The Charlotte News
Wednesday, July 8, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that former New York Governor Averell Harriman had described his recent talks with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as "terrifying, shocking, worse than Stalin." His account was in the current issue of Life, but the above quotation, according to that magazine, had been contained in his report to Washington. In addition to having been formerly the Governor of New York, he was also a former Ambassador to Moscow. In his signed article, he said that Mr. Khrushchev had told him, in "blunt and brutal language" that: "Your generals talk of maintaining your position in Berlin with force. That is bluff. If you send in tanks, they will burn, and make no mistake about it. If you want war, you can have it, but remember it will be your war. Our rockets will fly automatically." The magazine had also reported that Mr. Harriman had told Washington that the Soviet Premier had said that Russia had shipped numerous rockets to Communist China, having been planted behind the coastline, but having the range to blast Nationalist China on Formosa. If Communist China decided to try to take Formosa, it could count on Russian help, including direct military intervention, even if it meant war, according to the report. Mr. Khrushchev had also said that Communist strength was sufficient to destroy the U.S. Seventh Fleet, presently patrolling the Formosa Strait area. Mr. Harriman had ventured that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would be just as stubborn and inflexible when the Geneva talks resumed on July 13 as he had been before the talks had adjourned. He declared that he was convinced that there should be a summit conference and that the West should seize every opportunity to deal directly with Premier Khrushchev, "since he alone determines Soviet foreign policy." Mr. Harriman said that another reason for a summit conference, particularly if held in the U.S., would be to inform Mr. Khrushchev about conditions outside his own country, an area in which Mr. Harriman found the Soviet leader to be "profoundly ignorant". Mr. Khrushchev had ridiculed the idea that the Soviet Union coveted the Middle East, saying that Russia had more oil than it needed, adding, "Do you want to buy some?" Mr. Harriman had quoted him regarding German reunification, as having said: "You can rest assured I will agree to no reunification which does not provide for a 'socialist' [meaning Communist] system." Mr. Harriman said that some of Mr. Khrushchev's bellicose statements had appeared to be "mere acting", but added that it would be a mistake to think that he was all bluff, indicating: "The present situation is dangerous, for the Russian Premier might well overplay his hand." Mr. Harriman said that in his opinion, the Soviet leader lacked both Stalin's caution and calculating shrewdness. The State Department said that Mr. Khrushchev had recently made a number of tough statements but denied any alarm. Mr. Harriman had seen Mr. Khrushchev at the Kremlin on June 23 and had later visited him in his country home outside Moscow, during the course of a tour.
The President this date, at his
press conference, insisted that he was not trying to govern by veto,
indicating that his rejection of the housing bill had offered no
grounds for any such belief. In response to questions, he said that
he had not used the veto lightly and that he did not enjoy saying
that any legislation was bad and then having to explain to the people
why he thought it was bad. He said he was determined, however, to
have legislation which would keep the U.S. solvent. He had vetoed the
previous day a 1.375 billion dollar housing bill, charging that it
was inflationary. On other matters, he said that he believed racial
segregation was morally wrong when it interfered with equal
opportunity in political and economic fields, the first time since he
had taken office that he had expressed that specific view on the
issue. When asked what he thought about Premier Khrushchev's bellicose statements over Berlin, as quoted by Mr. Harriman in Life, he said: "Well, I don't think anything about it at all. I don't believe that responsible people should indulge in anything that can be even remotely considered ultimatums or threats. That is not the way to reach peaceful solutions." (The wartime Supreme Alled commander and former postwar military head of NATO obviously could not conceive of the U.S. initiating, without prior Congressional approval, a war against a small, militarily outmanned country on the pretext of that country obtaining imminently a nuclear weapon, a claim not true, pursuant to the guidance and advice of a secretary of defense who is an acknowledged recovering alcoholic, under a commander-in-chief who is a convicted 34-count felon, proud and boastful of having more power than any man in recorded history and thus bound and determined to prove his unrestrained, bullying megalomania
In Myrtle Beach, S.C., it was reported that tropical storm Cindy had fluttered erratically off the Carolinas coast this date, but that the Weather Bureau had said that it was expected to reach hurricane strength, 74 mph, sometime during the day. The storm had hovered about 140 miles east of Charleston during most of the night, with its central winds spinning at between 60 and 70 miles per hour. The Weather Bureau said that the storm's daylight forward movement would continue to be somewhat erratic but with a general drift to the northwest. Rains had struck the Carolinas coast during the morning. Sheets of torrential rain had swept the Wilmington area before early morning and continued into the middle portion of the day. Intermittent rains had splashed on the Myrtle Beach area amid gusts of hard wind. Forecasters said that the entire North Carolina coast would be visited by hard rains and high winds.
Dick Rigby of The News reports that the weather man at Douglas Municipal Airport in Charlotte had said that it was too early to tell where Cindy was going. For parched Mecklenburg County crops, the storm held out the only hope of rain for the ensuing three or four days. The assistant County farm agent had reported rain was needed badly in all areas of the county except around Davidson and Cornelius. The high temperature this date was predicted to be 87 degrees and the low the following morning was forecast as 65. The following day's high was predicted to be 85, ten degrees lower than the 95 which had been the high the previous day. Winds out of the north-northeast would be between 10 and 20 mph this date, with gusts between 20 and 30 mph. A cool air mass was perched over Pennsylvania, according to the weather man, and it was expected to bring fair skies as well as pleasant temperatures this date and the following day. It turned out that the weather man did not know which way the wind would blow. So how could you?
Ann Sawyer of The News indicates that City officials could feed 2,000 needy, hungry schoolchildren if only four of 14 recommendations advanced by a citizens committee were adopted. The committee also made it clear from minutes released this date that it believed City School officials had been dragging their feet in working for a solution. Details of the 14-point plan had been reported to the Social Planning Council this date, based on a study with school officials since February. The Council had appointed the study group the previous December after the newspaper had revealed the plight of the children. In suggesting changes in lunchroom operation, the committee had pointed out that the City Schools could save about $80,000 annually. It was estimated that it would take that amount to feed all of the City School children who went without lunch because their parents could neither afford to buy it nor pack a sandwich. The committee, headed by attorney William Van Allen, had recommended the City Schools put the junior and senior high schools on the Federal Lunchroom program, use more free Federal commodities and reduce labor and miscellaneous costs. By changing to a standard plate lunch in the junior and senior high grades and thus receiving a cash subsidy on each meal served, it was estimated that the City lunchroom program would gain $5,000.
In New Martinsville, W.Va., it was reported that three teenage reformatory inmates, charged with kidnaping a young secretary and threatening to kill her if she resisted, would have preliminary hearings this date. They had taken the 18-year old secretary for an 80-mile ride on Tuesday but had been captured less than five hours after their escape, as they sought to obtain food and money for a trip to Florida. The secretary was not harmed. The three boys, two of whom were 16 and the third 17, had been charged with kidnaping and grand larceny. The reformatory superintendent said that they would be provided preliminary hearings before a magistrate. The three had escaped from the State Industrial School for Boys at Pruntytown, near Grafton in north-central West Virginia. They were captured ten miles south of the Ohio River town of New Martinsville by the sheriff and other officers because the sheriff had gone to the mother's home of one of the 16-year old boys. The secretary said that one of the boys had brandished a knife and that another had handed her a note which read, "If you don't do what we say or try to get help, we'll kill you." They had all lain down on the seat of her car and later they had taken off their shirts so that they would not be recognized. They had been wearing their reform school's summer uniform consisting of khaki pants and blue T-shirts. She said that she had taken them to Clarksburg and that they said to her that they would let her off at the outskirts of that town, but that before they got there, she had become too scared to drive and that one of them had taken her place. The boys had not stopped at Clarksburg but had gone on to New Martinsville on the western border of the state. As they had driven along, they had told the secretary that they had been casing her movements for a week and knew the precise moment she would return from her usual lunch-hour drive. Two of the boys had been captured at a shack near the home of the mother of one of the boys, as they tried to obtain food and money from the mother, who had prevented her son from obtaining a rifle, wrestling with him and crying as he tried to take the weapon. The third youth had left the others to go on foot through the woods and was captured in an adjoining county.
In Monroe, Wash., it was reported that four young inmates who had held 39 hostages for 13 1/2 hours during an attempted escape from the Washington State Reformatory, faced the possibility of kidnaping charges. The superintendent of the institution said that three of the four were in the Reformatory hospital for treatment of the effects of teargas which had been fired at them the previous day when Reformatory guards had stormed the small room in which they held their hostages. The fourth inmate was in solitary confinement. The four ranged in age between 20 and 22. The inmates had seized a guard on Monday afternoon while they worked in the kitchen, and with a knife at his throat, had forced the guard upstairs to the visiting room where they had seized two other guards, 11 inmates and 26 visitors, including 12 women and eight children. No one had been hurt seriously.
In Chesterfield, S.C., it was reported that the former probate judge, accused in the fatal shooting of his old friend, a funeral home director, had taken the witness stand at his trial this date, testifying that the shooting was a bad joke which had tragically misfired. He told of making preparations for a European trip the previous October, punctuating happy business trips into town with occasional highballs. He said that he was planning to attend the funeral of Pope Pius XII, and that as a gesture of amity toward all Italians, was arranging to recover the unburied body of an Italian carnival roustabout. The body had been lying embalmed in a Laurinburg, N.C., funeral home, he said, since 1911, because no one had claimed it or offered to pay the funeral expenses. It was for that reason, he said, he had decided to visit his old friend. He said he had also wanted to give him a .25-caliber pistol which his friend had asked him to obtain through a Columbia gun shop. He told of entering the funeral parlor, and as a joke, pulling the pistol from his pocket and pointing it at his friend, calling out: "I've been due you a killing for a long time and I think I'll let you have it." As he did so, his old friend had struck his hand and pulled at the gun. He said that he did not have his finger on the trigger, but that in the scuffle, the gun had gone off, indicating that he had not realized it was loaded. There had been previous testimony that the gun had been delivered to him unloaded. He theorized that his son, presently in the Navy and not at the trial, had loaded the pistol. He said that after the gun had gone off, he had seen his friend "trotting toward the service station with his hand on his stomach." He said that he had gone home, called his lawyer and was advised to say nothing. He said that he told the police that the shooting was "just one of those things … one of those accidents, I mean." The trial had progressed swiftly on Tuesday at its outset, highlighted by testimony that the fatally wounded funeral director had said that the probate judge had shot him and had quoted the judge as saying: "I've had it in for you a long time. I'm going to kill you." The funeral director had lived for almost two weeks after the shooting. The former probate judge, ousted from his position the previous year for misconduct and neglect of duty, maintained that the shooting was accidental. One of the first defense witnesses was the former judge's wife, revealing that her marriage was a common-law relationship entered into at a "ceremony" only a few weeks after she had received a Mexican divorce from her former husband. Just what the relevance of that latter testimony was is not apparent.
In Roscoe, N.Y., it was reported that a large motor had fallen from a truck on Route 17 on Tuesday, was hit by a car and that a piece of it had flown through the air, smashed through the windshield of another car, killing the driver.
It is unsafe to be anywhere these days.
On the editorial page, "The Democrats Should Fire Paul Butler" urges the firing of the DNC chairman at once. For five years he had served as a symbol of disunity and discord in the party and his latest outburst against the Democratic leadership in Congress was typical of his tactlessness and unabashed debauchery in a sensitive party post.
It thus counsels getting rid of him, despite his skillful partisanship with an instinct for the jugular during political campaigns. The national chairmanship of a party required something more, someone who was broadly representative of the whole party, a unifying element, a person who could bring together warring factions within the party and who could speak reasonably for a common cause. Mr. Butler could perform none of those functions well and some not at all. He was a divisive influence rather than unifying.
He had alienated Southern Democrats so consistently that it was not certain that the South would ever vote solidly Democratic again. He had identified himself so closely with the party's liberal wing that he seldom, if ever, bothered to dignify the views of the party's more conservative members. His criticism of Congressional Democrats was a bald attempt to discredit the only large body of party members currently serving in positions of responsibility and power in the Federal Government.
It finds that one might wonder whose side he was own, that he was certainly not serving the cause of a strong, unified Democratic Party, and any philosophy of political leadership he might have, was strangely out of joint in 1959, with a presidential election on the horizon. One could only feel that it was the wrong doctrine in the wrong party in the wrong year directed against the wrong enemies. It finds therefore that the only correct thing he could do was to resign at once.
"What Is So Terrible about Beauty?" finds that the fear at City Hall that the county's new health center would be attractively furnished was probably justified. All of the community's newer public buildings had beautifully and tastefully decorated interiors, one of the reasons the buildings were so inviting and why they were so admired by local residents as well as by visitors.
It finds that rather than something to be condemned, the beauty of local public buildings ought be the source of pride, as there was nothing sinful, un-American, undemocratic or antisocial about "esthetic values". Furnishings did not have to be regal, but they ought be tastefully distinctive and, within prudent bounds, representative of the community's cultural development and personality.
It finds that fortunately there was demand for beauty in the city and the designer of the community's newer structures had yielded to that demand.
"What Clio Did to the Editorial Pages" indicates that on the eve of the Fourth of July, scores of editorialists around the nation had sat courting Clio, the muse of history, beseeching her to grant them eloquence to sing the praises of Thomas Jefferson, his colleagues, and their Declaration of Independence.
But then by July 6, according to custom, all of the noble rhetoric which the muse had supplied had to be forgotten for a season. "Perverse as we are, however, we took a certain devilish pleasure in looking back on what Clio and her editorial-writing sons were up to."
To the New York Herald Tribune, the framers of the Declaration had looked "beyond the laws and customs and social gratifications brought from the Old to the New World, to a nation dedicated, in Lincoln's words, to the proposition that all men are created equal."
The Washington Post had said: "'Equality'… tends toward a general leveling of social, material and intellectual capacities to a common denominator. This was a prospect that was to appall Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians alike… To insist on absolute equality is to … [drown] the individual spirit in a sea of mediocrity."
It finds that such sharp exchanges
were not surprising when one tallied all of the men and movements
whose works were said to have buzzed in Thomas Jefferson's head as he
had written the Declaration. The Richmond News Leader had
thrown in the Virginia pantheon, in the course of an editorial from
which one would never guess that there had been a Declaration of
Independence. There was Jefferson ("pensive, chin in hand"),
Andrew Lewis ("in the fringed jerkin of a frontiersman, looking
to the distant hills"), Patrick Henry, George Mason, Thomas
Nelson. Unfortunately, only Messrs. Jefferson and Nelson had signed
the Declaration. (It leaves out the primary subject of the piece, John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 until his death in 1835, and who took the Court from a relatively minor role to a substantial third branch of the Government as intended by the words of Article III, an interpreter of the Constitution and the laws passed pursuant to it, not merely a ministerial servant of the will of the Congress and the executive branch, resolving only conflicts between the two. The take it provides on Mr. Marshall has to be considered selectively tainted, given the editor of the News Leader having been conservative James Kilpatrick, given to considerably liberal latitude in his various interpretations of the Constitution, a staunch defender of the states' rights doctrine of control of the public schools by the state and localities, viewing the Tenth Amendment as paramount to all subsequently ratified amendments, whether the Thirteenth, Fourteenth or Fifteenth, not to be interpreted integrally to the whole fabric, and thus a fierce opponent of Federally directed desegregation of Virginia's schools under Brown v. Board Education—and its unanimous determination, based in solid precedent, not "sociology" as its detractors routinely proclaimed for its incidental, footnoted reliance on the work of Gunnar Myrdal, Kenneth Clark
The Washington Post had sounded a staggering roll-call which made the youthful Mr. Jefferson's work fall not too far short of the "Summa" of St. Thomas as an active synthesis. There were: "Locke … Aristotle, the Stoics, the medieval scholastics, the 16th Century Spanish Jesuits, the Frenchman Jean Bodin, the English Puritan Milton and the Anglican prelate Hooker."
The Greensboro Daily News, writing on the spark which linked Thomas Jefferson and Boris Pasternak across the centuries, had come through with Thomas Hobbes. The piece objects: "Sorry, boys, but we're afraid Tom Hobbes doesn't make this team. Hobbes, it must be remembered, was an apologist for the Stuart monarchy. He taught gloomily (his mother is said to have been scared shortly before his birth by the invasion by the Spanish Armada) that in the 'state of nature' every man is at war with every other man; that they had all better surrender to a state, any state, to avoid the 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' life outside government. He was anathema to Locke and also, we suspect, to Jefferson."
It finds that the most one could gather from that stroll through Clio's garden in the off-season was that in the house of history, there were many mansions, one for each writer to treat Mr. Jefferson and his Declaration to his taste, finding it probably to be a good thing.
"What on Earth Happened to Chicago?" indicates that though the Queen's subjects had turned a rather cool cheek in Canada to her, she had found in Chicago on Monday a gala reception which had to rank with her coronation parade, as two million Chicago residents had packed the streets for 20 miles to wave and gape at the Queen.
It left it wondering what on earth had happened to the city of Col. Robert McCormick, the late publisher of the Chicago Tribune, to whom "such an orgy of Anglo-philia would have been a sign that Chicago had sunk into an ultimate decadence." While living, he had subscribed to the nation's earliest statesmen's warnings against "entangling alliances", tracing most of the country's ills to the fact that President Washington had stooped to do business with the mustachioed Machiavellians in striped pants of the British Foreign Office. Mr. McCormick had banned mention of the British peerage in his newspaper and one of his editorial writers, in compliance with that policy, had written of the British "House of L-ds". He had said of the Marshall Plan, designed to pull the British and other Western European countries out of the postwar starvation: "To hell with it. It's really a snob plan."
The newspaper had taken issue with the colonel on almost every point, and yet there was a note strangely sad in the abrupt decline of his ideology. "To judge by the welcome lavished on Elizabeth II, the fickle Chicagoans will be the next joiners of the British Commonwealth. Even in Paradise, where the old gentleman doubtless resides at this very minute, that would be hard to bear."
A piece from the Laurel (Miss.) Leader-Call, titled "Why Waste It on Them?" indicates that one of the most remarkable things about youth was that it was always attractive, a skinny figure with no curve, big feet, stringy hair, the minimum of soft curls, freckles and sunburn instead of peachy skin the texture of an infant's, clothes which hid no deficiency but emphasized them all. "Just how girls can manage to be pretty and attractive in pants that were never made for the feminine figure, shirts that hang out of the belt—goody, goody gout, your shirt tail's out style,—is hard to understand." But it finds that they did.
"It's just because they are fresh and young. That's the reason, and none other, and we are drawn to agree once more with that wisecrack of the late George Bernard Shaw, when he said that youth was such a wonderful thing, it is a pity to waste it on young people."
Drew Pearson finds that it would surprise no one in the know regarding Louisiana politics should cronies of embattled Governor Earl Long not deliberately release him from hospital care to hasten his exit from political life or even from life altogether. The Governor was quite a sick man and continued activity could only cause a serious, prolonged breakdown, or even his death. (Indeed, he would die from his heart condition in September, 1960, while pursuing a run for Congress after losing in December his race to become lieutenant governor, an attempt to circumvent the legal limitation of not succeeding himself as Governor. Since he was estranged from his wife, who had sought recently to have him committed to a mental facility, he could not resort to the same stratagem which George Wallace employed in 1966 to get around the same restraint in Alabama, having his wife, Lurleen, nominated and elected Governor.) The doctors who examined him were aware of that fact, as were his closest friends. He had been examined many times while in the hospital, and it was shown that he had suffered a series of small strokes, that unless he was required to take complete and prolonged rest, it could result in rapid deterioration of all of his bodily functions.
Instead of that rest, the Governor was holding press conferences at the rate of two or sometimes three per day, was making 40 telephone calls from his bed in one evening, some of them from an oxygen tent, and was planning campaign speeches and extensive trips. In private talks with his psychiatrists, the Governor had made remarks about his close associates, which, if true, could send them to jail.
In a state where his brother, Huey, had died from an assassin's bullet in 1936, anything could happen, and it would surprise no one if Earl Long's release was not a calculated plan to get him out of the way.
It had not gotten into the headlines yet, but the Democratic revolt against elderly House Speaker Sam Rayburn was very much like the revolt against elderly Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany. Both indicated that the older a man got the more autocratic he got and both were putting blemishes on the great careers of two revered elder statesmen.
Young Turk Democrats in Congress wanted to keep their rebellion secret, but it was building up steam regarding education, a labor bill, and particularly an increase of interest rates on Government bonds. It had caused suddenly the Ways & Means Committee to stop the so-called interest rate "compromise" bill.
Some Young Turks had privately felt that the venerable Mr. Rayburn was becoming too much beholden to his fellow Texan, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson, who had offered to raise $200,000 to help operate the Rayburn library at Bonham, Tex.
Joseph Alsop, in Hartford, Conn., indicates that the previous week, the Republicans of Connecticut's seventh district, which embraced all of northern Connecticut west of the river, had a dinner meeting in the town of Simsbury, visited by former RNC chairman Meade Alcorn, asking the question, "Who'd you like, Nixon or Rockefeller?" As he told it, Vice-President Nixon was the universal choice. Among those people who constituted the entire working Republican organization in their part of the state, none favored the candidacy of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
One veteran Republican first selectman had seemed to speak for them all, beginning with the routine remark that Mr. Nixon would be a good President and a good candidate also, concluding with an emphasis that implied severe criticism of President Eisenhower, saying, "And by God, Nixon would build up the Republican Party, and how we need it!"
Other less rock-ribbed parts of Connecticut would show results differing somewhat from the results obtained at that meeting, but there was no sign of active support for Mr. Rockefeller anywhere in Connecticut, except among the exurbanites of Fairfield County, really a dependency of New York City, seething with men in gray flannel suits. Although the state's Republican leaders had made a pact among themselves to keep their mouths shut and their eyes open for awhile, there were plenty of signs of active support for Mr. Nixon all over the state. He indicates that Connecticut's decision did not make a convention decision, any more than one swallow made a summer. But although it was a small state, it was a state where the Republicans now wanted to win very badly. In 1958, in the midterms, they had succeeded in transforming the Legislature's majority of just under 10 to 1 into an actual minority, an unprecedented political feat satisfying the recurrent Republican hunger for lost elections. It was also a state where Mr. Rockefeller ought to show strength if he had any real strength anywhere.
In the three great Republican struggles since the debacle of 1932 involving incumbent President Herbert Hoover, Connecticut had gone for Kansas Governor Alf Landon over FDR in 1936, for Wendell Willkie over FDR in 1940, and for General Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson in 1952. There was a hard-core former minority in Connecticut for the late Senator Robert Taft, who were now automatically pro-Nixon. But those people had never controlled the state in any showdown fight. Mr. Rockefeller's sentiment could be expected to be visible in Connecticut because of the state's proximity to New York and because Mr. Rockefeller had many personal links with Connecticut leaders in both politics and business.
The absence of such sentiment was surprising to a visitor from Washington, so accustomed to the endless, airless political debate in the capital, that it came as something of a shock to find a massive lead in the grassroots for the Vice-President.
Back in Washington, half of the experts, perhaps even more, sagely predicted, "You wait and see; the Republican choice will be Rockefeller." But in Connecticut, where the hunt for delegates was already in progress, it was hard to see how the Republican choice could be anyone but Mr. Nixon, except under two special sets of circumstances. Should the public opinion polls again begin to favor Mr. Rockefeller, the seemingly massive lead for Mr. Nixon might prove fragile. Or, should a major foreign policy disaster occur, the same might transpire. After Nikita Khrushchev's grim remarks to former New York Governor Averell Harriman, no one could rule out the possibility of a major disaster in foreign affairs during the ensuing year. The President might suddenly be caused to look like a hand-me-down Stanley Baldwin, the former Prime Minister of Britain, instead of "a golfing Prince of Peace". In that case, although Mr. Nixon had often urged stronger foreign defense policies to the President, the Vice-President would be tarred with the same brush along with the President's failure.
Robert C. Ruark, in Barcelona, Spain, indicates that he had gone to a bullfight in the rain in the city recently and Ernest Hemingway had been sitting across the way. One of the bullfighters was the son of Nino de la Palma, around whom Mr. Hemingway had written his classic The Sun Also Rises. The other torero had been Luis Miguel Dominguin, a brash and bright fighter the day Manolete had been killed in Linares, with the crowd against him.
Fighting against Luis Miguel was Antonio Ordonez, the son of Nino de la Palma. Antonio was the best bullfighter in Spain and the brother-in-law of Luis Miguel. His father, Nino, managed both fighters.
His companion at the bullfight, a young woman from Delaware, had never seen a bullfight and loved horses. He had also taken Rex Smith's overcoat because Mr. Smith should have been present to see the greatest competition since Luis Miguel and Carlos Arruza and Manolete had tried to outdo each other. Mr. Smith was perhaps the premier bullfight expert in the world and was supposed to spend the summer in Barcelona, but unfortunately had been sidelined by a bout with cancer and so Mr. Ruark had taken his overcoat, which he had stolen years earlier, because if Mr. Hemingway was there, something of Mr. Smith ought to have been present also. Mr. Smith had once worked in Spain for the Associated Press when Mr. Hemingway was first writing about bulls. He had also taken along the young Harry Taylor, one of the best foreign correspondents around, whom he imagined was like Mr. Smith had been 30 years earlier.
He indicates that he was aware that a lot of people disapproved of bullfights and so would dismiss those people at present. But when there was general accord between bull and man, and the man and the animal were doing everything right, there was no sight quite like it in the world, combining Shakespeare's best tragedy with ballet, and blood and ballet and music all intermingled.
The young woman accompanying him was horrified at the horses and the blood for the first four bullfights, suddenly having come alive, however, when Luis Miguel had found the brave bulls and handled them well enough to collect two ears and a tail, akin to winning the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes for the same book. By the time Luis Miguel had finished, including placing three pairs of banderillas, a dangerous maneuver, while using the red cape perfectly, and killing the bull perfectly, his female companion was a bullfight fan.
He indicates that there was no spare seat in the Monumental, Barcelona's large bullring, and the scalpers had been getting rich for days. Out of a possible six, his female companion had seen two magnificent exhibitions and another which would be called good for present times, a period of great decadence in bulls and men.
He finds that the odd thing was that she knew what she was seeing because she had seen a horrid example of a bad bull, a coward, which a torero named Bienvenida had risked his life to rebuild into a fightable animal. She had seen Luis Miguel making a comeback as a literally old man, and fighting with the bravado of a youngster, although his face was drawn and old. She also saw Antonio Ordonez justify his rightful reputation as the best living bullfighter in Spain, although he had just been released from the hospital after a grievous wound inflicted by the same family of bulls he was fighting.
The crowd had gone nuts and carried both Antonio and Luis on their shoulders to the Ritz Hotel, where about 500 people thronged the doorway to see the matadors come out, until finally the cops came and chased most of them away.
He finds that it figured that Mr. Hemingway was happy to see something once again he only remembered from his youth. He also figured that his female companion was happy, because she was an artist and had just seen a new art form. He also reckons that Mr. Smith's overcoat was happy because, "man, this was a bullfight, and you don't see many good bulls or bullfighters anymore."
A letter writer from Cheraw, S.C., indicates that the state was again experiencing the burdens of taxation for the benefit of a few politicians who were bent on increasing the hardships of the people. He finds that at present, the people of the state were among the lowest paid in the nation and yet had the highest tax bills to pay, indicating that it seemed to be the purpose of the Federal, state and county governments to tax the people until they had nothing left on which to live but promises. He wants the people to wake up and realize where they were headed. He now found that they were asked to vote so that some of the school districts could borrow over $500,000 for the building of new classrooms, wondering why they should vote for it while the state was collecting millions every year from taxation for the schools, wondering what was being done with those millions by the state officials, as he had not seen much improvement in the school system so far.
A letter writer from Clinton, S.C., indicates that the President said that the nation had to preserve its freedom by being alert, and then had flown back to his Gettysburg farm. "Eisenhower, helicopter, Gettysburg, golf… Eisenhower, helicopter, Gettysburg, golf… 'If America wants to save her freedom, she must be alert,' helicopter, Gettysburg. Oh, where the hell will it end?"
Framed Edition
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