The Charlotte News

Tuesday, November 24, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page continues the report of the new Russian winter counter-offensive, now appearing to take its toll on severely depleted German divisions, moving them away from Stalingrad.

In New Guinea, Australian and American troops under General MacArthur continued to press hard the Japanese contingent holed up in Buna.

Navy Secretary Frank Knox announced that the standard Japanese supply line down through the Solomons to Guadalcanal from New Guinea and Bougainville, the so-called “Tokyo Express”, had been severed and the Japanese troops on Guadalcanal were therefore now without reinforcements and supplies, a sign that their days were numbered.

An article talks about the “fun” of bull sessions on the island in between shellings. The favorite topic among the men was the Russian front and how they would fight the Nazis if they were in the shoes of their Russian comrades.

Somehow, “fun” seems the wrong word; “Afghanistanism” might be more apropos, a distraction from thoughts of the potential death lurking around the next corner or being hurled into their encampment abruptly and without notice.

A two-week delayed report tells of the original landings in Port Lyautey in Morocco on November 8, the northern leg of the three-way approach orchestrated by General Patton. The Lyautey landing was led by Brig.-General Lucian Truscott. The piece tells of a thrust of six U. S. tanks, successfully taking out eighteen French tanks defending the beach.

The goal was to obtain northern and southern landing forces, the southern force having come ashore at Safi, both legs then converging with tanks and air support toward Casablanca in support of Patton’s main force landing at Fedala, about twenty miles north of the crucial port city. While there was some confusion in the landing at Lyautey and more resistance encountered than anticipated, the operation ultimately proved, as with its central and southern counterparts, successful.

On the home front, more spy trials concluded, with death sentences meted out to the father, uncle, and a family friend of Hans Haupt, one of the six Nazi saboteurs executed August 8, out of the eight who had landed by U-boat in June off Florida and New Jersey. Each of the newly convicted was found guilty of aiding and abetting Haupt, becoming thereby, in the eyes of the law, equally guilty as the principal offender. The three wives of the men were also convicted and sentenced to 25 years and fines. These convictions eventually would be overturned on appeal but the Government would again try the senior Haupt and obtain a conviction, this time sentencing him to life. The Supreme Court in 1947 would affirm the conviction. The others were deported to Germany after the war, and the father, after his release from prison in 1957, was also deported.

Jan Valtin, author of Out of the Night, which appeared in truncated serialized form in The News during June and July, 1941 (as presented in association with those months herein), was arrested on a warrant of deportation. Because his deportation would have sent him to sure death in Germany, it would be delayed until after the war. In 1947, however, he was able to convince immigration officials of the truth of his saga, an enemy ultimately to both the Comintern and the Nazis, spying at different times for each against the other until fleeing to the United States after his wife was murdered by the Gestapo while interned. He was granted United States citizenship and lived out the remaining four years of his life in America.

On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper continues his essay on the prospects for the post-war world, saying: “Peace, or freedom from fear, cannot be assured until the nations, particularly the great powers, recognize that the threat of war anywhere threatens their own security.”

It would become thus a realization, but not quite as anyone yet envisioned it in 1942. It would take the threat of thermonuclear war and complete annihilation of the nations to finally back man up to the wall and get him to desist in waging cross-border conflicts which risked world war. And even with that threat, it would require that which John Foster Dulles labeled “brinkmanship”, that which John F. Kennedy put into practice in October, 1962, “eyeball to eyeball” until the other fellow blinked, to put behind the threat the catapult of force and fill thereby the threat with substantial meaning.

Paul Mallon advocates maintenance of superior armed forces to ward off the prospect of future war. That would be sought but at the tremendous cost of meeting the potential of fire with fire in the corrosively acidic arms race to come with the Soviet Union and, to a lesser degree, with Communist China.

The world to come following 1942 began at the time to sound less hospitable to democracy and peace than to the establishment of multiple armed camps arrayed around the globe in mutual standoff. It would become not dissimilar in fact.

“Party Man” rejects the floated idea of nominating Senate Majority Leader, and future Vice-President, Alben Barkley for the Supreme Court to replace James Byrnes who had resigned in September to become the head of the new Office of Economic Stabilization. FDR’s last of nine appointments to the Supreme Court, all in the space of five and a half years since his first appointment of Senator Hugo Black of Alabama in fall 1937, would not be another politician but rather another academic, Wiley Rutledge.

President Truman continued the trend of appointing either senators, Sherman Minton, attorneys general, Tom Clark, or, in the case of his appointment of a new Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, a mixture of political experience, in the House and Truman Cabinet, as well having been head of the Office of Economic Stabilization after James Byrnes left in 1943 to head the Office of War Mobilization, as well as a judicial background on the Federal Court of Appeals bench, appointed by FDR.

After President Eisenhower’s first appointment, third-term Governor Earl Warren of California, to the Court in 1953 upon the death of Chief Justice Vinson, the trend of appointing political office holders would end and nominees to the Court would henceforth, into the modern era, be drawn almost exclusively from legal academia or judicial backgrounds, Justice Potter Stewart being a partial exception in 1958, having been Mayor of Cincinnati, but also coming directly from the Federal bench, and Arthur Goldberg in 1962 being another, having come out of President Kennedy's Cabinet via the labor movement as lead counsel for the CIO.

There have been senators or governors from time to time floated as possible nominees since Warren’s nomination 56 years ago, but thus far, no president has risked putting forth a political name into nomination. Since Chief Justice Warren, in nearly all cases, nominees have been completely unknown to the public at large prior to their nomination, exceptions being Byron White in 1962, having been known previously for his prowess on the football field in this time of the late thirties and early forties, and Arthur Goldberg, President Kennedy’s other appointment to the Court, having been Secretary of Labor. To a lesser degree, Thurgood Marshall, nominated in 1967 by President Johnson, was known for his piloting the legal arm of the Civil Rights Movement, especially his lead role in Brown v. Board of Education, but that reputation primarily existed only within the legal community, and, at that, of course, was highly controversial in its time, especially in the South. Robert Bork, appointed in 1987 by President Reagan, but failing to be confirmed, had come to notoriety at the time of the “Saturday Night Massacre” in October, 1973 (before “Saturday Night Live”), when Richard Nixon tried to find someone to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, ostensibly for getting too close to the truth on Watergate, and was turned down, first by Attorney General Eliot Richardson, then Assistant Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, until then Solicitor General Bork answered the call. This brief bit of notoriety did not bode well for his nomination in 1987.

“Red Package” seeks to wrap Roosevelt policies in with the doctrine of the American Communist Party, at least insofar as the limit on after-tax income of $25,000 just imposed by James Byrnes, responding to the President’s call earlier in the year for the limit, rejected by Congress, the piece reminding that this was a central plank of the Communists in 1928.

Of course, it is stated with not a little tongue in cheek, we assume, as the editorialist could not have forgotten so soon that there was no world war afoot in 1928 and that the only reasons for the proposed limit were both to curb inflation in wartime, a principal enemy of production apace, and to establish a clear symbol to all Americans that everyone, from the richest to the poorest, was equally involved in this fight to preserve democracy from the clutching grasps of the totalitarian hordes of the Axis.

Carp at the New Deal or not, America won the war under the decided leadership of President Roosevelt. Leadership, as opposed to salesmanship, will never be overwhelmingly popular with the American people while they are being led; for Americans are about as stubborn a people en masse to any form of change as you will find anywhere, given to yelling at each other, sometimes shooting at each other, and always critical of each other. And that is so even if the proposed change is inherently for the good of the people when viewed objectively.

Prime example of which is the present proposed health care reform and the acridly bitter opposition to it voiced in recent months.

But, in the end, once the medicine goes down, the great majority of the people also tend to reflect en masse and say, even if some a little grudgingly: “Well, after all, old President So-n-So there wasn’t half so bad as we thought he was while he was President, was he?”

The nearly clipped off quote of the day is: “The wrong way always seems the more reasonable.” --George Moore

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