The Charlotte News
Thursday, June 11, 1959
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that Secretary of State Christian Herter had met with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko this date to find out if there was any basis for continuing negotiations for a stop-gap Berlin agreement. Taking the lead for the West in the Big Four negotiations, Mr. Herter had met with Mr. Gromyko after consulting with his Western colleagues, Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd and French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve De Murville, as well as with Ambassador Wilhelm Grewe of West Germany. Mr. Gromyko showed some signs of willingness to lower his demands for ending the Soviet threat to West Berlin temporarily, but Mr. Herter and his colleagues had to determine whether Mr. Gromyko was willing to lower the demands enough to make further negotiation reasonable in trying to effect agreement. The Western diplomats were completely opposed to accepting the Soviet suggestion for a one-year deadline on a Berlin settlement, which the Russians could use to prolong the threat of a future blockade. It had been understood that the method of approach was to try to determine whether there were elements in various Western proposals on Berlin and in the unacceptable Soviet plan put forward the previous day which could be extracted to provide a hopeful new basis for continuing the talks. Failing that, an early collapse of the conference was a serious possibility. Mr. Gromyko had denied Western charges that the Soviet proposal was an ultimatum. Other Soviet spokesmen said that the one-year deadline was negotiable and indicated that the Soviets might agree to a longer period of Western occupation. Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Valerian Zorin at a press briefing had called on the West to make counter-proposals so that the negotiations could proceed. Western foreign ministers, however, remained adamantly opposed to any deadline on their occupation of Berlin. Secretary Herter told the foreign ministers conference that the Western occupation rights were not granted by the Soviets and "they are not rights which the Soviets can cancel, assign or modify." He and Mr. Gromyko had scheduled a private session for this date to consider the future of the conference and it appeared likely that the meeting would end in disagreement within a few days unless the Soviets would drastically revise their proposal. There was some talk of a long suspension of the conference while deputy foreign ministers of the four nations carried on negotiations. Western officials believed that Mr. Gromyko had contacted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to report the violent Western Big Three reaction to the new Soviet proposal and to discuss the possibility of modifications of it.
In London, British Home Secretary Richard Butler reported this date that atomic spy Klaus Fuchs would be released from prison late in the month and would be free to live where he wanted. The German-born scientist had been jailed in 1950 for betraying Western atomic secrets to the Russians and it had been said that as a result, the Soviet Union had obtained the atomic bomb five years sooner than it would have otherwise. Secretary Butler was asked in Commons whether the brain of the "brilliant scientist", once one of the leading persons in British atomic research, would be of value at present to potential enemies, and he had responded: "Fuchs has been out of touch with nuclear work for ten years, and any knowledge he may have had in this field is out of date in view of the vast developments which have taken place since. Allowing for normal remission, Fuchs will complete his sentence at the end of June. He was on conviction a naturalized British subject. He was thereafter deprived of British nationality. It will not be for the Government to determine where he should live after his discharge from prison."
In Washington, it was reported that
a trio of alleged mobsters, wearing over-sized sunglasses like a
uniform of their trade, had fascinated the Senate Rackets Committee,
chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, and audiences during
the week. They included Sam "Mooney" Giancana, John
Formosa, and Anthony Pinelli. Mr. Giancana, alleged to be the top
No. 1 or No. 2 hoodlum, along with Tony Accardo, in the Chicago underworld, had responded only
with giggles
In London, it was reported that evangelist Billy Graham had departed for Moscow this date, somewhat startled by reaction in London to his comment on public behavior in London parks. At a press conference, he had said that Londoners seemed to be turning their parks "into bedrooms" and that he and his wife had left the parks after being shocked by what they had seen on a stroll the previous Sunday. Several London newspapers had commented that it was natural and not repulsive for British lovers to hold hands and perhaps to indulge in kisses behind the bushes, or maybe even in front of the bushes according to some of the commentators. Dr. Graham said: "Perhaps my comments need to be amplified to be understood fully. We saw two couples in the midst of the sex act—in daylight. I am sure these things happen in other parts of the world and maybe in America, but I suppose I haven't had a lot of time to walk around parks in America. I have no objection to people kissing or holding hands, or that sort of conduct. But we saw things, which I'm sure any Britisher would object to. There were many children playing and I certainly would not want my children in the midst of that sort of behavior. But your parks are beautiful." The evangelist said that he and his wife planned to stay in Moscow for about five days as tourists and that there was a possibility that he might preach in some Russian Baptist church, indicating that he would not know until this night whether he would be invited to do so, but that if he did preach there, he would say the same things he did in other parts of the world, adding, "I don't think there would be any difficulty preaching through an interpreter."
In Tallahassee, Fla., one of the defense counsel in the trial of the four white youths accused of raping a 19-year old black Florida A&M University freshman coed contended that the latter had offered no resistance to the four youths accused of raping her. The lawyer for a 23-year old defendant told the all-male jury in his opening statement that the girl had willingly submitted to the four men. He added: "It is a close question whether or not consent was given." The State had accused the four of forcibly raping the coed after abducting her at gunpoint from her black date that evening. As to how she had ended up in the car with the four white youths, the attorney for one of them said only: "Through interplay, one of the girls was in the car with the four boys." He told the jury that his client was insanely drunk when he and his three white companions had happened on the victim parked in a car with her date and another couple on the night of May 2, indicating that the four boys had stopped because "someone suggested, 'Let's break up this necking party.'" The prosecutor said that he planned to get into the major part of the case against the four, who would receive the death penalty unless mercy were recommended by the jury after conviction. The alleged victim stood in a long line of nearly 60 State and defense witnesses on Wednesday night to be sworn. Her eyes swept across the courtroom to the long table inside the rail where the four defendants waited nervously for the court to recess after a tedious first day of jury selection. Selection had been completed early on Wednesday night after the members were deemed qualified by the prosecutor to enforce the death penalty. A dozen prospective jurors had been excused by the court for cause when they said they had conscientious objections to imposing the death penalty.
In Raleigh, it was reported that a State House committee had reported favorably this date a bill which would permit towns in dry counties to hold liquor elections. The Propositions and Grievance Committee had given the measure an overwhelming endorsement after listening to "wets" and "drys" debate the matter in a public hearing. The next step would be to put the bill before the entire House. It was introduced by Mecklenburg's Representative Frank Snepp, aimed at halting the flood of local enabling acts which cropped up in each session of the General Assembly. It would enable any town or city of more than 2,000 population to hold an ABC store election if one was requested on a petition signed by 25 percent or more of the registered voters. Under the current law, whether ABC stores were established depended on countywide votes. Representative Sidney Britt of Bladen County, one of the Assembly's dry leaders, had told the Committee that he did not think they should take the right away from a dry county and asked for fairness for those who lived in dry counties, indicating that the bill was reaching too far. Representative Marsalis Buchanan of Jackson County said, however, that he was "embarrassed" at having to decide on the local enabling acts when two representatives disagreed. The House recently had split down the middle on a bill which would give the small community of Gibsonville, straddling the Guilford-Alamance County lines, authority to hold a liquor election. The Guilford delegation favored the bill while a representative of Alamance had opposed it.
John Kilgo of The News reports that police officials had reported this date that the juvenile crime in Charlotte was apparently going down. A lieutenant, head of the city's Youth Bureau, said that the number of cases handled thus far during the year by his department was far below what it had been the previous year. It had occurred during a time when the number of young people in the city was increasing every day. During the first six months of 1958, 753 offenses had been committed by local juveniles and thus far during the year, the figure stood approximately at 675. There were four murder cases heading the docket of 271 cases which were scheduled for trial during the ensuing term of criminal Superior Court to begin on Monday in Charlotte, with there also being two rape cases, five manslaughter cases, three armed robbery cases and one burglary case. It provides the names of those charged with those serious offenses. Police said that the year's figure would be even much lower than the previous year's total except for many petty offenses. Just two weeks earlier, Youth Bureau officers had cleared up 35 cases of hubcap larcenies. The lieutenant said that they had less trouble during the current year with young people than they had in many years, that the local young people had committed no major crimes, such as murder, rape or narcotics violations during 1959. He believed that most of the success thus far during the year could be attributed to the cooperation they had received from the teenagers themselves. Outgoing Police Chief Ernest Selvey said that as far as he knew, there was no organized teenage crime in Charlotte, that there were no organized gangs and that they had no large gang fights and cuttings of which the police were aware.
Julian Scheer of The News reports from Matthews that people did not get riled-up there very often and even when they did, it was a quiet kind of seething. But now they were somewhat put out because the Seaboard Air Line Railroad was trying to close the Matthews depot and tear it down. An old-timer said this date, "It ain't gonna put us out of business, but you hate to give up something you already got." A group of local people had gone to Raleigh the previous day to tell the Utilities Commission why the depot ought remain in the Mecklenburg County community. They had hired a former local boy, Charlotte attorney Paul Ervin, to help them state their case and he had provided a lot of facts and figures showing that the depot's business was on the upswing at a greater percentage rate than the entire Seaboard system, that the outlook was getting brighter every day. Seaboard said that there was not enough carload business, however, to justify the maintenance of the station and the pay of its lone employee, H. L. Helms. Mr. Helms had said this date that he did "a right good business." There was some Railway Express, some Western Union business, some coal, fertilizer and furniture shipped in, that a local freight train between Charlotte and Monroe, if it did not stop in Matthews, would force people to have to go all the way to Charlotte to get what was shipped to them. There had not been a passenger train through the station since the previous November and the Birmingham or Richmond freights and passenger trains just rumbled through with a blast of a whistle. A storekeeper recalled that there had been a time when everybody in town met the trains. He said that they were making money and that they ought to keep the station and provide Mr. Helms with a pension just to keep him.
Mr. Scheer also reports that the "Voice" in the Johnston Building would soon be silent and no longer would people hear the foreign and feminine voice breathe, "Lassiter, Moore and Van Allen", the name of a law firm. It would be sad to callers who liked a touch of lovely Denmark with their lawsuits. It would be sad for the men of the building, who liked a touch of glamour in their elevators. Hanne Bowers, a 19-year old "Danish Brigitte Bardot", had thrown the building into a mild state of turmoil for the previous two weeks, during which she had been a substitute receptionist and PBX operator for the law firm. One man had said to another during the week, "Have you dialed FRanklin 7-3441 recently?" suggesting that he do it. Men had been doing it a lot recently, with one man saying to another on an elevator, "See what's up on ten?" indicating, "Lassiter, Moore and Van Allen…" behind his cupped hand. Ms. Bowers was a "beautiful little girl with kinda silver hair (it has been blonde, red, etc.)", from Copenhagen, presently living in Kannnapolis, stood 5 feet, five inches tall, weighed 110 pounds, and measured 36-23-36, leaving soon to model in New York City. She had turned down a five-year film contract in Sweden, a year trial at 20th Century Fox in Hollywood, which she regarded as an "aurful town", and would forsake those sunny climes for financially sunnier ones. Mr. Scheer regards it as too bad, as it had gotten to be a pleasure, according to some, to call a lawyer. Pshaw, they got that idea off "77 Sunset Strip", done, incidentally, for the season … until we'll see it again in September, unless, that is, you like re-runs. They will all be done for the season by month's end and so catch the fresh ones while you can, like, daddio.
Ronald Green, golf expert and assistant sports editor of the newspaper, offers a special report on the sports page from the Winged Foot golf course in New York, home of the 1959 National Open, beginning this date. Mr. Green would cover all rounds of the tournament with authoritative inside stories, indicating that Ben Hogan was being circulated as the person to watch closely in the tournament, explaining why. There were also some sidelights as to how Dick Groat, the shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Mike Souchak, the golfer, had once practiced together while at Duke University, plus other interesting information.
On the editorial page, "It's Simply a Question of Fair Play" indicates that the integrity of the General Assembly was at stake in the State constitutional debate over judicial reform and legislative representation. It finds that a plot was afoot which was easily explained. The Legislature's rural bloc wanted to wrap up in one big package the proposed uniform court system and a plan to limit every county to one State Senator. Then, when those issues were submitted to the voters, no one could approve the desperately needed court reform without also approving an already discredited scheme to deny the state's most populous counties fair representation in the Senate.
It urges that it simply would not work, that minority rule could not be tolerated in the state, no matter how attractive the bait. The one Senator per county plan had been submitted to the voters in 1954 as a single issue and had been overwhelmingly defeated. Rural legislators, who were so anxious to perpetuate their unconstitutional grip on State government, knew that it would likely be rejected again without the aid of some clever hocus-pocus. The General Assembly's persistent refusal to obey the present State Constitution and redistrict the state after each decennial census, not done since 1941, suggested the tenacity with which Georgia's "wool-hat boys" had perpetuated their own state's county-unit system, giving to a person in rural Twiggs County, for instance, 143 times the voting power of a resident of urban Fulton County. It finds that there was no place for such a system of "democracy" in North Carolina.
A glance at the 1950 census would provide a clue to the state's present plight. The 197,052 people listed in the 20th Senatorial District, comprising Mecklenburg County, had but one Senator, while the 105,945 people in the neighboring 19th Senatorial District, including Union, Stanly and Anson Counties, had two. The legislators knew that there was a gross inequity under the present system and that the state's voters had decisively rejected an amendment which would have written the present inequity into law, and also understood that North Carolinians had earned the right to vote on court reform without any qualifications.
It finds that since all of that was known, the massive weight of responsibility facing members of the 1959 General Assembly was obvious and inescapable, and that the voters ought be given the opportunity to vote on the two completely different constitutional issues separately.
"Here's a Project for the Economizers" urges that Charlotte's freewheeling system of allowances for municipal employees who used their own cars in their work ought be subjected to stern scrutiny at City Hall. Monthly payments ran as high as $105 for the purpose and several employees in the health, tax and engineering departments received as much as $80 per month. Those were flat amounts, not based on actual mileage recorded during work-related duties. In such cases, short-range savings might mean long-range extravagance.
It suggests that if the City had to pay an employee $105 per month to operate the person's personal vehicle, it would likely be more economical in the long-run for the City to purchase and service a low-priced automobile of its own for the employee to use in municipal service. The system of flat monthly payments contained another built-in booby-trap in that some local governments had used the device to conceal regular "bonuses" provided selected employees over and above the going rate of pay authorized under a job classification. That type of under-the-table deal was subject to the broadest abuse and ought never be allowed.
Municipal employees, as with other employees, it concludes, ought be paid what they were worth and paid in the open without any semi-secret gratuities.
"The Real Test of a Literacy Test" finds that the Supreme Court had wisely upheld North Carolina's literacy test, indicating that one thing about literacy tests was that they were fair enough if given in good faith to all and not used to pare the voting rolls in favor of the majority.
The plaintiff in the case, Louise Lassiter, whom the piece describes incorrectly as illiterate, had charged in her lawsuit that officials, in administering the test in Northampton County, had discriminated against her because she was black. The Court had found otherwise, and its settlement of the case had assumed that the state was using the test fairly.
It finds it more challenging to be concerned about whether a voter ought be required to read or write parts of the Constitution, for to ask a potential voter for such a qualification was to imply that North Carolinians, and voters in the other 18 states where literacy tests were administered, should be disposed to use literacy in politics. It finds the rub to be putting literacy to use, a larger order by far than learning it in school.
During the current month, colleges and universities in the state were graduating thousands of students and none would find it hard to read and write parts of the Constitution and therefore to obtain a ballot. But public surveys, as one recently conducted, had shown that about half of a college class was unable to identify the Senators from the state, indicating that citizens were not using "literacy" as wisely as they might. Literacy, it indicates, was a fair requirement of a voter at present, but the real test of literacy was not how many could qualify to vote but how many would use it with studied conviction rather than worn hearsay.
Speaking of the Drown America Act, perhaps an appropriate test for voter eligibility at present to determine literacy ought be to ask the applicant to state who has the right of due process under the Fifth Amendment and who has the rights of due process and equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, presenting the applicant with a copy of the document and affording 15 minutes to study same before having to answer. That would be undoubtedly a sure way to eliminate many residents of Magaville from the voter rolls, while not being at all discriminatory, as the inquiry is both valid and instructive to those who are destructive of our constitutional rights or who are unduly focused on only one or two rights and skip the rest as so much antiguities under glass and thereby miss the general spirit of the document, ever expansive of individual freedom historically, at least since the aftermath of Dred Scott and the Civil War taught the profound lesson against discrimination in blood and gore, and reaffirmed that lesson in the blood and gore manifested during the centennial of that war, not restrictive, at least not until the occasional narrow current majority of pikers got their say out of a milieu of societal insensitivity, formed in the late Seventies and Eighties, more attuned to robotic parroting—Polly-want-a-Cracker—of the law than understanding of it in terms of its effect on the society at large and not just special interest groups piloted by well-heeled lobbies, such as gun manufacturers, for instance.
While the principle set down in Lassiter has not been disturbed, that as long as the test employed is not applied discriminatorily to disenfranchise certain identifiable groups, it does not offend the Fifteenth Amendment, the case of South Carolina v. Katzenbach in 1966 upheld that part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which declared that in certain areas of the country having a history of voter suppression, that is which had maintained voter qualification tests or devices as of November 1, 1964 and had less than half the voting-age population registered to vote or who had voted in the 1964 presidential election, the tests or devices were suspended, subject to being renewed upon a showing by such a determined state or its subdivision before a three-judge D.C. Federal District Court that for five consecutive years, there had been no discriminatory test or device used. No new test could be used without approval first by the Attorney General or a three-judge D.C. District Court. South Carolina had sought to employ a new test without such approval and it was deemed barred by the Act from doing so, not violative of the Fifteenth Amendment. That part of the Act was, in effect, an extension of Reconstruction, without Thorough, based on a demonstrated need to rectify continuing discrimination after 100 years following the Civil War.
"Fallout Report" quotes from the New York Daily News: "Exactly what damage is fallout doing to the human body? No one is quite sure. An exciting recent discovery at Oak Ridge indicates it may be causing only one-fourth as much genetic harm as had been supposed."
It finds that it was three-fourths cheered up about the whole ugly business.
"This Is No Way To Save Laundries" finds that State Senator Frank Cooke's pleas that laundries be exempted from the State minimum wage law or that they be would be washed up in the state had not scared the Senators into exempting them until 1963, as the Senator had proposed. The Senate's Manufacturing, Labor and Commerce Committee had wisely turned down the bill.
As passed a month earlier, the 75-cent minimum wage law was more a victory of principle than of economic revolution. Amendments had riddled it with exemptions, from bowling alley pin boys to babysitters and it finds it was no time to add more exemptions as the state looked now toward expanding and deepening its coverage, not knocking holes in it.
Query whether laundries dry the lawns. Learning to read and write can become very confusing when one has become accustomed for six long years of just putting things together by sight and sound, without much discernment of the little curlicues forming words.
A piece from the Washington Post, titled "Uncomfortable Thoughts", indicates that it had reserved comment on the Discomfort Index because it felt that it needed a few uncomfortable days to appraise the new Weather Bureau formula and its effect on hot weather temperament. Now that it had huffed and puffed through some steamy spring days which had been statistically studied for their degrees of discomfort, it had the uncomfortable feeling that the Weather Bureau might have sneaked one index too many over on it.
To be reminded on the morning after how uncomfortable one had been on the day before did not seem to help at all, indicating that perhaps it would feel better about the Index if the Weather Bureau had taken a positive rather than a negative approach to heat and humidity. It suggests a Comfort Index, rather than the opposite.
When the Discomfort Index reached 79, practically everyone was supposed to be uncomfortable. But it wonders about the man who did not think the weather was too bad until he read the Index, and then was likely to conform all too quickly to the discomfort norm in such times of "disappearing individualism", leading only to further shortening of legislative and executive tempers around Washington in July and August, finding it was getting hot under the collar already and that if it had a congressman to whom to write, he would hear from the writer.
Drew Pearson, in London, in the third dispatch while he was serving as a delegate to the Atlantic Congress studying NATO prospects and problems, indicates that Queen Elizabeth had it all over her late grandfather, King George V, when it came to royal deportment before large crowds. He had watched her recently under circumstances almost identical with those when her royal grandfather had opened the London Naval conference in 1930. King George had then been about 60 and had plenty of experience at those kinds of functions. He had sat on his throne, short, stolid, sedate, rather perfunctorily reading his speech handed to him by his aide, and then made his exit with mingled decorum and boredom. At that time, his granddaughter Elizabeth was only four, playing around in pinafores and never expecting that her uncle, the Duke of Windsor, would renounce the British throne in favor of an American divorcee, thus putting her in line to become Queen.
The previous week, the Queen had sat on the same golden throne in the same Westminster Hall, built by the son of William the Conqueror in 1097, where Geoffrey Chaucer had once served as a clerk and where Charles I had been condemned to death. A retinue of state trumpeters, guards, gentlemen-at-arms wearing long white plumes, and yeomen of the guard dressed like the jack of hearts carrying long spears, had preceded her. There was a blare of trumpets as she entered and she stood for a moment receiving her Cabinet and distinguished guests. Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio, looking somewhat uncomfortable in a new cutaway coat, had bowed. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, also in a morning coat, bobbed his head. The Queen did not know that the latter's father-in-law had designed the British battleship Hood and the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth, named for the Queen's mother, and the Senator did not delay the proceedings to tell her.
The Queen had read her speech like her grandfather, having had it handed to her by an aide but obviously having rehearsed it, as, unlike her grandfather, she had read it with sincerity and feeling, and also unlike her father, George VI, who stuttered, she was not nervous when she said: "These old walls have witnessed unusual events in our history. There is unmistakable longing among peace-loving people for a happier international atmosphere, but there is no simple guide to point the way. There are, however, two things which unite us—respect for the freedom of the individual, and simple faith in God. These two principles show very clearly that the things that divide us are very small compared with those which unite us."
He finds that the nervous little girl whom President Truman had called a fairy princess when she had come to the U.S. for the first time, had grown into a mature woman of confidence, beauty and charm.
Walter Lippmann indicates that although in the previous 60 days West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had reversed himself about becoming the president and giving up the chancellorship, his convictions and purpose had remained consistent. Beyond the reunification of the two Germanys, he was determined to assure the continuity of a close collaboration between West Germany and France, the core of his European policy. Its instrumentalities were the Common Market, the coal-steel and atomic communities, and NATO. The binding force for the present was the personal affinity between Chancellor Adenauer and Premier Charles de Gaulle of France.
The problem with which he had been wrestling during the spring was how he could most effectively defend and promote that Franco-German policy. On April 7, he had allowed himself to be persuaded by his Christian Democratic Party leaders to give up the chancellorship and run for the presidency of the Bundestag, traditionally a largely ceremonial post. He had believed at the time that it was the best way to ensure his policy beyond the hazards of the elections of 1961. For at least two years to come, he would be president and the chancellor would be his appointee and his subordinate. The chancellor would be Franz Etzel, experienced and convinced of the Adenauer policy. During those two years, Dr. Adenauer would enhance the power of the German presidency, presumably as Premier De Gaulle had enhanced the power of the French presidency. Then, if the elections of 1961 were to go against the Christian Democrats, he would still be president with much power and great influence to check any radical revision of his policy.
Those calculations had miscarried because the bulk of the party leaders had refused to accept Herr Etzel as chancellor. The party had insisted that the chancellor be Ludwig Erhard, whom they considered their best vote-getter. That destroyed the assumptions on which Dr. Adenauer had made his decision to give up the chancellorship and run for the presidency. For two major reasons, Dr. Adenauer could not accept Dr. Erhard, one being that the latter was not an enthusiast for the idea of a Little Europe of six nations revolving around collaboration between France and West Germany, Dr. Erhard being a German version of a 19th Century commercialist liberal who expected an ever-increasing prosperity to come from ever-wider and freer markets, believing in wider markets not only in the Little Europe, not only in the bigger Europe which included Britain and the Scandinavian countries, but also in all of Europe, which would mean more trade with Eastern Europe, with Russia, and beyond.
Although Dr. Erhard had conformed and had been loyal, he was not a true believer in the Adenauer European policy. At the same time, he was not a yes-man, in fact was a strong man in his own right. With him as chancellor, Dr. Adenauer would be unable to enhance greatly the powers of the presidency and so he had felt compelled to reverse the decision he had made on April 7 and to declare his intention of remaining, if he could, as Chancellor, at least until after the elections of 1961.
That was not the official explanation, but it was the only one which made sense and fit all of the known facts. Moreover, it was the general view held by those who had a close knowledge of the problems of the Common Market and the Franco-German collaboration.
In a television speech, Dr. Adenauer had explained the reversal of his decision by saying that since April 7, the international situation had deteriorated and that therefore he had to stay in his post as Chancellor. That was true of his own European policy and his calculations about the future had foundered on the rocks of German internal politics. The kind of collaboration which presently existed between Premier De Gaulle and Dr. Adenauer was not assured for a long future time, as there was in neither Germany nor in France a successor in sight who could be counted on to continue.
Apart from that fact, Mr. Lippmann asks whether the international situation had in fact deteriorated since April 7 in a way which had not been foreseen at the time. It was evident on April 7 that there could not be an agreement to reunite the two Germanys, that the Soviet Union would not permit it and neither West Germany, France nor England had any serious and ardent wish to bring about reunification. On April 7, it had been evident also that nothing could be done to reunite the two Berlins. It had also been evident that if the future of West Berlin as a member of the Western community was to be assured, it would not be sufficient to stand pat on things as they were, for the position of West Berlin was vulnerable to all manner of pressure and harassment, and to uncertainty and anxiety. Against those pressures, there was no military defense and thus the future of West Berlin had to be assured if the West was to honor its commitments by its statesmen. They had to build upon the old foundation which was that West Berlin belonged to the Western community and the Western powers had a right to be present there with troops. Upon that old foundation they had to build a new structure, of which the essential elements were that it had the explicit approval of the Big Four, of the two Germanys, and the international society.
Mr. Lippmann posits that it might take some time to achieve, but that as long as it was a practical possibility, it could not be said that the international situation in Europe had deteriorated badly.
Robert C. Ruark, in London, says that he wished he had known that Dr. Donald Brown, the well-known botanist, who headed the biology department of the Medical Evangelists, a Seventh Day Adventist college near Los Angeles, was headed to Kenya to study the trade secrets of witch doctors, wanting to discover what drugs they used to treat everything from venereal disease to snakebite. Dr. Brown had been quoted as saying: "There is no doubt some hocus-pocus is connected with many of these cures. Still, there may very well be some plants that are used by the natives because they do help certain disorders by the chemicals they contain."
He indicates that Dr. Brown could have saved himself a lot of time and money by coming to Mr. Ruark because he was a graduate psychiatrist, rather a witch doctor, in his own right and could offer competent witnesses to prove it. But since he was on his way to Africa, he would direct him to a man he knew named Katunga, of strong standing in Machakos. He did not know how old he was, perhaps 100, but he was "as mad as a snake, and occasionally bays like a hound when the moon is full. But he is the best skinner in the world and is almost twice as ugly as anybody I ever knew. And he is a wizard with the drugs."
For years before penicillin had come from Dr. Alexander Fleming, Katunga was renowned for his speedy cure of gonorrhea, heavily afflicting the casually polygamist natives of East Africa. If Katunga could write, he might have even saved Dr. Fleming a lot of trouble. The cure he used was plain old mold, accompanied by curses, years before penicillin had come on the scene. He knew about things to prevent childbirth or to prevent hemorrhaging at the time of parturition of an infant, calling it in his native Wakambe something which Mr. Ruark could not imagine, but in the West, called ergot, a fungus which grew on grain, something about which Katunga and all of the witch doctors in the Masai country had known for hundreds of years.
Snakebite, unless from a mamba or big cobra biting one in the face, was reasonably simple to cure, involving taking a live chicken and splitting it, holding it over the bite after cutting twice across the bite, enabling the warmth of the still-living chicken to draw out the poison. He says that they did it a little better on safari with a suction cup, but that the principle was the same. The basic theory of witch-doctoring was not the actual remedy as much as autosuggestion induced by ceremony. In place of a couch, there was an arch made of banana fronds and sugar cane, making the patient crawl through the arch seven times, repeating the same process seven times and by the seventh time, the patient was apt to believe it himself.
There was also the ceremonial slaughtering of the black rooster, or the sheep, or the goat, and some very bitter native medicine which he indicates he would not attempt to describe for fear of infringing on the AMA. It tasted so nasty that it had to be good for a person. It was also practical, in the English tradition of the leech, to nick the patient on the arm and let the person bleed a little to reduce the hot humours of the blood, transferring evil spirits to the sheep or goat and afterward consuming the latter.
He indicates that there were some things too sacred to reveal but that causing a patient to jump through a fire seven times generally purified a person and also kept off the mosquitoes. There were certain things one could do with elephant-tail hairs, rhinoceros horns and goat hooves which might get him sued in the territory of High John the Conqueror. But the basic thing was the beer. No real ethical medicine man could do any good for a person unless the person brought him many calabashes of the local beer, which fermented in the stomach after being drunk and induced a kind of trance which lasted for days.
We recommend disabusing yourself of
any illusions
And the South Dakota farm girl who had self-admittedly just gone berserk at age 12 after school one day in 1956 and killed her aunt with whom she was visiting in Oakland, just as "The Bad Seed" was playing in the theater nearby, would live over three months longer than Dick and Perry, although death would catch her back in South Dakota at the levee as she rode along in her Oldsmobile in July, 1965. Or, did she catch death?
A letter writer expresses the hope that former City Council member Martha Evans was laughing up her sleeve at the Council's Old Guard, the three remaining incumbents. They were hollering about secret meetings of the new four-member majority and appointments without their knowledge, as in the case of the new Police Chief. He says that the incumbents had done the same thing for four years and had forgotten about their secret meetings at the Recorder's Court Judge Boyd's house and at the homes of the four horsemen, making appointments and policies, saying "to hell" with Mrs. Evans, not needing her. Now the three incumbents were crying to high heaven that they were not included, finding that they were getting a dose of their own medicine. He indicates that as far as the interim Chief, Ernest Selvey, was concerned, regarding his disappointment at not being retained, the writer does not think he ought be, that had he any gumption, he would have turned down the appointment in favor of John Hord, that his original appointment had only been from spite by the Old Guard to get back at former Chief Frank Littlejohn. He indicates regarding the Recorder's Court, that he had brought to the attention of both newspapers months earlier the scandal before it had erupted, but that his information had been rebuffed. He indicates that what he had read of the new Chief, Jesse James, he believed that he and Mr. Hord would make a good team and hopes that he would be as good a chief as the man of his same name had been a great outlaw.
Framed Edition
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