Washington - U.S.A.
COFFIN, TRIS
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. By Tris Coffin Faubus Success Encourages Segregationist Violence A few days ago, a strange storm, the tail of a wandering hurricane, hit Washington. Winds cruelly lashed the...
...A few already visible are: • School integration will be virtually stopped in the South until this new legal question is thrashed out all the way to the Supreme Court...
...surprising...
...to use its National Guard or its state defense forces within its borders in times of peace...
...Read a statement given by General Nathan F. Twining expressing alarm over Soviet technical advances, Wilson said whoever wrote the speech was an "eager beaver...
...School officials promptly warned that any violence would be swiftly and severely punished...
...Today, the missiles controversy has been stirred up again by the Soviet announcement...
...What appears to be a clear-cut case arose from Texas Governor Ralph Sterling's defiance of a Federal Court order in 1932...
...The Court forbade the Texas Railroad Commission (which controls the oil industry) to limit production...
...or call a special session of Congress...
...But several other possibilities have been suggested...
...If this does not die down, the next session of Congress may be doomed to demagoguery...
...At that point, the power will shut off and the missile will continue at a speed of about times the speed of sound, so that it will arrive over its destination in about, certainly not more than, 30 minutes, maybe less than that, having achieved en route an altitude of about 500 miles...
...Louis Lautier, Washington correspondent for the Negro Press Association, points out that before the Little Rock case Negro ministers and women were not touched by the hoodlums and night riders...
...It would be a great psychological weapon, a blackmail weapon...
...Some weeks ago, the Governor decided to throw his weight against integration...
...that the restrictions of the Federal Constitution upon the exercise of state power would be but impotent phrases, the futility of which the state may at any time disclose by the simple process of transferring powers of the legislation to the Governor to be exercised by him, beyond control, upon his assertion of necessity...
...The Justice Department regarded this threat as so frivolous that it sent the head of the civil-rights section (of all people) to Little Rock to talk the Governor out of it...
...Earlier, the Secretary had told a group of Congressmen privately that he saw no need for "supreme priority" for missiles...
...Governor Sterling declared the oil areas to be in "a state of insurrection'" and called out the Guard to do exactly what the Court ruled the Commission could not...
...The Soviet announcement should be the signal to the defense administrators to reverse the missile slowdown...
...This sounds more like Harry Truman than Dwight Eisenhower...
...A damp and sickly heat closed over the capital...
...Winds cruelly lashed the elms on Constitution Avenue...
...This could mean a delay of another school year...
...Four men must share the responsibility, and they are: 1. President Eisenhower, despite his military background, did not exercise his responsibility as Commander-in-Chief...
...But when enforcement breaks down, as in disasters, they loot, burn, kill and rape...
...In every community, North or South, is a fringe of bitter men and careless youth...
...Apparently, he saw a ready-made organization to boost him along in the White Citizens' Councils, penetrating into almost every corner of the state...
...General Tooey Spaatz, former Air Force Chief of Staff, made it a year and a half ago to Senators investigating air power...
...now they are fair game...
...General Earle E. Partridge, commander...
...That General Spaatz was correct and Jackson's fears not idle is shown by recent events—Russia's announcement of an intercontinental ballistic missile, her curt withdrawal from the London disarmament talks, and President Eisenhower's attempt to soothe the troubled world at his press conference...
...Instead, the President delegated his chore to others...
...The spokesman for an all-out development program, Senator Jackson, says bluntly: "This is a good time to bring home to the American people something they have a right to know...
...At the time, reporters patrolled a fifth-floor hall of the Justice Department...
...One reason for the alarm abroad, reflected in the questions of foreign newsmen in Washington, is the failure of President Eisenhower to act decisively in the crisis...
...But, instead, he played golf at the Newport Country Club and met with local Republican party leaders...
...set the Department of Justice to work on a criminal-conspiracy case...
...Despite the highest authority, target dates for operational missiles, both the 1,500-mile and the 5,500-mile, have been postponed...
...Walter R. Dornberger, formerly in charge of German missile research at Peenemiinde, said flatly: "I know that the Soviets have medium-range missiles, capable of carrying an atomic warhead, which could reach American cities from launching platforms at sea...
...There has been substantial slippage in the progress of our research...
...The Secretary's views were backed up by Budget Bureau directives and are reflected in the last big slash ordered in Pentagon funds...
...In this way the Governor's action has psychologically encouraged the mob...
...These talks, and Faubus's later TV and radio conferences, show that he was totally unaware of the terrifying consequences of his act...
...Faubus has, in effect, given legal sanction and protection to anyone who wants to horsewhip a Negro...
...Four months later, Khrushchev, picking his audience well, said to the British Industries Fair: "I am quite sure we will have a guided missile with a hydrogen bomb that can fall anywhere in the world...
...order the Attorney General to ask an injunction against the Governor (without waiting for the Court to request it...
...This was on orders from Stalin...
...Spaatz replied: "I think they could well use it as a blackmail weapon...
...Representative Emanuel Celler (D.-N.Y...
...Two years ago, an alarmed group of Senators pushed Eisenhower into giving missiles a "supreme priority...
...This was canceled in a 1947 economy wave...
...Humphrey was not impressed by missiles or research, primarily because they cost too much...
...They have been elected to high campus office by fellow students...
...Abroad, even the question of whether civil war may break out in the United States is being asked...
...Under our system of government, such a conclusion is obviously untenable...
...There has been an almost hysterical assumption of great capabilities on the part of the Communists, some of which, in my opinion, actually do not exist...
...He treated Secretary of Defense Wilson as an assistant and often called Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to his office to talk over defense planning...
...recommended, he could have flown to Little Rock and escorted the Negroes to school himself...
...Russia attacked the missile development with a "desperate earnestness," as one observer describes it...
...Faubus was looked on as a moderate...
...Governor Faubus has let loose the fury of the mob, not just in Little Rock, but in Nashville where a school was dynamited, in Birmingham where a Negro minister was brutally beaten, and in the back roads of the South where terror rides again...
...They are held in check by fear of the law...
...Four years later, during the Korean War, the contract was reinstated...
...A reason for the assurance that Russia has not successfully tested an ICBM is that there is no place where the USSR could have tested it and not been detected...
...The damage to the United States in the world is, in the words of Mike Mansfield, the Senate's leading foreign policy statesman, "beyond fathom...
...There, a mural depicts a black-robed judge protecting from a mob a man stretched at his feet...
...He told the air-power study: "I happen to think the Russians are having a lot of trouble right now...
...It is quite likely that Russia does have a missile of a 2,500-mile range, but with limited accuracy...
...Senator Henry D. Jackson (D.-Wash...
...The mob has been loosed and the United States degraded on the eve of key world tests...
...does not have an operational ICBM or a medium-range missile...
...Ugly clouds glowered overhead and dumped torrents of rain...
...He did not personally investigate the missiles controversy, even when Assistant Air Secretary Trevor Gardner resigned in a fury of frustration...
...As Senator Hubert Humphrey (D.-Minn...
...And if the Soviet was able to win some of these scientific races of discover), like the missile race, wouldn't there be a question in the minds of people abroad that the United States may not be the industrial colossus as compared to Russia...
...Eisenhower could have talked to the nation, via radio and TV, explaining how explosive the issue is and pleading for understanding and tolerance...
...This was underscored by General Walter Bedell Smith, formerly SHAEF chief of staff, Ambassador to Moscow, Central Intelligence director, and Under Secretary of State...
...He told the Senators: "There is good reason to believe that we normally overestimated Communist capabilities in almost every respect...
...The Governor had no clear plan for blocking integration until Georgia's Governor Marvin Griffin visited Little Rock in mid-August, and the two talked far into the night...
...On funds for research and development, he said: "I am not sure that what they need is more money...
...Yet, this priority has proved little more than a piece of paper, thanks to indecision, intra-service rivalry, and indifference in high places...
...This storm seemed to carry with it a sense of the violence, anarchy and inhumanity spreading across the South...
...It pointed due south...
...Administration spokesmen reply: "What do you want the President to do, send troops to Little Rock...
...The Little Rock affair will have many far-reaching consequences...
...A few steps away, Attorney General Herbert Brownell was in his huge office puzzling over a course for Little Rock, Arkansas...
...Congress in 1916 declared that nothing "limits the right of a state...
...Northerners of both parties will move in the next Congress for tougher civil-rights legislation...
...The syndicated photographs of tough, sneering Arkansas white boys jeering the Negro students are already causing incalculable harm in friendly, neutral, Communist-ruled and Arab nations...
...Soviet spokesmen have been puffing out their chests and dropping hints of missile progress for the past two years...
...When Negroes were integrated into the District schools, the "hard guys,' as the toughs were known, threatened violence...
...On August 26, Governor Faubus advised Acting Attorney General William Rogers, Vice President Nixon's close friend, that he would call out the Guard to prevent violence he anticipated when Negroes came to enroll in the high school...
...To an outsider, this wa...
...At the United Nations debate on Hungary, Russia may well raise the point of whether the terror in the South is not more violent than the rape of Hungary...
...Bearing in mind that American standards are much higher than Soviet, the U.S...
...There was no trouble...
...The target date has been 1960...
...Bulganin told the Supreme Soviet on December 29, 1955 about "rocket missiles which have been developed particularly over the past few years and, we can say, are becoming intercontinental weapons...
...The disillusionment of Negro voters with the Eisenhower Administration will spread unless swift, sure steps are taken to enforce compliance with the Supreme Court...
...To this evidence can be added Soviet Premier Nikolai Bul-ganin's note to British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden on November 5, 1956 at the height of the Suez crisis...
...In other words," Jackson said, "you feel the psychological application by the Soviet might be more effective than the military application in the early stages...
...He was the victim of vaulting ambition, the wile of other Southern politicians and lack of broad vision...
...Eisenhower in the first week of September would have slowed the mob...
...A spirit of moderation, which Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson persuaded a number of Southerners (including Dick Russell, Herman Talmadge and John Stennis) to adopt, is under angry attack by the mob...
...He could Federalize the Arkansas National Guard and order it to active duty...
...4. Admiral Radford revealed his position succinctly...
...He said gravely: "The fact that Russia would possess the ballistic missile would have a profound psychological effect...
...That is right," the veteran airman answered...
...Humphrey, a strong, persuasive personality with what amounted to almost a mania for balancing the budget, was given veto power over military spending...
...There is no such avenue of escape from the paramount authority of the Federal Constitution...
...There is a contagion to this madness...
...With the President at the Newport Country Club and Congress off seeing the world, a prophecy haunts Washington...
...The USSR grabbed all the V-2 rocket scientists and equipment it could lay its hands on (the bag of scientists was 160), seized control of Peenemiinde, and gave the research a top priority...
...and it will be under power and guidance for 400 to 500 miles...
...The best judgment in Washington on this crucial missiles race is: • Russia does not have an operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tested and ready for production...
...These threats alarmed Eisenhower and led to his pressure on London and Paris to cease hostilities...
...For some months, rumors have circulated that the police powers of the state, coupled with the National Guard, might be just the trick...
...As Lautier points out, the Negro press and leadership is shocked and dismayed at the lack of swift, vigorous action by the Administration and particularly the President...
...asked: "What would be the psychological impact of the Soviet's getting the 1.500-mile ballistic missile before we do, with reference to our NATO allies, all of whom are within that range...
...Senator Jackson suggested: "People abroad look upon the United States as a sort of industrial and scientific colossus of the world...
...Little Rock is in direct contrast, for example, to Washington, D.C...
...2. George M. Humphrey, the former Secretary of the Treasury, was one of these who became a part-time Commander-in-Chief...
...Before the Supreme Court, the Governor argued that his proclamation of martial law was conclusive and unreviewable...
...Air Defense Command, has described a theoretical Soviet ICBM: "If it were fired from Russian bases, it is going to have to travel about 3,000 to 5,000 miles, something of that order...
...This note and Moscow Radio broadcasts plainly threatened missile attacks on Britain and France unless they halted the war...
...Yet in 1956, in another case involving a National Guard, the Court decided with Justice Stanley Reed: "The states are the natural guardians of the public against violence...
...In the U.S., the Air Force gave Convair a "study contract" for a long-range missile...
...Griffin is one of the several radical Southern Governors who have been looking for a bold and effective way to defer, if not halt, integration...
...3. Defense Secretary Wilson consistently underrated Russian defense capability and the importance of the missiles...
...His one ambition was to break tradition and be elected Governor three times...
...Supreme Court rulings on the subject seem contradictory...
...chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, hag already served notice...
...Arkansas has been proud of his racial tolerance...
...They may have a revolution of their own or they may have a revolution between one satellite or another...
...It will probably have to start off with a booster which will drop off...
...Washington described an ICBM as having a 3,500-5,500mile range, a nuclear warhead, and capable of sharp accuracy...
...Two years ago, Dr...
...Before the Supreme Court decision, the University of Arkansas voluntarily admitted Negroes...
...Looking out his window, Brownell could see the weather vane on top the Smithsonian tower...
...The point many critics of the President make is that almost any act or positive statement by Mr...
...A unanimous ruling of the High Court written by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said: "If this extreme position could be deemed to be well taken, it is manifest that the fiat of a state Governor, and not the Constitution of the United States, would be the supreme law of the land...
...We would not interpret an act of Congress to leave them powerless to avert such emergencies without compelling directions to that effect...
...The Second Amendment to the Constitution says: "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed...
...order FBI agents to accompany the Negro children to school...
...Governor Orval Faubus, who touched oft the human storm, seems not to have understood what he was doing...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 38
