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University Daily Kansan Monday. October 16, 1961
On Tito's Planes
A recent announcement from Washington says the United States has agreed to sell 130 F86D jet fighters to Yugoslavia and train Yugoslav pilots to fly them.
This agreement was approved first by the Eisenhower administration, then re-approved by the Kennedy administration.
It is part of a long-standing policy to aid Yugoslavia, a Communist led, but not a Communist Bloc, country.
ALSO INCLUDED in the aid policy is $600 million in military aid awarded since 1952. Almost the entire Yugoslav air force consists of American made planes.
They have not received grant aid from the United States since 1957, but they have been eligible to make purchases, such as the jets, under a military sales program of the Mutual Security pact.
Yugoslavia split with the Kremlin in 1948, and a spokesman for the State Department said it has remained independent and has not participated in policies or programs to bring about the overthrow or subversion of legitimate governments by world Communism.
IF THIS IS THE CASE, then it is not as advisable, or perhaps even more so, to train the four men in question as it is to train Nationalist-Chinese or West German pilots?
To stop training now or to refuse the sale would give Russia a propaganda victory, especially since other Yugoslavs have received radar and flight training here in the past.
THE AID PLAN, which includes the sale and training, seems to be a means of luring Yugoslavia to the Western political philosophy, or at least insuring an "independent" stand.
But it has two other possibilities.
Propaganda is used by the United States to
certain advantage. The plan could be another facet of the cold war. When the smoke clears from the present fire, it may not be an effective propaganda weapon, however.
The plan could also be a return or semireturn to the nationalism of the 19th century when each country had its own goals, but also realized other countries had their aims and would aid them, realizing the goals were in conflict.
THIS CONCEPT IS OPPOSED to the nationalistic universalism of the mid-20th Century in which each nation appears to strive for world dominion.
If the aid plan is followed through, it could conceivably be viewed as an attempt for world peace, not world dominion, by the United States.
If the plan is abandoned, Communist leaders will have an opportunity to step in with Russian dollars, finish the aid project, and give the Kremlin undue credit.
THE MISTAKE WAS MADE in 1952 when the military aid plan was initiated. Now the administration must follow it without making another.
Congress evidently has not been too concerned over the situation—there has been only unofficial talk to "look into military aid to some neutrals," but nothing official has been done to remove Yugoslavia from its eligibility to buy military equipment. Only a definite "No" has been issued in answer to whether or not any more Yugoslavs will be trained.
Whatever happens to the jets and the trainees, no one knows just yet. But almost everyone agrees it isn't likely the issue will turn into a political football—Eisenhower started it and Kennedy approved it.
Carrie Merryfield
Book Criticized
... Letters ..
In reply to the review by NR (who-for reasons best known to himself, does not choose to reveal his name) perhaps the following information concerning Frank J. Donner and the book "The Un-Americans" should be made public.
TO QUOTE FROM THE CONGRESSIONAL Record of Monday, July 31, 1961, extension of remarks of Hon. Frank W. Boykin of Alabama: "This book, which has been in preparation for some time, was written by Frank J. Donner, an attorney, who has been identified as
a member of the Communist Party by three witnesses who have testified before the committee, and who invoked the fifth amendment when he himself appeared before the committee June 1953 and was questioned about his membership in the conspiracy. In a subsequent appearance before the committee in March 1959, he denied that he had been a member of the party since the time of the 1956 appearance, but refused to say whether or not he had resigned technical membership in the party.
"In giving the sources of the numerous lies about the committee contained in his book and in acknowledging assistance received in
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
SOMETIMES I THINK THE MATH SECTION OF THIS TEST IS A LITTLE TOO ROUGH.
writing it. Donner states that he is 'under heavy obligation' to one Bertram Edises. Edises is another attorney who has been identified as a member of the Communist Party, was a witness in the San Francisco hearings and had to be forcibly ejected from the hearing room because of his disruptive behavior."
IN VIEW OF THE PHILOSOPHIC views of the author, the book should indeed be an interesting, though inaccurate, picture of HUAC.
Temporary Chairman
Kansas University Chapter
Young Americans for Freedom
* * *
National Board of Directors Young Americans for Freedom
Charles McIlwaine
Patrick Allen
Kansan Coverage Criticized Editor:
It seems to me that a university newspaper could do without the type of journalistic drivel that appeared on the front page of Friday's Daily Kansan. The articles entitled "Marcher Feels Justified" and "Confused Reaction to Marchers"-including the minute-by-minute running commentary of inane observations—were of poor taste and served little purpose. On an issue as serious as a demonstration march regarding racial discrimination, descriptions of clothes color or the over-dramatic portrayal of the participants' feelings, call the ability-or the intent-of those responsible into question.
Secondly, the placement of such a loaded selection of quotes and depiction on the front page is something that a high school journalist would know better than. If such trash must appear, the editorial page (or the fashion column) would be a far more appropriate place. The Daily Kansas ought to display a bit more responsibility to its readers, and to the people who made Friday's headlines.
Stephen Goldfarb
California Graduate
Student
From the Newsstand
Frankfurter's Majority
The Supreme Court ended its 1960-61 term with a decision once again revealing the disheartening ineffectuality to which the five-member majority led by Justice Frankfurter has limited certain immunities to injustice, presumptively guaranteed citizens through constitutional safeguards. It is a matter President Kennedy, who in the fullness of time is likely to make several Supreme Court appointments, should think upon.
In the name of "security" the Frankfurter majority again turned down a citizen seeking protection from arbitrary government action. In this case, it was a colored woman employed by a cafeteria operator providing service at a Navy installation. The commandant barred her on security grounds, giving no specifications or listing of charges, and allowing her no opportunity to present a defense. The court majority said it was perfectly all right for the commandant to do this.
THE SAME FIVE-MEMBER majority including Justices Frankfurter, Clark, Harlan, Whitaker and Stewart earlier in the session upheld contempt convictions and jail terms for perhaps misguided but certainly harmless, decent citizens who pointblank declined to answer all the questions hurled by legislative professional subversion chasers, who wanted them to "name names" of associates in various wholly legal enterprises of which the subversion chasers disapproved.
The four-member minority of which Chief Justice Warren is an ornament—a minority including those veteran Franklin D. Recevelt appointees, Justices Black and Douglas, and Justice Brennan—protested the decision in the case of the cafeteria cook as vigorously as it had previously dissented from the decisions upholding the contempt convictions. It seems perfectly clear, however, that the current line of decisions in civil liberties cases is not going to be upset with the court's present membership. . .
The late Justice Jackson wrote, before he himself was named to the court, that by the nature of our judicial system the Supreme Court was inevitably a brake applied by the last generation to the present and the oncoming. It is also common observation that almost any man who grows older on the court may tend to become conservative with the passage of years.
IN FACT, HOWEVER, Justices Black and Douglas have not done so in all their two decades. In fact, Justice Frankfurter with an original reputation from his part in the ancient Sacco-Vanzetti case, has shown an almost unvaried disinterest in protecting individual liberties. Long ago he wrote the majority decision in a Jehovah's Witnesses case—a decision saying that despite the religious scruples of their parents, little children could be barred from school if they obeyed their parents and declined the ritual of a flag salute. The then Chief Justice, Harlan Stone, was so shocked that he wrote a fiery one-member dissent sufficiently compelling to produce within a few years a direct and stated reversal.
The problem is not so much to make the high court liberal as to keep it so. One of the highest duties of a President is his selection of justices, for the court is the last bastion of freedom, and the protection of citizens from political coercion by authority without due process is as precious as protection of the traditional rights of the possible murderer from indelicate attentions of the police.
Some Presidents have been thoughtless or otherwise careless in court appointments—as evidenced by the distance between the present court and Chief Justice Stone's, which both could and would correct its own errors. In this area, as in many others, President Kennedy faces great opportunities.
(Excerpted from an article by Willard Shelton in the June 23 Guild Reporter)
COSMONAUT
After all the darks and dawns of time,
Among void drawn tides of quiet,
I whirled in one sweet birth upon a fletched
Earth scattering bones upon stones,
Flesh grey gratings rubbing
Primal tides of soft ash,
And did not ask
And could not ask
And had no will past being,
And in a temple far off, a
Prayer wheel
Fluttered vainly.
His time was the wetshine furrow,
Turning the length of a field
Upon itself,
And he spoke, in this his second harvest,
To say of plowing these twenty years undone,
And the share, wrought by strengthfull blow,
Hammered to shape and promise with giant pride
In the heat of forge and sun.
Of the cradlescythe, flinting with dew and sweat
In shard-sharp stubble,
Of the Whip-poor-will, the crow,
Of the orchard plot where graves are,
Where briars over limestone grow.
—H. M. Hershberger, From "The Landsmith"