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Summer Session Kansan
Friday, July 24, 1964
The Press and Barry
Things have quieted down at the Cow Palace. The floors have been swept, the banners and balloons and cigarette butts and ice cream wrappers removed. Now the people can watch the summer re-runs again, and some of them, those who are really interested in politics, can wait for Atlantic City the end of August, and more big datelined stories and more newspaper prognostics.
It is doubtful that the gentlemen of the press will get it in Atlantic City the way they got it in San Francisco. Throughout this century the press has been predominantly pro-Republican, on the editorial pages, at least. The cry of the "one-party Republican press" began around 1952, led by attacks from President Truman and Adlai Stevenson. Not until 1960 did the Republicans seriously talk about another one-party press—a one-party Democratic press—when, after the Nixon defeat, Herb Klein, who had been Nixon's press secretary, let the newsmen have it. Two years later, after Pat Brown won in California, Nixon let go again—not at the editors but at the men and women who work for them.
THE PRESS GOT a new set of lumps in San Francisco, when Gen. Eisenhower spoke of "sensationalizing columnists and commentators" and got such applause. Republican delegates hooted and yelled and pointed in derision at the press galleries. Calm folks like Chet Huntley and David Brinkley found it difficult to hold themselves back, but they succeeded.
Such an attack as that of Eisenhower came even though it seems safe to wager that most of the nation's press, outside of such obvious left-wing scoundrels as Walter Lippmann and Ralph McGill and James Reston, soon will be making an accommodation with the man one commentator referred to as Gen. Goldwater (a designation which, he said, is technically correct). Editors whose dislike for the Arizona senator was as pronounced as that of their reporters (who usually, by the way, seem to favor Democratic candidates, to be quite honest about it) will be finding a way to come out for Goldwater in the months to come.
BUT SOME OF THESE EDITORS will find an endorsement of Goldwater difficult to make. It is hard to see, for example, how the Kansas City Star, which has been leaning Johnsonward for some time, but which usually is strongly Republican, will be able to make the pitch for Goldwater. Or John S. Knight, who heads up a string of papers in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida, and who has not been at all fond of Goldwater, even though a Knight interview with the senator last week sounded a bit more friendly.
The New York Herald Tribune, true to the heritage of both Horace Greeley and Whitelaw Reid, has been staunchly Republican, but according to that righteous citadel of conservatism, the Chicago Tribune, the New York paper sees Goldwater enfolded in "a dream of a world that isn't." How can the Trib endorse Goldwater? How can even a conservative paper like the Salt Lake Tribune, which ALWAYS comes out for Republicans, but wrote last week that "It is inconceivable that Goldwater can be victorious without somehow divorcing himself from the far right groups as well as gaining the support of a united party..."
WHAT THE EDITORS in Kansas will do we don't know, obviously, nor do they in all likelihood. One can hazard a guess that the Hutchinson News, which some Kansans probably regard as a combination of the devil and Karl Marx, will like Lyndon Johnson for November. And in the column to the right we quote from Whitley Austin of the Salina Journal, who daily boosts Harold Chase for governor but who probably would have many twinges about supporting Barry Goldwater.
We know what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the New York Post, the Milwaukee Journal and the Louisville Courier-Journal will do: they'll back Lyndon Johnson. So will, in all likelihood, the New York Times and the Denver Post. But most of these other journals that are so shocked by the candidacy of the senator from the South-west? Well, they'll probably take something strong, to keep it in their stomachs, and in good form do what they've been doing these many generations—back a Republican, because that's the only way to save America from the welfare staters and the hordes of Genghis Khan.
A Note from a Fan
Dear Hollywood:
Please quit making movies from Broadway musicals.
We don't know what you'll do with "My Fair Lady"—goof it up, probably, with big fantastic sets and Audrey Hepburn as big on your wide screen as the Arabian deserts. We do know what you've done with "Bye Bye Birdie" and "The Unsinkable Molly Brown." You've ruined them, that's what.
You took all the good songs out of "Bye Bye Birdie" and turned it into a gigantic writhe for Ann-Margret. You made it one of the stupidest things turned loose onto an unsuspecting public in years. You took all but four of the songs out of "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" and made it a showpiece for Debbie Reynolds.
You dropped good songs from "Guys and Dolls" and "The Music Man," and you made "South Pacific" a garish picture postcard. Your incredibly bad taste has given us almost no movie musical of any worth since "The King and I" and "The Pajama Game."
We've had it. We meaning my family. We know the rest of America will flock in to see a musical version of Elvis Presley in "Hamlet," with Ann-Margret as Ophelia in a happy clinch at the end. We won't be there. We'll buy the record and listen at home.—CMP
Salina Editor And the GOP
(Editor's note: Here are excerpts from (1) the Salina Journal's front page story of Wednesday, July 15, and (2) the editorial of Thursday, July 18.
First, part of the news story:
SAN FRANCISCO (Via Television)—A new Republican party has been born here by Caesarean section.
It is a new blood line as well as a new generation. The name is the same but the lily white child is out of John's Other Wife, a cousin of the late George Babbitt.
And it won't require a paternity suit to determine the father. He is Barry Goldwater, progenitor, midwife and Godfather all in one.
As the result of Tuesday night's protracted and noisy travail, Republicanism now means Militant Conservatism as bankers, generals and mid-week golfers understand the term.
Progressive Republicianism is out—a naughty phrase. Abraham Lincoln is to be treated as a "fellow-traveler."
General Goldwater, moreover,
has a plan for victory. He has
described it plainly in his vart-
ious campaign speeches. He would:
FROM THE EDITORIAL:
Tear down the Berlin wall.
Foster and support a revolution against the Soviets in Hungary. . . .
Demand a military victory in Vietnam and Laos and give the generals the power to achieve that victory as they think best. . .
Build more hydrogen bombs and bombers and develop an armament system superior to any.
Repudiate the nuclear test ban treaty.
Give top U.S. field commanders the power to use low-yield atomic explosives without consulting the President. . .
The Goldwater strategy certainly would involve us in a multi-front war with Russia, China and assorted nations. But this is why we should build more bombs. . .
What a sweeping, dynamic plan!
What a sweeping, dynamic plan:
My only worry is whether I still can get into my old uniform.
Fog Over Smoking
NEW YORK — (UPI) — In a study of 5,381 white women members of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Dr. Jacob Yerushalmy, of the University of California, found that almost twice as many smokers as non-smokers failed to carry their babies to term.
The ratio, as reported in "Medical Tribune," a publication for doctors: 6.4 per cent prematures among smokers, 3.5 among nonsmokers.
Most unlikely, said Dr. Yerushalmy. He said he cited the fixtures merely to show how, in connection with smoking, statistics can mislead.
However, the mortality rate for the premature infants of nonsmokers was strikingly higher 232.1 per 1,000 against 137.7 per 1,000 for those of smokers.
What is the significance? Are premature babies of mothers who smoke hardier than those of abstainers?
Summer Session
Kansan
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BOOK REVIEWS
THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE: READINGS IN THE TRANS-MISSISSIPPI WEST, edited by Robert V. Hine and Edwin R. Bingham (Wadsworth).
Enthusiasms of western history and the western symbol in American history should find this a beautiful and worthwhile volume to have. The editors are scholars of perception, who understand the deep meaning of the word "frontier." Though they confine themselves to what we think of as the West, they recognize that the word "frontier" has meanings and implications that go beyond a simple definition.
These are the general subjects which the editors explore: Understanding the American West, the explorer and the government, the Far Western fur trade, the Oregon territory, the Southwest and the Santa Fe Trail, Texas, Manifest Destiny and the Mexican War, the Mormons, the mining frontier, the cattle frontier, conflict between Indians and whites, transportation, the development of communities, the land and the farmer, and culture and the frontier.
Many of the writers are well known to historians and readers of general literature. It is not surprising that the editors begin with Frederick Jackson Turner, who pioneered this subject 70 years ago. Other familiar names are Henry Nash Smith of "Virgin Land," Bernard De Voto of several outstanding books, Francis Parkman, Jefferson (who sent Lewis and Clark West), Fremont the Pathfinder, architects of the Hudson Bay Co., Paul Horgan, the frontiersman James Ohio Pattie.
Josiah Gregg of the Santa Fe Trail, Stephen Austin, Walter Prescott Webb of the University of Texas, the Congressional Globe, President Polk, Gen. Meade, Josiah Royce, the Mormon historian Brigham Roberts, Theodore Roosevelt, Helen Hunt Jackson, William Gilpin, Grenville Dodge, Mark Twain, Edgar Watson Howe of Atchison, Horace Greeley, Hamlin Garland, Carl Becker the Kansas historian, Ignatius Donnelly, John Wesley Powell and Henry Ward Beecher.
***
JOHN F. KENNEDY, PRESIDENT, by Hugh Sidey (Crest 75 cents).
And still they come, and still they will come for many years, for John F. Kennedy is part of American legend. Here is another, by the White House correspondent for Time magazine.
Sidey describes Kennedy from the time he met the late President in a Senate elevator in 1958 until November 22, 1963, the black day of last year. This starts, then, two years before Kennedy received the Democratic nomination.
Sidey takes the reader through the big White House years—Cuba and the Bay of Pigs; the confrontation with Premier Khrushchev; the conference with President De Gaulle; Jackson, Miss., and the racial crisis; the call to arms last summer at the time of more racial crises.
There are eight pages of photographs.
AURORA DAWN, by Herman Wouk (Dell, 60 cents).
Let an author get a little fame and wham, out come the things he wrote in the days before he became famous. Like some college themes and term papers it should have been filed away—it meaning those books that appeared long ago and got bad critical reception.
"Aurora Dawn" came four years before "The Caine Mutiny." It's a story of the city and a young man and two young women. The book came out of Herman Wouk's radio-writing experience.
"Remember, Now Don't Grow Any Bigger".