summit meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The West German Foreign Minister ducked when asked if he had formal assurance from the Western Big Three that they would refuse to attend the summit meeting if the Soviets would not assure Western rights in Berlin, but Secretary of State Christian Herter had already warned Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko that the President would refuse to attend if the Russians set a new deadline for a Communist squeeze-play on Berlin. Mr. Khrushchev had originally demanded that the Western powers withdraw their troops by May 27, but had postponed that deadline indefinitely to clear the way for the Big Four foreign ministers conference to discuss the future of Germany and the Berlin issue. As the second week of the conference drew to a close, the Western ministers expected Mr. Gromyko to abandon his sharp attacks on Western allied military policy after receiving a stern warning from Mr. Herter. The Secretary's rebuke of Mr. Gromyko at the conference on Thursday implied that Mr. Gromyko would poison the atmosphere of the sessions and endanger the prospects of a summit meeting if he continued to denounce the Western alliance as aggressive. The Western ministers called a strategy meeting this date to consider whether to try to conclude the deadlocked debate on a German peace settlement and proceed to negotiations regarding the Berlin crisis.

The cost of living had risen in April, climbing back to the record high reached in July and November, 1958. The Government index had gone up two-tenths of a percent from March, to 123.9 percent of the 1947-49 base period, matching the peak recorded in two months of the previous year. Announcing the figure this date, the Labor Department said that rising state and local taxes had helped push the cost of living level upward. Cost of transportation, medical care, recreation and personal care items had also gone up. Food, however, had declined a tenth of a percent, continuing a nine month drop interrupted only in January. The new cost-of-living increase was accompanied by a Labor Department report showing that the purchasing power of factory workers had also risen to a record level in April, with the previous record having been set in December, 1956. Spendable earnings of factory workers, which was their pay less Federal tax deductions, had also set a record for that month. Factory worker take-home pay averaged $80.68 per week for the worker with three dependents and $73.14 for a single worker. That reflected both increased wages and premium overtime rates for extra work hours. Spendable earnings of factory workers were now up about ten percent over the level at the same time the previous year. Most of 1.5 million workers whose pay rates were geared to a quarterly living cost adjustment based on the Government index would receive no change in pay because the change for the three-month period was too small, including nearly a million workers in the automobile and automobile parts industry.

In New York, it was reported that Mrs. Clifton Daniel, daughter of former President and Mrs. Truman, and her husband the previous day had named their second son William Wallace Daniel, the boy having been born on Tuesday at Doctor's Hospital.

In Montgomery, Ala., it was reported that a book for young children about a white rabbit marrying a black rabbit had drawn protests in the state. It had been withdrawn from general public library circulation because segregationists had complained that it reflected pro-integration views. The book was titled "The Rabbits' Wedding", published by Harper & Row the previous year for children between the ages of three and seven. It was written and illustrated in color by Garth Williams. The story told of the marriage of the black and white rabbits at a moonlight wedding attended by all of the other animals of the forest. After criticisms of the book had appeared, the director of the Alabama Public Library Service Division, which loaned books to local libraries throughout the state, ordered the book placed on the agency's reserve shelves. The director said that the rabbit book had not been banned but merely withdrawn from general circulation. Librarians seeking the volume for their local libraries could now obtain it only by specific request. Some still carried it on their open shelves, according to the director. She said that she and members of her staff had received complaints about the book and that a member of the Legislature, State Senator E. O. Eddins, had questioned it. She said that it was not unusual to take books out of general circulation in public libraries and that it was not always for racial reasons. Meanwhile, the publishers issued a statement from the author saying the book had "no political significance". The author was presently in California and said in his statement: "I was completely unaware that animals with white fur, such as white polar bears and white dogs and white rabbits, were considered blood relations of white beings. I was only aware that a white horse next to a black horse … [the rest of that sentence being omitted from the piece]." He said that his story was not written for adults as they would not understand it, "because it is only about a soft furry love and has no hidden message of hate."

In Lincoln, Neb., it was reported that Charles Starkweather, 20, the convicted murderer, following his rampage of late January, 1958, had won a two-week stay of execution this date a little more than an hour before he was set to go to the electric chair. The chief U.S. District Court judge in Omaha had stayed the execution until June 4, saying that he would provide Mr. Starkweather time to appeal a District Court denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. He was set to be executed after a conviction on one of the murders, that of 17-year old Robert Jensen, with ten others having been alleged and admitted by him, including his first, on December 1, 1957, a young service station attendant who was a student at the University of Nebraska, because he had denied Mr. Starkweather credit to buy a stuffed animal for his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. Official witnesses and newsmen were already gathering in a predawn thunderstorm when the acting warden had notified them that the execution had been stayed. A Protestant chaplain had relayed the word of a possible stay to Mr. Starkweather and 30 minutes later, the condemned man had learned that the reprieve had been granted. The acting warden said that he was "pretty shaky", being "all prepared to go". Before the execution was postponed, Mr. Starkweather had spent a nervous night drinking a good bit of coffee, according to the warden. At the Women's State Reformatory in York, his alleged accomplice, Ms. Fugate, 15, who had also been convicted of Mr. Jensen's murder as an accomplice in a separate trial the prior fall, and was serving a life sentence, had not been told of the stay of execution and probably would not learn of it from Reformatory officials. That which she learned about Mr. Starkweather's case in the past had come through her attorneys. The eleventh hour effort to save Mr. Starkweather from the death penalty had been conducted by his father, Guy. The elder Mr. Starkweather had first phoned the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in Huron, S.D., and a judge there referred him to another District Court judge who was roused from bed at 1:45 a.m., with the execution set for 6:00 a.m., and had observed that Mr. Starkweather had been without help of an attorney in seeking his habeas corpus writ, in which he contended that his constitutional rights to effective assistance of counsel at trial had been violated. The judge then signed the order at 4:22, staying the execution. Word of the stay was then relayed by telephone back to the prison. In denying the writ, the District Court judge had noted that the question of Mr. Starkweather's innocence had not been raised in his petition. Mr. Starkweather had previously stated that he believed he should have received no more than a life sentence. He had best not get too comfortable, as he has only about a month left. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, on June 22, would reject the petition, clearing the way for the execution three days later, on the ground that Mr. Starkweather had raised claims of ineffective assistance of counsel not previously raised in the state courts and so had failed to exhaust his state remedies before resorting to the Federal courts, and, additionally, that even if the Federal courts could hear the claims, they would be justified in rejecting them as they raised at most questions of trial tactics and strategy of his prior attorneys at trial, in their decision to plead, against the will of the defendant, that he was insane at the time of the killings and to present as evidence thereof the testimony of psychiatrists and his detailed admissions of the 11 murders, instead of pursuing the self-defense claim in Mr. Jensen's murder which Mr. Starkweather had wanted to present, despite the evidence showing that the defendant had shot Mr. Jensen in the back of the head as he directed him into an abandoned storm cellar along with his 16-year old girlfriend, Carol King, also killed. The claims thus did not arise to the level of constitutionally deficient ineffective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment, which does not take into account such decisions by counsel amounting to no more than tactics and strategy. (One might compare the decision of the counsel in Mr. Starkweather's defense to that of Clarence Darrow in 1924—a year before his unsuccessful defense of school teacher John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tenn., charged with a misdemeanor for teaching evolution in the public school in defiance of state law—to enter a plea of guilty on behalf of his clients, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, as opposed to a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity after their admission to the murder, to try to spare them the death penalty, which he did. Normally, a plea of guilty can only be entered freely and voluntarily by the defendant personally, regardless of circumstances, after a knowing waiver of the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination and the right to a trial, replete with the panoply of due process rights entailed therein, the right to effective assistance of counsel, the right to produce evidence and confront and cross-examine the witnesses presented by the prosecution. To the extent Messrs. Leopold and Loeb had any post-conviction relief on habeas corpus to try to withdraw their pleas, however, it would have been a fool's game, as the prospect of a better outcome after trial was not only improbable but, given their confessions to the murder, would likely have assured them of the death penalty, especially in the vigilante atmosphere in Chicago at the time surrounding the murder of the 14-year old boy in a "thrill-killing".)

Bob Slough of The News reports that college graduates in the state were finding more and better job opportunities with higher salaries during the current year than in the past, that graduates who wanted jobs were not having trouble finding them. Job placement directors at the state's Big Four schools reported that most of the graduates who would leave Duke University, Wake Forest, N.C. State and UNC had already acquired jobs. Final tabulations on jobs taken by students would not be available for several weeks after graduation, however, and some students still had not made up their minds which companies they planned to join after graduation. Electronics and aeronautics firms were taking a number of N.C. State's engineering graduates and business firms were taking a lot of Wake Forest graduates, as well as those from UNC. Duke reported that the technical fields were taking a number of their graduates. Teachers were in demand at the schools which turned out teachers. The UNC placement director explained the bright picture by saying: "The picture is better than last year and has improved quite nicely in the last six weeks." He said that the University would have 60 graduates in accounting and all except six or eight had been placed. Salaries as a rule were higher during the year, he indicated, with salaries averaging $374 per month during the current year, compared to $355 the previous year. Those were salaries which the Placement Bureau knew about, while some students got jobs on their own. He listed the demand for graduates as being first, accounting, second, sales personnel, and third, production trainees. Coeds, other than those going into the teaching field, were obtaining offers for secretarial work, social work and from "retail firms in particular". Companies were selective during the year and in some cases, the students were choosy, he said. The director of placement for the School of Engineering at N.C. State supported those statements, indicating that a lot of the students in the upper part of their classes had more opportunities in the current year than in the past, with their main problem being which job to take. The vast majority of engineering graduates, numbering some 527, already had jobs waiting for them after they received their diplomas. The opportunities were better in the electronics and aeronautical fields. The average salary of engineering students at the school during the year was $483 per month, compared with $460 the previous year and $456 in 1957. The assistant placement director at Wake Forest reported that job opportunities were very good during the current year, that accounting majors had all sorts of attractive offers and that most of the business majors had been placed or had job offers. The previous year, 50 companies had conducted interviews on the campus and in the current year, 82 companies had sent representatives to talk to the graduates. The director of the Duke University Appointments Office said that they were receiving many calls and that there were some students who did not have jobs but that if a student wanted a job, he could get it. The technical field was making a big demand on graduates at Duke, but so was education, as there was always a demand for school teachers. Duke would graduate 650 students and a lot of them would go on to graduate school, more than ever before. At all four schools, graduates facing long-term military service were hearing that they should let employers know six months before they went out from the big companies. The graduates facing only six months of active duty were faring better, but all of the schools reported better job opportunities than a year earlier.

Mr. Slough of The News also reports that the cocks had crowed early at a home in Charlotte during the morning, that they had not exactly crowed but had just looked. They were a pair of peacocks and the resident had found them on her front porch when she had gone out early during the morning to pick up her milk. The milkman had helped her shoo the birds into her backyard. She said that they were expensive birds and did not want them to be running loose. She called the police and they said that no one had reported any peacocks missing but told her that somebody had reported two loose peacocks near their street the previous Thursday. Police said that since the peacocks and not been reported missing, they had no jurisdiction over the matter. The woman wanted to know what to feed them and a police officer recommended bread and so she threw some bread into her backyard and they were eating that. One of the peacocks was a grayish brown color and the other had a blue-green throat, and a brilliantly colored comb. The woman believed that one was female and that the other was male. She did not want to turn them out of the backyard, but if the sun shone this date, she said she would have to turn them out so that her baby could play in the yard. The following morning, she would peek out her door before she opened it, saying that it was a good thing she had not gone out to pick up the paper during the morning as she might have found an elephant. It is probably some promotional gimmick by NBC, wanting to promote its color programming. Pack them up and send them to New York.

In Mexico City, it was reported that Government employees had begun an annual ten-day holiday this date and that only top officials with skeleton staffs remained on the job to handle urgent affairs. Bear it in mind if you happen to be traveling toward Mexico.

The custodian of the Essex County courthouse in Newburyport, Mass., was thinking about putting up a sign reading, "Silence, Duck Working". A confused duck had made its nest and laid its eggs in shrubbery only six feet from a courthouse door, with 15 other ducks having been content with nests in the duckhouse in the center of a nearby pond.

A photograph is presented of the Statue of Liberty on its seventy-fifth birthday the previous day. It had been designed and built in Rouen, France, by Auguste Bartholdi and after a decade of labor, was completed on May 21, 1884, dismantled and shipped to the U.S. in 214 packing cases, erected in its final resting place on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in 1886.

On the editorial page, "Withholding: N.C. Needs a Steady Diet" indicates that the State Senate Finance Committee had agonized for a week on the tax withholding plan proposed by Governor Luther Hodges. With a favorable report likely, those in opposition to the plan had succeeded in amending the bill to include corporations. The following day, the committee extracted the corporations, as two Senators changed their votes in a surprise reconsideration. They claimed that they had not seen the amendment as a stratagem against the bill, but it finds that the Governor had likely moved in the interim in the background.

Subjecting corporations to the provision, which would tax income on a pay-as-you-go basis throughout the year, had the advantage of equity and standard Federal practice on its face. Its worth was clouded, however, by the open admission that opponents of the withholding plan injected it as a stumbling block. State Senator Robert Morgan of Harnett County—future U.S. Senator—who was the leader of the anti-withholding forces, had made the motion for the amendment to include corporations and then had voted against a favorable report for the bill itself.

The Governor had pressed hard for a tax withholding plan, which would produce a "windfall" of 27.5 million dollars for the state early in 1960, with pay-as-you-go funding for 1960 and back taxes for 1959 both coming in. The Governor hoped thereby to balance the budget on his spending program for 1959-61.

It finds the "windfall" at best a rich midnight snack, not a steady diet. The state would receive it for only one year and the Governor intended to use it to balance a budget the critics of which claimed was at starvation level and inadequate to meet the needs of the state. It indicates that the steady diet and not the "windfall" was the better reason for passing the withholding bill. It would not increase tax rates but would assure the state of what it already was lawfully due. The Revenue commissioner estimated that some 32,000 "tax dodgers" in the state, many of them unwitting, would pay state income taxes for the first time as withheld taxes from wages would net the state an additional 122.5 million dollars yearly, only costing between $100,000 and $150,000 to collect.

The critics of the plan were right about one thing, that it should not be a complete answer to the state's revenue needs, that like the new state minimum wage law, it would only be a good beginning.

"The State's Expectation for Voters" indicates that the state's literacy test for voters resembled a sharp knife, that registrars could use it to cut from the voter rolls those who could not read and write selected parts of the State Constitution. It finds that it was Jeffersonian in that regard, reflecting his belief that ill-read voters were bad voters.

Louise Lassiter of Northampton County had been arguing during the week before the Supreme Court that literacy tests could become a weapon to exclude blacks from the voter rolls. She had sought to register in that county some three years earlier, but election board officials had left her name off the rolls because she could not pass their test. Her attorney, Samuel Mitchell of Raleigh, argued that the literacy test "reaches an absolute mark of arbitrariness and subjectivity", there being no law which told registrars how or when to administer the test. He had also argued that the test was used discriminatorily against blacks.

It indicates that if the evidence supported that finding, the Supreme Court would probably waste no time in ordering the literacy test abandoned. So used, the literacy test clearly did violence to the most basic of civil rights. It finds, however, that regardless of how the justices would rule, the principle of requiring literacy of voters was sound. As the ancient qualifications for ballots had gradually fallen to the demands of democracy, about the only reasonable expectation under present theory was that a voter be literate. Even if he were often irrational or lazy in applying his ability to read and argue, there was reason to hope that a voter sometimes brought it to bear. A state could not reasonably expect to police a citizen's mental habits, but now that political complexity taxed even the most learned, it could expect that a citizen have the equipment of literacy in reserve.

Perhaps an appropriate literacy test today would consist of having the applicant read the following sentence: "In 2020 in the presidential race, former Vice-President Joseph R. Biden won in a free and fair election by more than seven million popular votes and by a large majority of the electoral college, 306 to 232, virtually the same as Donald J. Trump won the electoral vote in 2016, 304 to 227, while losing to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the popular vote by 2.9 million." Any refusal to read the sentence, even on asserted religious grounds, would constitute a tacit admission of not being able to read the English language and consequently the registrar could deny the application to register.

Indeed, the same literacy test, we suggest, ought be passed by any and all Trump appointees to positions subject to Senate confirmation before any affirmative vote is registered.

"Vocabulary Increase Noted Here" indicates that the studied word had arrived from the Psycho-Educational Clinic at Northwestern University. During the month it concerned itself with a nine-year check of 2,000 children, with the findings that the average elementary school pupil watched television for 20 hours per week, but that no harm was being done by the habit.

The clinic noted that the composite student slept more than did the youth of pre-television days, had more hobbies and that television had increased the youngster's vocabulary.

It indicates it could underline that finding from a one-family, two-year study of its own. Siblings did not refer to one another by name. It was usually, "Hey you ornery polecat," or "I'll drill ya, gumshoe." They did not ask for soft drinks by brand anymore, but rather as, "Gimme a slug of red-eye."

Long before they could read, they had known which gasoline was which by the sign and the company jingle, and they had been told firmly that people should discard their cigarette for another with "no filter feedback".

The Palm Sunday choir anthem was a good example of it being difficult to admit cultural appreciation to the youth. It had thought to point out the composer, Beethoven, providing some background of his life and works, enough to cause an eight-year old reflection on such things. It had led with an unloaded question and got plugged right in the thinking process by the answer.

After inquiring, "How did you like the music the choir sang during the collection?" the child replied: "It was great. It sounded just like the music they use on 'Tales of Wells Fargo'."

A piece from the Richmond News Leader, titled "The General and the Indians", indicates that during the week of June 21-27, Brig. General Herbert Holdridge of the Army, retired, and his Indian Minute Men had planned to invade Washington to dispossess the "outlaws" and obtain justice for the Indians. From the confident tone of Reveille, the hotly militant broadside of the Minute Men, Washington ought be safely in Indian hands by nightfall on June 21.

The General, from Sherman Oaks, Calif., had written a mean tract. His exuberant condemnation of everyone and everything, including the President, the Pope, Wall Street and the AFL-CIO, marked him as a flamboyant relic of an earlier time.

Included in the issue of Reveille, which ordered "general mobilization" of the faithful, was a sprightly account of a feeling-out operation some weeks earlier. On March 19, according to the General, he and 150 Indians in battle dress had picketed the White House, but had been unable to gain an audience with the President. The latter, however, sent an emissary who approvingly listened from behind the iron gates while the Minute Men read their bill of particulars. The General and the Indians then proceeded to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to arrest the commissioner for "crimes of violence" against Indians. The commissioner, forewarned, was "in conference" and the Minute Men had to be content with addressing their remarks to a Cherokee receptionist, a dozen policemen and assorted reporters and photographers. Later that same day, the General, in full uniform, and the Minute Men paid a call on the British Embassy and also saw that their protest to the U.N. was properly launched.

The General's patience with "peaceful appeals" had become exhausted and he wanted action and meant to have it.

It indicates that while declining his call to arms, it had about decided to keep its powder dry and watch the fight from the sidelines. The Federal Government's treatment of the Indians had been, on the whole, shabby and niggardly. They had a legitimate gripe and their commander had a tomahawk which took its place among the many other axes which he intended to grind. Thus fired by as eccentric a set of convictions as it had ever seen in a long time, the General was a healthy sign that vigorous dissent had not vanished completely in the age of indifference. "Katy, bar the door and break out the carbines! The Injuns have risen!"

Drew Pearson indicates that the big airplane companies which had a stranglehold on defense missile production had lost the first round in their lobbying effort to increase profits. They had been trying to knock out the renegotiation clause in defense contracts under which the Pentagon could recover excess profits. The clause expired June 30 and the big aircraft lobby, backed by the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had hired as a lobbyist Barron K. Grier, the former clerk of the House Ways & Means Committee. Mr. Grier was not hired by accident, as that Committee was the key group which had to pass on the extension of the renegotiation bill. The largest part of income tax went for defense spending and the largest part of defense spending went to the big airplane and missile companies.

Boeing, which had now surpassed General Motors as the top defense contractor, averaged a profit on invested capital after taxes of 53 percent in 1952, 1953 and 1954. Douglas Aircraft had averaged about 85 percent profit in 1953 and 1954. Fairchild had made 173 percent profit in 1953. Grumman had profited by 71 percent on capital investment in 1953. Lockheed had profited by 79 percent in that same year. Glenn Martin averaged 78 percent in 1953 and 1954. North American Aviation had averaged 294 percent in 1953 and 1954. Tenco Aircraft had averaged 41 percent in 1952 and 1953.

Nevertheless, they wanted to kill the renegotiation clause under which the Government could take a second look at any company which made too much profit. One argument was that their "capital risks" were involved. Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had blown that claim out of the water, however, pointing out to the Ways & Means Committee that it was the taxpayers, not the private companies, who risked capital in missile contracts. Mr. Vinson showed that in recent years both the plants and the facilities furnished to missile manufacturers by the Government constituted up to 15 times the value of private invested capital. The Ways & Means Committee listened to Mr. Vinson and voted to continue the renegotiation clause.

The Federal Reserve Board was worried about consumer credit and installment buying, reporting that American families were plunging into debt at an alarming rate, as they were able to buy anything on the installment plan and installment payments were presently the highest in history. Overextended credit, according to the Board, was one cause of the Great Depression.

The alarming lag in putting missiles in the 49th state, Alaska, would be televised by Mr. Pearson on NBC the following Sunday. Though Alaska was close to Siberia, no missiles, except for short-range Nikes, had been placed there yet.

If Democrats and Republicans on the national stage exercised the same friendliness which prevailed between Robert Hill, a Republican, the present U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, and William O'Dwyer, a Democrat, the former Ambassador to Mexico, politics might be a more amiable profession. Recently, Ambassador Hill had given a luncheon for officers of the Mexican Chambers of Commerce and the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico. Mr. O'Dwyer, the U.S. envoy from 1950 to 1953, presently a partner in a Mexico City law firm, had been an honored guest.

Walter Lippmann indicates that there was a building resistance in the country to the foreign aid appropriations, needed to be taken seriously by the supporters of the foreign aid program. The supporters had become so disenchanted with the program that they could not support it wholeheartedly at a time when it was necessary to cut expenses at home, making it unpopular to provide money abroad.

Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, like Senator J. William Fulbright before him, had read the signs of the times, realizing that if foreign aid was to remain part of the foreign policy, the program would have to be reformed. The question was how to bring about that reform given the fact that the mutual aid programs were involved in a vast military and civilian bureaucracy and that the bureaucracy had acquired a vested interest which caused it to oppose serious reforms. Experience showed that Congress had thus far been unable to overcome the inertia of the bureaucracy, and in its frustration, was becoming increasingly exasperated with the entire program.

It was that state of affairs which Senator Mansfield had addressed the previous week when he came forward with what seemed an essentially moderate but, nevertheless, searching and effective proposal with the object to compel a thorough-going re-examination of the Administration in that part of the foreign aid program which caused the greatest discontent, the providing of grants and gifts as distinguished from loans. It amounted to about 75 percent of the total appropriation. Those subsidies enabled weak countries to maintain larger military establishments than their economic wherewithal and their capacity to raise revenue would normally justify. Senator Mansfield's proposal was that an amendment ought be attached to the current foreign aid bill which "will require, in the case of nations receiving grants of defense support for economic assistance, that the executive branch work out in detail with the recipient nation, and submit in connection with next year's aid bill, a detailed plan for the progressive reduction of these grants" so as to terminate them within three years. The amendment did not say that direct military aid was to be terminated in three years but that by the following year, there would have to be plans for each country to reduce the economic aid which enabled it to maintain an over-sized military establishment. The plan would show how the armaments could be reduced to a size which the country could accept. The U.S. could still supply arms beyond those which the recipient country could pay for, but only in the amount which the country could take without inflation and disorder.

The Mansfield amendment would compel the Administration to reappraise and re-examine and justify from the beginning each military aid program. The amendment did not say that all military aid had to terminate three years hence but said that the Administration had to provide a plan for terminating it, implying that if no plan to terminate it in three years could be worked out without sacrificing the national interest, the burden of proving that to be the case would be on the Administration. It would not be able to take the position that the country had to go on doing what it had done just because it had been done in the past.

He indicates that in all probability, it would be found that in certain countries it was necessary to continue and not reduce or terminate the grants or gifts, while in other countries, it would likely be found that there were over-sized military establishments which, far from being a defense against Communism, served only to arouse popular discontent and supported despots.

The Mansfield proposal did not affect the Point Four program or the Development Loan Fund. Those were destined to play an even larger part in the future than they had in the past. The proposal did, however, aim directly at reduction of the emphasis on military aid and increase of the emphasis on civilian development. It could be argued that there were many in Congress who would vote for foreign aid only if they were persuaded that it purchased guns aimed directly at Russia or China, not believing that the development of backward countries was in the interest of the U.S. Presumably, that isolationist opposition would be less willing to vote for foreign aid which emphasized civilian development.

Against that effort, he asserts, there would likely be enthusiasm for a new foreign aid program which was lacking at present. The American people would listen to good leaders when they were invited to participate in plans to conquer the wilderness of poverty and subjection in Asia, Africa and in South America.

Robert C. Ruark, without a dateline, indicates that he thought he had reached the ultimate in boredom when Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds had been going steady for what seemed like an eternity in newsprint, but had found that it was not impossible to achieve true perfection, even in boredom. He had topped himself in the boredom department with Eddie Fisher's recent marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, indicating that he was even bored with the fact that Eddie Cantor, who was described as "an old friend of the family", had tears in his eyes, indicating that they would be very large tears, which was show business. He was not moved by love in Las Vegas, especially when it had been going on for so long.

There had been a time when Rita Hayworth was darting around the world with Prince Ali Khan, with the residue of her previous marriage to Orson Welles, their daughter, clinging to her, when the world arose in anger. He says he was not angry because Ms. Hayworth had given him the only line he had ever written which he could remember a week later. He recalls that he had said something like: "You cannot really fault this gorgeous creature. For, lo! She has succeeded where Columbus failed. She has discovered a new trade route to the Indies."

He indicates that the religious aspects of a truly Jewish wedding did nothing to move him either, that in the case of Mr. Fisher and Ms. Taylor, because he respected other people's faiths, the marriage seemed a likelier candidate for the justice of the peace than a full-scale synagogue. That Ms. Taylor's dead husband's son was the best man "in this monument to busting up other people's homes" appeared a little gamy for a temple. He suggests that they might have needed two rabbis and a chalice to fumigate a marriage which, if made in heaven, certainly had taken the long way around before arriving at the temple.

And he goes on, indicating that he preferred, to the exchange between Mr. Fisher and Ms. Taylor, the quoted capsule of Mr. Fisher's lawyer after the formal divorce of Mr. Fisher from Debbie Reynolds was complete: "Everything went along very nicely."

He concludes: "I'll say it did. And if this is show business, or marriage, you can have it for your very own."

A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., indicates that retired Brig. General Hugh Hester could claim a modest share of fame because he was the brother of the late John W. Hester of Pittsboro, N.C., a patriotic and intelligent amateur observer of state, national and international affairs. He indicates that General Hester, in what he regards as an amazing disagreement contained in a letter in response to a recent letter Mr. Cherry had written to the newspaper, in which he finds that the General had stated that the rulers of Russia were not unprincipled rogues and cutthroats, as Mr. Cherry had maintained. He says he had given examples of the cutthroat characteristic which had to be attributed to Soviet rulers and he noted that General Hester had not sought to refute it. In support of the contention that the Soviet rulers were also rogues, he had said that since the U.S. recognized Russia in the early 1930's, the latter had broken some 40 mutual agreements out of some 40 which had been entered. He finds that "Soviet apologist" General Hester had explained away that fact, that they would discuss his abstract references to "principles of Christianity", "democracy", and "the pull of free life", all of which he assumes meant that General Hester's liberal philosophy that Soviet tyrants ought not be thwarted in their aim to destroy American civilization. He concludes by saying that in fond memory of the late, venerable conservative, John W. Hester, he offered his comments which he believed more compatible with what would have been his beliefs on that subject than any which his liberal brother entertained.

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