The Charlotte News
Thursday, April 9, 1959
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a Communist attempt to seize control of Iraq by naked force had become a distinct possibility, and reporter William L. Ryan of the Associated Press suggests that if that happened, something in the nature of another Korea was also possible. The threat of a Communist coup in Baghdad had become more real with persistent reports of an infusion of armed Kurds from the Soviet Union, plus an Iraqi decision to arm civilian units known as the "People's Resistance". Because Iraq had no borders with any Communist-ruled country, a forcible Communist seizure of its government would be a departure from past practice. Up to the present, armed communism had not leaped land barriers. But the elements for such a leap were present, as were the makings of a situation not dissimilar to that which had occurred in Korea nine years earlier. Troops of Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic, according to Turkish reports, already had taken up positions in northern Syria near the Iraqi frontier. Shammar tribesmen, who had supported the recent pro-Nasser revolt in northern Iraq and as a result had to flee the country, were reported to be massed in an area roughly 50 miles from the Iraqi border. The fierce cold war between Premier Nasser's U.A.R. and the Iraqi regime of Premier Abdel Karim Kassem could easily turn into a hot war, even a Moslem "jihad", or holy war. A military clash could be a prelude to an attempt by pro-Nasser forces to install a rival government in Iraq. The spark for the clash also could be a Communist takeover in Baghdad. The tools for the takeover could be a nucleus of tough, heavily armed Kurds from the Soviet Union and the street militia made up of what the Arabs called the Muquwamah al Sha'Abiyah, or popular resistance. Such organizations existed in other Arab states, notably in Syria, but the latter, up to the present, had trusted that potentially violent mob with live ammunition. Ostensibly, the organization was supposed to train for guerrilla warfare in the event the country was threatened from outside, but, actually, it was a handy weapon of political control through intimidation. The arming of the group in Iraq had come in response to strident demands of the increasingly powerful left, dominated by the Communists. With that weapon and the added support of Soviet Kurds, the Communists could hope to seize Iraq and make the takeover stick, similar to the situation in Czechoslovakia.
The Senate Select Committee
investigating misconduct in management and labor had heard this date
the experiences of a large Detroit and Ohio jukebox distributing firm
against which Detroit gangsters had allegedly waged bitter warfare.
The Committee had called as a witness, to appear the following day, the firm's president, Joseph
Nemesh, whose company, Music Systems, Inc., had offices in Cleveland
and Detroit, and distributed Seeberg jukeboxes. In two days of
hearings regarding jukebox racketeering in Detroit, the Committee had
received testimony that Mafia mobsters in that city had formed
alliances with some labor union officials and had muscled in on the
lucrative jukebox business. Committee counsel, Robert F. Kennedy,
said that he planned to question several business agents of the
Detroit Teamsters Union, whose international president, Jimmy Hoffa,
had been named in testimony as receiving payoffs in connection with
the jukebox war. Mr. Kennedy said that the witnesses would include
Lawrence Welsh, of Teamster Jukebox Local 985, and Morris Coleman and
Cecil Watts of Local 337, which was headed by Mr. Hoffa's top Detroit
aide, Bert Brennan, who had also been named in the hearings as
receiving the payoffs. The Committee the previous day had heard
testimony that William Bufalino, who would also subsequently testify, had quit a jukebox business
partnership with an alleged Mafia mobster and narcotics trafficker,
"Poppa John" Priziola, to become head of Local 985. A
parade of coin-operated machine operators and others had sworn that
they had experienced violence and other intimidation after clashes
with Mr. Bufalino or others in the union. Jimmy James, former
president of local 985, had refused to answer questions about his
role in Detroit jukebox rackets, saying, "The stuff that you are talking about here today is
directly incriminating toward me," invoking the Fifth Amendment privilege against
self-incrimination. After leaving the jukebox local, Mr. James had
become a power in the Laundry Workers Union in Chicago, and was an
international vice-president of that union. Query whether the jukeboxes yet had as a selection "Monday, Monday"?
In Whitesburg, Ky., it was reported that another dynamite blast had rocked a coal-loading ramp south of the town early this date and that a group of striking United Mine Workers pickets had reported that shots had been fired at them. The explosion had put the ramp out of operation and damaged machinery which separated coal, with an estimated $3,500 in damage done. The blast had been the third in two days in Letcher County, one of seven eastern Kentucky counties embroiled in a month-old strike of 7,000 UMW miners. Arsonists had set fire the previous day to a scale house five miles from the ramp and another coal company radio tower had been dynamited. More dynamite had been thrown on a railroad track near Chavies, and State Police reported that pickets stationed at loading tracks near Isom had been fired upon, with about six shots having come from the hills as a train had gone by, lighting up the pickets' position. The renewed violence had come as small coal operators returned from a meeting in Washington with UMW international officials and had reported that the talks had been unsuccessful. They said that they would seek to run their mines with anyone willing to work. The mine workers were seeking a two-dollar per day basic wage increase, but the small operators said that the pay increase of $24.25 per day would break them. One operator had been killed and five UMW members had been charged in the death. Pickets in Letcher and Perry Counties had virtually halted all coal movement from the mines not under contract.
In San Francisco, it was reported that 21 cases of serious or potentially serious illness had been uncovered among the first 350 doctors to submit casually to free physical examinations while attending the American Academy of General Practice convention in the city. Those findings had been made by a group of physicians and technicians in the first large-scale undertaking of that nature by the Academy. The convention and the project had one more day remaining and so the final figures on undetected ailments among the doctors would be somewhat higher. In about 40 minutes, the doctors had undergone a thorough checkup which would take 3 to 4 days to complete for a patient in ordinary practice. The ordinary patient would have to pay about $75 for such an examination, but it was free to the doctors. The physical examination center was manned by a volunteer staff of 140 nurses and technicians, plus between ten and fifteen examining doctors from a volunteer staff of 70 who were on duty. A $40,000 layout of the latest in laboratory and testing equipment, including electronic blood counters and on the spot X-ray reading, made possible the immediate reporting of findings. Twelve electrocardiographs were also used for heart studies and a cardiologist was on duty to analyze those records. Dr. John D. Humber of San Francisco's Southern Pacific Hospital was the center's director and he reported the 21 cases of serious symptoms which had been discovered in the first 350 checkups, which included four cases of glaucoma, a dangerous pressure disturbance of the eye, one case of rectal cancer, three cases of enlarged livers, one abdominal mass, requiring more checking, ten suspicious chest X-rays of conditions other than tuberculosis, and two urgently suspicious chest X-rays calling for prompt diagnostic check. The doctor said that a complete statistical study report would be made from the mass examination on the health of family doctors. Such statistics normally were hard to acquire and the survey showed that only one of four doctors had a complete physical examination within the previous two years. The statistical study would be done by the American Association of Bioanalysts, one of the project's sponsors.
In Phoenix, Ariz., it was reported
that architect Frank Lloyd Wright
In Boston, it was reported that an estimated 65 New Hampshire residents had picketed the Charles Street Jail for the second successive night the previous night in a demonstration of loyalty to a 41-year old man who earned his living in Massachusetts but lived in Pelham, N.H., and had been jailed Tuesday for failing to pay his 1956 non-resident income tax. Governor Foster Furcolo of Massachusetts said that the state would be happy to free the man if he paid his $140.80 tax or posted a bond for a similar amount. The Governor said that the man was more "interested in headlines than in obtaining his release or contesting the case." The chief of the tax department's collection bureau said that the tax evasion was "an outstanding and flagrant case" and added that the man had "made a great deal more money in Massachusetts than many other taxpayers." The Governor had met the previous day with the man's wife and his attorney, and he said that he had asked the attorney why he did not bail him out of jail as it was perfectly agreeable to the tax commissioner, and then they could proceed to test the law if that was what they wished to do. The pickets who had paraded in front of the jail where the man was confined had come to Boston in a motorcade of about 30 cars, many carrying placards, one reading, "Taxachusetts".
In Indianapolis, it was reported that legal doubts regarding a new court clerk had again delayed the crucial testimony of the defendant in her murder trial for having allegedly murdered her wealthy, married lover. Although a new clerk had been appointed and sworn in to succeed the late court clerk, new legal questions had arisen when the County Commission had refused to sign the bond for the new clerk. The court had remained at a standstill while the commissioners met. The defendant waited in the courtroom to tell of the shooting of her former lover, saying that all days were "of tension" at present. After Republican Governor Harold Handley had appointed the new clerk the previous day, the County Commission had claimed that they had the authority to make the appointment, touching off a Republican factional fight. The judge and attorneys for both sides feared that a possible mistrial might occur if it was found later that the deceased clerk's deputies did not have authority to certify trial documents, and hence the delay in the trial had been consented to by both sides pending the outcome of the dispute. We continue to await the outcome with bated breath.
Julian Scheer of The News reports that school consolidation and an 8 million dollar "crash" program to take care of City-County school needs might obtain a public decision as early as June. City and County school officials had tentatively agreed the previous night to seek an 8 million dollar bond issue to take care of desperate City and County school building needs in the ensuing two years. It had been generally agreed, particularly by City school officials, that a vote on a proposed City-County school merger and the 8 million dollar bond issue ought be in mid-June or late June. County school officials, however, said that their school needs were "urgent" and had asked for even speedier action. At a meeting at Myers Park High School the previous night, the 8 million dollar bond figure had been agreed on by members of both the City and County School Board members. No more than that amount could be sought, it was believed, because of the City-County school bond indebtedness reaching the allowed limit under state law. No definite division of the money had been agreed on, although County Schools superintendent J. W. Wilson had told the educators that the County needed to get started on its building program immediately and could use most of the bond money. It was pointed out that the legal requirements of advertising a bond issue and approval by New York bond attorneys would probably take until mid-June. Thus, a bill for consolidation in the Legislature could presently be passed in that time frame and an election arranged at the same time on both issues. The general feeling of the meeting was that the County would obtain 4.75 million dollars of the bond issue and the City the rest. A veteran school consultant had emphasized that the money would carry the boards only for two years, that 1960 and 1961 school needs could be met, but that was all. Mr. Wilson had said that the County could spend 6 million dollars to build new and additional classrooms for 5,000 more students expected during the ensuing two years. He was supported by elaborate figures and charts drawn by a member of the County Board of Education of Huntersville. The latter had shown increasing school populations, plus the great development in the perimeter area. A City Board member had emphasized that the separate planning could no longer be effective since the boards might merge. A legislative act was in the General Assembly at present calling for a supplemental tax vote which, if approved, would be tantamount to City-County school consolidation on July 1, 1960. Another City Board member said that he thought consolidation and the bond issue ought be set for a vote at the same time. The school consultant said that the 8 million dollar figure would merely be a stopgap measure and that more bonds would be needed in 1961 for the needs of the 1962 fiscal year.
Another piece also quotes from various members of the County Commission, and the City treasurer, L. L. Ledbetter, regarding the urgency of the bond issue for both city and county needs and the availability of the bonded indebtedness, limited to 8 million dollars.
Mr. Scheer also reports on the signs of spring. "You take the birds, the bees, the hand-holders. We'll take a plain old hollyhock. But it is a rather distinguished hollyhock at that." It was the Bank of Commerce hollyhock, which grew from a mound of sand and dirt whipped into a corner of the building's front by South Church Street's lusty breezes, the hollyhock emerging each spring from behind a downspout, jammed between it and a granite cornerstone. A passerby hardly noticed it walking past it on Church Street. But in another month, it would be two feet higher and in June, a corner of Church Street's asphalt and concrete jungle would have a single bright blossom or two, in some years the hollyhock being more prolific than others. The bank president said he did not know how it had been growing there, but that they did not touch it. A janitor for the building kind of guarded it, not standing guard over it but not liking to cut it or break it, careful not to break the thick stem when he hosed and swept the front of the bank. "You look for your signs of spring. On S. Church St., we've got ours."
On the editorial page, "This Talent Hunt Is an Urgent Chore" urges that the search for a successor to City Manager Henry Yancey ought begin at once. Although the final choice would be left to the new City Council after the municipal elections, it was neither necessary nor proper for the present administration to mark time languidly on one of the year's most urgent chores. His retirement would become effective on May 1 and a new council would be elected May 5, leaving thus a month to scour the nation for likely applicants.
It indicates that the previous year, more than 80 communities had adopted the 51-year old plan of municipal administration via a city manager and several other cities were currently looking for talent for that role. Some U.S. colleges now offered masters degrees in public administration. The University of Kansas, for instance, had been graduating large classes of city managers with such degrees since 1950.
It took both training and rare natural talent to run a city the size of Charlotte, but, as Mr. Yancey would be the first to concede, all of the essential qualities could not be learned in a classroom. It finds personality to be a key factor and a good city manager had to be something of a politician, not in a partisan sense, but sensitive to what people were thinking and anticipating what they wanted. He had to be a good conciliator, a good summarizer of complex situations, and a tactful statesman rather than a glad-handing back slapper. He also could not be afraid of work, as a recent national survey showed that some city managers worked 70 hours or more per week and that only 39 percent of them polled used all of their vacation time.
Most of all, the person had to have a sincere interest in the field of municipal administration and a democratic outlook. Charlotte needed a city manager who would serve the people and not manipulate them.
It finds that for 12 years, the city had been fortunate enough to have as a city manager a man who had filled all of those qualifications and more. Finding a suitable replacement who would measure up to Mr. Yancey's tradition would not be easy, all the more reason it had to begin its search right away.
"A Teutonic Al Smith Earns a Hurrah" finds that the decision of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany to withdraw from active direction of the West German Government was being quietly applauded in official Washington, as his exit would permit a greater degree of flexibility in negotiations with the Soviets regarding the Berlin crisis and related problems. But to connoisseurs of courage, the loss of Chancellor Adenauer was irreparable.
It finds him no ordinary statesman, and in an age of great events but not of greatness, he had emerged late in life as a hero of free men everywhere. His durability alone was remarkable. He had outlived or politically outlasted most of his contemporaries, from Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, Alcide De Gasperi of Italy, Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, to former President Truman, and a dozen or more French premiers. Only Premier Charles de Gaulle, who had faded and then miraculously reappeared, was left in the high places of Western politics.
All had tried to pick up the pieces following the disastrous World War II, and to his enormous credit, Chancellor Adenauer was still trying. It indicates that if he had died at age 70, he would have been known only as an efficient, if somewhat cantankerous, Mayor of Cologne. A series of well-publicized disagreements with the British, after the four-power occupation had begun, had made him a national figure. His reputation as a tough-minded, independent thinker had boosted him to become Chancellor in 1949 when West Germany held its first postwar free elections. He had a knack of turning out phrases in the manner of a Teutonic Al Smith, the former Governor of New York and 1928 Democratic nominee for the presidency.
When asked to summarize his foreign policy, the Chancellor had once said: "In truth the situation is this: Germany must be united with Europe or otherwise go under. This is not a matter of party politics, but rather one of national concern." On domestic policy, he had said: "Just as in overall European affairs, what matters most to us is that our people shall not again be commanded by the specter of a bogus nationalism. Germany must not again become the football of political adventurers." Of the Soviet Union, he said: "We must wait and see what time brings—but we must not wait with our hands folded in our laps. No matter what happens on the other side of the Iron Curtain, on our side we must get on with things. The free world can dare not sit idle and look with fascination at Moscow." (Regarding those quotes, you dumb Magaville residents, who never read a history book, except the vanity publications which masquerade as "histories" from the supermarket shelves by the cash register or proliferate in the bargain bins of the bargain bookshops, may wish to study them assiduously vis-à-vis the current dip in the White House and your insistent support of him despite all of the indications since 2017 being that he is nothing more than a slick salesman, a bait-switch artist, a nobody who lies constantly to promote only himself and his vain imagery of himself, caring absolutely nothing about your plight in Magaville, U.S.A., obviously not giving a fig for you or your family's struggle to exist, who would, in fact, at this juncture, no longer needing your political support in any election, just as soon have you die or be tortured to death in a Salvadoran prison. He could care less. The only thing he cares about these days is having his name on everything and anything he can get it on, from his stupid ballroom, which he now wants you to pay for to the tune of a billion dollars, somehow justified now by "national security", so that all his wonderful balls for his billionaire blackmailed pals will be secure against any riffraff who might invade, as if the layers of security already in place around any event at which he might deign to appear do not already provide security enough—for some reason. Have you, you stupid Magaville resident, ever stopped to ask yourself whether that reason might be just for political purposes, to convince suckers like you to support him in whatever venture he decides in a given meandering midnight tweet-tweet to undertake? Ask yourselves whether or not your nationalistic cult is not akin to what occurred in Nazi Germany starting in 1923 and continuing through April, 1945, when it finally came crashing down with a self-administered bullet to the brainpan by Herr Hitler, and some self-administered poison capsules by Herr Goebbels to himself, his wife and children. Are there not unmistakable similarities to the new Germania which Hitler wanted to construct in Berlin? Go read a thorough history of the Third Reich, written by recognized authors of history and not some right-wing kook trying to soft-pedal what actually occurred, and find those similarities in the mirror. If you then embrace it, you are no better or worse than the average National Sozialist was, worthy in the end of only self-destruction. If you are driven to vomit at the image of yourself thus conveyed, you may be on the road to recovery from your cultish behavior pattern, helplessly locked into a realm pervaded by miasmic grotesquery by a reality-tv sales-pitch artist, incompetent at everything he has sought to do in life and seeking to make up for it by idle boasts carrying no reality with them, a convicted felon who, but for your reckless, heedless cultist votes in 2024, would quite deservedly be in prison for numerous other felonies by this point.)
The piece concludes that Chancellor Adenauer's present stand on the question of reunification of the two German states involved great risks as Walter Lippmann had pointed out this date in the last in his series of penetrating reports on the Berlin crisis. "But it is impossible not to admire the old warrior's courage, his firm faith in democratic institutions, his dedication to the cause of European unity and his complete confidence that the day will come when Germany will again be united and free." It finds Winston Churchill to be correct, that Konrad Adenauer was the greatest German statesman since Otto von Bismarck.
As indicated, Dr. Adenaur would be induced, internally and externally, to remain as Chancellor, in which role he would continue until October 16, 1963, succeeded by Ludwig Erhard.
"H. M. Victor: A Pioneer of Progress" indicates that Mr. Victor, who died the previous day at age 94, had been one of a handful of dedicated men who had given more of themselves and their talents to their communities than could reasonably be expected of ordinary citizens, and were, consequently, pioneers of progress. He had been a banker from the age of 17 and had contributed untiringly to the growth of Charlotte for more than 50 years.
In 1904, he had come to Charlotte and four years later was active in organizing the Union National Bank of Charlotte, presently the First Union National Bank of North Carolina. He had been the bank's president from 1913 until 1945, when he became the chairman of the board, and later was named honorary chairman. During that long period of years, the city's slogan had been "Watch Charlotte Grow", but Mr. Victor had not been content to watch, as he helped in every possible way to promote that growth.
It indicates that his service to the community during two world wars and during periods of economic instability had been particularly impressive, the kind of leadership which Charlotte slogan-makers later would call "The Spearhead of the New South". It finds that his name would live long in the city's memory.
A piece from the Manchester Guardian, titled "Hawaii and the Union Jack", indicates that those who had watched television might have been puzzled a few days earlier by the Union Jacks prominently displayed in the Hawaiian Legislature when the Senators had thrown over business for pleasure at the news of their imminent acceptance into the United States.
The flags had been no imperial relics dug up for want of something better in the way of decoration and were neither unfurled by the League of Empire Loyalists. In the strictest sense, Hawaii had never been under British flag and in the material sense, the Jack had been worn since the late 18th Century, but no one was sure how it got there.
The explanations had distinct colonial undertones. Captain James Cook had discovered the islands in 1778 and a few years later, George Vancouver, who had sailed with him as a midshipman, was said to have given King Kamehameha I, who had united the islands, a Union flag and told him he could fly it over his palace. Another version was that the King had made a "vague cession" of Hawaii Island to Vancouver and that the Jack had become the national flag until the War of 1812.
The flag of the present was attributed to an English master mariner, George Beckley, who, according to the story, was asked by the King when the war was over to design a national flag for the islands. Mr. Beckley had obliged with eight horizontal stripes of red, white and blue, not in that order, to represent the eight main islands in the Hawaiian group. But either as a salute to the old flag or in a mood of patriotism, Mr. Beckley had stitched the British Union flag in the upper hoist, or, as the layman would say, in the corner nearest the top of the pole. That anomaly was accorded statutory recognition when the U.S. formally annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1900, and was what was seen on the news recently.
Drew Pearson, writing earlier from Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, indicates: "This is a land of soft tropical days and hot Spanish tempers, a land where the nightingales' singing and the barking of rifles break the stillness of the night, a land where you can walk down palm-studded boulevards beside the lapping waves of the Caribbean and have a policeman for no reason at all suddenly tell you to walk on the other side of the street." It was a land where the Spanish conquistadores built property rights and later sovereign rights, but not human rights.
Sometimes called the haven of dictators, currently ruled by dictator Rafael Trujillo, it was the home now of two exiled dictators, Juan Peron of Argentina and Fulgencio Batista of Cuba. Sr. Peron had become philosophical in exile, but Sr. Batista had not. The former danced in the nightclubs sometimes of an evening or went up to the mountains where it was cool, whereas Sr. Batista paced the floor of his room in the Hotel Jaragua, "lonesome, fretful, worried over what is happening in Cuba." Significantly both of them had the strong backing of labor. The Argentine labor unions had battled for Sr. Peron to the very end, while in Cuba, they had refused to go on a general strike against Sr. Batista. Even in exile, Sr. Peron recently had won a tremendous victory when his labor followers had elected President Arturo Frondizi, a victory which had helped to make Sr. Peron philosophical. He could look back on his mistakes, the two greatest of which politically had been favoring American oil companies and opposing the Catholic Church, the latter, he believed, having hurt him the most. He had antagonized the bishops by opposing the Church law that children of divorced parents were illegitimate. He felt deeply about that issue, because his late wife, Evita, had been the child of divorced parents and was stigmatized as illegitimate. Thousands of children were registered in Argentina as illegitimate because of that law and Sr. Peron had proposed to change it. When he did so, the entire weight of the Church had been thrown against him and he fell from power into exile.
In reminiscing to Mr. Pearson, Sr. Batista had said that he had been a good friend of the United States and that when the latter was at war, he had given it everything, including sugar and extra landing rights. He stated that a German submarine used to come up just outside Havana and taunt him. Its captain spoke in Spanish threatening to fire at the presidential palace. He would say, "You are within range of our guns, Batista. Be careful how you help the United States." He said it did not bother him and later he had broken relations with Russia when the U.S. wanted him to do so and had exiled the Communist Party. "Yet today I cannot go back to the United States, the country I befriended. You have barred me… I sit here in this beautiful country, and I would like to be gay. But I am not. I think of the people who are suffering in Cuba, the people who are being killed. And I wonder what I did wrong, and what I can do to help them. I don't know the answers."
To cheer up the lowly former dictator, pretend it is his birthday and present him with a piñata
Walter Lippmann, in the last of a series of four pieces on Berlin and Germany, in the wake of his recent tour of Europe, indicates that the final question was how to deal with a situation in which there were two German states with West Berlin as a special problem, facts which neither the U.S. nor Russia could change. The Soviets would not allow East Germany to be absorbed into the Western military and political community for if it did so, it would sacrifice control of Eastern Europe. The Western allies would not allow West Germany to unite with East Germany in a neutralized federation as that would destroy the basis for NATO, which now rested on the strategic position of West Germany and the reinforcements coming from the West German Army.
An international agreement to reunite Germany was, as he had indicated in the previous three pieces, an impossibility at present unless either the Soviet Union or the Western allies abandoned what they regarded as their vital interests, and since neither side would do so, or could compel the other to do so, everyone had to live with the facts that there were two Germanys and Berlin.
He indicates he did not like the situation and belonged to the minority who had long argued that German national feeling would not accept the partition of Germany, that one day the West Germans would come to terms with East Germany and the Soviet Union to reunite the country. The case for a politically neutral Germany and for the disengagement of non-German troops had been inspired by an attempt to find an orderly settlement to the problem of German reunification, to avert a disorderly settlement precipitated by an explosion of frustrated national German patriotism. But the attempt to negotiate a general settlement for reunification had failed, the meaning of the present German crisis. Both sides were against an agreed reunification and now had to live with the consequences, which included the risk that the German people would eventually not accept the partition of the country.
He finds that the best which could be expected from the coming negotiations was not a settlement but a modus vivendi and that the big question was whether to recognize and regulate the situation which could not be changed or to accept the facts but to refuse to recognize them on the theory that one day the facts would change for the better.
Insofar as there were conflicts of opinion among the Western allies, they arose primarily regarding the question that while there were two German states, nothing could be said or done by the allies which recognized the existence of the other Germany, the view of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, which had the formal support of Premier Charles de Gaulle of France. Thus the subordinates of Chancellor Adenauer negotiated traffic and other agreements with the Communist officials, arguing that if the U.S. did the same, it would destroy the fiction that the East German state did not really exist as a fact in the international world, as the U.S. continued not to recognize the East German government.
The British view was based on the practical and prosaic notion that since the East German state did in fact exist, the West would have to live with it and there was no point in pretending that it did not exist. The British recognized the East German government.
Before the meeting with the Russians in the coming conferences, the U.S. would have to make up its mind about where it stood in the argument between the West Germans and the British, a hard choice, for though the issue was posed in a theoretical form, there were substantial risks which could follow from either choice.
He finds the essential argument for Chancellor Adenauer's doctrine of non-recognition not to come from any passionate interest in the reunification of Germany, as he knew that reunification was not practical politics, and as an old Rhinelander, his heart did not bleed for close political union with the Russians and the Saxons of the East. That which he distrusted and feared was German nationalism, which, in its most respectable form, derived from Bismarck and in its most degraded and malignant form, from Hitler. His doctrine of nonrecognition of East Germany was a defense against German nationalism which, if it were to go on a rampage for German unity, could upset the whole of NATO, the Common Market, the entente with France, and the alignment of West Germany with Western society against the barbarians of the East.
He finds that in the last analysis, the U.S. was asked to follow Chancellor Adenauer's doctrine of non-recognition of the fact of the two German states to avoid the defeat of his party, the Christian Democrats, in the German elections of 1961. Mr. Lippmann indicates that although he did not agree with it, it was an impressive case, but the risks of the Adenauer policy were greater than those of the British policy under Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. For the British were essentially correct in wishing to recognize the facts of life as they were and to regulate them through a negotiated agreement.
The case for recognition of the two German states and, therefore, the special situation in Berlin, was that it was the West's best chance to arrange for an orderly evolution in Germany, that if an international charter for Berlin could be developed, the risks of dangerous incidents from misunderstandings by the recklessness or carelessness of subordinate officers and officials or from mischievous provocation, could be reduced. If the two German states could be brought into a legal relationship with each other, there would be a chance that the movement toward German unity, which was certain to grow, would be open and visible rather than clandestine and conspiratorial.
He finds that in weighing the two views, which could be roughly termed the German and British views, it needed to be borne in mind that the West was not choosing between a divided Germany and a reunited Germany. Prime Minister Macmillan, Chancellor Adenauer, Premier De Gaulle and Premier Nikita Khrushchev were agreed in realizing that the two Germanys were not going to be reunited, with the question rather being whether to recognize that situation or to drift along without its recognition. If the latter, accepting the fact of partition but refusing to recognize it, hoping to stand pat against the evolution of things, the West could probably manage for awhile. When the Soviet Union or the East German government grunted, the West could growl, and since neither wanted war or dared to have a war, things could be maintained as they were for some time to come, perhaps through the elections of 1960 and 1961 in the U.S., in Britain and in West Germany.
"But we need not try to be proud of ourselves if this is what we do. For what we shall have done is to buy a temporary standstill for ourselves at the risk that at some later date there will be an explosion of the pent-up popular feelings which we have managed to frustrate. We shall be better off and we shall feel better about it all if we grasp of the realities and do not evade them. Then we can say to ourselves, 'Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck the flower, safety.'"
A letter from the chairman of the resource committee of the North Carolina judicial system of the League of Women Voters, indicates that the previous year, the members of the League of North Carolina had studied reports from the Bar Association Committee on Improving and Expediting the Administration of Justice in the state and the consensus had been favorable to the report, the League believing it expedient to have a single court system with the responsibility of rule-making for the court vested in the court itself. The Bar Association's bill to rewrite Article IV of the State Constitution was presently in the hands of the Senate Committee on the Constitution and the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments, and joint weekly meetings of those committees were being held. She asks, on behalf of the League, not to let those bills be killed in committee and to write the legislators to support the bills.
A letter writer indicates that she believed, as the Reverend Billy Graham, that if people prayed for world peace, peace would occur. "Otherwise, we may all be destroyed." She finds that too many Americans had turned away from God and from church and were simply not good Christians and did not behave as good Christians ought.
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