The Charlotte News
Saturday, May 9, 1959
ONE EDITORIAL
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from Geneva that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had arrived this date for the following week's Big Four foreign ministers meeting, set to begin on Monday, and had declared, "We shall make every effort for this conference to be crowned with success." He was the first of the foreign ministers to arrive in Geneva for the conference and was greeted by a large turnout of Soviet bloc diplomats. He led a 17-man delegation and repeated Soviet assertions that the most urgent problems for the conference were a peace treaty with Germany and liquidation of the Allied occupation of Berlin. He stated: "It is for a positive solution of these important questions that the Soviet delegation has arrived here. Our intentions are serious... The Soviet Government is confident that at present there exists the necessary conditions to prevent war and ensure a lasting peace." The Communists appeared in a confident mood, and Western diplomatic sources appeared rather pessimistic. The latter cautioned against raising high hopes for success from the conference, pointing to prospects of contention at the outset on such routine matters as the agenda and procedure, including the seating arrangement, whether at a round or square table. The four Western powers, Britain, the U.S., France and West Germany, had prepared a package plan, while the Soviets wanted priority for Berlin and a German peace treaty, objecting to bringing in Western plans for German unification and European security at the same time. More argument might develop on whether outside powers could take part in the first Big Four foreign ministers conference since 1955. Secretary of State Christian Herter, following a stopover in Bonn for a conference with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and French Foreign Minister Couve de Murville were also due to arrive this date. British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, the last of the Big Four representatives, was not scheduled to arrive until the following morning. The East German Communists were set to arrive before the main participants. Leaving Berlin, East German Foreign Minister Lothar Bol said that he was "full of optimism". The precise role, if any, of East and West Germans at the conference was one of the first things to be brought up, along with possibly inviting other outsiders to take part.
In Helmstedt, West Germany, Communist East Germany this date released Emory Vaughn, an American civilian pilot who had been detained since March 27. The 32-year old pilot from Portsmouth, Va., had been arrested by the Communists when his sports plane had strayed across the Iron Curtain boundary. He was freed at the West German frontier post into the custody of the American Red Cross. The European operations director of the Red Cross had crossed the border to meet him and guide him into Helmstedt. The director had earlier arranged for the pilot's release in negotiations with the East German Red Cross. As Mr. Vaughan crossed the border to West Germany, he said to newsmen, "I have nothing to say." The director of the European Red Cross said that he was well treated and was in good health. He had received mail and packages through the Red Cross while being held in the East and the East German Red Cross had been cooperative and helpful, according to the director.
Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota proposed this date that the U.S. immediately launch a "grand design for peace—a seven-year plan of our own." One goal would be technical and economic aid to free peoples, to cost at least 14 billion dollars, or two billion per year for seven years, with the need possibly lasting for decades, according to the Senator. Other goals, he said, would be winning a just and durable peace and realization of dignity, well-being, and equality of rights for every American. In a keynote speech prepared for the 12th annual convention of the Americans for Democratic Action, the Senator, a vice-chairman of the organization, said that the Soviets had put the country on notice with a seven-year plan in communism's competition with capitalism. "We have laughed off five-year plans and seven-year plans in the past—and to our sorrow. We will laugh off this at our peril. I propose that we set the goals which are the price of survival and that we set ourselves to meet them." The Senator, a possible contender for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, said: "I do not propose that we imitate the Soviet Union—either its goals or its methods. I propose that as they have set their goals for the triumph of communism, we set our goals for the preservation of peace and security and for the extension of human freedoms and individual welfare everywhere on earth. They have set authoritarian priorities by dictate. We must set our goals by consent through democratic processes. We must demonstrate the superiority of the methods as well as the goals of freedom and democracy." The Senator said that Russia was growing stronger and therefore bolder, that there was abundant evidence of what he termed the "solid and substantial performance and plans of the Soviet economy and the Soviet military." He said that in spite of the President's "soothing words, there are well-documented doubts about our military strength, now and in the future. In international politics and diplomacy, by our dogged defense of the status quo, we have allowed ourselves to be outmaneuvered in Europe, leapfrogged in the Middle East, and seriously challenged in Asia and even in our own hemisphere."
The President's choice of a successor to Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles, who had died suddenly the previous day, would be closely scrutinized by Democrats in Congress. The former communications industry official had been mentioned prominently as a possible successor to Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, who had told the President that he wanted to leave his post late in the year. Some of the Congressional Democrats had looked on Mr. Quarles as one of the Administration's officials who had resisted their demands for more spending to close the missile gap with the Soviets. It had been the impression of those Democrats that Mr. McElroy relied heavily on the advice of Mr. Quarles, who technically was more familiar with details of the defense program than almost any other official. Mr. McElroy had told reporters on Friday that the death of Mr. Quarles would have to be another factor in considering what he would do. He said that it would be a good many months before the time for his intended resignation and he would have an opportunity to consider the matter in the meantime. Describing Mr. Quarles as "really irreplaceable", Mr. McElroy said that fundamentally he favored promoting someone within the Defense Department instead of going outside, indicating that an acting deputy might be named for the interim.
In Hot Springs, Va., Government officials this date reported a striking improvement in the nation's employment picture, with the joblessness total dropping well below the four million mark. It was indicated that unemployment might have declined by as much as 500,000 in April while employment had registered a greater than seasonal gain. The advance word on the monthly job report, due to come out the following Monday from the Commerce and Labor Departments, had been obtained privately from individuals for officials attending the spring meeting of the Commerce Department's business advisory council.
In Henderson, N.C., it was reported that a Greensboro National Guard unit was poised this date to move into the strike-torn town in the event of new violence related to the Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills strike. Highway patrolmen, some of whom had been in the town since the middle of February, had pulled out this date to return to their duties as traffic patrolmen. In announcing their withdrawal, Governor Luther Hodges had said on Friday that any new strike-connected flareups around the mills would be met by the immediate call-up of the National Guard units. The Guard's Adjutant General, Capus Waynick, said that the state's only military police guard unit, a 71-man detachment in Greensboro, had been placed on standby alert. The unit's assistant provost marshal reported that the detachment could be on the way to Henderson within two hours after being notified to move. General Waynick said that the Greensboro unit and others had been on standby alert for about two weeks, declining to mention the other units. Governor Hodges decided to withdraw the Patrol contingent, which had numbered between 50 and 150 at the struck mills since they had reopened on February 16, because conditions had improved at the strike scene. It had been quiet on Friday when the plants had closed for the weekend and police reported no disturbances during the changes of shift. The Governor told his press conference that Henderson and Vance County officials had informed him that about 55 local law enforcement officers were available, which ought be adequate to maintain law and order under existing circumstances. It marked the second time that the Patrol had been pulled from Henderson, as they had left in mid-April when the mills and the Textile Workers Union of America had appeared to reach an agreement. But when the pact had fallen apart and rifle bullets had begun whizzing around the plant areas, the Patrol had sped back. The Governor said that he was notifying union officials that he would use Guardsmen if it again became necessary for the state to step in to maintain order. He said that he would "emphasize to them that the state expects every person in Vance County, whether a striker on or off the picket line, or a worker going to work, to be a law-abiding citizen." The union and the company, in an apparently hopeless deadlock regarding job rights of strikers versus non-strikers, had been at odds since the previous November 17. Violence had flared up sporadically since the plants had reopened and had reached its most serious proportions in mid-April when the agreement had fallen apart and the mills had opened the second shift which had ended after dark. The agreement had fallen apart after the available jobs for the strikers seeking return to work were far fewer in number than the jobs they had before the strike began.
In Oxford, O., it was reported that a Miami of Ohio University student, whose mother was visiting him for Mother's Day, had been shot to death in the student's dormitory early this date as he interceded in an argument between two other students. One of the participants in the argument had been wounded slightly and the other had been found several hours later in a telephone booth in another dormitory, suffering from apparent self-inflicted wounds. Two of the students were 18 and the third was 20. One of the 18-year olds had been shot in the neck and the other, carrying two stolen .22-caliber automatic pistols and 250 rounds of ammunition, had died by apparent suicide. Police and Miami spokesmen said that the two 18-year olds had been dating an 18-year old coed and that the dead boy had gone to the other boy's room early this date and demanded he come out and fight. The 20-year old boy had come down the hall to quiet down the two and when the boy shot in the neck had turned to reenter his room, the other 18-year old had opened fire, with one bullet striking both the other 18-year old and the 20-year old, the latter fatally. The boy with the gun had then fled. Police and Miami officials had immediately started a search of the campus, but it was about seven hours later when a student had found in a telephone booth in a hall, about 400 yards away from where the shooting took place, the body of the dead youth. Other students in the hall recalled that the latter had entered in the wee hours of the morning and asked to borrow a dime to make a telephone call. They then heard what they thought was a firecracker a short time afterward, not knowing of the earlier shooting.
In Baltimore, a 12-alarm fire early this date had turned a grocery warehouse into a mass of charred rubble, with damage estimated at between a million and 1.5 million dollars. Police had picked up a 10-year old boy at the scene and reported later that the youth had admitted starting the fire. About 55 pieces of fire equipment had been called to the one-story warehouse and hundreds of firemen had fought the blaze through the early morning hours before bringing it under control. In the meantime, the walls had collapsed and the twisted roof covered the rubble. Police and members of the arson squad had become suspicious of the presence of the 10-year old boy early in the morning, and when he gave evasive answers, they took him to district police headquarters where, following questioning, they indicated that he admitted setting the fire, that he had been looking for canned goods which might have spilled on the ground at the warehouse's loading platforms and was playing with matches at around 12:30 a.m. and that one of the matches had dropped on some loose paper on a platform and spread to a nearby stack of wooden skids used for handling cartons. He tried to put out the fire by throwing sand on it and when the blaze continued to spread, he ran to a nearby small hill and watched the arrival of the first fire engines, then had come down and hung around the fringe of the spectators until he had been picked up. He lived about two miles from the warehouse and was a ward of the Welfare Department. His 80-year old foster father, with whom he stayed, reported him missing at 3:00 a.m. Officers said that the child would be charged with being a delinquent.
Bunny Harris of The News Raleigh Bureau reports that Wayland Spruill of Bertie County was grading fellow legislators on their speech-making and that the latest scores recorded during the Legislature's withholding tax debate were: 96 for Representative Frank Snepp of Mecklenburg; 95 for Representative George Uzzell of Rowan County; 98 for Representative Ed Kemp of Guilford County; 91 for Representative Tom Turner, also of Guilford; 98.5 for Representative Bradford Powell of Rockingham County; and 94 for Representative Sam Burrows of Randolph County. The piece provides Mr. Spruill's stated reasons, tinged with folksy humor, for the ratings.
In Salisbury, England, it was reported that 84-year old Richard Chipperfield, ancient master of the circus arts who was known as "Old Mr. Chips", had died on Friday. He had started in the circus ring at age 5 and had soon learned most of the abilities of a circus performer. He had retired 20 years earlier.
In Dublin, Ireland, burglars had broken into an Irish auction room this date and stolen a collection of rare stamps worth more than a million dollars. But the haul consisted of varieties of well-known stamps to philatelists and the burglars would have a difficult time therefore in trying to pass them along.
On the editorial page, "The Mind of the South Re-Examined", an editorial book review of The Southern Temper by William Peters, with a foreword by Harry Golden of Charlotte, indicates that the South's psyche had been poked and probed by many touring writers since Brown v. Board of Education had been decided in 1954, holding that segregation of the public schools was per se unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, but that no one had laid bare the raw realities of Southern attitude with more deftness in the meantime than had Mr. Peters.
He was a Northerner, a doctrinaire integrationist and a connoisseur of human frailty. What he lacked in objectivity he made up in an easy ability to isolate and render into readable prose the torrents of emotion which were sweeping the region at present. It finds that his book would be a far more valuable document if he were less dogmatic, as there were times when the book was more a social tract than a dispassionate examination of the South's mental climate. It finds that moral judgments were made with abandon and complex problems of the human spirit were reduced to a kind of righteous arithmetic in which two and two always added up to four.
Unfortunately, it indicates, things were not always so simple in the modern South. There were no sovereign remedies to social problems which had been aged in anguish for generations. The flesh was weak and the conversion of the heart was sometimes a slow and painful process.
It finds, however, that if Mr. Peters was short on compassion, there was nothing wrong with his powers of observation. He had traveled far, seen much and experienced a great deal, and his impressions had been recorded with superior journalistic skill, although occasionally reading like program notes for a chamber of horrors. Wherever there was a social conflict, there was cruelty. Man's inhumanity to man had been particularly heartless at times in the South and few major instances had escaped his notice. He reported those incidents with great clarity, conferring the trappings of martyrdom on all likely subjects.
It finds that the book performed its most valuable service in its journalistic description of major events in the post-Brown drive for black civil rights. The milestones were carefully recorded and the participants adroitly drawn. The White Citizens Councils, the Klan, Southern politicians, the NAACP, ministers, reformers, white supremacists, newspaper editors, educators, law enforcement officials and ordinary citizens were all subjected to searching examination. There was an excellent interview with Georgia segregationist Roy V. Harris, a comprehensive survey of black employment in the South, good descriptions of the Little Rock crisis, Montgomery's bus boycott, integration of the armed forces, and the desegregation of Southern colleges and universities. It finds that some of the book's more provocative pages were devoted to the notion that Southern white women, particularly white churchwomen, were lining up on the side of desegregation. It finds it an interesting theory, although the supporting evidence that large or significant forces were at work along those lines was flimsy.
It finds that Mr. Peters had relied heavily on recognized spokesmen of the "new South" and on the works of several noted sociologists. Consequently, readers were given useful summaries of and long quotations from the works of Lillian Smith, W. J. Cash, James McBride Dabbs, Harry Ashmore, P. D. East, Harry Golden, Carl Carmer, and John Dollard.
But it also finds that his attempts to understand the variety of feelings among Southern segregationists to have been largely unsatisfactory. "The lines between good and evil in this question are not so finely drawn as he seems to suggest. Nor can history, tradition, mores, customs and ancient social convictions be lightly dismissed." It also finds it regrettable that the author did not give a great deal more attention to Southerners of both races who chose to call themselves "moderates". The conflict in the South, it suggests, was not solely between the integrationists and the segregationists. There were others who were involved in the social dilemma who were somewhere in the middle, who knew the region and its people and knew also that time, understanding and great patience would be required to effect social change. It indicates that perhaps they did not qualify as martyrs, despite taking enormous risks, but worked nevertheless constantly for unity, harmony and civilized relations between the races and between regions within the framework of law. "If this terrible problem is ever solved, it is likely that the so-called 'moderates' will solve it. And they will solve it safely, sanely, without coercive action and also without excessive piety."
It indicates that even though the historical perspective of Mr. Peters sometimes went awry, he was an effective reporter and allowed his readers to feel the full brunt of feelings which, when stirred up, occasionally became irrational and violent. "It is not a pleasant journey he takes his reader on, but it is an enlightening one."
Mr. Peters had summed up the portents of his own ideas succinctly: "Continued school desegregation for a certainty." He predicted that there would be violence and more closed schools, but that eventually, a new status quo would be established. He indicated that how long it would take depended on "dozens of unpredictable factors. In the Black Belt it will take longer—much longer—than elsewhere. Once desegregation has been established for a single pupil in every state, however, state boundaries will cease to have much meaning in the movement. And that day cannot be more than several years away.
"In any case, the movement has begun, and it is propelled by forces which, having their roots in history, cannot be turned aside. It is even possible, as one Southerner speculates, that 50 years from now the South will have moved further toward complete equality for the Negro than the North. For, as he puts it, 'with the backlog of guilt for its past treatment of the Negro, the South, once it begins to move, may build up a momentum which carries it far past the North. After all, where can you find a more aggressive worker for any cause than a recent convert?'"
The piece concludes that Mr. Peters had found the cause, but had not yet found the convert.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "'We're Off To See the Wizard!'" indicates that it had a bone to pick with certain librarians who, as Martin Gardner had described them in the Saturday Review, were shouting, "Wake up and read what we think you should read." It indicates that its complaint had nothing to do with the Rover Boys, the Bobbsey Twins or even such classics as "Little Black Sambo" or Oliver Twist. Its concern was rather with the Oz books of L. Frank Baum.
It acknowledges that not all of the Oz books were literature, finding the writing not to be masterly but that the achievement had been in the quality of the imagination in the creation of the lasting characters.
It expresses amazement that some librarians had developed an allergy to fantasy and to the Oz books in particular. The chairman of the Miami Public Library had found that "kids don't like that fanciful stuff anymore", instead wanting to read of missiles and atomic submarines, and the State Librarian of Florida had included The Wizard of Oz on a list of books which she urged all public libraries in the state to withdraw from circulation. She contended that the books on her list were "poorly written, untrue to life, sensational, foolishly sentimental and consequently unwholesome for the children in your community."
It finds that it was bosh if applied to the Oz books, indicating that children at present were no more wedded to fantasy about missiles and atomic submarines than they had been to Buck Rogers and the like 30 years earlier. They liked broadside fantasy of the Oz variety then and it wagers that they continued to like it at present. Thus it says "down with this tendency of librarians to tell our children what they like to read. Call it censorship or selection or what you will, it is an insidious influence."
At least seven editions of The Wizard of Oz were in print at present and, according to Mr. Gardner, all of them were selling briskly. Two years earlier, a Milwaukee librarian had reported that the children had worn out 135 copies of the book in eight years and were rapidly wearing out the 50 remaining copies, with 25 more on order.
"So here's to L. Frank Baum's land of Oz. It has more mystery and excitement in one corner of the Wicked Witch of the North's domain than in all of outer space."
Drew Pearson indicates that Fidel Castro's statement that he had known nothing about the Cuban invasion force which had landed in Panama was "Fidelista double-talk." He indicates that the actual facts were that the port from which the 96 Cubans and 200 subsequent invaders had departed had been Batabano, a small anchorage in southern Cuba opposite the Isle of Pines. A Cuban naval post was present at that port, plus an Army post and a police barracks, as well as a gunboat in the harbor. Twenty miles away, at Managua, was the cadet school for the Cuban Army, with at least 300 soldiers and officers. Batabano was so small that it would be impossible for a force of 96 well-equipped men, and later 200 others, to depart without the knowledge of the Cuban authorities and without direct authorization from Sr. Castro. Army commanders had to answer to Sr. Castro for their every move and they made no moves without direct orders.
Yet Sr. Castro claimed that he was in complete ignorance of the Panamanian invasion. He notes that the actual fact was that Sr. Castro verbally attacked the U.S. in Cuba and praised Americans when in the United States.
Few Senators who had listened to the earnest plea of Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico to scrutinize carefully the part played by Admiral Lewis Strauss in the Dixon-Yates conflict-of-interest case, had realized a reason why Senator Anderson was so earnest. They had not known that he had once played a vital part in exposing another conflict-of-interest case. In South Dakota, where he had been born, young Mr. Anderson had contracted tuberculosis and gone to New Mexico for his health. Working for the Albuquerque Journal, he had unearthed the first clue to the famous Teapot Dome oil scandal during the Presidency of Warren G. Harding. He learned that a prize racehorse had been shipped from the East in a special railroad car to the New Mexican ranch of Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior at the time. The latter was a relatively poor man and his sudden affluence had aroused Mr. Anderson's suspicion. He had investigated and, in cooperation with the Chicago Tribune and the Denver Post, had finally run down the fact that the racehorse had come from the New Jersey farm of Harry Sinclair of the Sinclair Oil Co., a beneficiary of the Teapot Dome lease. Mr. Anderson and his newspaper had been subjected to great pressure, including an advertising boycott which had forced the publisher, Carl Magee, to sell the Journal to a friend of President Harding.
According to M. R. Werner and John Starr in their book, Teapot Dome, on one occasion Secretary of Interior Fall had come into the Journal office and asked in a loud voice, "Who is the s.o.b. who is writing those lies about me?" Mr. Anderson had stood up and said, "I'm the s.o.b., and I don't write lies." Secretary Fall had evaporated and Mr. Anderson had gone on to become a Congressman, a Senator, and a member of the Cabinet under President Truman as Secretary of Agriculture. The Teapot Dome scandal had caused President Calvin Coolidge to appoint two special prosecutors, future Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts and Atlee Pomerene, to prosecute Mr. Fall and Attorney General Harry Daugherty, together with Mr. Sinclair and Edward Doheny.
The Dixon-Yates contract, which presented the biggest conflict of interest since the Teapot Dome scandal, had been canceled by the Eisenhower Administration because a banker representative, Adolphe Wenzell, had been secretly placed inside the Budget Bureau to help get the contract. Although the Justice Department officially had cited that as the reason for canceling the contract, the President, unlike President Coolidge, had appointed no special counsel to prosecute the guilty.
He notes that one of those who had helped to unearth the Teapot Dome scandal had been the late Senator John Kendrick of Wyoming. His secretary had then been young Joseph O'Mahoney, who later, as Senator from Wyoming, helped unearth the Dixon-Yates scandal. Another Wyoming Senator, Gail McGee, was the most faithful Democrat on the committee presently examining the Dixon-Yates conflict of interest as it pertained to Admiral Strauss.
Walter Lippmann indicates that despite many people thinking that the Russians had staged the Berlin affair as a distraction to divert attention from their ambitions in Iraq and the Middle East, he believes it was misleading, that the stakes for the Russians and for the U.S. were bigger than in Iraq. For in Germany, the Soviet Union and the Western allies, both sides armed with nuclear weapons, confronted one another directly and neither could or would surrender their vital interests to the other. If they could not find an honorable and acceptable modus vivendi, there might be no alternative other than a great war.
Compared to that, the cold war regarding Iraq and Iran, though important and dramatic, was nevertheless secondary. The oil of Iraq had to have its market in the West. The Soviet Union had no need for it and no use for it, and would, therefore, not go to war to seize Iraq as it would probably go to war to hold Eastern Europe. The West would not go to war regarding Iraq because, when the chips were down, Iraq, with its oil fields, like Egypt with the Suez Canal, had to have a trading arrangement with the West. The practical conclusion was that however bad things might look in Baghdad, the one thing above all which should not be done was to write off Iraq and then treat it as a Communist satellite in the same class with North Korea and North Vietnam.
Even though the Iraqi Communists might dominate the Government, which they had not yet done, the West ought not regard the situation as final and irreparable. Egypt had taught that as between Arab nationalism and Soviet Communism, there was much flirtation and perhaps even a heavy affair, but not yet any indissoluble marriage.
The main reason for that situation was that there was no common frontier between any Arab state and the Soviet Union. With the exception of Albania, which was not much of an exception, the genuine Soviet satellites were all countries into which the Red Army had marched and could march again. For that reason, Iraq, which was not touching the Soviet Union, was unlikely to become a satellite. For the same reasons, Iran, which did not have any common frontier with the Soviet Union, was a great risk if ever there were a breakup of the Shah's regime.
The West's wisest course in the Middle East, he posits, was to refrain from any threats or promises which, in a showdown, could not be carried out. In its relations with the Iraqi Government, the West ought be unexcited and reserved, making it plain, but without excessive rhetoric, that the West believed in the independence of Iraq, that it supported its independence from the great powers, including the Soviet Union and the United States, and believed in its right and capacity to find its own place in the Arab world. He regards that as a realistic policy, not "dynamic" or dramatic, but all that the traffic would bear.
The old policy had collapsed, having been based on the illusion that Iraq could be aligned with the West by subsidizing and arming an oligarchy which was aligned with the West, and that such an artificial arrangement could be regarded as a military bastion against the Soviet Union. The architects and supporters of that old policy had looked upon themselves as hard-boiled and tough-minded realists. But the structure thus built had disappeared overnight, which ought prompt those who would seek to resurrect that old policy to be wary. In light of what had occurred in Egypt and to Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser's affair with Russia, and what had occurred to the latter's imperial dream of making Cairo the center of the Arab world, the time had come to discount heavily the catastrophic view of the Middle East.
The Arabs were a community from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, but nobody soon, if ever, was going to unite them in a single great state, neither Premier Nasser nor any other Arab, neither Premier Nikita Khrushchev nor any other Communist. For as long as there was a future which could be foreseen, there would be many Arab states and there would be no one great settlement, good, bad, or indifferent, of the Arabs' relations with each other or with the rest of the world.
Joseph Alsop, in Paris, indicates that the NATO commander, General Lauris Norstad, not long earlier had asked Premier Charles de Gaulle of France for special permission to place medium-range American nuclear rockets on French soil for the duration of the Berlin crisis. The only purpose had been to strengthen the Western deterrent for the critical period which lay ahead. Assent by Premier De Gaulle would not have involved any long-range commitment. Yet, the Premier had refused to make even a limited and temporary compromise in his long dispute with the U.S. regarding nuclear weapons. He continued to insist that France had to have entire control of any of those weapons which were placed in France. Congressional action would have been needed to give up the American rights of control of the nuclear warheads and so General Norstad's plan had been blocked.
He indicates that the incident was not, in itself, enormously important. Judging by the now-exposed Pentagon faking regarding the ballistic missiles emplaced in Britain, new rockets based in France would probably not have been ready in time for the expected climax of the Berlin crisis. Nonetheless, Premier De Gaulle's refusal of General Norstad's request had cast light on the divergences among the Western allies in their approach to Berlin. The difference was not great between the French, the West Germans, and the Americans. Premier De Gaulle's rejection of emergency rocket bases was comparable to the President's oft-repeated formula: "I won't give an inch but I won't mobilize a man either!" The difference was between the Germans, the French and Americans, on one side, and the British on the other.
The British position was that the Soviets meant business regarding Berlin and they were deeply fearful of the outcome. To avoid the worst outcome, they were ready to go pretty far to conciliate the Soviets. The other Western allies were not ready to make the kind of concessions which were talked about in Britain behind the scenes. But they were not ready either to make the obvious military preparations to make a firm stand.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had pointed out to Premier De Gaulle and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that their strong positions on Berlin implied a need for special military preparations. In both cases, the Prime Minister had been met with a blank response. Undoubtedly, Premier De Gaulle was a special case, since his analysis of the Berlin problem was known to be decidedly somber, that it would "probably end badly, perhaps very badly." Such had been his reported forecast. Yet in the actions he had taken, he had not differed greatly from President Eisenhower. He did not believe the State Department thesis, that Premier Khrushchev had gotten out on a limb and now wished to get off of it, and yet he behaved as if he did.
He indicates that all of those divergences raised many questions about the future, most of them unpleasant. The most unpleasant and most urgent of them was the question of what would occur if the British were correct.
Mr. Alsop believes that the British were wrong, but indicates that even if a person were convinced that the Soviets would not risk a nuclear war over Berlin and even if convinced that the other Western allies would not surrender under threat, the question still demanded an answer. He recalls catching the last plane out of Manila with the solemn assurance of General Douglas MacArthur that the Japanese would "never dare to attack the Philippines, and would surely direct their assault against the Netherlands Indies." That had been convincing at the time and yet it had been that judgment, wholly logical, which had produced Pearl Harbor. If the U.S. fleet in the Pacific had not been waiting in Pearl Harbor like a sitting duck, there would have been no basis for an attack.
The situation at present differed in manifold ways from the situation extant in 1941. But the chance of Soviet error regarding Berlin would be greatly reduced if the Western powers made the effort to achieve a state of real military readiness, instead of contenting themselves with what might be called "Eisenhower-McElroy-stand readiness".
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