NOTES IN THE NEWS
The Arrogant Mr. Acheson We have always been of two minds about Dean Acheson, who was Secretary of State under President Truman. He has seemed to us a man of cool competence and strong conviction,...
...prices may be below their peak but they are now protected directly by government subsidies (once, and still widely, regarded in some quarters, as a sinister conspiracy to penalize the consumer and enrich the farmer...
...Why is this, and who is at fault...
...That Man Again We don't enjoy, believe us, jabbing away at Mr...
...A Southern judge gave the leader six years at hard labor, his chief aide three years, and the others a year...
...Perhaps, but there is that cozy cushion of unemployment compensation (once thought to be Red Russia's secret weapon against American capitalism...
...Ladies and Gentlemen, Held Over by Insistent Popular Demand" But the man is a positive genius at putting one foot in his mouth while he scampers up the runway of a plane on his other...
...Not this time...
...Curiously enough, when Acheson spoke he had no authority to speak for the Democratic Party, although his words gave the impression that his was a quasi-official if not wholly official disclaimer by the Party...
...Kennan, of course, hadn't pretended to speak for anyone but himself...
...After a stormy debate three years ago, the cooperative suburb of Crestwood opened its gates to a Negro family...
...Cruell and his wife offered to baby-sit and their offer was accepted...
...nowhere is there a head-on collision with Dulles' position, and indeed there can't be, for Acheson doesn't greatly disagree with the Dulles policies...
...News & World Report would carry the most doleful warnings that New Deal and Fair Deal legislation would destroy our free enterprise system...
...This tradition has been accepted by American scientists because it keeps politics out of science...
...Examples: one state nursing association secured "no discrimination" clauses in 12 hospital contracts...
...Turner had to go to the hospital to be with his sick wife, but there was no one to take care of the children...
...Competition The foregoing may sound like pretty silly stuff, but it would be a grave mistake to assume that the State Department has an absolute monopoly on this sort of thing...
...Poosh...
...He had ranged beyond his station by aspiring to associate with and act like white folks...
...But this is purely personal...
...In neither his statement nor his new book, Power and Diplomacy, does Acheson have anything to offer by way of foreign policy except arms and more arms and still more arms...
...Despite dire predictions of collapse in values, a survey by the Governor's Commission on Human Rights three years afterward shows the property values in Crest-wood are the same as the general price trends in the area...
...Claude Cruell is colored...
...Acheson sneeringly dismissed some of Kennan's affirmative policies as "utter rubbish" and hastened to assure "bemused Europeans" that Kennan wasn't speaking for the Democratic Party...
...Dulles has a rule that made this impossible...
...This sort of petty retaliation raises questions concerning our standards of national dignity," Dr...
...The result, said Berkner of the rule laid down by the "wisest man" the President knows, "is to increase the importance of Moscow as a scientific capital and on occasion to isolate American scientists unless they will travel to Moscow...
...Two leading scientists, for example, testified the other day that seven different government agencies translated the same non-secret Russian report—and then proceeded to stamp it "Secret...
...Mass layoffs...
...Acheson recently took it upon himself to set the world straight about George F^_Kennan's qualifications to speak for the Democratic Party...
...he was seeking to let some fresh air into a room gone stale and musty with the negative concepts of Dulles-Acheson rigidity...
...Then & Now We can remember, when we were young, how the ideological ancestors of right-wing publications like U.S...
...For some time the Canadians have been disturbed by our dumping of farm produce, our restrictive import policies, and our trade and tariff program...
...These are some of the reasons, we are told, why "1958 will not be another 1929...
...Ken-nan, former U.S...
...Among other things, Kennan proposed the neutralization of a unified Germany and the withdrawal of American and Soviet troops from continental Europe as a start on the road toward breaking the East-West deadlock...
...Weaver was complaining about the State Department's weird rules restricting visits of Communist scientists on diplomatic and security grounds...
...In his testimony before the Congressmen Mr...
...The other day U.S...
...The People's Republic of China is represented by its Academy of Science...
...Just before dashing off to Turkey recently, the Secretary of State dropped around to tell a House Appropriation Subcommittee about our worsening relations with Canada...
...And they laughed at Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman when they said they wanted to do nothing more radical than to save American free enterprise from destroying itself...
...I should say," said the Secretary of State, "that most of the difficulty is due to the inexperience of the present Canadian government in handling diplomatic relations...
...Recently he had the good sense to speak out against our pious insistence on a package deal for peace, arguing in a notable speech in the Senate that we might try to show our good faith by negotiating one proposal at a time...
...That's why we hail two modest but perhaps precedent-setting developments in recent weeks: • Mohawk Airlines, bless 'em, announced the appointment of the nation's first Negro stewardess, Ruth Carol Taylor...
...An all-white jury in the Deep South found two of them guilty of conspiracy and assault and battery and two others with conspiracy...
...The reason...
...Stock-market crash...
...For this simple act of kindness the Ku Klux Klan decided to teach Cruell a lesson...
...Those very New Deal and Fair Deal measures that were once thought to doom American business...
...Few Democrats in Congress cared to speak up to make it clear that Acheson's sarcastic negativism did not represent their views...
...Thus: "On one thing only I feel a measure of assurance—on the Tightness of contempt for sanctimonious self-righteousness, which, joined with sly worldliness, beclouds the dangers and opportunities of our time with an unctuous film...
...But along with these admirable qualities we have always been bothered by, quite apart from our frequent disagreement with his views, streaks of petulance and arrogance which have made him a lesser man than he might have been...
...Safeguards are built in this time...
...Dulles was asked...
...Farm collapse...
...American scientists dearly wanted both these prizes for the United States, but Mr...
...A band of Young Turks in the House, under the leadership of Wisconsin's Representative Henry S. Reuss, has been pleading for affirmative alternatives to the sterile course currently being pursued...
...Bank failures...
...And Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, who has worked long and tirelessly on the Disarmament Subcommittee, is asserting hopeful leadership in the Senate...
...three state associations reported that requests for photographs of applicants had been eliminated from professional application forms...
...But this time the cowardly hoodlums were arrested and tried...
...Weaver said...
...Southern Justice Usually a heading of this kind might mean more bad news, but that's not the case here...
...He owns 100 acres near Greenville, S.C., and has a penniless tenant, Sherwood Turner—a white man...
...He has seemed to us a man of cool competence and strong conviction, who speaks with great clarity and writes like an angel...
...He is critical of Dulles...
...This holds true for most Democrats in Congress too...
...In fact, this is the kind of Southern justice we dream about...
...Dulles...
...The Kluxers beat Cruell to a pulp...
...It seems that a Russian scientist, if he can crash our pearly gates at all, may visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with its vast store of important scientific activities, but he may not go to the Harvard Medical School "because that is across the line in Boston and Boston has been ruled out of bounds...
...In fact, few Americans realized that Acheson's statement was sponsored by the American Council on Germany, Inc., a private organization dominated by officials of the Chase Manhattan Bank who are hardly interested in a unified Germany that would almost certainly be a Social Democratic Germany...
...Dulles' passion for keeping the Communists in their place gets us into "queer and unbelievable" positions at times, according to Dr...
...Dulles all the time, especially since it's become so popular...
...Not a chance...
...International Spitballs American foreign policy—inspired by the "wisest and most dedicated man" President Eisenhower said he knows—seems to have a built-in gift for making us look silly...
...There are many government regulations (once denounced as foreign importations designed to strangle the investment business...
...Dulles allowed as how "relations with our good neighbor on the North are not what they should be...
...another state group was able to persuade an employer to remove the qualification "white" from its advertisement...
...News etc...
...And then, still on the hopeful side, there is a survey in Madison, Wis., that disclosed what happened in one case to property values when a Negro moved into an all-white community: nothing...
...Don't worry about another depression like that of the 1930's," U.S...
...Happily not all, however...
...Since no truly international organization can accept an invitation to meet in any country that excludes some of its members, our ban on the entry of Communist scientists into the United States prevents any meetings of such organizations from being held in this country...
...sang out cheerfully...
...Warren Weaver, vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, board member of the government's National Science Foundation, and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
...For the most part Democrats in and out of Congress cheerfully snipe away at Secretary of State Dulles, but few if any in positions of power have cared to cross swords with him by proposing basic alternatives to the inflexible dogmas embraced by Dulles...
...Lloyd B. Berkner, member of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, president of the International Council of Scientific Unions, and a member of the executive committee of the American Committee for the International Geophysical Year, tells why in the current Foreign Affairs: "It has always been the rule of international, non-governmental organizations that any bona fide scientific group from any country would be recognized...
...Is it necessary for us to throw silly little international spit-balls because someone else does...
...Two of the most important of the many international scientific meetings that will be held in Moscow in 1958 are those of the International Astronomical Union and the special committee for the International Geophysical Year...
...He was laying down no American policy...
...e The American Nursing Association reported considerable progress toward racial integration in the nursing profession during the past year...
...Northern Justice For all its moralizing, the North's skirts are far from tidy on the subject of race relations, as The Progressive has often emphasized...
...ambassador to the Soviet Union and chief of the State • Department's Planning and Policy Division under Acheson, had delivered a series of six lectures over the BBC which greatly fired the imagination of the people of Europe...
...News 6- World Report reassured the free enterprise system that its present recession could not snowball into a depression...
...There's the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (once regarded as one step removed from communism...
...The scientists' testimony didn't surprise many Americans who have long felt that our government does a better job of keeping things secret from its own people than from the Russians...
...This type of dictation by the Department of State serves neither the purpose of American foreign policy nor American science...
...Hopeful Leadership Acheson's outburst at Kennan symbolized, in a way, the dreary approach of the Democratic Party to matters of foreign policy...
...Sillier Still If you soon begin to get the impression that Moscow has become the scientific capital of the world, you can also thank Mr...
...We have heard a diplomat characterized as an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country, but we have never known one before who went out of his way to slander the nearest and dearest friend of the government he serves...
Vol. 22 • March 1958 • No. 3
