The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 20, 1959
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that the Big Four foreign ministers conference this date had recessed until July 13 without breaking the East-West deadlock regarding Berlin. Western officials forecast a new Soviet drive for a summit meeting following the failure of those talks. They said that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was trying to frighten the Western powers into a summit conference instead of offering concessions regarding Berlin as a lure to the West. Secretary of State Christian Herter and other Western diplomats were reported to have decided two weeks earlier that such had been Mr. Khrushchev's strategy and Western interest in breaking off the negotiations had dated from that time. The West had come to Geneva believing that it held one trump card, Mr. Khrushchev's desire for a summit meeting. In the view of Mr. Herter, the conference had taken a bad turn about two weeks earlier when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had proposed a one-year time limit on Western occupation of West Berlin, denounced by the Western foreign ministers as a Soviet ultimatum. The negotiating line followed by Mr. Gromyko was regarded by the Western leaders as having borne out their estimate of Mr. Khrushchev's strategy and they believed that it probably meant that the Soviet Premier considered the Western position to be weak and that he felt that he did not have to bargain away anything to obtain a summit conference.
In Baton Rouge, La,, officials of the state were at loggerheads this date as to who would act as governor since Governor Earl Long had indicated he might be plotting another court battle to free himself from court-ordered treatment in a mental hospital. Lt. Governor Lether Frazar, a friend of the 63-year old Governor, said that he wanted legal advice before formally taking over as acting governor. The state's Secretary of State, Wade Martin, Jr., a political enemy of the Governor, said that he would continue to recognize Mr. Long as Governor. He had challenged the right of the Lt. Governor to take over without formal certification of Mr. Long's inability to act. He said that the Governor had been "irresponsible for some time but there has been no legal declaration of that." The Governor had called for legal counsel from his ward at the Southeast Louisiana Hospital at Mandeville, 54 miles to the east of Baton Rouge, where he and his brother, the late Huey Long, had begun thriving on peppery politics during the 1920's.
Bill Hughes of The News reports from Henderson, N.C., that Charlotte Air National Guardsmen had started packing their bags this date for their motor convoy trip home early the following day. The main body of the Guardsmen would leave early the next morning and arrive in Charlotte during the early afternoon. The few Guardsmen who would remain to clear up last-minute details had been scheduled to leave by noon. The Charlotte Guardsmen had been on duty for the previous two weeks at the strike-bound Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills. They would be replaced the following day by a special task force of the North Carolina Army Guard. The number of troops returning to Charlotte was estimated to be between 100 and 200, though the exact number had never been revealed. A brief flurry of activity had occurred the previous weekend when eight union men had been charged in an alleged conspiracy to dynamite the power substation feeding one of the struck mills and burn the main offices of that mill, but otherwise, the strike scene had been quiet during the two-week duty period.
In Brainerd, Minn., it was reported that a rapidly spreading fire had swept a huge main log building of Breezy Point Lodge early this date, killing a man and his wife and injuring more than 20 other guests. Most of the injured had suffered arm and leg fractures as they jumped from second-floor windows. The male of the dead couple, about 75, had died instantly when he had jumped from the second-floor window, landing on his head, and his wife, about 65, had lost her grip as she attempted to slide down a rope and had fallen about 20 feet to the ground, dying later in the hospital. An insurance man who had written most of the insurance on the building estimated that its total value was 1.75 million dollars. Most of the guests in the main building had lost all of their belongings.
In Atlanta, it was reported that a suburban Hapeville mother had told police the previous day that she had been praying that she could stop the abduction of her seven-year old daughter by deliberately crashing her small sedan into the abductor's car and rescuing her daughter. She told detectives that she could see her daughter fighting to get out of the window, that the car had started off fast and so she rammed it as hard as she could. Detectives had identified the driver from papers found in his wallet, showing that he was 17 and from Chicago, having come to Atlanta to live with his grandmother for two months. The detectives said that he had fled on foot after the collision. Bloodhounds were put on his trail, but he had not been found. The Georgia State Patrol and authorities in neighboring states had been alerted in the belief that he might be headed back to Chicago. The little girl and her nine-year old sister had been visiting a friend when a car had pulled up and a youth had asked the girls, "How about pushing this button and helping me start the car?" The little girl had walked over and the youth had grabbed her as she screamed, took her into the car and sped away, while her sister shouted for her mother. The mother had obtained a description of the car and told a neighbor to call the police, jumped into her own car and went in search of her daughter, after which she spotted the car parked about a mile away and could see her little girl fighting to get out of the window. At the time of the crash, the little girl had been flung from the car into the street and 17 stitches had been necessary to close a cut on her forehead. Detectives said that the youth who had been driving answered a description of a teenager who had grabbed a mother of five children the previous week, had tied her up, beaten her, taken seven dollars and left her in a car on a dead-end dirt road, that woman still being under a doctor's care.
In Raleigh, it was reported that pay raises proposed for State Utilities Commission members had been trimmed this date and prospects had brightened for Industrial Commission members to obtain a salary increase, the action having come as legislators pressed forward toward an afternoon adjournment to end the 4 1/2 month session.
Robert Willis of the Associated
Press reports from Blowing Rock, N.C., that Perry Mason had won his
case with the North Carolina Bar Association on Friday night, as
actor Raymond Burr, who played the lawyer on television, rose to a
standing ovation at the Bar Association convention. Sustained
applause had followed his defense of the lawyer's dignity and role in
society. Laughter had greeted his sallies at published criticism from
Superior Court Judge Frank Armstrong of his show and appearance at
the convention. Before and after his talk on "Lawyers and the
Public View", Mr. Burr had been swarmed by autograph seekers,
including scores of pretty, chic wives of lawyers. Textile magnate J.
Spencer Love had observed the spectacle and remarked, "I think I
must be in the wrong profession." Mr. Burr said that his TV
show's first purpose was to entertain, but that "closely
interwoven with that is our responsibility to be authentic in
courtroom procedure and uphold the dignity of the law and courts…
We will do nothing on our show to endanger the respect people should
have for all of you." (But he always wins. How the hell is that
the least bit realistic? Most criminal defense attorneys rarely win
at trial, the wins coming usually on motions and procedure to obtain
dismissals. It is just a fact of life. It is harder than it looks.)
Mr. Burr had expressed the belief that the world had two
alternatives: "To blow everything to hell and gone with atomic
bombs, or find a way to equal rights among men and nations through
lawyers and the courts. The world needs to know more about you men
and what you do." He closed by inviting comment and questions
about his television show, but there were none. Judge Armstrong, when
asked by lawyers in court earlier in the week if he would recess so
that they could attend the convention, had loosed a blast both at Mr.
Burr's appearance and at court reform, which had been a Bar
Association project. He said: "Perry Mason's program bears no
semblance of the correct and proper means of administering justice or
the proper conduct of the lawyer in trial of a criminal case…"
(That was quite true.) Mr. Love, the board chairman of Burlington
Industries, had told the group that while court reform had been
killed in the Legislature during the week, it eventually would win.
He blamed "political trickery" and sectionalism for its
defeat and declared, "The people of North Carolina are way ahead
of the Legislature." Similar sentiments had been expressed in a
telegram from Governor Luther Hodges and in a talk on Friday by
Federal Judge Edwin Stanley. The general session this date, including
election of vice-presidents and a board of governors, had ended the
convention. (And another thing, no one ever comes storming into the
courtroom or stands up from among the spectators or breaks down on the witness stand
The winning entry for the newspaper's contest which required stating in 25 words or less why "My Pop's Tops" for Father's Day, had been an eight-year old boy, who posed for a picture with his father in the backyard of their residence. The boy was adjusting his baseball glove and getting ready to climb on his father's back for one of the photographs, which appears on the page. The father said, "You find a boy who is interested in fishing and in baseball and you'll find a boy who is not in trouble." Well, what if you're interested in neither? Does that mean you're necessarily headed for trouble? What if you're interested in the law, politics, and equal rights and opportunity for all?
Another piece lists the 15 prizewinners, with the grand prize having been a $100 savings bond for the father and a $50 savings bond for the son, second prize having been a $50 savings bond for the father and a $25 savings bond for the son, with the third through sixth prizes having been $25 savings bonds for the entrants, seventh through tenth places winning $10 in cash, and 11th through 15th places winning five dollars in cash. Second and third places had gone to two girls. The prizewinner had said that his father was tops "...because he takes me fishing, hunting and plays baseball with me. He can spank too, but only when I'm bad. We're friends."
The weather in Charlotte for the following day, which would be the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, was predicted to be fair, with temperatures mild through Sunday, the high anticipated for this date being 87 and the following day, 88, falling to 63 this night, registering 82 at 11:00 a.m.
In Brantford, Ontario, a 31-year old man, whose hobbies were mathematics and sports car driving, had won dismissal of a charge of speeding, having told the court that a radar unit would clock a short car at a greater speed than it was actually traveling, that such a unit had clocked his 13-foot sports car at 38 mph, but that the difference in length between his vehicle and a normal 18-foot car would result in a deviation of 5.92 mph, meaning that he was going within the speed limit at the time he was apprehended. He produced figures worked out with a slide rule to prove his point and invited the court to have a professional mathematician check his figures. The magistrate gave him the benefit of the doubt and dismissed the case.
In Kansas City, Mo., the 1959 international sweetheart of Sigma Chi was Laurie Mills, a blue-eyed blonde from Los Angeles, standing 5 feet, 5 inches tall, a sophomore at the University of Southern California, picked by the fraternity at its convention on Friday night. We congratulate her.
On the editorial page, "The 1959 Legislature in Retrospect: A Little Sunlight in the Shadows" finds that the record of the General Assembly was not as somber as it had seemed during the last "tragic" days of "parliamentary violence" to court reform and constitutional revision, that there had been notable achievements as well as destructive mischief.
There had been the passage of the state's first minimum wage law, setting a 75-cent minimum, which was merely a beginning. The new law had many exemptions but was nevertheless an important effort to provide North Carolinians on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder some needed security against poverty and want. Thus, for that accomplishment, it could not be described as a "bad" Legislature.
The second most important accomplishment had been the creation of a withholding system for the collection of State income taxes, taking considerable courage to obtain that piece of legislation in the face of noisy opponents who had not hesitated to make use of highly emotional and largely irrelevant arguments against it. It would enable State Government to corner thousands of North Carolinians who had been successfully evading State income taxes for years and thereby spread the cost of government more fairly.
It finds that the Legislature ought be congratulated also for several things it had not done, for instance, successfully resisting efforts to wreck Governor Luther Hodges's 1957 reform of the State Highway Commission and turn road-building back into a cheap political exercise. It had also refused to give aid and comfort to those who would threaten to make a witch hunt out of textbook selection in the schools. It also refrained from tampering with school laws to please those who wanted to scuttle the successful program of limited desegregation undertaken in Charlotte, Greensboro and Winston-Salem. It had also rejected a powerfully backed but ill-conceived proposal to solve the state's illegitimacy problem with compulsory sterilization.
In addition to the failure to provide needed court reform, a less publicized but related failure had been the reluctance to agree on a completely revised state constitution to replace the obsolete 1868 version. But sooner or later both jobs would be done.
The Legislature had also not followed the mandate of the present State Constitution to reapportion with every decennial census, not done since 1941. It had been more inclined to write into law the present inequities with a proposed constitutional amendment limiting every county to one State Senator regardless of its size in population.
There had been other important failures, such as not making a sincere effort to cope with the problem of low salaries for schoolteachers, the failure to pass badly needed legislation to reduce the slaughter on the streets and highways in the form of a mechanical inspection law, the failure to recognize fully the value of community colleges, the failure to outlaw the much-abused civilian absentee ballot, and the failure to ditch the despised secrecy rule in legislative committee meetings. Some of those failures could be traced to limp and unpredictable leadership. The first 90 days of the session had produced little more than a study in slow motion, and the Legislature had produced the largest and worst crop of amateur poets in American parliamentary history.
But it finds the statesmanship of Senator J. Spencer Bell and the bright promise of young Representative Watts Hill, Jr., to have stood out significantly, finding both to be men of the future as well of the present in North Carolina politics.
It concludes that the General Assembly could have accomplished more with firmer leadership, more vision and less sectionalism, but North Carolinians had learned through the years to be grateful for small favors and even amid the rubble of court reform, some gratitude was in order.
A piece from the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, titled "The Ritual of Thunderheads", indicates that slowly, too slowly, the season had come for the march of the thunderheads across the clear, hot skies of afternoon. "The plowman, turning tractor or mule at the end of the road, scans the skies for them, and the urbanite, too busy watching his watch and his step, hopes nonetheless the great clouds are there. A Southerner cannot bear his summers without hope that the heat will not be as bad as he knows it will be. And the hope for the shower that sweetens the dusk and refreshes the spirit, resides in the thunderhead."
Despite the predictions of an afternoon thunder shower by the weatherman, most often, nothing came of it, except the perpetuation of the ritual. "The thunderheads, for all their pomp, are empty. They move their shadows away from the sun, and across another field to play their drama for another audience. But sometimes they unleash the shower, and the countryman knows joy, and goes homeward more in peace."
For us, it only stymies for a time our circuits 'round and 'round the house, always counterclockwise, 'round and 'round, at least during this summer in Shelby…
Drew Pearson indicates that a lot of backstage pressure had been applied to Representative Chet Holifield of California to stop what might be one of the most sensational Congressional probes of the year, to show for the first time in history what could happen to Russia if it bombed the major military targets of the U.S. and what would happen to the U.S. in turn if it bombed Russia's main military targets. In each case, the radioactive poison would be so great that the attacking nation would be wiped out by its own fallout.
He indicates that the reason for the pressure on Mr. Holifield to hold up his investigation had been the diplomatic sparring at Geneva, with some advisers to the President fearing that if the American public became too anxious for an end to hydrogen bomb testing, the Russians would be able to put forward a half-baked treaty under which they could cheat inspections. The President, however, seemed determined to sign some type of agreement to end hydrogen bomb testing and was just as vigorously for it at present as he had been critical of Adlai Stevenson for urging it during the presidential campaign of 1956.
The reason why Representative Holifield presently had the facts with which to measure total radioactive fallout was that for the first time, the total figure for all bomb tests thus far held had been declassified. It was no longer secret that a total of 92 megatons of nuclear explosions had been made by the U.S., Russia and Britain, combined. That would permit scientists whom Mr. Holifield would call to testify to pick 224 targets in the U.S. and show what would happen if they were blasted out of commission. Mr. Holifield's simulated nuclear attack would use 260 weapons, ranging from 1 to 10 megatons. The Pentagon, a prime target in the U.S., would receive from 8 to 10 megatons and Mr. Holifield's home city of Los Angeles would receive a half-dozen. From that, scientists would be able to figure out the complete structural damage to the country and compute the number of killed.
Perhaps more important, they could compute the damage done to the country supposedly launching the attack, that it would be wiped out by radioactive fallout coming from its own aggression.
Unless the pressure would become too great, Mr. Holifield's investigation would begin on Monday.
Democrats were blinking their eyes over the President's latest speech calling for "a responsible, sensible, fiscal policy in government." Those were almost the exact words he had used in the 1952 presidential campaign to attack President Truman's "mismanagement" of the national debt, which had then been at 265 billion dollars, with annual interest less than 6 billion dollars and Government bonds selling at par value. But after six years of the Eisenhower Administration, the national debt was now at 285 billion dollars and the annual interest was more than 8 billion dollars, with Government bonds selling below par on the money market. The President apparently believed that if he preached economy loud and long enough, the public would believe that his fiscal policies were sound. Yet for all of his talk about a balanced budget, he had plunged the Government deeper into debt in the current fiscal year than any President ever had during peacetime.
Joseph Alsop indicates that, as he finds few Americans realized, the other Western allies longed for bolder, more dynamic American leadership and that the country would also suffer if its allies looked to America in vain. But there was a silver lining.
Any serious American observer at the Geneva foreign ministers conference had initially to be deeply depressed with the nearly total sterility of American policy and its purely defensive stance as well as the great increase in Communist confidence in future victory. The causes for that confidence included the grave decline in the Western world position and the substantial improvement in the Soviet position, not easy to forget. Under those circumstances, since America alone had the power and resources to reverse that trend, it loomed large at Geneva, with everything seeming to depend increasingly on a panoply of new ideas, though any idea at present aroused deep suspicion if not outright hostility in Washington.
The result had been a theory of the course of American politics which was at least hopeful and might at least provide wiser men something to knock down. If the theory were correct, the previous 25 years of the country's political history was divisible into two distinct time frames, the first of which having begun with the 1932 election of FDR, ending at the close of the first Truman Administration in 1948, marked by the greatest innovations taking place in American politics since the Civil War. The second period, since 1948, had not produced a single major new idea, but had achieved the adjustments and consolidations badly needed after all of the previous new departures.
He posits that one could ask whether President Eisenhower could not have prevented the serious deterioration of Western position which had taken place during his tenure in the White House, but that no one could argue that he had not performed a useful service by presiding over a successful political adjustment and consolidation after a time of unsettling change. The proof of his success in that regard was clear, visible in any morning newspaper, in the innumerable stories about the numerous presidential candidates of the two major parties. That multiplicity of extremely able men, all of whom were good bets to do a good job in the presidency, with a free choice between Vice-President Nixon and Governor Nelson Rockefeller on the Republican side, and Senators Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey on the Democratic side, plus several others, had no precedent during the previous 25 years. In all elections since 1932, there had been at most two men, and quite often only one, who seemed likely to be able to perform adequately the biggest job in the world.
He finds the reason for that past scarcity to have been that most of the able, energetic men available had not achieved their own adjustment to the substantial changes which had been made and were still being made, could not say how the nation had gotten to where it was and how it ought to go forward, wanting instead "to row back up the river of time, which is impossible." The late Senator Robert Taft, whom he describes as one of the biggest and finest men of his generation, had been the most conspicuous case in point.
In contrast, all of the current presidential candidates of both parties were describing how the nation got to where it was and where it ought to go, accepting what had been done and not wishing to undo it, merely wanting to improve on it. They were not gripped by the type of attachment to the past which had made so many surviving New Dealers continue to parrot Franklin Roosevelt, with unfruitful results. Except for Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, who partially represented a continuation of the Truman group in the Democratic Party, none of the presidential hopefuls had any real attachment to the past, as no one could suppose that a Nixon administration would be a mere continuation of the Eisenhower Administration.
He indicates that whether one was a Democrat or a Republican, the person could not help being impressed by the demonstration of American political dynamism provided by those impressive candidates. "And in them lies the hope for the great jet of new ideas, the bold rush of new departures, which the cause of the West so desperately needs."
Marquis Childs indicates that one measure shortly to come before the Senate related directly to millions of Americans and their hopes for the future, that being the bill for medical research which had the potential power of opening the way to longer life free of disease and pain. Although the Administration had been plagued more than any other in recent times by illness and death, the Bureau of the Budget was recommending such small amounts each year that they were raised substantially by the Senate. Testifying for larger appropriations, medical scientists had stated this time that great discoveries could come only from expanded research, and that the Federal Government was the only source of the money which could bring large new inquiries.
The death of John Foster Dulles from cancer, the plight of Louisiana Governor Earl Long, confined to mental health facilities, and the handicap of the President from his heart attack in 1955, had underscored the three greatest killers and cripplers, cancer, mental illness and heart disease. For cancer research for the following year, the Budget Bureau had recommended 75.218 million dollars and the House had increased it by 8 million, and the Senate was expected to add considerably more.
Dr. I. S. Raydin, professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania who had performed the surgery on the President for his 1956 attack of ileitis, had stated: "Great breakthroughs in medical knowledge are usually the result of research by many workers, each of whom add to the sum total of the final accomplishment. If you provide for the additional research facilities still seriously needed, you will have done your share. The rest is up to those of us who believe that the necessary answers will come—next month, next year or later, but come they will." In his testimony, he joined equally distinguished medical men in supporting a total of 110.203 million dollars for the National Institute of Cancer the following year. As he had done successfully in the past, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama was again shepherding the medical research appropriations through the Senate.
He had a formidable ally in Senator Richard Neuberger of Oregon, who, a little more than a year earlier, had seemed in good health, but had discovered during an annual checkup that he had cancer, albeit cured by cobalt radiation therapy, enabling him to return to the Senate only a little late for the current session after his treatment in Portland. While he had been an advocate for increased research before his diagnosis, he had put in a bill for a massive attack on cancer with funding up to a half billion dollars and was at present a passionate apostle of medical inquiry.
One of the consultants on the Senator's case, Dr. Sidney Farber, professor of pathology at the Harvard Medical School, had testified before a Senate committee that the cure for cancer had changed in the previous three years from one in four to one in three as a result of medical research.
Few men in political life had the dedication and resolve which had been underscored in Senator Neuberger by his experience, having at first thought that he would inevitably die from cancer and then understanding that patient research had devised a method of treatment which had given him a good chance of life. His service over many years in the Senate could help to save millions of lives and perhaps even checkmate once and for all the deadliest of the killers, cancer. Mr. Childs finds it a measure of the role which he could perform into the future.
Senator Neuberger would unfortunately succumb to his cancer the following March at age 47, though the immediate cause of his death was cerebral hemorrhage.
A true contemporary survivor of cancer was tv and radio personality Arthur Godfrey, who had undergone surgery for lung cancer earlier in the year and lived until 1983, dying at 79.
A letter writer responds to a letter of the prior Saturday regarding the Henderson mills strike, indicating that the previous reader had suggested that his rights had been abused. He asserts that people themselves had destroyed any rights which had been destroyed because they had violated the laws by violent picketing in support of their union demands. Governor Luther Hodges had never sought to stop peaceful picketing but only violence. The reader had referred to the National Guard as a "costly military operation against the people", but the writer opines that had the workers picketed peacefully, the Guard would not have been necessary and thus the pickets were directly responsible for the costly operation. He further indicates that bombings, acid-throwing, burning, shooting, stoning and mobbing were not peaceful picketing. He believes that the workers had been making a fair wage prior to the strike and had chosen to walk out of the mill, that the president of the mill had not asked them to leave, and so he wonders why the previous writer believed that people hired in their stead were "stealing the jobs". He believes that the mill owner had the right to hire whomever he chose. He finds that men like Jimmy Hoffa were heading the unions, "crooked as the day is long." He indicates that the country was not like Russia. "No Siberia for me. I like Charlotte."
A letter writer, who is a justice of the peace, says that he had warned State Senator J. Spencer Bell that magistrate's courts, known as "JP's" in the state, had been in existence since the 16th Century and would be present in the 32nd Century, that Mr. Bell was not big enough to stop the magistrates. He suggests that if Mr. Bell had spent the time knocking out the obsolete laws, he would have done a great thing for the bar and the people of the state. "His court reform bills are like the old cracked dinner bells—past history. Four years of his life have been wasted. I'm sorry a man trained as a lawyer could not see this." He says that he was 80 and that either way, court reform would not have hurt him, that he had established his office only to have a place "to hang around when I grow old. I'm just a young 80-year-old kid, enjoying life."
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