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Summer Session Kansan Friday, July 28.1961
JFK Asks Sacrifice
President Kennedy's military build-up plan inspired by the current Berlin crisis probably will affect the college age group more than any other age group.
His plan to increase the draft, call ready reserves back to active duty and extend enlistments up to 12 months is bound to change the plans of many young men and women. Plans to call 30,000 in the September draft call proves that Kennedy means what he said. This is almost triple the July draft call of 8,000.
This rapid acceleration means, of course, that many young men will be called sooner than expected. Many others, who now are on reserve status, will be called back to active duty. Some who are nearing the end of their enlistment will be required to stay up to 12 months longer. Families will be separated and many incomes will drop when young men are taken from their regular jobs.
This is the price we must pay to show the Soviets that we will not be pushed on the Berlin issue.
But the average American on the street probably was more impressed with the President's
intentions than were the Russians. The seriousness which President Kennedy attached to the Berlin crisis no doubt surprised many Americans who viewed recent developments over the German issue as just another of the many crises we have been managing to survive for the last 15 years.
The course of action outlined by President Kennedy should erase all doubt about the United States position on the defense of West Berlin. For the first time in several years we have backed words with actions. Americans have shown that they are willing to sacrifice to insure continued existence of the ideology that inspired their revolution.
Now it becomes the responsibility of a new generation to answer the call of freedom and individual dignity. Americans have always answered this call. Others in history have fought that their heritage might be passed on.
Now the burden of the protection of our ideals has come to rest on a new generation. They will be expected to make the same sacrifices that their parents and grandparents made in World War I and World War II.
—Ron Gallagher
Editor Shadow-Boxing
Dear Editor:
To paraphrase your introductory statement in Tuesday's "Summer Session Kansan": "I'm getting tired of childish editorials." Furthermore, you persist in shadow boxing
... Letters ...
with bogey issues and creating very localized tempests in a teapot.
No one, Mr. Morelock, who regards issues with a critical, constructive and unbiased eye, objects to Mr. Kennedy's wealth. What one objects to is the fact that he, Mr.
U.S. China Policy
By Phil Newsom
UPI Foreign News Analyst
For more than 10 years the United States has followed a policy toward Nationalist China branded even by its friends as unrealistic.
And it is illustrative of the unrelenting pressures of world complexities that at this particular time the United States must divert a part of its attention from threatening crises in Berlin and Tunisia to consider a change in its China policy.
U. S. POLICY IN THE UNITED NATIONS IN THE PAST involved refusal even to debate the possibility of a U.N. seat for Red China. And such was the U.S. influence in the U.N. that for 10 years it successfully barred the question from the U.N. agenda.
But the winds of change which have swept the world, also have swept the United Nations.
The United States no longer is assured a majority vote, and the possibilities of a two-China U.N. policy are being increasingly discussed.
ON THE ISLAND OF FORMOSA. THE CHAING KAL-SHEK government is angered and dismayed.
Nationalist newspapers help fan the flames and the American community of 10,000 persons in Taipei feels increasingly the resentment against a reported softening of the U.S. position toward Red China.
There are unpleasant memories of an anti-American demonstration in 1957 in which nine Americans were injured.
There is no more anti-Communist leader in Asia than Chiang Kai-shek and it would be pleasant indeed if he were able to pass his declining years undisturbed in his dream of a reconquest of the mainland.
BUT THAT SEEMS NOT TO BE. FOR IN CHIANG'S ONE-track determination lies the hard decision facing the United States.
Published in New York is a small, new publication called "WarPeace Report." It is oriented toward support of the United Nations and in its July issue carries what purports to be a survey of 96 of the 99 members of the United Nations.
It reports that more than three quarters of the U.N. members believe Communist China should be seated as the representative of China both in the Security Council and in the United Nations.
IT SAYS MORE THAN TWO-THIRDS OF THE MEMBERS
believe Nationalist China should remain in the General Assembly. It adds that in case of a showdown between the two Chinas, a majority believes the decision should go to Red China.
The figures seem not to be out of line with the United States' own soundings.
These were some of the facts behind the U.S. decision to negotiate recognition of Outer Mongolia and to permit Outer Mongolia's entrance to the United Nations in exchange for similar action on the new African republic of Mauritania.
IT IS A VOTE-GETTING GESTURE TO OTHER FRENCH-speaking republics of Africa. It is a play for time only.
But inherent in it is the two-China theory. The school of thought which promotes it believes it better for Chiang Kai-shek to accept half a loaf than have nothing at all. And there is always the possibility that Red China will reject it, making the strategy successful.
President, does not seem to possess the attributes of a statesman, and that he does not observe sound fiscal policies, which are prerequisites to discharge adequately the position he occupies. Inasmuch as the New Deal, Mr. Harold Lasky, and the means by which that wealth was acquired, might have molded his outlook on government intervention in the national economy, these antecedents have a direct relevance to the points of criticism.
In the pre-convention days, when the moralists and the informed observers were weighing the possibilities of drafting Stevenson, one heard Carl Sandburg sound the alarm as to the negative attributes of our current leader. This bard publicly declared the way in which the elder's wealth was acquired, and the sordid roles played by the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedyys on the political scene in a bankrupt city, which is now captive to the dictates of an unscrupulous political element bent on exploiting religious prejudices, ignorances and narrow provincialism.
During the very first election-enering rounds after World War II, Mr. President went about assuring the Back Bay elements that he was one of them, despite his veneer of Yankee erudition. This trend saw fruition on a national level when he issued the 1956 manifesto at the Democratic Convention, which contained the blatant effrontery that he could capture monolithic religious votes for a national slate.
Capture these votes he did, as well as those of the shiftless mass which populates the innards of the eastern seaboard cities. They also consume the alcohol which engendered the Kennedy millions, and they were manna for those first obsessed yearnings for power. But, the same climate prevails as when Miguel de Unamuno admonished Franco to the effect that: "You will rule, but you will never convince the knowing."
When you acquaint yourself with big city politics, you will recognize that we are letting a clique, whose motto is "increasing vulgarity and lack of purpose," select our national leaders.
The American people, Mr. Editor, then does not include the Yankees or the people in the Midwest, by an extension of an inference drawn from your writings. Yankee intellect, know-how, and common sense forbade granting sanction to one with so few qualifications, at the time a critical choice was made. None-the-less, our chief executive has the interim assurance of complete dedication from his charges. However, I do hope that someone worthy will come along to give us a new rebirth in this wonderful experiment dedicated to tolerance and world living.
Harold Schick
Baldwin, graduate student
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
MR. LINCOLN'S ARMY, by Bruce Catton. Doubleday Dolphin,
$1.45. GLORY ROAD, by Bruce Catton. Doubleday Dolphin, $1.45.
For some of us who have suffered from the Civil War fever of the last few years, Bruce Catton does least to dispel that fever. His beautiful prose, his emotional incidents, his feeling for the drama and tragedy of the war all capture and hold us.
"A Stillness at Appomattox," which won the Pulitzer Prize, is perhaps his best known history of the war. But there is little to distinguished this fine book from its predecessors. "Stillness" was the concluding volume in Catton's history of the Army of the Potomac. "Mr. Lincoln's Army" and "Glory Road" preceded that book, and either of these could have won similar literary recognition as easily.
The first of these is mainly the story of McClellan, and it takes us from the start of the war down to the dismissal of that pompous general who was tagged the "Little Napoleon." "Mr. Lincoln's Army" details the string of failures of the Army of the Potomac, the chessboard campaigns plotted by McClellan, who was a brilliant strategist but who shook—or so it would seem—at the sight of blood.
McClellan was an unlikely choice at the same time that he was the logical man for the job. He was believed to have southern sympathies, he was a Democrat, and he was not beloved by the Radicals. But he had enjoyed a minor victory in the western theater at the start of the war, and when McDowell seemed unable to get going, McClellan was brought in to head the Army of the Potomac.
His campaigns were grandly designed, and they played into the hands of the Confederates. He relied on poor intelligence from Pinkerton, and he refused to pursue the enemy when he could do so. That was the tragedy of Antietam, after which McClellan was dismissed. If ever a general had an opportunity for greatness it was at Antietam, and McClellan muffed that opportunity, right down the line.
Catton's description of the horrible battle of Antietam, that which raged around a sunken road, a bridge, a cornfield and a Dunker church, is worth noting. "In a square of ground measuring very little more than one thousand yards on a side—cornfield, barnyard, orchard, East and West Woods, and the fields by the turnpike—nearly twelve thousand men were lying on the ground, dead or wounded." Catton writes. Some soldiers recalled it as the heaviest fighting of the entire war.
"Glory Road" continues the story of Lincoln's efforts to find a general who would fight. Here we read particularly about the terrible battle of Fredericksburg, where the nept Burnside sent wave after wave of Union troops against Marye's Heights on a wet and cold December day.
His determination was pitiful; he just didn't know how to go about winning a battle. Fredericksburg added to the toll of North and South, though especially North. And Burnside, who is best known perhaps for giving his name to male facial adornment, was dismissed.
His successor was the dashing Joe Hooker, and Hooker lost still more men in the horror of Chancecellorsville, a battle fought around a Virginia mansion in the area soon to be known to history as the Wilderness. Once again there was evidence of Union ineptness, and Hooker was dismissed. His successor—George Meade.
So Catton brings us to Gettysburg, which was a Union victory but another victory marked by indecision. Meade let Lee escape; Lincoln told him the retreat reminded him of an old woman shooing geese across a creek. And after Gettysburg, the North finally got a general. But that is the story in "A Stillness at Appomattox."
"Glory Road," like the other books, is filled with passages of vivid language. Here is one that follows the battle of Gettysburg:
"One day they would make a park there, with neat lawns and smooth black roadways, and there would be marble statues and bronze plaques to tell the story in bloodless prose. Silent cannon would rest behind grassy embankments, their wheels bolted down to concrete foundations, their malevolence wholly gone, and here and there birds would nest in the muzzles.
"In the museums and tourist-bait trinket shops old bullets and broken buckles and twisted bayonets would repose under glass, with a rusty musket or so on the wall and little illustrated booklets lying on top of the counter. There would be neat brick and timber cabins on the hillsides, and people would sleep soundly in houses built where the armies had stormed and cried at each other, as if to prove that men killed in battle send forth no restless ghosts to plague comfortable civilians at night."
★★★
FIVE PLAYS, by Gerhart Hauptmann. Bantam Classics, 60 cents. Gerhart Hauptmann belongs in the naturalistic tradition of Zola and Dreiser. His plays are more than realistic; they are pessimistic depictions of man's fate; they are deterministic in the mood of Marx and Darwin. His striking "Weavers," his doomed "Rose Bernd," his "Drayman Henschel" are victims of circumstances. Rose seems old-fashioned, as Sister Carrie and Crane's Maggie and even James' Daisy Miller are old-fashioned. Henschel is a forerunner of Miller's Willy Loman. All five plays in this volume demonstrate the singular power of the great German dramatist.