NOTES IN THE NEWS
A Turn in the Road The crisis in the Congo—a direct consequence of centuries of arrogant colonialism practiced by the mother country, Belgium—had taken a hopeful turn as we were going to press....
...Commenting on the relatively swift progress of lunchroom desegregation, begun only six months ago, the Council said, "This shows that, given effective leadership, Southern communities can eliminate racial discrimination speedily, without long periods of litigation, uncertainty, and accumulating tension . . . Negro Southerners can be expected to increase their economic and moral pressures for equal treatment...
...As America's unofficial chief investigator Senator Kefauver has become known throughout the nation as a friend of the "common man...
...Business As Usual Fears of Southern merchants that desegregating lunch counters would result in a decline in trade have proved groundless, according to a survey by the Southern Regional Council...
...an Air Force drill bushing: cost, $9.65...
...The result: The average length of the outstanding debt, far from being stretched, shrunk by more than twenty per cent...
...I. F. Stone, a shrewd and able Washington editor, recently returned from a survey of Cuba with the report that the Cubans feel they were given the cold shoulder when they petitioned us for help in the early days of their revolution...
...Furthermore, desegregation has been met with massive indifference, at least outwardly, on the part of both Negroes and whites...
...In addition to their cash contributions, Kennedy's sisters, brothers, and in-laws have an investment of $385,000 in a twin-engine, specially-fitted plane for Senator Kennedy's use...
...Castro himself, the Cubans complain, fished for an official invitation to Washington, but could not get one...
...Tennessee Waltz Senator Estes Kefauver's easy waltz to victory in Tennessee is a victory not only for liberalism in his home state, but a national stride forward in the fight for genuinely democratic government that responds to the political and economic needs of the people...
...Douglas estimates that at least two and as much as three billion dollars are wasted each year by the Defense Department, largely because of its system of purchasing eighty-seven per cent of war materials through "negotiated" contract rather than through competitive bid...
...Voting Patterns Scholars at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center have long been engaged in the scientific study of voting patterns in the United States...
...The following year the Defense Department flushed down the drain all the individual Federal income taxes paid by all the people of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Delaware, South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Alaska, and Hawaii—and the year after took, in addition, the taxes from Rhode Island, Iowa, and Kansas, and threw them away, too...
...The United Nations took the turn with flying colors...
...A significant interpretation of the Mexican mood appeared recently in The Christian Century, written by Gonzalo Baez-Camargo, a Methodist minister and prominent Mexican churchman...
...A Commission on Cuba Senator Mike Mansfield, Montana Democrat, has uttered a wise and timely warning against the hasty adoption of a Latin American aid program that could be interpreted in Central and South America as a crude and callous scheme to buy their friendship while we are in desperate difficulties with Castro's Cuba...
...This is the management of the national debt...
...Senator Douglas, a top flight economist, said he could bring to the floor of the Senate a hundred more items of this kind—they are not just a few "horrible examples...
...Although figures directly comparable with other pre-convention campaigns are not readily available, Woods' researches would indicate that the Kennedy outlay, if accurately reported, was not unusually large...
...The goal: To transfer more of the debt from banks to individual bondholders...
...1 The total expenditures do not take into account the "endowment" provided Kennedy by members of his family who worked without salary and paid their own expenses, including the substantial cost of maintaining headquarters in several strategic regions...
...The Keyserling report blames the tight-money policy for much of the recent chronic unemployment—now sixty per cent higher than in 1953— and the sharp rise in business failures, particularly among small businesses...
...But Tennessee voters saw through the smear and returned to the Senate a man who represents, as much as any man in public life, the economic and political interests of the great majority of the American people...
...if the Defense Department could somehow be made to develop a conscience about throwing away all the income taxes paid by the citizens of nineteen or twenty states, perhaps then this disgraceful waste could be stopped...
...Their most recent survey has turned up these interesting conclusions on the behavior of the electorate: f Between two-thirds and three-fourths of those who will go to the polls in November have their minds made, up now...
...properties if during the talks we did nothing to damage the Cuban economy (i.e., cut the Cuban sugar quota), but he was turned down...
...Store managers in twenty-nine cities now desegregated reported "business as usual or noted an increase...
...But if Congress, and the President, and the people could come to realize that all the Federal income taxes of the one-fourth of our taxpayers who have the lowest incomes were being completely, unnecessarily wasted...
...The goal: To bring more order and confidence into the government securities market...
...These amounts are merely what Senator Paul Douglas calls "the appalling mismanagement and waste in the procurement system of the Defense Department," expenditures for which the taxpayer receives nothing in return...
...The result: Government securities, traditionally the financial market's Gibraltar, have fluctuated in price as widely as stocks...
...There is a deficit of $217,000...
...The Senate's Democratic whip proposed that the newly elected President embark on a "get acquainted visit" to Latin America before his inauguration in January...
...There is a feeling among the Kennedy forces, Woods reported, "that winning the nomination with a reported outlay of less than $1,000,000 was like getting something at the bargain counter...
...He has attacked, on behalf of the consumer, administered and inflated prices in steel, automobiles, drugs and other consumer lines...
...For only by understanding the just and human core of the Cuban revolution is it at all possible to help its leaders see the great danger to that revolution in the insincere and treacherous 'friendship' of international Communism...
...They spent three to four weeks checking...
...These colossal sums do not represent what it costs to operate the Defense Department, or any part of it...
...Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold had led his band of United Nations troops into the secession-minded province of Katanga, and the Belgian forces were pulling out in response to a United Nations demand in which both the United States and the Soviet Union had concurred...
...The danger that Cuba might become a Russian base is real, but we shall never meet that danger unless we try to find common ground with the Cubans...
...One month after the revolution Castro sent a three-man delegation to Washington to explore the possibility of financial aid to bolster Cuba's depleted exchange reserves and make possible a program of industrialization, but the mission went home empty-handed...
...There are some conclusions in the Conference report which may be open to debate or modification...
...No matter how much candidates Nixon and Kennedy try to discuss issues, the electorate will evaluate them as personalities as much as spokesmen for a particular cause...
...Woods recalls that the rash of rumors of Kennedy vote buying reached its peak after Kennedy's victory over Senator Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primary last May...
...The tragedy of the Congo is spelled out in many years of Belgian neglect—notably its failure to train Congolese in the arts of self-government...
...It is this background that needs to be investigated by a Presidential commission, for we shall never get back on the track until we learn how and why we left it...
...Unsigned smear sheets insinuated he was a Communist, a tool of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and an advocate of school integration by the use of bayonets...
...This is a rise of more than forty per cent in interest costs, and is equivalent to a seven per cent sales tax on an average family's total expenditures for food...
...Castro and his ministers of economics and finance had hoped they would be asked how the United States could help, but all they got, Stone reported, were handshakes...
...It is significant that it was shortly after they returned empty-handed that Castro and his associates decreed the confiscation of property belonging to Batista supporters and a little while later enacted the sweeping agrarian reform...
...Pounded intermittently by bitter attacks from the Belgians, the Congolese, and the Russians, Hammarskjold, with Ralph Bunche riding in tandem, steered a steady, patient, impartial course until the United Nations prevailed...
...Two or three billion dollars has become a vague and meaningless sum to most people within the context of an eighty billion dollar budget and a $490 billion gross national product...
...Cuban officials told Stone that help from the United States might well have resulted in slower and more temperate reform...
...It is far too easy—and a far cry from the truth—to blame it all on the confiscation of American-owned property and the inclination of the Castro regime to work with the Kremlin...
...A comparison of the Administration's four major goals with achievements in this area, after more than seven years, reveals vividly how self-defeating the tight-money policy has been...
...It is the conviction of many a moderate Cuban that a helping hand and expressions of official cordiality by the United States would have made for a more moderate development of the revolution and for a policy of friendship for this country...
...Premier Lumumba seemed bent on upsetting the settlement, and there may yet be a bloody renewal of the conflict...
...This is an excellent notion, but we would propose an additional step—the appointment by the President-elect of a commission of distinguished Americans to investigate the whole sorry story of Cuban-American relations...
...The result: The debt rose from $260 billion in 1952 to $285 billion in 1959...
...Somewhere something went terribly wrong...
...and several recent efforts of the U.S...
...Any other policy will only convince them they have no alternative but to increase their dependence on the Soviet bloc...
...His conclusion, and that of his reporters, was that the vote-buying charges were false...
...We are at a turn of the road," said this man of great restraint, "where our attitude will be of decisive significance, I believe, not only for the future of this organization but also for the future of Africa...
...The proportion of securities maturing in less than one year jumped from thirty-three to forty-one per cent...
...Nobody we know about bothered to explore the facts until the St...
...Kennedy did not buy that election...
...This interpretation of developments in the decisive days of the Cuban revolution is widely shared in Cuba but little known in this country...
...We sent two of our best men out on the story," Hoffman said...
...Communism simply is not wanted here...
...For example, the modest request for a $3,000,000 loan for road building equipment and a $1,000,000 barter deal of Cuban chrome for corn to meet an urgent food shortage were turned down by our government in the formative days of the revolution...
...The people of Tennessee were responding to Senator Kefauver's persistent efforts in their behalf when they assured him a third Senate term by one of the greatest margins in his long political career...
...Judge Andrew (Tip) Taylor, Kefauver's arch-segregationist opponent, waged an unprecedentedly vitriolic, lavishly financed, below-the-belt campaign aimed at the Senator's excellent civil rights and civil liberties record, one of the best in either the North or the South...
...As compared with 1952, a 1960 home buyer with a thirty-year, $10,000 mortgage, will pay $11,024 rather than $7,712 in interest, an increase of $3,312...
...Woods went to Kennedy headquarters where they "opened up their books"—the quotation marks were used by Woods— and found: f A total of $912,000 was spent between January, 1959, when Kennedy's quest for the Presidency "was just getting off the ground," and July, 1960, when he captured the nomination...
...Kefauver's record over the dozen years he has been in the Senate has identified him clearly to the people of Tennessee as the political heir of such Senate guardians of the public interest as Bob LaFollette and George Norris...
...In general, the public is much more inclined to "throw the rascals out" than to reward a party for good performance in office...
...The High Cost of Tight Money In the seven-year period preceding 1960, the American people laid out more than twenty-three billion dollars in excess interest payments as a direct result of the tight-money, high-interest policies pursued by the Eisenhower Administration...
...If these repressive measures were to continue in force, the loss to the economy in the next five years would total $470 billion in national production and $125 billion in public revenues...
...The goal: To decrease the size of the national debt...
...One of the principal objectives of a Presidential commission would be to determine if our own policies—especially our official coolness to the social revolution in Cuba long before it acquired Red trimmings—did not drive the Castro regime closer to the Communists...
...Using the device of the Senate committee investigation, Kefauver has ruthlessly rooted out the crime syndicate, the political racketeers, and the big business monopolists...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, with characteristic enterprise, turned one of its Washington correspondents, Edward F. Woods, loose on the subject...
...And Africa may well in present circumstances mean the world...
...f Although three out of four voters identify themselves with one of the two major parties, the independent vote is sufficiently great to decide the election...
...Every year the story is the same...
...He sold himself to the voters...
...The result: Bank holdings declined slightly, but there was not only no corresponding rise in individual holdings, but a decline here as well...
...Americans who consider themselves Democrats outnumber Republicans by a three-to-two margin nationally, by a four-to-three margin outside the South...
...Furthermore, the Conference on Economic Progress reports, these policies depressed the American economy generally, stunted economic growth, slowed sorely needed housing construction, and created a new kind of artificial inflation, based on shortages of services and under-production...
...When he came anyway, in April, 1959, President Eisenhower, who has decorated Latin American military dictators, did not receive the hero of the Cuban revolution...
...Senator Kefauver has made his name and reputation as the foremost detective in the nation...
...it is not too early to conclude that the United Nations has enjoyed its finest hour under Hammarskjold's brilliant leadership...
...an Army-purchased wrench set for $29—market value, $4...
...But there is at least one aspect of the Administration's policy which seems to us to provide conclusive documentation of its failure...
...Did Kennedy Buy the Nomination...
...The report points out that current excess interest payments add up to nineteen times the President's proposed outlays for education in the 1961 fiscal budget, eleven times the expenditures for health, and twenty-four times the amount allocated for housing—a sharp contrast to the Administration claim that the economy "cannot afford" an expansion of social services...
...value, fifty cents...
...It is too early to estimate the eventual outcome of the tragic conflict in the Congo...
...f Although both parties sought regional balance in selecting a Vice Presidential candidate, there is no evidence from either the 1952 or 1956 election that the Vice Presidential candidates were better known or liked in their home regions than elsewhere...
...As late as February of this year, Castro offered to renew negotiations with the United States regarding compensation for expropriated U.S...
...The goal: To shift more of the debt from short-term to long-term obligations...
...No store in the South," the Council's report continued, "which has opened its lunch counters to Negroes has reported a loss in business...
...Almost every time the Comptroller General investigates an area of negotiated contracts," Douglas pointed out, "he finds the government has been overcharged...
...One of the most persistent political rumors this campaign year is that Senator Kennedy's father "bought" him the nomination for President by spending some $7,000,000...
...behavior as just another case of Washington's use of the specter of Communism to protect its economic interests...
...There is mounting evidence, said the Wall Street Journal after a survey throughout Latin America, that there is "genuine sympathy among many Latins, not so much for Castro, but for what they believe he stands for: revolt against entrenched wealth and political power...
...government to borrow money have been, in the judgment of the Wall Street Journal, "failures...
...The Secretary of State received him in a hotel room to underscore the unofficial character of the visit...
...When five variety stores in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, opened their counters to all without discrimination, Time was able to report: ". . . whites and Negroes sat side by side without disorder, insults, or even stares, as if things had never been any different...
...speculation has become the rule rather than the exception...
...But whatever the outcome, the United Nations had established precedents bound to leave a lasting impact on the future of Africa...
...But the liberal and truly progressive forces of the country seem to believe—and their belief is worthy of serious consideration—that, paradoxically, only by being on Cuba's side, in sympathy and understanding, will it be possible to forestall that country's present leaning toward the U.S.S.R...
...The role of the United Nations must be not only to prevent bloodshed, but to provide newly born countries with a pool of professionals to train natives in the skills so urgently needed in the new nations...
...Thus, a study by the Brookings Institution estimated that the cash outlay for the Eisenhower drive for convention delegates in 1952 was $2,500,000...
...But the evidence in the report that is most likely to drive home to the man on the street the cost of tight money is the example of its effect on home mortgages...
...Reports to such bitter anti-Castro publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal emphasize that countless Latin Americans with impeccable anti-Communist credentials and many reservations about the Castro revolution condemn President Eisenhower's drastic slash of the Cuban sugar quota and regard U.S...
...f Of this total, more than half— $545,000—was contributed from "outside sources" during 1960, $90,000 came from the Senator's brothers and sisters and their spouses, $60,000 from Kennedy himself, and $24,000 from Kennedy's father and mother...
...f One-tenth of the voters will not decide until the last two weeks of the campaign...
...The Neighbors Are Talking The evidence continues to multiply that our policy toward Cuba is costing us a great deal of good will among our good neighbors south of the border...
...Support for Castro's social revolution is widespread in Mexico, as we reported here last month...
...In an impressively documented study of "Tight Money and Rising Interest Rates" prepared for the Conference under the direction of economist Leon Keyserling, evidence is presented that the average American family lost, in effect, $3,500 during this seven-year period, and that governments at all levels missed out on $65 billion in revenues because of the depressing economic effects of the tight-money, high-interest policies...
...Mexico is as opposed as any country could be to Soviet domination," he wrote...
...The Defense Department promptly took the money and threw it away...
...The Wasteland In 1956, the latest year for which detailed information on the subject has been published, approximately twelve million individuals and families with incomes of less than $3,000 a year squeezed out of their meager resources a total of two billion dollars with which to pay Federal income taxes...
...Typical of the scores of items he cited to back his charges were lamp sockets for which the Navy paid $21.10 each, but which were available on the market for twentyfive cents...
...The cost of servicing the debt, because of the high-interest policy, has risen twenty-eight per cent...
...The rumors prompted Harry G. Hoffman, editor of the Charleston Gazette, to assign reporters to a statewide investigation of the election...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
