Abilene Reporter-News from Abilene, Texas • 20

DAVID LAWRENCE Congress So Bad! EDITORIALS If we desire to secure peace it must be known that we are at all times ready for war George Washington to Congress 1 793 Malapportionment lit Is Difficult Fig leges-as has dons instances then it can ronsUtu tionally do so for elementary and secondary schools Mr election was due to no small extent to the so-called Catholic vote but he may lose much of this ir 1964 unless ho takes the posit iot that Congress should enact it laws and rely on tlw Supreme Court and not on the pressure groups or political parties decide constitutional questions All in all Mr Kennedy man aged to get the most urgent of fair measures passed though thesi were not always in the form hi recommended The Congress foi instance did fivp its best judg mrnt on foreign aid that certaii proposals to extend financial ak to various foreign countriei should be carefully examined am re-examined without long-rangi commitments which couldn't In altered every two years On the whole the Congress self in the face of thousands obstacles did a creditable job ii its handling of several controver sial subjects to a certain extent where Individ-' ual districts stand to benefit from congressional action Such broad proposals however as medical care for the aged and federal aid to education failed largely because the esse for them was not as clear as the csss against them: These two major pieces of legislation are far from dead they will come up agaia and again until some compromise is worked out The real issue that remains for further solution involves the question of federal money for schools and colleges that are operated by various churches Un-fortunately a good deal of inconsistency has been exhibited in same of the arguments Thus President 'Kennedy conscious of the religious issue in the last campaign insisted that any aid to elementary schools that happen to be run by churches would be unconstitutional But he never answered satisfactorily the argument that if the federal government can appropriate any money at all for church-operated col- WASHINGTON Thi the time Congress adjourns when thf scorecard on what it accomplished is tallied up for praise or blame The measurement usually is in terms of what legislation a President obtained or failed to get Actually the wonder is that in a Congress of so many conflicting currents anything much was accomplished at all For the Congress of the United States in a parliamentary sense has not been a responsible institution lor many years It is not responsible to any party It is not responsible to the President In fact it is responsible not collectively to the residents of 437 congressional districts and the constituencies of 100 senators 'Time was when the two major parties held frequent caucuses and when individual members were required to abide by the wishes of the majority of their fellow members in the party Today both parties are split wide open and leadership is a sort of makeshift arrangement to secure the passage of those bills which are the least controversial What affects Congress more than anything else in a session like the one that has just closed is the uifRKinnnHSixnHNiiuw 8-B THE ABILENE REPORTER-NEWS AbUese Texas Monday Eveaiag October 2 1961 tT A TrTTTC PTTTT TVC? mood of the country President jHAllUUlO LillLUS Kennedy was elected by one of New York Improves UN Efforts Move Uncertain Troika We Could Go For Two Oklahoma organizations today began circulating petitions for amendment of the state constitution to force reapportibnment of the legislature Next Monday the US Supreme Court devotes its first real working day to hearing reargument of an appeal by a group of Tennessee voters in a reapportionment case A three-judge lower federal court had ruled that it lacked power to order reapportionment of the state legislature The real alternatives of malapportionment in state legislatures appear to be intervention by the federal courts or continued inaction Anthony Lewis Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times has explained these alternatives succinctly in a recent article in the Harvard Law Review: a group has the dominant position as the rural legislators generally its overriding interest is to maintain that position Vot ing for a fair apportionment bill would in many cases mean voting oneself out of office That is too much to ask of most politicians" The result as estimated by Sen Joseph Clark (D-Pa) is that the senates of 33 states are controlled by less than 40 per cent of the state populations The appellants in a Tennessee case now before the US Supreme Court for rearguraent allege that rural voters while outnumbered by urban voters control legislatures of more than half the states This is despite the fact that the constitutions of 45 states require reapportionment of one or both houses of the legislature at least as often as once in 10 years But in 1958 Lewis established that as many as 23 of the then 48 states 4 pv opATm had not reapportioned for periods of from 10 THE ALLEN-SCOTT REPORT years to half a century or longer The leading Supreme Court decision on malapportionment was handed down in the 1946 case of Colegrove vs Green The ruling involved congressional rather than legislative districts but the Court only five years ago cited the three-way split Colegrove precedent in refusing to entertain an appeal involving seats in the Tennessee legislature The Court in 1946 held that the issue was of peculiarly political nature and therefore not meet for judicial determination" In speaking for the majority Justice Felix Frankfurter said: ought not to enter this political thicket The remedy for unfairness in districting is to secure state legislatures that will apportion properly or to invoke the ample powers of State legislatures by their very nature are not going to supply the remedy And although the Constitution gives to Congress exclusive authority to apportion seats in the national House of Representatives among the states it is mute about apportionment of seats in state legislatures But the Tennessee appellants in the pending case are encouraged by a 1960 Tuskegee Ala case In this the Court ruled that gerry mandering for purposes of racial segregation of voting areas violated the Fifteenth Amendment Gov Howard Edmondson (D) of Oklahoma where reapportionment also is a hot issue on Sept 5 filed a brief curiae" with the Supreme Court in the Tennessee case Edmonson declared that federal courts must assume A Anti-Missile By ROBERT ALLEN and PAUL SCOTT WASHINGTON The military significance of the Soviet nuclear tests grows with each new explosion This ominous development is clearly indicated in the preliminary evaluation of the Soviet high-altitude atomic blast These findings give Russia the nuclear capability of being able to shoot down launched satellites when they pass over certain areas of the Soviet Union Prepared by a team of top nuclear-missile experts for the Atomic Energy Commission the unpublished report say that the tests show that the Soviets have both the atomic warheads and the missiles to do the job It credits the Kremlin with major breakthrough in the fitting of a nuclear warhead to an antimissile If the Soviets fully exploit this new weapon development the report warns atomic balance-of -power could pass from the to At present the number of these ICBM sites were spotted by the Central U-S spy their flights were May 1960 THE EVIDENCE high-altitude testing the with deadly accuracy down targets of heights of 200000 feet nuclear warheads flying objects The same warheads atop the SR-6 could just have been exploded at to 300 miles according to evaluation With that capability can track and shoot launched satellite the Air Force's Samos satellite if and vehicles pass within miles of a satellite-killer site Some top rocket believe that the Soviets their skill with the new in the near future For Dr Walter Dornberger Breakthrough? NEW YORK Hie future of the United Nations even whether this rather battered symbol of peace shall continue to be housed in this great brawling city still hangs in the balance Various proposals have been put forward for moving all or part of the UN to West Berlin The American position is that some of the specialized agencies might well have headquarters in Berlin as part of the assurance that the city will remain free with international conferences held there whenever possible But however wise or unwise it may have been to select New York as the UN site there can be no question of moving the whole show to West Berlin Too much is at stake in terms of American support If the UN were to be moved lock stock and barrel 110 miles behind the Iron Curtain Congress would certainly take fright The United 'States currently pays more than 30 per cent ol the cost of the UN and its agencies Of the emergency to maintain forces in the Congo and the Middle East the United States has been paying nearly half the whole bill Nationalist China one of the five permanent members of the Security Coundl has contributed nothing to the Congo and is in fact behind on most of its UN contributions Both France and the Soviet Union have refused to contribute to the Congo operation and the Russians made no contribution to the Middle East operation Because the cost of the emergency forces is not included in the overall cost of operating the UN the rule that a country which fafla to pay it share will be denied a vote may not run against either nation although this is still to be tuns 100 with the latest add! tion Sierra Leone and perhap -two more to come One reason i-the intensive effort of severs dedicated members of the staff the United States Mission or kin in cooperation with the UN Sec retariat Despite two or three widely ad vertised incidents they have hat considerable success in breakinj down the barriers of prejudice am finding living quarters for the am bassadorial heads of delegation and their staffs This has beet far from easy since they are deal ing with highly sensitive African and Asians who sometimes seen to want to find an affront tha will fit in with their pre-concep tion of racial discrimination ii this country The Ambassadors are more a problem than the staff mem bers since they want luxur apartments and that often mean a breakthrough in an apartmen building that has maintained race barrier Four or five Anr bassadors are currently on th waiting list hotels and restac rants have long been open to any one who can pay the price am incidents such as those in Mary land that so distress the Stat Department no longer occur Recently Adiai Stevenson him self went to extraordinary length to counteract any damage ths might have been done by an ir cident involving a Guinean diplc mat who alleged he had bee roughed up by the New Yor police' That episode appears have been blown up out of aJ proportion as the Asian-Africa bloc finally came to realize Th atmosphere as the Assembl meets this year is far more rain than was a year ago when th inflammatory Khrushchev wa shouting interviews from the ba the narrowest majorities of the popular vote in history When the country is almost equally divided there is no over-all mandate in a presidential election which can be said to give the President the influence he needs to exert his leadership Then on top of all this came the crises in the international situation These tended to slow down the momentum behind various bills which in normal times might have been readily passed It's difficult indeed for any president in abnormal times to shape up a program that will command a majority in both houses It happens that in this case economic conditions also were certainly not normal recession developed early in I960 and unemployment was running at a substantial rate when Mr Kennedy took office The remedies customarily proposed involving vast spending were blocked by those in Congress who felt that a temporary economic setback might be made worse through inordinate spending with all the dangers of an inflation that could reduce the purchasing power of an already shrinking dollar Basically the last Congress proved wrong those prophets who backed the Kennedy cause in the last campaign with the argument that since there would be a Democratic majority in Congress the election of a Democratic President would mean passage of a comprehensive legislative program Mr Kennedy did get almost a two-thirds majority in both houses in the I960 election but these analysts have constantly underestimated the conservative strength in both major parties in Congress supported as is by a majority sentiment in the country as a whole The country is not in favor of standing still nor is reactionary in its thinking about needed reforms It wants however reforms which can be shown to be sound and which will not cause a further decline in the purchasing power of the dollar The last Congress did move the budget up to $88 billion and did spend 'a lot of money for special projects Ibis will always be true under former President Eisenhower has told friends that of all the people he met or worked with during his stay in the cabinet the one who knew the most about his personal life was Premier Khrushchev They met during Khrushchev's visit here and Mueller discovered that the Soviet boss knew everything that was on record about his background and personal history and such trivial bits as how often Mueller went to big social affairs and what he liked to oat He even kidded Mueller about the fact that as a widower he was available as an extra man at big dinner parties and that he was eating and drinking very well as a result President Kennedy despite bis engagement in the Berlin crisis has not lost his dry sense of humor Reading a newspaper the other morning Kennedy noticed a story from Gettysburg Pa quoting former President Eisenhower as saying he had made no Invasion plans for Cuba said Kennedy to an aide beginning to sound like Before taking off for Europe Senator William Fulbright Ark chairman told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Kennedy administration plans to renew Hie cultural exchange program with Russia despite the growing East-West tension Senator Fulbright says he recommended the extension (Distributed 1961 by The Bell Syndicate Inc) INEZ ROBB nuclear-tipped anti-missile missiles ready for firing by the Soviets are believed to be very limited These satellite killers known as the SR-6 are operational only in the immediate vicinity of the two principal Russian missile testing areas However the report forecasts that the Soviets are expected within a year to install these SR-6 missiles in the 06 of type missile complexes that make up the heart of the Soviet air defense system These complexes designed to protect major cities and jurisdiction truly representative government is to survive" Malapportionment in state legislatures is generally recognized to be at the root of congressional malapportionment One-half of the states are to gain or lose one or more seats in the House as a result of population changes disclosed by the 1960 census Redistricting is almost politically mandatory where the seats are lost but in the states which gain seats these can be filled by election of House members at large In Maryland where an inequitable redistricting plan has been blocked the Baltimore Sun comments: (at-large) procedure runs counter to the strong base on which the organization of the Congress rests" determined This is not however cony of the Soviet delegation a happy situation and there have Park Avenue and rival picket been rumblings of discontent from Congress New York as the home of the UN has had a greatly improved record in the past year in housing and feeding the 100 delega- were besieging the UN building Fidel Castro tried a propagand coup by rushing up to the Hole Theresa in Harlem with the iir plication that only there was welcome Oak Ridge Is Changed Now and photographed Intelligence planes before stopped in In their Soviets knocked satellite-size at by exploding near the launched as easily heights up the intelligence the Soviets down any including reconnaissance when these a hundred launch experts will test weapon instance who was in charge of German rocket development at the Peenemunde base during World War II is warning: the very near future the Russians will create an incident by shooting down or intercepting a launched He contends that there is a real danger that the Soviets within a few years will be able to wipe out space systems and their final goal of dictating the conditions of survival to the free world without firing a single shot on Dr Dornberger who was brought to this country by tha Army is now a naturalized American citizen and is working on some of this top missile projects To counter this new Soviet threat the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense are now making a joint study on whether it will be necessary for the to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere to push our anti-missile missile development Already the Army has taken the stand that if the Nike-Zcus the anti-missile missile is to be developed into a satellite killer such tests are necessary NOTE: A satellite is not in the sense an aircraft is destroyed After being hit by a nuclear warhead the remains or parts of the satellite left will stay in orbit until natural decay at some time in the future brings reentry ON THE INSIDE Frederick Mueller Secretary of Commerce Phone Cuts Out The Middleman CHICAGO (AP Now you'll he able to talk directly with the conk when you order your meal in a restaurant Myerson of Washington demonstrated his new Dine-A-Phone system at the National Restaurant Association's national convention You'D sit down at a table pick up a telephone and dial the kitchen You won't even see the waiter until your order is served Myerson expects to install a number of the new phones throughout the nation shortly He says it will enable a restaurant to serve twice as many customers with a third less help FRANK GRIMES 30 YEARS AGO The Glory of Autumn In the past year there has bee a growing realization of the iir porta nee of the propaganda of thi deed in the polyglot almost ur governable city that is host to th-UN The Soviets at one poir dickered to buy the 25-slory Beek man Tower Hotel which is onl two blocks from UN headquar ters This seemed clearly fa more bpace than they could us themselves and by offering a ret uge to Afrkan-Asian delegation: having housing troubles the could make hay The deal fei through because or so the Sc virts believed of the intervention of the Slate Department Besides the work of member on Uie Mission and the UN secretarial citizens group hen in New York and around the coun try have worked hard to give th delegations a sense of being a home They have been welcome! in American homes and given ai opportunity to see at firstborn how democracy works in thi country in bringing about slowlj but surely the eradication of an cient prejudices and ancient bar riers In short there is stroni support for the UN and for it place in New York There are no longer guards at the entrance gates or even any entrance gates (a credit union now operates in one of the abandoned guard houses) There are still top-secret sections of Oak Ridge where no visitor can penetrate and guards still check one in and out when a special visitor is granted permission to see the atomic reactors But Oak Ridge in contrast to its secret years is today a tourist attraction and visitors come in droves Only four weeks ago Oak Ridge checked in its one millionth visitor who was given the regular guided tour open to the public But none of the young women who drove me to Oak Ridge has ever yet been permitted to see the inside of the building where her husband (Copyright 1961 by United Feature Syndicate Inc) the spirit moves him And suppose that we are too mundane to be atirred by such fanciful things? Well in the mere matter of material comfort fall offers more than spring Spring gets you ready for warm weather and then sprinkles snow op you The is proverbial and the bright days have an icy Bting underneath the sunshine Autumn is more honest You exoeci the and very often you get the best The old tradition needs revising Autumn once you get to understand it is the best time of all the year OAK RIDGE Term An hour out of Knoxville just before one turns off Tennessee Highway 62 into Oak Ridge there is a gentle rise in the land One looks down into a lovely roiling heavily wooded valley to the left There is a village in the distance and beyond it the blue and beautiful Cumberland Mountains stretch into infinity under a hot autumn sun It would he hard to imagine a more peaceful landscape isolated and remote from the world's bustle Nor does the impression fade as one turns into the Oak Ridge enclave drives along its roads and finally through the quiet tree-lined residential streects Then one of the young women in the back seat says emphatically and defensively (one hears the note often here) furthermore Mrs Robb no one absolutely no one in Oak Ridge has a guilt For a moment lost in the sun and the somnolent landscape I am about to ask automatically why on earth should you have a guilt complex?" when I remember that the lofty scientific community responsible for the split atom is supposedly suffering from a guilt complex at (he atomic Pandora's box loosed on mankind Today the of Oak Ridge's residential sections and its big new super-shopping center its little then Ire its symphony orchestra its chorus and its PTA-conscfousness make doubly incongruous the hard' fact that this once-hidden community was the nerve center of the war's best-kept secret Only a handful of the brilliant men and women who worked here before the first bomb exploded at Alamogordo in July knew what brew they were helping produce The majority said the young matrons who had come to the Knoxville Airport to drive me to Oak Ridge could only deduce that the brew was terribly secret And from the physical isolation of Oak Ridge they suspected that was something that might blow Oak Ridge to kingdom come without injury to other communities The atom bomb stunned Oak Ridge too although the for the first three the Alamogordo Nagasaki and Hiroshima was produced here The bottom of the barrel was literally scraped to supply enough for the trio whr lives here loves Oak said the young matron in a tone that defied me to aay or write a single critical word about the community I can only suggest that this fierce protective feeling for Oak Ridge so prominent here derives from the fact that since the Alamogordo blast man and his world have never been the same Man dazed by the transformation is struggling today to master and control to understand the great watershed of history (comparable to Gold Age or the Renaissance and Reformation) into which Alamogordo blasted him Oak Ridge ia no longer a closed and highly guarded community Once it was 92 square miles and 56mn seres of super-secret government property with a peak population of 7501)0 persons Today much of the secrecy la gone the population is down to 27000 and Oak Ridge ia an incorporated town not a government enclave THE BETTER HALF By Bob Barnes Abilene Daily Reporter October 1 1931: It is a little hit odd that spring is generally supposed to be more of a hopeful restless and unsettling sort of season than autumn Nobody expects much of fall It is a collection of melancholy days it abounds with chilly rains and raw winds and it has a funeral overtone that sets ports and other sensitive people beating their breasts Spring on the other then the young men see visions and the old men dream dreams and each man wants to leave the place where he is and go places where he has not been That at any rate is the tradition But it doesn't jibe with the facts Autumn has been frightfully maligned It is time justice was done In most parts of the country autumn provides the nicest weather of the whole year since our moods so greatly on what the sun and wind and sky do to it is a time for visions and dreams for the birth of new hopes and the revival of old ones: a season in fact which does most ol the things spring is supposed to do mmh better than spring actually does them aTo be sure autumn brings death and de cay But it works with greater artistry than spring for it clothes all in the beauty of flaming woodland and misty field that is breathtaking: it reconciles us to them it bemuses us and persuades as supremely great artists that death and decay are only preliminaries to a rebirth Its hazy air too carries a breath of vagabondage A morning in May ran incite one to truancy but an October afternoon when the moire-shuck stand in uneven rows like the tepees of an Indian encampment on a rolling field is the time when the Red Gods are really astir For then one perceives that the road to the end of Hie earth starts wherever one's feet happen to he and there is apt to he just enough of a nip in the wind to delude a man into thinking ho can walk as far as TIIE ABILENE REPORTER-NEWS FubUihce twin Dally Except One Saturday and Sanday hy Iha RFrosTKi itriishivo NrSnd 4 Crprata PS UR Mill Abilene Tmm CKRtiHEri CIHCtLAfioN-Vha AhUana" Raiwtar la a member rf I ha Audit Burma ri Circulation a national nraaniMtk which rvrtilla lha tlrnulatlon IHa laadlna aawaaapara Uia I'll Had Statao Sarnnd ciaan mall VlvilaSM autXnrtod at Abilaiio Tuan Sobaratptlon Bala by uurlar AbUrm Waal Tana Momma 4 Sunday or Kvanina 4 Sunday SI s-ar mo piua X- at ala lax total HU par mo Minna 4 KYeron and Sunday OH par no olua 5c atatr tax total (ZVV oar mo Weekly ralra on raquaat By mail lo Weal Ttaaa Morning and Kuoday ar KrenlM and Sunday 1 Bar mo ulna Sr Hair tan IU ar mo at II7U a year piua 15r aiara Uni total oar yaar Outaldo ol Wrat Taua II per mo plni mala tax Ial II 71 a month at 117 sn a yaar piua Jv aula lax total 117 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