KICKING THE ATOMIC FOOTBALL AROUND
STOUT, JONATHAN
Washington and the Nation Kicking the Atomic Football Around By JONATHAN STOUT WASmifOTOH. D. C. UNIVERSAL ACCEPTAHCE of the concept fhat international conferences can .be utilized as hostile...
...and that the door remains open for discussions with Russia . . . but only through the United Nations...
...The least creditable performance was ' turned in by Stassen, former Minnesota Gorcrnor and candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination, who is currenUy President of the University of Pennsylvania...
...As a "hot" political question, the a tern-bomb race was rivaled in' Washington this week only by the equally hot domestic issue of the crisis in coal...
...Stassen borrowed his ideas from Senator McMahon, his emphasis from a host of preceding atomic orators, and added nothing but boring repetition...
...Both subjects were marked for their high content of double-tajUc...
...His contribution— made at a Republican dinner in Grand Rapids, Mich., home city of Senator Vandenberg, ailing spokesman of Republican foreign policy—added up to practically nil...
...All of which made more ridiculous another typical performance by Senate Tom Connally, the unfortunately bewildered spokesman of Administration foreign policy in the Senate...
...But the miners have ignored all three communications from Lewis...
...In effect, the Judge set aside the tangible evidence of compliance with the court's injunction in favou of "evidence" he inferred from the presumed motives of Lewis and the coal miners...
...And the business of publicizing globally such a conference was repeated often enough to underline the feeling that the vocal politicians conceived of the effort chiefly as a propaganda weapon...
...A CADAVER which was not properly interred three years ago is rising to haunt the domestic coal crisis...
...and that Harold Stassen was winding up for a pitch at Truman and not at Stalin...
...The one point on whic,h they all seemed to agree is the idea, •borrowed from Senator McMahon's eventful speech, of launching a major moral offensive against the Soviet Union...
...Perhaps the U. S. Supreme Court will eventually have to answer these questions...
...he can be depended upon to catch up with the bus in a month or so . . . breathless, perhaps, but without loss of pontifical poise...
...Connally may have embarrassed the Administration, but, fortunately, he need not be taken seriously...
...and President Truman, State Department officers, Harold Stassen and Senator Tom Connally in the United States...
...To assume that the common citizen cannot discern the difference between a sincere praetical proposal and ulterior political motives, is a challenging insult to the citizenry which is bound to produce self-defeating consequences...
...The issue now is this...
...Certainly they are fraught with authoritarian implications...
...There was no discernible realistic hope in any of the utterances that still another conference with the Kremlin Would actually result in a cessation of the atom-bomb race...
...in an interview with reporters after the President's press conference, ignored Truman's and Acheson's insistence that the UN is the only acceptable channel for meeting tho Russians, and took off on pelf-inspired solo flight during which he suggested sending the Secretary of State or Chief Justice Vinson to Moscow for direct talks...
...A judge's pen can neither mine coal nor improve conditions...
...HOW THE POXES in the Kremlin —who are past masters in the technique of taring the innocent into conferences which are intended to be used as propaganda weapons—are to be lured into their own type of trap just isn't explained by Winston Churchill, Harold Stassen or Tom Connelly...
...Prominent on the atom issue were Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in England...
...In addition, both were firm in the conviction that it will take more than another piece pf paper to convince , anyone that the Russians can be depended upon to respect any agreement...
...Meanwhile, one of the basic defects of Taft-Hartley—the assumption that genuine collective bargaining can be enforced at the point of a legal gun—is exposed...
...Reiteration of the fact that all agreements are mere scraps of paper to the Kremlin and that it respects only force made it clear that nobody expects any real results from a - conference...
...What must Lewis—or any other union leader—do to convince a court that he has carried out the court's order to the letter...
...District Court in 1947, when he laid a huge fine on the United Mine Workers Union and John * L. Lewis during the coal strike of that year...
...The only serious contributions on the atom question were made by Clement Attlee and Harry Truman, when they stressed that British and American policy remains identical...
...Judge Goldsborough set a juridical precedent by providing a new definition of what constitutes legal evidence—the "nod and-wink" theory...
...In 1MT Judge Goldsborough handed down an ioitwMUpn -against .the coal strike...
...What are the limits of a court's authority under such an interpretation of evidence as Gtaldsbotough's...
...Connally...
...Lewis complied by wiring 'his miners that he was obeying the injunction in ordering -them heek to work...
...The cadaver is the "Goldsborough doctrine," enunciated by Federal Judge Alan T. Goldsborough in the U.S...
...That notable ommission indicated that Churchill was really aiming his guns at the British Labor party instead of the Bolsheviks...
...Daniel Boone, once lost for three days in a trackless wilderness, denied that he had been "lost" and insisted he had merely been 'bewildered" for threedays...
...The miners failed to respond, end Judge Goldsborough fined the union and Lewis on the grounds that the manner in which the Lewis telegram was worded constituted "a wink and a nod" to the miners to ignore the order...
...Judge Goldsborough may have been correct in his inference, but the feet remains that he established the judicial precedent of relying on intuition instead of tangiblo evidence...
...In contrast with 1947, 'Lewis' this time has three pieces of tangible evidence to show that he complied with the court order—two very decisivelyworded telegrams and a very stronglyworded letter...
...That's where the double-talk came in...
...Must he personally drag the woskers back to we*k...
...Both the President and Secretary Achesea told newsmen that agreements with the Kremlin must be baaed on strength and the ability of the democracies to enforce compliance with them...
...His "sound-off" appeared to serve only one purpose—to announce that Stassen is still a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination...
...D. C. UNIVERSAL ACCEPTAHCE of the concept fhat international conferences can .be utilized as hostile weapons appears to be the only solid fact which emerged this week from the utterances of a number of office-seeking politicians—in Britain as well as the United States—who in recent days have leaped with alacrity, and mixed motivations, on the question of an international meeting to halt the atom-bomb armament race...
Vol. 33 • February 1950 • No. 8
