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The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth. Thoreau We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. The IleY;c Observer al Weekly Newspaper q ; dR SEPTEMBER 16, 1960 ti i” r Vol. 52 15c per copy No. 24 A Visit to Dallas Demo Platforn Lashed by Nixon Jack’s Texas Jaunt Kennedy Stresses From Our Dallas Correspondent DALLAS Vice-President Richard Nixon sandwiched a quick afternoon’s stopover in Dallas between Indianapolis and California Monday. The trip was only a preliminary visit, for he will return later in the campaign. It was an impressive preliminary, nonetheless. Nixon emerged from his chartered red-and-white intercontinental jet at Love Field, jutted his chin at greeters, and said: “There’s nothing like a good crowd to cure a bum knee.” Rep. Bruce Alger and a committee of party officials welcomed the Republican candidate and Mrs. Nixon. Long streamers strung from the rails said ‘Young Republicans for Nixon” and “Welcome Pat and Dick.” Numbers Game And the Race AUSTIN The thousands of people who saw and heard Kennedy were not only countless, they were uncountable, and this made for conflicts. “Freedom of the press!” Sam Rayburn exploded contemptuously in Dallas. Were there 30,000 people in Alamo Plaza, 12,000, or 5,000? Did 900 or 12,000 people greet Kennedy at the Lubbock airport? The Austin American said there were 15,000 in front of the Capitol, but Land Cmsr.-elect Jerry Sadler, who has not joined in the endorsements of Kennedy by Texas officeholders, thought there were about 475 paid poll taxes in the crowd, the rest of them being state employees “at $2 an hour.” Rayburn told the Dallas crowd he had traveled Texas with Roosevelt, Truman, and Stevenson and had “never seen such an outpouring of people” as those who turned out for Kennedy. They had 15,000 to 20,000 at El Paso, “and. one paper said 500.”. There were 12,000 in Lubbock, “500 said one newspaper.” At Houston the night -before in an auditorium for 12,000, there were “just a few vacancies,” but “one paper said 900.” Lt. Gov. Ben Ramsey said one great newspaper might have been using “their selling yardstick” instead of “their buying yardstick” when they estimated Nixon’s Monday crowd in Dallas at 100,400. The next day, however, the Dallas News dutifully reported that the same police chief who had estimated Nixon’s Dallas turnout at 100,000 said Kennedy’s the next day was 175,000. In Texarkana, the police chief guessed 103,000 came to the fair and heard Kennedy, and the Dallas News reporter said “there were others who thought that 60,000 would be more accurate.” The reporters did not ask the police chiefs whom they planned to vote for, but then the police chiefs might have asked the reporters back. Clearly there was nothing for it. From the opening flourish of his whirlwind three-hour visit, less than 24 hours before his Democratic opponent John Kennedy stopped here, Nixon was greeted enthusiastically. Between the smiles, handshakes, and autograph-signing, he pledged continued peace and American leadership under another Republican administration, predicted victory in Texas in November, and vigorously attacked the Democrats’ liberal platform as being “out of step” with the people. Along the route from the airport to the city, workers in the Love Field industrial area waited for the Vice-President’s white convertible. In front of a clothes factory Nixon and Pat ordered a halt, got out and shook hands all around. The ride to City Hall, where a parade which included the Kilgore Rangerettes was waiting, took half an hour. Thousands watched from the sidewalks, snapped pictures, and waved from office windows. Between Main and Commerce, on Akard, the crowd bustled forward, shoving aside Dallas Secret Service chief Forrest V. Sorrels and Police Chief J. E. Curry. Office workers, defying company: safety rules, opened skyscraper windows to peer down. As confetti floated down into the street, Nixon and Pat again left their car to shake hands with people in the crowd. Tvvo bands, meanwhile, entertained the crowd waiting in the city auditorium. Ed Bernett, former SMU football player, led one group which performs regularly at a Mockingbird Lane nightspot. Hyman Charinsky and his State Fair Musicals orchestra were also there. Only the -topmost rows in the futuristic, convention-oriented hall were empty. Bright banners and signs dotted the floor and balconies, and at the far end of the area a giant “Texans for Nixon” banner was displayed on the wall. While the band played “The Eyes of Texas,” a noisy five-minute ovation greeted the candidate and his entourage. Nixon was introduced by Alger as “the next President of the United States.” He was interrupted frequently during his 40-minute speech by shouts and applause. He neither mentioned Sens. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson by name nor alluded to the religious issue in his talk, but he plainly said what the conservative Dallas audience wanted to hear. Describing Johnson as being “very astute” and “very able” as a Senate Majority Leader in the regular session, Nixon charged that “the leadership in the special session after the two political conventions failed because the people are against what they advocated.” The Democratic platform is “out of step” with millions of Americans, he said. The Democratic leadership had “forfeited its right” to ask for party loyalty because of the “extreme” platform, “the platform and party of Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Bawles,” and not THE KENNEDY TOUR Rooting himself in the progressive tradition, promising “to speak for the people in a dangerous time,” Senator John Kennedy campaigned across and up and down the center of Texas before countless thousands this week. Texas is Democratic; the Democratic Party is the only truly national party, he said at almost every stop. Texas voting for a Republican president “would be like stepping on the accelerator and putting the car in reverse.” Russia is gaining on the U.S. in the world and in its own national strength. U.S. defenses must be “second to none,” and the people need full employment, government help for agriculture, low interest, opposition to monopolies, and the full development of natural resources, he said. In San Antonio and Dallas he called for equal rights regardless of race. Thomas Paine, he said a number of times, had written that the cause of America is the cause of all mankind. “I think in 1960 the cause of mankind is the cause of all America,” he declared. He and Lyndon Johnson do not promise a life of ease or the solutions for all the nation’s problems, he said; they ‘do promise that if the Democrats win, “this nation will move again.” The Vice-President, Mr. Nixon, had visited Dallas Monday and asserted that the Democratic Party was no longer the party of Jefferson and Jackson. Kennedy took off in Fort Worth Tuesday: “They said Woodrow Wilson was not in the tradition of Jefferson and Jacks-on. When Franklin Roosevelt was president they said it was not the party. of Jefferson and Jackson and Wilson. When Truman was president they said he was not in the tradition of Wilson or Jefferson or Jack-son. We do not need members of the Republican Party to tell us for what the Democratic Party stands.” In Dallas he picked up the point again: “We are in a great tradition stretching back to the beginning of our party. It’ includes Jefferson and Jackson and Wilson and Roosevelt and Truman and Stevenson and Johnson and Kennedy. “There is no question of the tradition of the Republican Party Taft, and Harding, and Coolidge, and Dewey, and Landon, and all the others. No one will doubt the THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN AUSTIN Two Observer staffers traveled after Senator Kennedy on his Texas tour from San Antonio to Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, and Dallas. Their reports are on pages 1-3, 5, and 8, but do not include the ministers’ conference in Houston, which will be discussed in a special issue on Catholicism and the presidency in Texas, now in preparation. The staff also plan close coverage of Vice-President Nixon’s fulldress visit to Texas scheduled in October. interests the Republican Party defends, as they have ever since the party beganafter the death of Lincoln.” The election would test, he said, “whether we wish to stand still with a policy of `no new starts’ or carry on a great tradition of looking forward, of breaking new ground, of starting in the ’60’s revitalizing the great boiler,” the American economy. “Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were not popular with the Nixons of their day. Woodrow Wilson was called a dangerous man. Franklin Roosevelt was hated. Harry Truman was despised. And yet today, those men are regarded as the -great groundbreakers of the Democratic Party,” Kennedy said. The Democratic Party “has a great role to play, as it has in the pastto speak for the people in a dangerous time,” he told the cheering Dallas crowd. The issue, he said before the Alamo, is “assistance to our people” and “the hand of friendship Debate in Austin Baptist’s AUSTIN The Rev. Blake Smith, pastor of the 1,600-member University Baptist Church in Austin, last Sunday became the first leading Baptist clergyman to rise from his pulpit to resist the Baptist tide against a Catholic for president. Smith’s sermon drew almost immediate disagreement from most Baptist ministers in Travis County. Meeting early this week, they voted about 25 or 30 to 3 to support a specification of criticisms of Smith’s arguments submitted by one of their number. The Rev. W. A. Irwin, author of the criticisms, said, “Have I not a legitimate stand when I am fearful of a man who has been reared in and is faithful to an organization that is admittedly not democratic and by its own admission believes that it is both spiritual and temporal ruler of the world? Here is the very heart of my contention …” Speaking before more than 1,000 persons in his regular sermon, Smith spoke of “dark demonic passions which lie dormant in every society” and said “it is frightening to contemplate how diabolical these passions can become once they are given religious sanction.” \(His sermon is excerpted on pages He blasted both Rev. W. A. Criswell of the 12,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas and Rev. Harold Lindsey of Waco’s First Baptist Church, although he did not name them. He quoted a sentence from Criswell’s sermon last July \(“a man standing in a great and influential pulpit and saying, ‘If a Roman Catholic is elected president, religious freedom in this country is may be his personal opinion, born of his own fears, but it is not necessarily true and it is not the voice of God.” Tradition abroad” so that the uncommitted peoples “will decide that the future belongs to freedom.” “The preservation of freedom all over the globeit is to that responsibility that we dedicate our efforts. And I assure you that if we are successful, this country will begin to move again.” In an eloquent speech in Houston’s coliseum, Kennedy, speaking without notes, said the Republicans had stood pat with McKinley, kept cool withCoolidge, returned to normalcy with Harding, “put a chicken in every pot” with Hoover, and “had enough and no new starts”though he did not name Eisenhower. Wilson had the New Freedoms, Roosevelt the New Deal, Truman the Fair Deal, Kennedy -said; “and now in 1960 -we’re going to take our people on the new frontier.” Roosevelt had said in 1936 that the -sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-blooded are weighed in a different scale: Democrats were concerned with ‘the plight of the older citizens, Rebuttal Progressive He quoted from Lindsey’s talk July 27 that if Kennedy is elected and the day comes when America is 51 per cent Catholic, “we can expect the Knights of Columbus to carry out the obligations they swear to,” and then reading from the discredited Knights of Columbus “oath.” Smith referred to the “hideousness and immorality of -these tactics.” Lindsey has since expressed regret about using the oath. Just before these two references, Smithobviously having decided to state flatly his opinion of “these tactics”said, “We have among us apostles of discord who are taking the supposed ‘religious issue’-in this campaign as an excuse for spreading the poison of hate . . . There are not many of them, thank God! but their influence among the people is very great.” In the main body of his sermon, Smith discussed “deep and radical” differences between Protestants and Catholics, said there is a high level where these are transcended, said he is undecided how to vote but argued that the real issues are being neglected, fears are being exaggerated, freedom involves risk, and “we cannot afford the luxury of a religious controversy in a presidential campaign.” Reaction after the sermon was overwhelmingly favorable: many lined up to congratulate Smith. Two Catholic professorS sent him word afterward that in their opinions, he had been eminently fair to Catholicism, he said. Leaving by a -side entrance, one person said she was not convinced; another was heard to say there were other reasons for voting against Kennedy than his religion. About 100 students attended a give-and-take forum on the question at University Baptist Sunday night, the trend running strongly in favor of Smith’s position.