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PEARLS OF GREAT PRICE FROM NOWHERE EREHWON ON THE COLORADO “Ye Gods, it doth amaze me, A man of such a feeble temper should So get the start of the majestic world, And bear the palm alone.”‘ Julius Caesar-, Ac. 1, Sc. 2 Gad on a mountain and hell’s bells and panther tracks, but I’m grateful to Jake Pickle ! Because if it hadn’t been for Jake, and the newsletter of the stateand you should excuse the expression, Democratic executive committee, I, for one , swine, would certainly have missed the pearls of before me last week. Whew! but it was a near thing. I refer, naturally, to the utopia built by Gov. Price Daniel in his first year in office, a period of time it now appears is so drenched with significance that henceforth history will write, it in capital letters”His First Year”–r-as it does Napoleon’s “100 Drays.” Said the newsletter, fetchingly, eyes cast down, cheeks reddening rosily at its own necessary immodesty, its big toe adragging in the dust like Tom Sawyer offering Becky Thatcher the brass knob: “For the first time in the history of Texas \(and what other history is Gov. Price Daniel and the Texas Legislature have completely enacted every major plank in the state Democratic platform. “All but four of the recommendations of Gov. Daniel and the party platform adopted in Fort Worth \(you at the regular session of the legislature. The remaining four were submitted to. the legislature at the special session just completed, and have now been \\enacted . “This now gives the Governor a near 100 percent record of enactments in some form of all recommendations to the legislature, a record which few \(oh, dear, the embarrassment of having to point out this sort of thing oneever attained in the first yearsorry, The First Yearof of fine.” I feel that only a churl would mention … oh, say : Slums, infant diarrhea, a growing unemployment rate, a shortage of schoolrooms, a scarcity of teachers, mental hospitals old age pensions, “simple honesty and integrity,” the biennium’s coming $12 million deficit, 19w wages, a burgeoning prison population, William Harrison’s Senate blackballing, the treatment of minorities, oil’s political power,migratory labor, Allan Shivers’s hang-on appointees, loan sharks, the highway death and maiming rate, the crime rate, farm-to-market roads, taxes and the tax structure, George Parkhouse, Carlos Ashley, William Moore, Jerry Sadler, Joe Chapman et al, Bill Daniel, the cost of medical care and. hospital rooms, the antiquated and stupid liquor laws, the overburdened courts, illiteracy, syphilis, tidelands,’ the industrial accident rate, workmen’s NEW WAVERLY I see by the mornin’ papersas Mr. Dooley used to saythat they are giving Lyndon a rehabilitation dinner in Houston. What a pity that protocol man, Purse was his name I think, got kicked upstairs, or was it down ? We are sure going to need somebody like that before we get all the creamed-chicken-mashed-potatoespeas-ice-cream-and lukewarm-coffee choked down. It isn’t the menu anybody needs to worry about, that’s routine. It’s the invitation list. It’s the seating at the head table. It’s the whispering. They couldn’t give Lyndon a dinner without inviting Price, he’s the Governor ; and if you have Price you have to have Allan and John Ben. Fortune Magazine only gives Texas compensation, unemployment compensation, aid to the blind, aid to dependent children, the anti-troops bills, the integration-segregation question, “harmony,” Ed Clark, Claude Gilmer and lobby kin, the good ship “Ava,”. Ben Ramsey, Herman Brown, a growing public awareness that Daniel intends to govern by good intentions onlyyou pays your money and you takes your choice. BUT, AS I SAY, only a churl will mention these things, so I will not. No, “the morning’s at seven the hillside’s dew-pearled,” Utopia is WASHINGTON When likable Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas calls a galaxy of brass-hat experts on missiles and satellites to testify before the TV cameras and the Senate preparedness committee, he will begin one of the most important Senate probes in years. It is vital to the defense of the nation. But some of Lyndon’s colleagues, who in the past have given him the nickname “Lyin’ ‘Down Lyndon,” have their finger’s crossed regarding the final result. They figure Lyndon will start off with real fireworks, but they are not sure what will happen after the first week of hearings. Reason for their skepticism is Johnson’s pattern of probing in the past. For some tithe he has been chairman of the Senate preparedness committee, yet he has held no very important probes in recent years:, And when he did run into two dynamiteladen scandals he suppressed. the f acts. One was his investigation of gangsterism on the New Jersey waterfront where the U. S. Army lost -millions of dollars by hiring gangsters. Johnson never did publish this report, even fired the two _investigators, Downey Rice and George Martin, who prepared it., General Motors Profits The other was his probe of airplane profits, showing that the Allison Motors Division of General Motors made Sabrejet engines for the Air Force in 1950-51 at a profit of 39 per cent. They did this by charging a 10 or 12 percent profit by one GM subsidiary, then a profit by the next GM subsidiary, then another profit by the third GM subsidiary. While lagging far behind in Sabrejet production, General Motors executives had _time to get houses and barns built for themselves at cost by a construction company doing business for the governmentHuber, Hunt, and Nichols. Daniel Babcock, chief engineer for GM’s Allison division, got a $31,000 home built for $15,800. Edward B. McNeil, a GM vice president, got an air-conditioning system installed at cost$3,890.18., GM official I. E. Settle got a barn built at cost. a dozen men who have more than $50 million, and each one ‘of them can, of course, buy up a whole table full of tickets, but can they get people to come and sit in those seats ? I mean just plain people who do not need rehabilitating and don’t much care for people in public life who have had wonderful opportunities and used them so poorly that their friends feel the need of helping them to seem to make with good. works ; will they come? And the whispering ! What is it that they are saying ? “Look at Allan and Lyndon sitting up there together both needing rehabilitation before 1960 when, they say, Allan will run for the Senate while Lyndon runs for President.” What a Ticket ! M.F.C. here, nothing now remaining to be done but quaff the milk and spoon up the honey in this best of all possible worlds. Well, maybe one small thing: Daniel should legally have the P in his front name fixed to stand hereafter for Pippa or Pangloss. But I guess that’s all. How, after all, improve that which is beyond improvement? Not even a tiny flaw has been left in the social fabric, as Hitler left here andthere a solitary Jew, to serve as a horrible example for those born hereafter. There is just one more thing. I’ve All these facts were censored. Johnson’s investigation of the New Jersey waterfront likewise was suppressed, though later Governor Dewey’s crime commissionrevealed some of the shocking facts. Johnson’s probers found that after the Army took over Jersey City’s Claremont terminal, dock workers played ‘poker on Army, time, shot dice, bribed, pilfered, peddled dope, and amused themselves by crashing Army fork-lifts into each otherall under the nose of the Army engineers. The Army contract with Dade Brothers, Inc., was so lucrative that in four weeks alone Dade Brothers pocketed a profit of $281,876.33, according to Johnson’s investigators. The night hiring boss in charge of loading Army cargo was John Denoia, alias Johnny Duke, former proprie Drew Pearson for of Duke’s Tavern, underworld hangout for Joe Adonis, Anthony Anastasia, and Willie Moretti. Senate investigators for Johnson checked the Dade Brothers payroll against rogue’s gallery photographs and discovered more than 30 so-called longshoremen with criminal records. Senator Johnson, however, never made this report public. He showed it to the Army and told them to clean up. In this way the Army was saved embarrassing publicity. Johnson made no effort to turn the healthy spotlight of publicity on this situation and his report gathered dust in Senate files until some of his Senate colleagues asked about it after Governor Dewey’s, crime commission started a real cleanup. Johnson claims he can get more accomplished by quietly going to the armed services when he finds something wrong and asking them to clean up. Frequently this works. Invariably, also, the grateful armed services will do anything under the sun for the thoughtful Lyndon after one of these quiet talkssuch as giving him free airplane . rides back and forth to Texas, or putting the Air Medical Research Center at Randolph Field, Texas, after Secretary of the Air Force Talbott had ruled that it was to be elsewhere. The delay and paperwork involved in switching the medical center cost the taxpayers around’ $100,000. But Lyndon’s heart beats for, Texas and he got the center located right in the heart of Texas. Missile Go-Round The man who should have handled the missile probe is Sen. Stuart Symington of Missouri, who has lived and breathed missiles for years. He was the first Secretary of the Air Force, long ago warned the nation that the Eisenhower administration was falling dangerously behind. Symington heads a subcommittee which was all set to probe missiles, but Johnson, who rules Senate Democrats without benefit of Democratic caucuses, decreed that the probe should NOTE Political Intelligence is on page seven this issue. tried hard to wipe out the thought but there it is ; it will not down : Another utopia I’ve heard of was called “Erehwon.” And “Erehwon,” as any fool can plainly see, is “Nowhere” spelled, of course, backwards. And I cannot help but think, too, of Churchill’s observation on Sir Stafford Cripps “There,” said Winston, “but for the Grace Of God goes God.” And that other piece of Churchill wisdom, his remark about a Commons colleague : “Blank is a modest man. He has much to be modest about.” LYMAN JONES be taken away from Symington … At first Johnson seemed leery aboutletting Estes Kefauver, another great Senate prober, get too much in the limelight. But he called Kefauver, asked him to postpone a hearing featuring Walter Reuther on inflation, scheduled for November 25. Two Senate headline investigations, he indicated, shouldn’t be competing with each other. Kefam -rer complied, postponed Reuther … Kefauver and Symington are members of the Senate armed services committee and have been asked by Johnson to specialize on some phases of the missile probe. BANKRUPT AUSTIN Rep. Joe Pool of Dallas has run out of politicians’ credit, that deposit ‘ of cynics’ tolerance a public man can claim as he dissembles along -the road to a higher office. Pool has been banking on his deposit too long; he has now indecently overextended himself. He has a way of sidling up to reporters and telling them that part of his story he hopes will appeal to them. He also freely admits his opportunist nature. He wants to go to Congress. His bill to gut Yarborough in the Senate race, on which he was counting to vacate, the office that congressman-at-large Martin Dies holds, was defeated, so now he’s running for the Dallas place. He has decided the way to win is to convince Dallas he’s a worse racist than Bilbo, Rankin, Sadler, or Chapman. If Dallas isn’t convinced, it ought to be. First he helped bait Daniel into this dismal second special session. Then he baited dignified and distinguished men of the cloth’ at House hearings on the anti-children troop bill with such questions as, “Do you believe in intermarriage? I just want to know.” Not content, thinking he will be forgiven, by insiders, any cheap outrage in the name of politics, he has now foisted on the legislature his bill to strip citizens of their rights to assemble and speak without harassment. His bill requires any organization \(defined, in the Senate version, to include “any person or group of perfull list of members, officers, purposes and connections upon the demandnot of Caesarbut of ‘the county judge, or, the Senate version, the county attorney; district judge, or district attorney. He told a colleague he doesn’t believe in his bill, himself. As the color-terrified House passed the bill, Rep. Bob Mullen said plainly, “This is a bill so a Negro citizen can be fired from his job, and driven from his home, and subjected to violence.” “It sets up target lists for mob violence.” As the guilty work of a demagogue, especially designed to ride the tides of political cowardice which have not run so high in the Capitol since the McCarthy fright four or five years ago, it also strips Joe Pool of any claim he had left to the tolerance, much less the affection, of civilized voters. R.D. Page 3 Nov. 29, 1957 Rehabilitation Dinner Lyndon ‘Suppressed’ Facts