The 1950s: Government and Politics: People in the News

THE 1950s: GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

On 21 January 1950 Whittaker Chambers, former editor of Time magazine, told reporters, "my work is now finished.… I have told the FBI all I know," after a federal jury in New York found Alger Hiss, a former State Department official whom Chambers had accused of spying for the Communist underground, guilty of perjury.

On 27 April 1955 Gen. J. Lawton Collins, special envoi to Vietnam, said the United States faced a "strange" and "almost an inexplicable situation" in trying to fight communism in Asia.

On 24 September 1957 Texas governor Price Daniel criticized the use of federal troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School, calling the action "reminiscent of the tactics of Reconstruction days."

On 16 February 1955 U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles assured the exiled Nationalist Chinese government in Formosa that it would "not be forcibly taken over by the Communists" of mainland China.

In a 13 February 1950 speech Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that the increasing size and power of the federal government was a "creeping paralysis" and a greater danger to freedom than the atomic bomb.

On 17 June 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the Tennessee Valley Authority an example of "creeping socialism."

On 24 September 1957, as he dispatched federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to prevent interference with court-ordered integration efforts there, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said that "under the leadership of demagogic extremists, disorderly mobs had deliberately prevented the carrying-out of proper orders from a federal court."

On 18 March 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower pledged a reduction in taxes as part of a plan to boost an economic recovery.

On 16 February 1959 Democratic senator and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, in order to quell fears that the Vatican might influence White House decision making if he were elected the country's first Roman Catholic president, announced his opposition to church-state ties, an American ambassador to the Vatican, and federal funding of parochial schools.

On 12 February 1959 Democratic senator Michael J. Mansfield of Montana proposed that East and West Germany use United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld as a mediator to help settle their differences.

On 6 January 1950 Democratic senator Pat McCarran of Nevada criticized the Truman administration for lacking a policy that would help Europeans displaced by World War II and protect them from becoming "ready recruits in subversive organizations in Europe."

On 24 September 1957 Vice-president Richard Nixon, referring to Arkansas governor Orval Faubus's decision to call out the state militia to prohibit black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, noted that Faubus "actually tended to invite violence [and the governor] should have used the Guard not to keep Negro children from going to school but to see that they were able to go."

On 1 August 1959 Vice-president Richard Nixon went on Moscow radio and television to warn the Soviet people that in promoting the spread of communism throughout the world they would extend the "era of fear, suspicion, and tension."

In 1951 McCarthy critic and political columnist Drew Pearson sued Sen. Joseph McCarthy for bodily injury following a fight between the two men at a Washington dinner party. McCarthy had slapped Pearson and kneed him in the groin.

On 18 August 1958 Rear Adm. Hyman G. Rickover received a gold medal from Congress for his part in successfully "directing the development and reconstruction of the world's first nuclear powered ships."

On 1 June 1950 seven liberal Republican senators, led by Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the Senate's only woman, issued a "Declaration of Conscience," denouncing McCarthy's tactics.

On 1 November 1958 former Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson claimed that under the Eisenhower administration the world had become "more dangerous."

On 5 June 1950 Georgia governor Herman Talmadge pledged, "as long as I am Governor, Negroes will not be admitted to white schools."

On 27 December 1952 President Harry S Truman told reporters that Gen. Douglas MacArthur "wanted to involve [the United States] in an allout war in the Far East."

On 19 February 1958 former president Harry S Truman accused the Eisenhower administration of ruining the national economy and leading the country to the brink of another depression.

On 6 February 1950 Democratic senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, appealed to President Harry S Truman to "end the world's nightmare of fear" by calling a world conference to outlaw all weapons "stronger than a rifle."

In a 7 September 1952 article appearing in This Week, former vice-president Henry A. Wallace conceded that he had been soft on communism prior to 1949, when he had become convinced that the Soviets "wanted the Cold War continued indefinitely, even at the peril of accidently provoking a hot war."

On 13 May 1958 Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), suggested that President Eisenhower had failed to give "leadership and heart" to civil rights forces when the president suggested that blacks have "patience and forebearance" in their campaign for equal rights.