Dark Valley

Seldom have so many U.S. newspapers mounted such attacks on a President as they unleashed last week, and never have they so attacked Dwight Eisenhower.

When the President ordered paratroopers into Little Rock, it was predictable there would be an angry outcry from Southern newspapers; only half a dozen of them--notably the Nashville Tennessean, the Chattanooga Times and the Louisville Courier-Journal--had endorsed the Supreme Court desegregation ruling. What was not to be expected was the violence or speed with which the South's press turned directly on Ike, the moderate respecter of state sovereignty who has won warmer and more widespread support in Southern newspapers than any other Republican President. Grieved the Birmingham Post-Herald's John Temple Graves, Dixie's most widely distributed native pundit: "It is sad, remembering how he has been loved in the South, to sense the 'never, never,' the totality of the Southern turnaway now, and the certainty that it will endure. And we loved him so."

Leading the turnaway were such longtime Eisenhower champions as the Montgomery Advertiser, which rebuked Ike for provoking a ''new pitch of sectional animosity," and the Nashville Banner, which damned him for turning the South into a "zone of occupation for a replay of Reconstruction." The Ike-minded Dallas News trumpeted that a Southern governor is now "a satrap-on-sufferance, removable or jailable on the order of a carpetbag judge." "CAESARISM," shrilled one of six anti-Eisenhower editorials in a single issue of the Charleston News and Courier.

From Nuts to Mud. Many Deep South dailies echoed the blunt sentiments of Little Rock's street crowds. In Mississippi the Jackson Daily News's fire-breathing editor, Major Fred Sullens, addressed a one-word editorial to the President: "Nuts." (New York's Daily News picked up the editorial and flung it back under the headline: MISSISSIPPI MUD.) In Louisiana the Shreveport Journal added its jeer: "Heil Eisenhower! Heil to der great Fuehrer!" A more flattering comparison was made, however, by Mississippi's famed Hodding Carter, who telephoned his Delta Democrat-Times from a Maine vacation spot to dictate his state's only editorial endorsing President Eisenhower's constitutional position: "We go along with the first President and the present President."

Puffing on the coals of martyrdom, some Southern editors indulged in such overblown headlines as the seven-column banner in the Danville (Va.) Bee:

SOLDIER BAYONETS WHITE MAN. (On the other hand, some Northern editors, among them those of the Chicago Tribune, felt the need to tone down their reporting by substituting Negro and Negro-lover for "nigger" and "nigger-lover," as bandied about by the Little Rock mob.)

More interesting than the predictable was the anti-Eisenhower sentiment that welled up outside the South. While the overwhelming majority of U.S. editors agreed that Orval Faubus left Eisenhower no choice but to use force to preserve the integrity of the nation (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), several influential dailies outside the South looked at Eisenhower's motives with a new brand of cynicism that lacked even the compulsion of Southern war wounds. Indiana's biggest paper, Eugene C. Pulliam's right-wing Indianapolis Star, accused the President of "a deliberate effort to placate the Negro vote." The ordinarily all-for-Ike Los Angeles Times took the opportunity to indict the Supreme Court for practicing "sociology" and sniffed that the President seemed to have decided on the Little Rock showdown not so much for sound domestic reasons as to please "our hired foreign friends."

Belated Leadership. Even among the majority of papers that applauded the President's action, opinions varied widely on its timing and effectiveness. Some agreed with the Minneapolis Tribune that the impact was sharpened by Ike's "almost inexhaustible patience." Others, like the Cleveland Press, complained of his "inexcusable delays." Said the Republican-bent Providence Journal: "His final drastic response to the challenge, welcome as it is, must be called a belated and faulty assertion of leadership."

Fourth Estate Faubus. The pundits, on the other hand, rallied almost unanimously behind the President, though they differed over the matter of the President's timing, dividing about equally between those who praised patience and those who complained that presidential procrastination was a catalyst for the Arkansas trouble. There were two notable exceptions. Walter Lippmann of the Herald Tribune Syndicate insisted that Ike had "made a weak case" in his TV speech to the nation because he omitted the chronology of Faubus' folly. "It is necessary to say also," chided Lippmann, "that during this grave business he ought not to be away from Washington, but at the center of things where he can really keep himself informed and advised."

Most dogged in the doom-crying, North or South, was Pundit David Lawrence, whose five-times-weekly column appears in 270 dailies, 62 of them in the South. By last week Lawrence (also editor of U.S. News & World Report) had written 18 consecutive columns on the evils of enforced integration; his words were played by many Southern editors on Page One. One of Lawrence's obscurer arguments--that Eisenhower's action was empowered by an 1871 law that had "never been used by any Chief Executive for the purpose set forth" by Eisenhower-was promptly rebutted by the New York Times's astute Supreme Court Reporter Anthony Lewis, who retorted that not one but two statutes were involved, and that both "trace all the way back to 1792." Undaunted, Lawrence in his next column argued that the 14th Amendment, "allegedly forbidding segregation," was "ratified illegally by the pressure of military force." Thus, concluded Lawrence, "government by bayonet has superseded government by the laws of Congress in supposedly free America.''

While many Northern newsmen also quibbled over the constitutional niceties, such prickly questions were largely ignored in the South outside of Lawrence's column. So, in the onrush of events, was Orval Faubus--though the Raleigh News & Observer drummed home to readers that Orval, far from being a Southern hero, "has carried the hopes of this region into the dark valley of national impatience."

The week's most eloquent editorial, Northern or Southern, came from the border-state Louisville Courier-Journal, which raised its eyes from the valley to observe: "The gleaming bayonets are ugly, and the cause for their presence is enough to grieve the heart of a nation. But they carry a proud and beautiful message. They say what too long was unsaid before, that ours is a government of law, that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, that the Supreme Court is the final interpreter of the Constitution, that edicts of the court are not to be flouted."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.