NOTES IN THE NEWS

...This is not quite so snide as it might sound, for Nixon has now identified himself as a "progressive conservative...

...But the small scale revolt now in progress represents the brightest hope in two decades that the Committee's tenure is something less than permanent...

...Almost alone among prominent political leaders, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York has thrown his full support behind a massive shelter program, perhaps in desperate awareness of the hopelessness of quickly evacuating New York City...

...The public has seemed to sense instinctively from the beginning that there is no effective defense against warfare involving missiles with hydn> gen warheads...

...It was an important, hour-long speech, packed with documentation of the Committee's ruthless tactics and outrageous violations of common decency...

...The friendly Wall Street Journal takes us behind the scenes to show us a Vice President tormented, not by a soul-searching quest for principles and proposals to reflect and meet the needs of our time, but by the feverish pursuit of a formula that will produce the votes...

...f The highway from Cleveland to Lorain, Ohio, is marked for evacuation from Cleveland toward Lorain...

...The public, on the whole, has greeted the senselessly shifting civil defense plans with a mixture of apathy, skepticism, and scorn...

...Can any reasonable human being imagine all the automobiles in Columbus, a city of half a million people, being driven from the city at one time...

...Still aglow with the heady wine of liberalism, the Vice President acclaimed Truman's "unflinching determination" to involve the United States in war in Korea as "another conspicuous act of statesmanship...

...But a doctor who looked after condemned men and women at California's San Quentin prison has concluded that in every instance the death penalty, by its very nature, is cruel and barbaric...

...Does any intelligent person think," asked the Senator, "that civilians fleeing an atomic attack [with fifteen minutes' warning] would watch, much less obey, traffic signals...

...A second series of treatments was necessary before he could be led to the gas chamber...

...cil of Churches, the most recent of a long line of organizations and individuals subjected to abusive attack by the Committee...

...The California fiasco and the boomeranging of its attack on the National Council of Churches may have been the turning point in the Committee's contemptible career...

...I am a liberal in foreign policy," he said in a California speech...

...But we can also end this ^terrible agency and take back our powers...

...In 1954, Dr...

...At the very moment that the Federal Power Commission was under unprecedented fire for its neglect of the public interest, and its knuckling under to the natural gas interests, the President dropped the one member who had dared stand against the industry in behalf of the consumer...

...As a progressive, he talked of the necessity to "produce for the future...

...Twice, for example, the Commission voted four to one against protecting consumers through the regulation of natural gas prices...

...ixon's Dilemma To be a conservative, or to be a liberal in 1960—that is the question that haunts Vice President Richard M. Nixon as he gropes for a winning campaign strategy...

...It is rarely administered swiftly, and it is far from equally applied—only one per cent of first degree murderers are executed in the United States...

...As a conservative, he warned that it was vital to "preserve the best from the past...

...This year, with membership in the Communist Party reduced to about 5,000—but not through the Committee's efforts—an almost empty House slipped through an appropriation of $327,000 for the Un-American Committee—more than the important Ways and Means, Armed Services, Education and Labor, Agriculture, or Judiciary Committees...

...The civil defense campaign to lull the American people into a false sense of security with ludicrous evacuation plans and unrealistic shelter programs actually constitutes a threat to the achievement of peace by downgrading the urgent necessity of reaching that goal...

...Few criminologists defend the death penalty as an effective punishment...

...It would be a serious mistake to underestimate the deeply entrenched power of the Un-American Committee and its chairman, Representative Walter...

...It is used far more frequently against Negroes and other racial minorities than against whites...

...On both occasions, the United States Supreme Court rebuked the majority in scathing terms and upheld Connole's insistence on consumer protection...

...Cops and Commissioners Suppose you lived in a small community and came across this news story in your evening paper: "Police Chief D. D. Eisenhower today announced he had fired Patrolman William R. Connole, who has served in the police department for five years...

...To prove his point, the Vice President heaped warm words on former President Harry Truman's "real leadership" in foreign affairs...

...fA man near seventy, within weeks of a natural death from cancer, was operated on three times so that the state could kill him instead...

...Now that officials like Governor Meyner and Senator Young are speaking up, there is new hope that the program will be appraised realistically for the empty effort that it is...

...Politicians and the press have' shown no great enthusiasm for civil defense, but, with few exceptions, they have approached the program with the uncritical deference and respect generally accorded useless but untouchable sacred cows...

...Governor Meyner's indictment develops this crucial point in his article on page 13, while Senator Young revealed typical examples of the waste and the "half-baked, idiotic" programs promulgated by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization...

...Governor Robert B. Meyner of New Jersey, in a powerful denunciation of the underground shelter program printed elsewhere in this issue, has called the plan "a cruel deception on the American people...

...As a progressive, Nixon emphasized the need to "look at these great social and economic problems with which we are confronted...

...In recent weeks, however, responsible leaders in high office have begun to recognize and expose their sacred cow for the monumental billion dollar white elephant that it is and always has been...

...As the result of one of the "victories" of the House Un-American Activities Committee, a brilliant mathematics scholar whose contributions in his field are described by his employer as irreplaceable, has been placed behind bars for six months...

...We have no mandate to abuse the rights and feelings of our citizens...

...fA man on death row who had become a complete mental vegetable was removed to the prison hospital for a series of shock treatments designed to make him well enough to be executed...

...In Lorain, civil defense authorities plan to evacuate the people of Lorain toward Cleveland—on the same road...

...More important, there is a growing realization that civil defense is not only a waste of talent and money, but a positive evil...

...f A total of $4.5 million worth of penicillin, said Young, is being destroyed because it has deteriorated in civil defense stockpiles...

...With Davis safely isolated from his job and American scientists in many fields effectively deprived of his unique and vital services, the Un-American Committee has again illustrated the dangerous absurdity of its reckless crusade...

...a degrading spectacle . . . sanctimoniously cruel...

...Representative Roosevelt placed the responsibility for the life and death of the Un-American Committee squarely on the House...

...Senator Stephen M. Young of Ohio called for the abolition of the civil defense agency in a stinging speech in the Senate which went unreported in the nation's press...

...Writing in Frontier, Dr...

...Legalized Brutality Much of the world-wide protest against the execution of Caryl Chessman was centered on the inhumanity of the twelve-year delay in carrying out the death sentence...

...Several years ago we warned in these columns that rather than risk defeat in a head-on attack on regulatory legislation, President Eisenhower might try to achieve the same results by the backdoor method of appointing commissioners who do not believe in the public-interest objectives of the regulatory agencies...

...He was fired from his post as instructor at the University of Michigan for lack of "candor" and cited for contempt of Congress...

...All this appeared in the same paragraph, the last sentence of which was: "This is where I stand...

...The trade publication Petroleum Week revealed, weeks before the President's decision to replace Connole was disclosed, that gas industry officials were out to "get" him because he had established himself as the spokesman for "consumer interests" and was in favor of "stringent regulation...

...The still small but steadily rising tide of opposition to Chairman Francis E. Walter's Committee comes after a year of particularly vicious forays by the Committee into Puerto Rico, where it inflamed the entire island with irresponsible charges and unsupported accusations, and into California, where it all but wrecked the professional careers of more than one hundred teachers and then fled the state...

...It is no credit to his fellow Representatives that no more than a dozen were on hand at any one time to hear him, nor to the press, which virtually ignored Roosevelt's unprecedented attack...

...Which role will Nixon choose...

...There is no evidence that it succeeds as a deterrent to crime...

...New York author Walter Millis, in backing an American Civil Liberties Union resolution that the Committee be abolished, said ironically that its job was done because "it has run out of victims...

...Powerful utility interests launched a campaign to get rid of Connole...

...Graves left his post at San Quentin because he could no longer reconcile his duties to his ethics as a physician nor to his responsibilities as a member of society...

...It is," he charged, "a monstrous thing that we have created such an institution and lent it our powers and prestige...

...Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last month, the Vice President seemed to give his heart to the Right by avowing, "I believe in economic conservatism," but then, in the same sentence, he seemed to hold out a hand to the Left by insisting that "conservatism at its best must be progressive...

...the former President, Nixon said, has shown "real leadership" in deciding to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...This gloomy prediction has been confirmed on a number of occasions, most recently in the case of the scandal-scarred Federal Power Commission...

...I think we [will] find wide support for the abolition of this thoroughly bad institution...

...Chandler Davis, thirty-three-yearold associate editor of the American Mathematical Review, refused under the First Amendment to answer the Committee's questions about his political beliefs or his authorship of a pamphlet critical of the Committee...

...The power to appoint is the power to destroy...

...One group of advisers, the Journal tells us, is exerting great pressure for him to "present himself as a liberal" in an effort to woo the all-important independent vote from the Democrats...

...The Danger of Civil Defense Ever since its inception a decade or so ago, the nation's civil defense program has been received by the public, its political leaders, and the press with ambivalence...

...Asked why he had fired Connole, the chief replied: 'I think I can get a better man, that's all.' " This is almost precisely what happened recently on a far greater scale...

...assures him that a "large but latent conservative vote, if he mobilizes it, will carry him to victory...

...President Eisenhower refused to reappoint William R. Connole to the Federal Power Commission although the latter had become widely and accurately known as the only champion of the consuming public on the five-member Commission...

...Representative James Roosevelt of California rose in the House recently and demanded the abolition of the Committee, which he described as "an agency for the destruction of human dignity and constitutional rights...

...The chief's action followed two court decisions which severely criticized the other four patrolmen on the force for failing to protect the public, and praised Connole for enforcing the law and guarding the public interest...

...Both Young and Meyner hammer home the point that the only genuine defense against atomic war is peace...

...A gifted linguist, Davis' work consisted largely of translating and interpreting articles in journals of higher mathematics published abroad, particularly in Russia...

...The other group, we are told, It will be fascinating to watch and hear Nixon in the months just ahead...

...I urge my colleagues to speak [of the Committee] when they return to their constituencies this summer...

...For those who find the suspense unbearable we hasten to provide a measure of relief by suggesting the obvious answer: both...

...William F. Graves has recounted personal experiences with executions which went virtually unnoticed in the press, but which far surpass the Chessman case in sheer brutality...

...f Over the years, the civil defense planners' pendulum has swung from hiding to fleeing, and now the confusion is such that civil defense seems to be recommending building shelters and then leaving them behind by evacuating...

...Electrical World, another trade publication, reported unusual pressure on the President to replace Connole, and added: "It remains to be seen whether business interests can do to the politicians what they're not supposed to be able to do to the FPC itself...

...This represented a remarkable reversal, for Nixon had been the Republican hatchetman during three campaigns in denouncing Truman's "wrong policies, which had resulted in a war in Korea that cost us 140,000 American boys as casualties...

...fA $700,000 traffic light system has been installed in Columbus, Ohio, to speed up evacuation...

...Yet this most distrusted but most feared of all Congressional committees may be approaching the end of its clamorous and destructive life...

...But there is a good deal of evidence that it serves to obstruct justice...

...In one area of public policy the Vice President has not hesitated to identify himself...

...The answer was not long in coming...

...This will be no easy task, for as the Wall Street Journal observed with regret, "Many folks who like Ike say firmly, in varying words, 'There's just something about Nixon I don't like.' " The Ugly Un-American In 1945, when there were 64,600 known Communists in the United States, the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities received an appropriation of $50,000 for its year's work...

...Perhaps his testimony will speed the day when our social order will cease to drag itself down to the level of the killer...

...Davis is now tending tomatoes at the federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut...

...As the Committee's destructiveness has become increasingly obvious, even to its friends, its voice has become more shrill and its charges more ridiculous...

...But it was not Truman's association with the Marshall Plan or Point Four that Nixon singled out for praise in nailing down his liberalism...

...Although the delay, of course, was the result of Chessman's own legal efforts, it was widely viewed as constituting cruel and barbarous punishment...

...But only a few days earlier, spunky Representative Edith Green of Oregon and eighteen other House members had filled thirty-six pages of the Congressional Record with a documented defense of the National CounVictory for Whom...

...But until recently there has been little leadership to focus this widespread discontent with an essentially fruitless and frequently contradictory program...

...As a conservative, he came out boldly against "the phony schemes and panaceas" designed to meet these problems...

...President Eisenhower replaced Connole with a former FBI agent with no experience in the field of power regulation...

...He has a wardrobe full of costumes, and whether he runs as a conservative or progressive or conservative-progressive or progressive-conservative, he can hope to win only if he finally comes to mean something to voters other than the conservative Republicans who know him for one of their own but are numerically incapable of electing him...

...His appeal failed, and Dr...