Porcelain & Clay

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. . .

--Charles Dickens

Last week, as in every week in human history, in the best of times and in the worst of times, the leaders of the world's nations played out their separate parts. In Washington, President Eisenhower presented his annual budget to the Congress --one that presages the most prosperous year in U.S. history, making possible a tidy budget surplus. In Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Red army will be cut by 1,200,000 men (wary Western diplomats listened hopefully, but wondered if it was not just another refrain from a familiar Russian lullaby). In Paris, Under Secretary of State Douglas Dillon exhorted 18 members of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation to join the U.S. and Canada in a gigantic economic pool to help solve mutual problems and share the heavy responsibility for aiding underprivileged nations.

But notably last week, just another week in the life of the daily newspaper, the break of the news seemed to dramatize the human scene at less lofty levels, to bring into focus the old, old fact that with the wise must come the foolish, the weak, the greedy and the evil. In terms of journalism, it was tabloid week. Two great universities were rocked to their foundations by campus scandals. Eleven students resigned from Yale after a 14-year-old nymphet, daughter of a well-to-do Hamden, Conn, family, named them as her partners (along with 20 others) in a dormitory sex orgy. And the respected dean of Louisiana State University's graduate school, a scientist of world renown, was arrested and charged with the bludgeon murder of a woman biologist.

In Los Angeles, Dr. R. Bernard Finch, wealthy and socially prominent physician (with a big swimming pool), and Carole Tregoff, his pretty paramour, were in the midst of a trial for their lives, accused of murdering the doctor's wife in cold blood. On the other side of the world the missing heiress to a typewriter fortune, Debutante Gamble Benedict, turned up in Paris with her Rumanian lover, a married man (see PEOPLE).

Neither the trust of public office nor compassion for fellow men stemmed the tabloid flow of the news. In New York City, Hulan Jack, borough president of Manhattan, suspended himself from office after his indictment for criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. Eight Chicago policemen, technically guardians of the law and justice, were arrested as the leaders of a brazen, multithousand-dollar burglary ring. In the case of two airline crashes in which 76 hapless passengers lost their lives, fingers of suspicion pointed to Julian Frank, a heavily insured lawyer who died in one crash, and to Robert Spears, a convicted forger who may have died in the other. In each case, the investigations centered on a grim possibility: the premeditated bombing of both planes in midair.

It was a week of excitement, a week of scandal and human tragedy, yet a week with a certain meaning: despite man's highest aspirations and achievements, the human clay is still far from porcelain.

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