K & K in Vienna:

...My friends admit, in fact observe themselves, that the South and its attitude toward Negroes is a cross that all America must bear, stumbling with the burden...

...The President's faith in the information and perceptiveness of the Central Intelligence Agency and the State and Defense Departments has been badly shaken by the Cuban fiasco...

...Yuri Gagarin, is making speeches urging settlers to go to the virgin lands...

...The United States is overcommitted and overextended...

...Kennedy was embarrassed by the effusive Soviet praise and Khrushchev's desire to bargain with him, particularly in view of his own narrow election margin...

...The President will go into the Vienna meetings in much the same spirit as he entered the bleak stage for the first Kennedy-Nixon debate...

...He is committed to swiftly raising Russian living standards and this is well nigh impossible as long as the USSR pours one-fourth of its national income and a vast supply of brains, energy and labor into defense...

...The most influential state, Brazil, has virtually proclaimed itself a neutral in the world struggle and is exchanging a trade mission with Communist China...

...South Korea came very close to falling into the pit of absolute political confusion and disillusionment—an ideal situation for the Communists—and was temporarily saved only by a military junta...

...This will be an encounter between two shrewd political masters, each with a tough will and the vanity to think that history is on his side...

...And on January 27, the new President publicly rebuffed UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson for commenting at a press conference that he thought a faceto-face meeting between Kennedy and Khrushchev would be helpful...

...and that there are countries which have just liberated themselves or are in a process of liberating themselves from colonial slavery...

...But, realistically, we have to coexist on our planet, and consequently we have to find a common language in certain questions, as peace...

...He has also hammered at shoddy consumer goods and a lag in the growth of agricultural production...

...Reports from many sources indicate Khrushchev's interests are quite programmatic, and thus fairly reliable...

...After a recent Congressional hearing on the Cuban debacle, Senator Gore demanded that the Joint Chiefs of Staff be fired...

...But it seems we must be realistic about the true state of things...

...Khrushchev made an obvious appeal to the American President: "Although President Kennedy and I are men of different poles, we live on the same earth...

...But the remedy is severe and may not work...

...By Tristram Coffin K & K in Vienna When John Kennedy's jet plane heads east to Vienna, where he will meet with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on June 3-4, the literate young President may well recall James Joyce's line, "Welcome, O life...

...3. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev are basically agreed that disarmament must begin soon...

...There is, too, among the business leaders of the South, an ardent desire, if carefully restrained in public, to end the terrible feudalism of the South's social and political system...

...Soon after the American election, stories appeared in London, Paris and Warsaw that the Soviet Premier was eager to catch the first plane west for a talk with Kennedy...

...I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience...

...Harold E. Davis of the Atlanta Journal estimates that while the people of Georgia are opposed to integration, a popular referendum would reveal them to be "moderates...

...Russian propaganda portrayed the President-elect as another FDR who, in the Soviet view of history, was the only President to truly understand the USSR...

...Iran, too, is at the brink of chaos...

...He is troubled, deeply troubled, that their picture of the USSR and Khrushchev himself may be false...

...President Kennedy will come to Vienna still shaken by an awful knowledge...

...And by the propagation of a doctrine about the status of the Negro, it has impressed on an entire region a philosophy agreeable to its necessities and succeeded for many decades in maintaining a regional unity in national politics to defend these necessities...

...Kennedy has discovered: • Massive retaliation, the strategy on which we have so glibly rested our fates, is a Maginot Line and, what is more, a virus...

...This essentially is why the South cannot solve by itself the painful dilemma of integration...

...In the four months he has been in office...

...put out brushfire wars...

...And we won't get that until we can guarantee them there won't be race riots at the plant gates...

...Significantly, one of the most active campaigners for resuming tests, Senator Albert Gore (D.Tenn...

...His mission will not be to bargain with Khrushchev, but to find out how grim and difficult is the task ahead for America...

...For, they say, the image of the United States as a land of just and humane people falters at photographs of burly whites beating Negroes, and women shouting obscene words...

...We must see that there are now on the planet Earth Socialist countries which include over a billion inhabitants...

...Meanwhile, the events involving the Freedom Riders in Birmingham and the besieged church where Martin Luther King was speaking in Montgomery, Alabama, have shocked and dismayed many people here...

...Laos is an unhappy example...

...For it has rotted out the judgment and effectiveness of the U.S...

...Southern Politics also points to "an extraordinary achievement of a relatively small minority—the whites of the areas of heavy Negro population—which persuaded the entire South that it should fight to protect slave property...

...This undemocratic system is made possible by such tricks as poll taxes, voting literacy tests and the county unit system...

...He wants to make one last effort to reach an agreement with Khrushchev...

...Back came word from Moscow that Khrushchev was willing to wait —a few weeks...

...Trying to get the Government to let International Tel and Tel raise its rates," he replied...

...They also put Khrushchev in a real hole...

...Moreover, Southerners generally are more moderate on the race issue now than 10 years ago...

...In "Yerevan, he complained that housing was lagging behind and units were being commissioned before they were actually completed...

...A few days later, in Georgia, he criticized the number of mud huts still being used and demanded a speed-up in the construction of homes, schools and hospitals...

...Three other factors are also driving Kennedy to meet with the man who is the chief political agent of what he bluntly called "the enemy" in his Ottawa speech...

...Kennedy responded by issuing his statement criticizing personal summit diplomacy, and suggesting that contacts be made through regular channels...

...Kennedy has been doing his homework by boning up on the remarkable off-the-cuff speeches Khrushchev has been making on his grass-roots tour...

...All the devices to maintain this minority control are passed with ease through state legislatures which no more accurately represent the views and needs of the people than a Communist party committee...

...Who can match the deft and intelligent humanity of Alabama's Hill as chairman of the Labor and Welfare Committee...

...Or the shrewd sagacity of Vinson of Georgia as he deals with the military as chairman of the Armed Services Committee...

...2. The Administration suspects that the flies of crisis buzzing about its head—the Congo, Laos, the Geneva stalemate and Cuba—may come in part from Kennedy's polite but firm refusal to see Khrushchev earlier this year...

...The final blow came when Kennedy, in a letter to the Premier delivered by our Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson on March 9, said he did not think any early meeting was feasible...

...Why then is it possible for brutal beatings and lynchings to occur still in the South...

...and Russia began pouring arms into Laos...

...So Khrushchev was made to look foolish...

...The black belts make up only a small part of the area of the South and—depending on how one defines black belt—account for an even smaller part of the white population of the South...

...On his journey, Kennedy carries with him no heavy baggage of illusions or great hopes, but a conviction that he must discover by the "reality of experience" the truth of Soviet intentions...

...He adds that the die-hard segregationists are by and large over the age of 50...

...They differ widely on how...

...has all but demanded that the President pass up the Vienna meeting...

...Therefore the problem of housing is an acute one...

...In addition, the Russians made it quite plain they could stir up new hornets' nests in Iran, Berlin, South Vietnam and Korea whenever they desired...

...The South can't become prosperous," he told me, "until we get big industry down here...

...The Northerner is often struck by the strange and terrible irony of a section of the land which produces such truly great men as Senator Lister Hill and Congressman Carl Vinson being the scene of feudal and horrible acts...

...The Soviet cosmonaut...

...political prestige has so crumbled in Latin America that our "good neighbors" are most reluctant to take any steps to contain Castro...

...They are amiable, intelligent gentlemen with a gift for making you feel you are their friend...

...The answer is that the South is dominated, indeed terrorized, by a relatively small number of voters...

...Within a few days, Moscow moved bluntly and roughly on three fronts: Russia kicked the props out from under UN efforts in the Congo and demanded that Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold be fired...

...In his May 12 talk at Tiflis...

...Soviet delegates to the test-ban talks at Geneva reversed their positions and completely deadlocked the negotiations...

...This reflected the feelings of President Kennedy immediately following the unsuccessful invasion...

...He knows that, although he has many advisers, he is entirely on his own...

...1. The President is under devastating pressure from Congress, the military and uranium mining interests (who also have considerable influence on Capitol Hill) to resume nuclear testing...

...Southern Politics explains the reason: "The hard core of the political South—and the backbone of Southern political unity—is made up of those counties and sections of the Southern states in which Negroes constitute a substantial proportion of the population...

...In Georgia, the county unit system is so weighted that the big, teeming county of Atlanta is worth less in the governor's race than two sparsely populated rural counties...

...After the bloody Alabama riots, my friends shook their heads and said with feeling, "My God, this is terrible...

...that there are capitalist countries which have a highly developed capitalist, monopolist system...

...He is like the heir who finds his fine estate eaten up by gambling losses and bad debts...

...Thus, the Western fire brigade could become exhausted rushing back and forth to...

...During the regime of Fulgencio Batista, when Castro's rebellion had just begun, a visiting Senator asked Arthur Gardner, then our ambassador in Havana, what his biggest problem was...

...The President has now reached the conclusion, as he has often in his political career, that he must find out for himself...

...He had been boasting to the Chinese and to skeptics in his own country that peaceful coexistence was the best policy and that he and Jack were going to set things right...

...The fictional Stephen Daedalus wrote these lines in his diary after his boyhood faith was shaken, many illusions had been dropped, and he decided he must go out to see life for himself...

...He said, "During the last two days I received many letters from the working people, and the majority of these letters concern housing, comrades, housing...

...Kennedy himself must find out how far Khrushchev is willing to go, for if the Soviets remain armed as they are, the West must itself bear heavy new arms burdens...

...The Russians are terribly sensitive to what they regard as social slights, and these rebuffs were received with shocked anger by the Soviet press...

...Therefore we will probably understand and assess the Socialist and capitalist systems differently...

...Thus, John Kennedy will arrive in Vienna with no aces in his hand and little prospect of getting any...

...The legislatures, obviously, will not accept any reforms which will change this balance of power...

...He would come to New York in March for the disarmament debates at the United Nations, and the two heads of state could get together then...

...Two of my best friends are Southerners, and we often linger together over coffee in the Senate restaurant...

...The definitive work, Southern Politics by V. 0. Key (Knopf, 1949), says that a Virginian can slide into the Statehouse on 5 to 6 per cent of the state's adult population, and that Mississippi governors have won the Democratic primary by getting as low as 12.4 per cent of the adult population...

...It will have to be prodded, pushed and perhaps bullied by the whole will of the American people, operating through the Federal government...

...He must sit down with Khrushchev and measure him...

...The local allies have no will to fight, and for every American soldier that might be sent to fight in the jungles, the Chinese could supply three...

...In vast areas of revolution and change, the United States is inhibited by its private interests and our own aversion to socialism...

...Yet if the politics of the South revolves around any single theme, it is that of the role of the black belts," where a unified white minority has held decisive power...

...And, of course, we apparently have a different understanding of these categories, and we have a different notion of freedom...

...Later, with allies from conservatives generally, substantially the same group put down a radical movement welling up from the sections dominated by the poor whites...

...The black belts, the book points out, drove the South into civil war and prevented populism, a form of rural radicalism, from controlling the politics of the South at a later time...

...In Congress, the Southerners as a group are the most able...

...military machine...

...In these areas a real problem of politics, broadly considered, is the maintenance of control by a white minority...

...They reveal that the Soviet Premier is preoccupied with thrusting Russia a "great leap forward" in living standards, particularly housing...

...A few years ago, I spent a week interviewing prominent men m the business community of Mississippi, and all agreed with the bluntly practical view of a big land owner...

...So he said "No, thank you," but that he had so many chores of tidying up he could not find the time right away...