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`Well, I Wonder What Finally Got Him Going’ Bartlett Appears Exclusively in the Texas Observer ON COY CRITICISM e y eke Just more than 300 miles from Austin, in Matamoros, Mexico, out beyond Boys’ Town the tourists know, is another little town they do not know, “Colonia Popular.” One thousand families live piled together there in shacks of board, tin, paper, bottle caps ; they have no blankets for the cold nights, they have no doctors, they have no medicine ; fathers have no work ; mothers have no milk for their children, in bottles or in their breasts ; children have no shoes. The young go into Boys’ Town at night and beg, or do what else they must ; and the girls do not have much chance for dreams. This is just 300 miles from Austin, so Texas people might care. It is so difficult to care about the sufferings of people we have not seen : we do not really believe they are real, or their sufferings, it is a story told by some fool, probably a oneworlder. But perhaps readers of the Observer will take the word of their newspaper that it is so in Matamoros ; and anyone who has traveled in Mexico, Latin-America, Asia, will tell you how lucky they are in Matamorosthey have a whore town to draw in rich Americans. It is easy to lose touch with Washington, to assume that the Americans will continue to try to outwit the Russians, and the Russians the Americans ; to stop reading the papers. But now and then one must pay attention. What are the politicians doing about such people as those down in Matamoros? And what are the Russians doing? It is a simple story. The politicians in Washington are talking about them ; the Russians are doing something about them. One can say with some confidence that if the Russians wished they could make many communists in Colonia Popular, two or three miles from Texas, but they are not in evidence, they have other millions to keep them busy, other millions to whom any help means life. Now we see our nation in a militaristic frenzy, a spasm of fear : the Russians have Sputnik. Those whirling orbs in the thin cold air frighten us more thap such wretched poverty at our own border. It should not be so. Both sides can destroy each other at will : what difference does it make whether you are destroyed by a hydrogen bomb delivered by an intercontinental ballistics missile or a Sputnik ? The only point now is to stop the “race” from becoming a fight. Mr. Eisenhower, our ailing President, spoke of many things when Reading 1933 testimony before a Senate committee on the tidelands bill the other evening, we saw two familiar names in unfamiliar juxtaposition. Seems that Ralph Yarborough, film a private citizen, and Price Daniel, then a senator, bumped into each other. Yarborough had gone to Washington to testify for the bill before the committee of which Daniel was a member. Said the man who is now governor of the man who is now senator : “Let me interrupt to say that Mr. Yarborough is a former assistant attorney general and one of our distinguished former district judges of the State of Texas.” That’s what he, and we, said”distinguished.” Milliono he talked to the Congress the other day, but he spoke mostly of how to make better guns. One feels that the people in Matamoros were not reassured. Nor Mexico, nor LatinAmerica, nor Asia. Perhaps the Russians were reassured, for they are at their more potent work. The President knows this, but he cannot convince enough people that it is so. He said : “They \(the trate heavily on economic penetration, particularly of newly-developing countries. … This non-military drive, if underestimated, could deour military strength. This danger is all the greater precisely because many of us fail or refuse to recognize it. Thus, some people may be tempted to finance our extra military effort by cutting economic assistance…. I am stressing a greater use of repayable loans…. While some increase in government funds will be required, it remains our objective to encourage shifting to the use of private capital sources as rapidly as possible…. This is no `give-away.’ Let’s stick .to facts. We cannot afford to have one of our most essential security programs shot down with a slogan.” You see, there were two messages, and they did not come from the same person. He knows, but he is not enough of a leader to convince. The people of the world are starving, and dying of disease by the millions, and we do next to nothing, while the Russians help them. A man in pain loves who helps him. What are the Democrats saying? Well, if Lyndon Johnson is the Democrats, nothing. He made a state of the union talk, too, and released it to the papers, all about missiles, military power, outer space, nothing about those people in Matamoros, they don’t vote in Texas, yet. Said Roscoe Drummond, in the Christian Science was silent on the vital policy of trade and economic aid is that his party is increasingly disunited on the very policies it used to espouse. ThiS forced the Senate majority leader to be mute on the very issues which most required him to speak out.” Mr. Drummond is a conservative, but he, too, knows. If Ralph Yarborough is the Democrats, the Democrats are saying : cut foreign economic aid. He has voted twice now toin the President’s words “finance our extra military effort by cutting economic assistance.” He could slay a million Republicans and not make up for those two votes. We would call to his attention an advertisement in the current Life Magazine, called “another way the UN works !” There is a picture of a bog, his face covered with the sores of yaws, a disease that destroys skin and bones. A UN health team arrived in his African village and gave him a single shot of penicillin. There is another picture of him, the sores gone, the skin clear, ten days after the shot. The ad says, “Twenty million Africans alone are infected” with yaws. Is there no way for our people to see that their riches are the hope of a little boy with sores on his face, a little girl with pus running out of her ear, a mother in anguish that she is milkless and her babe hungry ? And these, by the millions ! MARSHALL Not long back, Drew Pearson warned us that Senator Johnson had never driven a committee investigation home to its logical conclusion but had formerly earned his name of “Lyin’ Down Lyndon” by whitewashing everything that moved and sweeping all that didn’t tinder the rug. He is more than fulfilling his billing in his present tact with the preparedness subcommittee. In the early days of the investigation, we felt justified in concluding that he was simply showing a sense of fairness in saying the committee was more interested in getting a missile program under way than in condemning those who had let it lag. It was fair to assume that when the facts began to appear ; the chairman of the committee would let the chips fall where they would ; that this process would make it inevitable that some individual or group would emerge as being responsible for the present crisis. In this foolish fantasy, we must have momentarily forgotten the wiles of the liberal’s Lorelei of May, 1956, and their executioner of the subsequent September. So help us, the old spectre of moderation has been spruced up by the senator and offered the world as a reason for failing to fix blame for a needless national peril. Once more Johnson has determined that the image of father Ike may not be sullied, even though a failure to recognize and accept reality may destroy the nation ! The senator is so, so noble that he will concentrate on going forward with preparedness while he draws an impenetrable curtain of charity around the past. And well he may, for his inadequacy as Senate leader has contributed much to the situation. Aside from the question of how we may correct our shortcomings in the future, if we know not who caused them in the past, there is the need to Published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. JANUARY 17, 1958 Ronnie Dugger Editor and General Manager Lyman Jones, Associate Editor Sarah Payne, Office Manager Dean Johnston, Circulation-Advertising EDITORIAL and BUSINESS OFFICE: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: 2501 Crawford. Mrs. R. D. Randolph, Dean Johnston. Entered as second-class matter, April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. recognize limitations of health and energy. We appreciate that the senator hesitates to emphasize a cardiac condition which he shares, but again the realities are inexorable. They may not be ignored until they disappear, for they have a habit of staying around after .all else has departed. Our favorite son justifies his wielding of the whitewash brush, first, because he does not w?nt to take the position that he is bigger than the president, and second, because he could not force disclosure of the Gaither report. The feigned humility implicit in the first reason may be promptly laid to rest. The senator need have no fear anyone will mistake him for being bigger than the president. His problem is to convince some people that he is bigger than the dog catcher. Scarcely more validity can be claimed for his coy dodge about forcing the Gaither report out. Almost any Justice of the Peace could tell him he could subpoena the members of the committee and learn the facts on which the report was based from them. He says nothing could be gained from seeking a report that the White House saw fit to withhold. Has he forgotten the Kefauver committee of 1956 ? Of course he would like to forget Senator Kefauver, but surely he must remember the committee which pulled out into the open the rotten mess that was Dixon-Yates despite block after block at the White House level. When we examine those making up the leadership of the loyal opposition, is there any wonder the administration has brought us to our present sorry plight ? England had a backstop in Churchill when its prime minister was the old and tired Chamberlain, but America’s present opposition leadership offers as little or less vitality than our moribund party in power. FRANKLIN JONES Published once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per annum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 10c each. Quantity prices available on orders. We will serve no group or party but will hew to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of democracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the Ignoble in the human spirit. Let those flatter who fear, it is not an American art.JEFFERSON .11r &xas Obstrurr