NOTES IN THE NEWS

...Not only was the AMA-lauded survey rigged to cover an unrepresentative higher-income sampling, but many sociologists—including Senator McCarthy—attacked as "naive" the survey's technique of attempting to determine a person's state of health merely by asking him how he felt...

...Our only conviction is that this was easily the most wretchedly reported major event in recent memory...

...Thomas Hennings, Freedom Fighter The nation lost a staunch friend of freedom when cancer recently took the life of Senator Thomas C. Hennings of Missouri...

...and that the vast majority of those over sixty-five preferred to finance their own medical care "without government intervention...

...Fraud Begets Fraud In the wake of the deceptive medical-needs survey, Congress passed an Administration-approved bill providing grants-in-aid to the states so inadequate that no state, at this writing, had submitted a plan for participation in the program...

...His last statement to the people of his home state, published on the day of his death, was a plea that they refuse "to accept the religious beliefs of a candidate as a worthy election issue...

...f International Harvester announced it was closing ten plants which manufacture farm implements, throwing 25,000 employes out of work...

...this will add more than 5,000 workers to the unemployed...

...It is more important than ever to understand the neutral point of view...

...We can conceive of no more self-defeating course than to cling to policies because they produce the largely fictitious triumphs of the headline writers —policies that tend to tranquilize us into a false sense of victory in a struggle that is only beginning...

...Jesse W. Tapp, board chairman of the Bank of America, predicted that the "readjustment" we are moving into may "prove to be more troublesome" than other postwar recessions...

...Furthermore—if more evidence is needed to discredit the AMA-adver-tised survey—the Federal government-sponsored National Health Survey reports that seventy-six per cent of those over sixty-five years of age have at least one chronic illness...

...And yet Thomas Hamilton, the New York Times' U.N...

...Referring in campaign speeches to the defeat of the Soviet move to condemn Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold's policies in the Congo, Nixon said: "You know what the score was...

...The decline in durable goods production has come even earlier this year, according to Business Week, but there is little likelihood that Republican Presidential candidate Richard Nixon will own up to the present recession in the closing weeks of the campaign...

...Donald Grant, United Nations correspondent for the St...

...It's better in international relations...

...Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who is a sociologist as well as a Senator, analyzed the survey in a scalding speech on the floor of the Senate which was buried, for the most part, in the fine print of the Congressional Record...

...Not only is the bill so loosely drawn that no standards are included, but it seems almost as if it were passed by Congress with the cynical knowledge that few states are in a position to raise still more taxes to benefit from participation in the new program...

...Castro's speech, which was the subject of so much derision in the American press, was, in reality, "the most damaging speech" to the American position delivered "in this Assembly," in Grant's judgment...

...Actually," said the Journal, "a recession has been underway for some time, and the real question is when it may end...

...This is in sharp contrast with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's official figure of forty-two per cent...

...Characteristic of the reaction of Republican governors is Governor Nelson Rockefeller's polite, but firm, wait-and-see policy of inaction...

...Chrysler has announced a cut-back in production of the new models...

...It may be recalled that the recessions of 19534 and 1956-7 were never acknowledged as such by the Republican Administration until they were almost at an end...

...I have faith that unwarranted emotionalism and prejudice will be cast aside as sores which beget only solutions for which posterity may sadly pay and long suffer...

...Senator McCarthy estimated those excluded represented at least forty per cent of persons over sixty-five, most of them the neediest of all...

...Senator Hennings was one of the first men in public life to stand up to the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy when he accepted—in his first year in the Senate—the assignment of investigating the notorious Maryland election of 1950 in which McCarthy played such a shadowy role in the defeat of conservative Democratic Senator Millard Tydings, running for reelection to a fourth term in the U.S...

...I have faith that the false issues will be discarded and that the true ones will be faced with calm appraisal and solved only on the basis of proper consideration and intelligent reasoning...

...But these were the exceptions...

...Rockefeller stated that he felt a better medical care program will be enacted by the next Congress...

...The report not only made headlines, but undoubtedly helped scuttle the Forand-type medical-aid proposals then before Congress in favor of a weak and cumbersome system of federal-state matching funds that, in effect, throws the burden back on the states, which can least afford to carry it...

...Nikita Khrushchev's raucous rhetoric and crude desk-pounding made front-page headlines, but as Walter Lippmann emphasized on the inside pages of the papers that use his column, the Soviet premier "has staged a powerful and significant demonstration against the status quo...

...Reporters and headline-writers treated the sessions like a sports spectacle, chalking up victories and defeats in the manner of sports writers...

...Latter-Day Hoover Vice President Richard M. Nixon's campaign theme of Republican prosperity has begun to sound a little off key...

...The more conscientious and seasoned correspondents shared the judgment of Marquis Childs of the St...

...With the exception of half a dozen or so correspondents, about whom more later, newsmen seemed content to rely on the hand-outs of our State Department, which invariably showed the West in general and the United States in particular scoring spectacular victories...

...We got seventy...

...Several newspapers which carry Childs' syndicated column published editorials exulting over our victories at the United Nations—apparently unaware that a few columns further over on the page the seasoned correspondent who was there had this to say: "The fact is that the United States has been spending capital in the U.N.—the capital of long accumulated good-will...

...Like the Russian reporters, ours —with some honorable exceptions...

...fin mid-September, 410,000 more workers were drawing unemployment compensation payments than a year earlier—an increase of more than one-third...

...The survey which so elated the AMA has been totally discredited as political propaganda, but it served its purpose of helping to kill effective old-age medical assistance legislation...

...One of the most gifted members of Congress, Senator Hennings possessed a rare combination of a dedicated liberalism, a brilliant yet solidly practical mind, a capacity for formidable but always fair debating, and a fearless devotion to civil rights and civil liberties...

...What Nixon did not go on to say, nor did most newsmen, was that the African and Asian nations nearly all felt that what they regard as the "legitimate" government of Patrice Lumumba, which we oppose, must be reinstated, and that there is some point to the Soviet charge of "imperialist intrigues" in the Congo...

...With 1961 model automobiles already on the market, a huge inventory of 575,000 of last year's models are still unsold...

...There were occasions, in our judgment, when the press performed its duties conscientiously, as for example, when it reported in depth the crude character of Premier Khrushchev's unjustified assaults on Dag Ham-marskjold and the Soviet leader's determined effort to emasculate the executive of the United Nations by saddling the post with the paralyzing veto power of a tripartite secretariat...

...But the "independent" survey which so delighted the AMA has now been' exposed as a calculated fraud...

...f Most persons interviewed in the survey reported a net worth of more than $10,000—an obvious indication of the grossly-loaded nature of the sample...

...To document his argument, McCarthy cited a scholarly study published in the American Journal of Public Health which disclosed that fewer than one in four interviews revealed the true state of the health of the person answering the questions...

...Take the case of Cuba's Castro and his crowd...

...The Wall Street Journal, which, on its highly opinionated editorial pages, shares Nixon's enthusiasm for Nixon's economic theories, has been obliged to report in its more objective news columns that Nixon's repeated claim that "you never had it so good" has acquired an ominously discordant sound...

...get their cue from official briefings and run in so overwhelming a pack that the lone dissenter is made to feel unpatriotic...

...That's pretty good in football...

...The survey concluded that "nine out of every ten older persons report no unfilled medical needs...

...Most newspapers gave more space to the chicken feathers and cigar butts in the Cubans' hotel rooms than to Castro's interminable speech to the Assembly...

...f The stock market, traditionally the barometer of the immediate future of business generally, has been moving downward sharply since mid-August, and by October the financial press was reporting on a mid-September plunge: "Stocks crashed to new low prices for 1960 in the sharpest break in nearly five years...

...Thanks in part to the economic reforms of the New Deal, there is scant prospect that the present recession could turn into a major debacle...

...correspondent, who was as revolted as anyone by Castro's conduct, quietly pointed out, nevertheless, that Castro "strengthened himself with the neutralists and with the Africans in particular...

...f The Wiggins-Schoeck survey reported that sixty-four per cent of those interviewed had some form of health insurance...

...Wisconsin's Democratic Governor Gaylord Nelson was more outspoken...

...Professor Edith Sherman of the University of Denver, one of the interviewers who was "profoundly shocked" at the conclusions of the survey, said her instructions were to interview only sixteen per cent of the lower-income oldsters as against thirty-two per cent in the upper-income bracket...

...From his post on the Senate Judiciary Committee Senator Hennings waged a ceaseless fight for the achievement of full civil rights and civil liberties for all...

...He denounced the program as a "fraud...

...While serving as chairman of a subcommittee that investigated McCarthy's involved financial affairs in 1952, Senator Hennings single-handedly forced, against determined opposition from its members, the publication of a devastating report which marked the beginning of the end for McCarthy by laying the groundwork for his censure by the Senate two years later...

...But there may be many voters with long enough memories and keen enough ears not to be seduced by the soothing syrup of the Republican Party and its latter-day Hoover...

...The 1932 Hoover slogan, "Prosperity is just around the corner," has been replaced by Nixon's "Prosperity is still with us...

...The signs of deepening recession are multiplying daily: f Steel production, which ordinarily picks up briskly after Labor Day, declined instead from the low August figure, and October production was scheduled to drop still further, from 54.7 per cent to only 52.6 per cent of capacity...

...Professor Constan-tine Yeracaris of the University of Buffalo was asked for only nine per cent in the lower income group...

...We have quoted these cheerless reflections of some of the honorable exceptions in the American press because we feel it is urgently necessary for us not to be misled by headlines and dramatic shots on television into swallowing the cozy view that we are slaying the Soviets and winning the neutrals in this historic session of the United Nations Assembly...

...Senate...

...But our national interests are poorly served by misinformation, particularly when we confront a new United Nations dominated by neutrals...

...Sixteen sociologists around the country did the interviewing and provided the raw material for the survey...

...non-whites...

...And as with all such transactions, the result, as this Administration understands so well in the fiscal field, can only mean ultimate bankruptcy and defeat...

...Nelson seemed to be speaking for many of his fellow governors of the fifty states in the nation when he said: "I, for one, will not ask the taxpayers to handle the costs of a program that should be handled under Federal social security...

...I. F. Stone, whose courageous Weekly is an immensely helpful mine of information not readily available elsewhere, summed it all up by saying that the American press "is behaving almost as badly as the Soviet press in providing its readers with a distorted view of what is going on at this session of the United Nations...

...Older persons see physicians forty per cent more often and spend more than twice as many days in hospitals than does the general population Again, it was the big lie which won the day...

...But when the survey was published, nine of the sixteen protested the conclusions and disassociated themselves from the results, using such strong language as "appalled," "amazed," "political propaganda," and "unscientific...

...They got none...

...The closing words of that statement are an eloquent summary of the faith of a man whose life was devoted to the fight for freedom and the elimination of prejudice and injustice: "I have faith in my fellow citizens, an unshakable faith in their determination and ability to seek and find the truth behind any issue before expressing their ultimate opinion at the polls...

...The reporters act more and more like a claque and a mob, cheering our side and hooting theirs in a way which may comfort the President and the Secretary of State but gives foreign visitors a poor impression of our free press...

...The AMA Backs a Fraud At the height of the debate on old-age medical assistance legislation in the post-convention session of the last Congress, the American Medical Association released what purported to be an independent national survey by university sociologists...

...The bill provides for outright Federal grants for medical care of persons now receiving old age assistance, and matching funds for the care of other elderly people...

...f One-third of diabetes cases found through clinical tests had not been recorded in interviews...

...f The survey found thirty-four per cent of those over sixty-five in the active labor force, whereas the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports only twenty per cent...

...The headlines in the Washington Post celebrated the great victories of the West, but Chalmers Roberts, its experienced diplomatic correspondent, observed that Khrushchev is the "dominant figure" at the United Nations and "it is the Americans who are on the defensive...

...and persons in hospitals, homes for the aged, nursing homes, and other institutions...

...Louis Post-Dispatch that "the interpretation that it is a great triumph for the American position is dubious...

...Among the distortions, inaccuracies, and deceits of the AMA-approved survey exposed by Senator McCarthy are these: f Deliberately excluded from the interviews were: anyone receiving old-age assistance...

...that lack of money was not an important factor among those who did need more care...

...The study was made under the direction of sociology Professors James W. Wiggins and Helmut Schoeck of Emory University, in Atlanta...

...f Declines in housing construction, railroad carloadings, manufacturing employment—even a reduction in the production of such a universally basic necessity as shoes—all add up to what many expert economic observers are now openly calling a business recession...

...Louis Post-Dispatch who writes for The Progressive occasionally, reported that President Eisenhower's refusal to meet with Khrushchev and the methods employed by the American delegation to strangle the resolution of the five neutrals calling for such a meeting resulted in an "overall feeling of disillusionment [with the United States] among the Asians and Africans...

...1 Nine out of ten cases of cancer were revealed only in clinical examination...

...Vice President Nixon, whose press releases identify him as a sports fan, was quick to catch on...

...Mostly the press distorted developments so as to make it virtually impossible for Americans to know how their country's position was faring in the councils of the United Nations...

...The outgo has been greater, despite the radiant personal good-will shed by the President, than the income...

...Some of the discrepancies between statement and fact in that study were startling: f Six out of ten heart conditions were not reported in the interviews...

...They do not admit it, of course, but they are...