ustxtxb_obs_1963_12_27_50_00015-00000_000.pdf

Edward Teller and from Gen. Powers, the S.A.C. commander. His face was impatient, his words came quick, an angry man’s words. There was something about his manner that was crying out, ‘My God!’ ” He said that with our present weapons, we could kill 300 million people in an hour. Of course, we could improve on that. “He fell silent then for a second or two; one could sense his quick mind, weighing the terrible implications of what he had said. \(‘That could be used as propaganda by the Russiansbut it has an ironic power, a force of truth my own people need to accept and live with. Let it next. IC. . I concluded that he has listened to the warnings and laments of the peace movement and has decided that they are right in what they are saying and has del , tided that he will risk every shred of his power, his very re-election, rather than fail to lead off toward disarmamentrather than forsake his very personal duty to those 300 million people he could order killed by a nod of his head.” N AUSTIN ON NOV. 22, he would have said, of his second great crusade, for civil rights: “There is no non-controversial way to fulfill our constitutional pledge to establish justice and promote domestic tranquilitybut we intend to fulfill those obligations because they are right.” He would also have said, I fear too optimistically, but gamely: “. . . this country is moving again. . . . We have stepped up the fight against crime and slums and poverty in our cities, against the pollution of our streams, against unemployment in our industry and against waste in the federal government. We have built hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes. We have launched a broad new attack on mental illness and mental retardation. We have initiated the’ training of more physicians and dentists. We have provided four times as much housing for our elderly citizens and we have increased benefits for those on social security. . . . “This country is moving, and it must not stop. It cannot stop. This is a time for courage and a time of challenge. Neither conformity nor complacency will do. Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a party is not to our party alone, but to the nation, and indeed to all mankind.” I criticized too soon, and praise too late. To set the story right after it is told is not to tell it right, yet now it is too late for me, for my part, to do any better than this. He was moving swiftly toward his greatness in life when an assassin’s bullet drove his death into the immortal company of martyrs who died for man. Thanksgiving came came late this year and strange. I was in Dallas when the usual day arrived, and was forced, alone in the coffee shop of the Baker Hotel, by pieces of turkey laid over a mound of dressing and celery on a side plate, to decide what my attitude was. I did not know what to do, so I took a piece of paper: What shall we give thanks for? We shall give thanks for our country, for the vital and changing place it is, for the chance there is among us here for the noblest hopes of man. We shall give thanks for our problems, the wrongs, the cruelties, the hungry babies, the abandoned mothers, and those who learn to hate before they learn to love, for they give us purpose, and something to do. We shall give thanks for the way the air feels, and the way a knowledge of love finds its way into the quick of the heart, and the right to walk in the open land, or on a side walk, or drive to the beach, as we may think. We shall give thanks for the fruit of thy bounty set befote us this day. A Few Righteous Men This [Dec. 13] issue of the Observer is even better than last, if that is possible. The vignette, “The Subject of Dallas,” goes into my permanent file as one of the bestwritten bits I’ve ever come across. . . . Is Dallas in any way responsible for the assassination? Does a community create its own “climate”? If so, how? If the image must be related to “the reality,” what constitutes the reality, and how does one get at it? .. . some years ago wrote The Feast to set forth that a few righteous men may save a city; and a concentration of the wicked \(without attract lightning. Is there a “folk soul” of a group? Does it come “from above,” or is it the emanation of the “emotional tone” of all the people who make it up? Or, does the “community tone” attract spiritual entities of like “tones” ?=as implied in Goethe’s writings? Let’s get down to cases. I heard a fine speech a few days ago which agreed with the congressman who said: “Nobody is guilty except the one lone person whose We shall give thanks that we know, as no generation of human beings has ever known, our sins; our sins of war, our sins of color, our sins of creed, our sins of righteousness, and our sins of dereliction ; for knowing ourselves at last we may at last change our drifting species. We shall give thanks for time, which more he has not, that we may each recall the best he gave his for, and give ours too. We shall give thanks for a secret, that gets us through our hate, to seeing what it was, and seeing so well_what it was, we will not even hate ourri’elves. We shall give thanks for John Fitigerald Kennedy. – _ _ The pall does not lift easily from the days. Take respite if you can, and holidays. R.D. aberration caused the crime.” Is there then NO REALITY in community? Where do we go from here? Marg-Riette Montgomery, 1150 W. French Place, San Antonio 1, Tex. We Just Buy Groceries I did not like Hart Stilwell’s “The New Look” [Obs. Nov. 29]. I live on the, opposite side of the bayou . . . where the Negro population is even heavier, but as yet I j .Ist have not noticed “a look of arrogance, hostility.” I make a three-mile round trip twice a day to our elementary school besides the other driving I do, and I have yet for “Negroes [to] cut in front of me, honking insultingly as they do, force me out of my lane of traffic, glare at me insultingly.” I did get mad at a white man who cut in front of me the other morning, but I was the one who glared insultingly as I put him in the category of a knot-head driver. His color did not occur to me until I read Mr. Stilwell. I do my heavy shopping in my neighborhood at a grocery store that sells the finest meat in Houston. \(The sign on the window December 27, 1963 15 “The only thing we can do now is for each of us to do our best in our every day lives to reduce the hatred which has driven men to such terrible deeds.” Sen. Hubert Humphrey Robert E. Cogswell, Houston