Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Russian school
teacher Oksana Kosenkina, who had the previous day jumped from a
third-floor window of the Soviet consulate in New York, suffering
serious injuries in an effort to escape the Russians, had been
placed under the protective custody of the U.S. Government after she
accepted a subpoena, served on her at Roosevelt Hospital, to appear
before HUAC. She stated that she had no objection to appearing
before the Committee. Russia had demanded full control of Ms.
Kosenkina while in the hospital, but the State Department, acting
through Undersecretary Robert Lovett, had rejected the demand.
Pravda charged that American intelligence agents,
wearing New York City police uniforms, had violated international
law by entering the Soviet consulate grounds to aid Ms. Kosenkina
after the jump. Pursuant to international law and diplomatic
treaties, consulates and embassies are considered foreign soil in
the country in which they are situated. The newspaper claimed that
the "agents" then seized Ms. Kosenkina by force and
transported her to Roosevelt Hospital.
New York's Acting Police Commissioner, Thomas Mulligan,
denied the claims, saying that no Government intelligence officers
were dressed as policemen. The FBI likewise denied the report.
The Voice of America was broadcasting to Eastern Europe,
extending to Moscow and Valdivostok, the story of Ms. Kosenkina and
her jump to freedom, powerful propaganda for the West to combat
Soviet propaganda. The broadcasts had gotten through the iron
curtain despite efforts discovered of late by the Soviets to jam VOA
transmissions.
The Russian-controlled press in Berlin admitted for the first
time that serious shortages of food existed in the Soviet zone of
Germany. The newspaper said that a poor harvest had caused a severe
shortage of fat. The Russians had promised 10,800 tons of fat,
according to the report, which would close the gap somewhat. The
previous week, the Soviet press reported severe sanctions imposed against
food hoarders.
In the American zone of Germany, some 300,000 demonstrators
had protested on Thursday high food prices, but there were no
reported shortages, with rations the highest since the end of the
war.
The British-American Berlin airlift operations were
temporarily halted the previous night because of heavy rains and
poor visibility.
Sixteen F-80 jets, the first American jets to be deployed in
Europe, were returning to the United States. They had arrived in
Germany on July 25.
A story by Sterling Green begins: "President Truman loaded his
elephant gun today for a double-barreled blast at Republicans for
trampling his budgetary and anti-inflation plans." The President would
release the next day his mid-year budget review, which some
Government officials predicted would show a deficit of two billion
dollars for the previous fiscal year. It was believed that the
Republican tax cut would get most of the blame for the budget
deficit after the President the previous January had forecast a 4.8
billion dollar surplus for the fiscal year.
The following Monday, the President would act on the
anti-inflation bill from the special session, limiting bank and
installment credit.
The Egyptian Government notified U.N. mediator Count Folke
Bernadotte that it had rejected Israel's proposal for direct peace
talks between the Arabs and Jews. The Egyptians said that they
expected any permanent solution to the conflict in Palestine to come
from Count Bernadotte. The Count asserted that if the truce could be
maintained for six more weeks, the conflict might be resolved
peacefully. He believed results might be achieved by mid-October.
Then, it will be October again.
Fighting raged in Jerusalem the previous day, the time set by
Count Bernadotte for a ceasefire. Three Jews were killed by Arab
sniper fire. Arab Legion troops said that they were under fire from
Israelis.
The Dixiecrats failed to meet the ballot registration
requirements in the President's home state of Missouri.
In Springfield, Ill., Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho, the
Progressive Party vice-presidential candidate, said that Russia was
in no position to threaten or fight anybody and its citizens were
not anxious to give their lives to spread Communism around the
world. He and the Progressive Party candidate for the Senate from Illinois accused
the Democratic ticket of being "red baiters, militarists and
monopolists."
Chester Bowles, former head of OPA, was nominated in
Connecticut to be the Democratic candidate for governor.
In Chicago, the fate of a 22-month old girl was being
determined by medical authorities, deciding whether an operation for
her rare congenital condition of her bladder being outside her body,
might give her a chance to live. Doctors said that she could not
survive without such surgery and had but a one in one-hundred chance
even after the surgery. A court would ultimately make the decision.
The parents were leaving it up to the judge.
In Camden, N.J., the divorced woman who had sought, through
advertising, a new husband willing to support her and her six
children, having found her mate, was looking with him for a house.
They were set to be married the following week. The lucky candidate
was a construction worker, also with six children.
Cheaper by the dozen.
In Whiteville, N.C., a State Senator criticized the new
practice by the Highway Patrol of painting its cars in conspicuous
colors, wasting taxpayer dollars and reducing the Patrol's
effectiveness. He said that the only equipment the cars lacked were
neon signs to tell motorists of their presence in the nighttime. He
favored utilizing the money to increase salaries of the officers.
The "conspicuous colors" to which he referred
were not identified. It was probably a spray job.
"Citizen radios", camera-sized broadcasting
stations, would soon be on the market. Patterned on the wartime
walkie-talkie, the citizens' band radios would have a fifty-watt
power output able to broadcast about the distance a person could
see.
That's a big 10-4, good buddy.
A big Christmas shopping season was expected, according to
business specialist Elmer Roessner, as reported on page 5-A.
On the editorial page, "A Woman Defeats Molotov" views the case of Oksana Kosenkina as a diplomatic defeat for
Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov. He had objected to the American
government listening to Ms. Kosenkina's stories and said it was
disturbing international relations. The same, he thought, was true
of the Samarin couple.
Ms. Kosenkina's husband had been seized by the secret police
in 1937 and was still missing.
The piece finds the story to have great psychological and
symbolic significance as the lowly teacher had outwitted the Soviet
spymasters and secret police and confounded the Communist
propagandists. Mr. Molotov had lost face and his continued
usefulness to Stalin and the ruling Politburo was dubious.
It recommends that Mr. Molotov retire and predicts that
otherwise he would be removed and purged for allowing this woman to
make a mockery of the Russian dictatorship and "deliver a
mighty blow to the Red revolution."
"UN Needs more Than Our Dollars" expresses the
thought that it would be nice to believe that the passage of the
bill to loan 65 million dollars to the U.N. to build its permanent
headquarters in Manhattan was a sign of lasting faith in the body.
But it could not so find for the fact that the U.N. had inspired
such great expectations for world peace at its inception that they
were impossible of fulfillment.
U.N. mediation had stopped the war, at least for the nonce,
in Palestine. But wars still raged in Greece and China, neither of
which was subject to U.N. resolution because both the U.S. and
Russia would not submit the cases to the body. Such big-power policy
limited the U.N.'s role in major struggles between East and West.
It counsels that the U.N. would have to become top
policy-makers if the world was to avoid World War III. As long as
the cold war continued, the new headquarters building in New York
would simply be another skyscraper and not an edifice symbolic of
world peace.
"Canada's Experience with Spies" finds HUAC
proceeding on the theory that every American Communist or fellow
traveler was an espionage agent. The Committee found its rationale
in the Canadian spy ring case of 1945-46. The Royal Canadian
Commission which reported on the case had said that one of the most
remarkable aspects of it was the fact that the Soviets had been able
with uncanny success to recruit willing Canadians to assist their
efforts at espionage. Many were highly educated and had positions of
trust in the Canadian Government. None had responded to a lure of
money. They had done their work for ideological reasons.
The piece finds Winston Churchill to have summed well the
mentality when he had told Commons at the time of the Canadian case
that one of the greatest dangers of Communism was that it believed,
with religious fervor, in sacrificing one's native land for
Communist Utopia.
A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "It
Was Hard Won", tells of someone always warning Americans that
they were using up their natural resources faster than they were
being replenished or viably substituted, while others always said it
wasn't true.
But the people with the dire warnings usually were those
charged with the responsibility to look ahead, such as the U.S.
Forest Service, who warned that the forests were being used up at
the rate of 1.5 times their replacement, that in 40 years standing
timber had been reduced by 44 percent.
With the postwar building boom, demands on forests and other
natural resources were great. Exploiters could cause the nation
irreparable loss. It was necessary therefore to continue to fund the
Forest Service and provide for active management of the resource. It
advises not to listen to those who claimed it was "socialistic".
Drew Pearson tells of the President sometimes mixing up the
Congressional Thomases, Senators Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma and Elbert
Thomas of Utah, and Congressmen Albert Thomas of Texas and J.
Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. The President had recently informed
Senator Elmer Thomas that he had appointed his son-in-law to the job
he wanted. Senator Thomas stated that he had no son-in-law. Later in
the day, Senator Thomas told Senator Elbert Thomas that he would be
probably getting a call from the President, as he did.
He notes that the public confused the two Senators also. When
Elmer Thomas was under fire for commodities speculation, Elbert got
a lot of the blame in his mail. Moreover, now that Congressman J.
Parnell Thomas was taking heat for his kickback scheme with staff,
Elbert was also getting the blame for that.
Maj. General Clayton Bissell, former head of Military
Intelligence, had been ordered back to Washington and was under
investigation for black-marketeering, one charge being that he used
an Army airplane to fly coffee into Germany and sell it on the black
market. His two bank accounts in the United States had grown
three-fold from $9,000 in the two years he had been overseas.
Housing Expediter Tighe Woods and Attorney General Tom Clark,
in their conference with expediters and district attorneys from 21
key cities, called for a crackdown on fraud against veterans in the
rental and purchase of homes. The builders had received priority
allocation of materials to build houses for veterans and then
exploited the preferred status when it had saved many builders from
bankruptcy. They had not always adhered to the regulations
circumscribing the arrangements. Part of the problem, according to
V.A. Solicitor Edward Odum, was that the banks would no longer carry
the low-interest G.I. loans. The district attorneys, however,
criticized the V.A. for hiring appraisers who sometimes valued the
properties without inspection.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop find American foreign policy to
have enjoyed great success despite much criticism. In Greece,
victory against the Communists was in sight, saving the entire
Mediterranean from Soviet control. The U.S., through the Truman
Doctrine, had accomplished the fact. Just nine months earlier,
before the program had taken full effect, it appeared a close case
whether Greece would survive, as 75 percent of the land area was
controlled by the Communist guerrillas. But within the previous ten
days, the guerrilla leader, Markos Vafiades, had fled to Albania, and
his Grammos Mountain stronghold had been cut off from supply lines.
Now, there was no chance that Greece would fall to Soviet domination
save through a war between Russia and the West.
The Greek Army had performed the fighting with British and
American arms under the command of American Lt. General James Van
Fleet and three hundred American officers. General Van Fleet, a
former football coach, had transformed demoralized Greek Army troops
into a formidable fighting force. The General had used a two-pronged
attack along the Greek border to cut the guerrilla supply base in
Albania. The Russian satellites, not wishing to join the war
overtly, had abandoned Markos.
The previous winter, the Greek Government was in chaos and
inflation was rampant. Reconstruction had hardly started. The Greek
Government, since that time, had been reorganized, with 8,000
underpaid civil servants who had been subject to bribes, having been
released. The Government was being decentralized. The budget had
been balanced and the currency in circulation was being reduced,
stopping inflation. Reconstruction was progressing, as the Corinth Canal had been
reopened and Greek harbors were beginning to thrive again. Eight
hundred miles of roads had been resurfaced, whereas a few months
earlier they were impassable.
While there was still much to do, the previous few months had
shown that the end of the civil war would bring new prosperity and
new, free elections, at which point genuine government reform could
take place. Americans could accomplish more than many had believed.
The job in Greece had to be done and it was being done. Saving
Greece for the free world was the equivalent of saving the free
world.
DeWitt MacKenzie tells of the fate of Italy's North African
colonial empire, including Libya, Eritrea, and Italian Somaliland,
again being debated at the Big Four deputy foreign minsters
conference in London. Mussolini had settled thousands of Italian
colonists in Libya's Cirenaica province, his Garden of Eden. The
rich coast of Libya was a favorite attraction from the times of
Cleopatra.
But neither that nor the rich farm lands was the chief
attribute which made Libya an attractive plum. Rather, its
geopolitical and military significance were vital. Libya and Crete
could dominate the Mediterranean. So it was not surprising that
Libya's disposition was a bone of contention between Russia and the
West.
Russia wanted return of all the colonies to Italy for rule
under U.N. trusteeships, pending independence. Most of the Western
allies wanted Libya split into its provinces, with some falling
under trusteeship by Britain, and Fezzan to France.
By so advocating, Russia hoped still to make political
inroads in Italy through the Communist Party there. That could
effectively place Libya, under such a settlement and consequent re-emergence of
the severely weakened Italian Communists, within the Soviet sphere
of influence.
The Libyans longed for independence. Their leader was the
Grand Senussi who was a striking personality possessed of much
culture. When Mr. MacKenzie had interviewed him in 1943, he
expressed great hope for the education of the Libyan masses. He said
that freedom should come first and then guidance from a larger power
could aid in developing a new state.
The Editors' Roundtable, compiled by James Galloway of
Asheville, examines the spy investigations in Congress, finding most
editors to focus on the proof found by the FBI that Elizabeth
Bentley was telling the truth in her charges of receiving
information valuable to the Soviets from two spy rings in the
Government. The majority believed that public disclosure of any such
misbehavior was salutary and necessary but also disapproved of the
Congressional methods and favored instead grand jury secrecy in
conducting the investigations. The minority position was that
absence of grand jury indictments undermined the credibility of Ms.
Bentley and asserted that election-year politics had motivated the
Republicans in timing the hearings, considered by the majority of editors,
however, to be secondary to getting at the truth.
The Trenton (N.J.) Times asks why, if the charges were
true, the FBI and grand jury investigations in New York had not
produced any indictment.
—Yeah, Bob. We have to fix that.
—I know, get 'em while the iron is hot.
—No, yeah. That's exactly right. We should focus on that
Hiss fellow because his name will really grab the people. He sounds
threatening, just like a Commie snake.
—Yeah, that would be good. Orwell. Get a farm involved. This
fellow Chambers has a farm in Maryland.
—Okay, you work on that angle, Bob. But try to come up with
something spooky before Halloween, a couple of days out from the
election.
—Pumpkin? That might work. Or maybe a turkey.
—Oh yeah, well, couldn't it be frozen?
—I know. But you never know. Polls can be wrong and we must
protect the country, Bob, from Commies and radicals. Leave nothing
to chance. We don't only wish to win, we wish to demoralize the pink
opposition for good.
—Pigs. That's exactly right.
—Yeah, yeah. Best to your wife, Bob.
The Washington Post suggests that HUAC was essentially
telling the American people that the FBI and the courts were not
protecting their security. The Committee was conveying its own lack
of trust in the courts and that distrust would transfer inevitably
to the people, a dangerous effect. What was worse, the Committee was
proceeding outside due process of law and thus providing its own
public example of lawlessness.
The Fargo Forum quotes from The Winnipeg
Free Press in Canada which found that the support for Ms.
Bentley's story coming from former Daily Worker editor Louis
Budenz had been nearly a carbon copy of the revelations by Igor
Goudenko before the Royal Commission and later in court.
We suppose it never occurred to these people that a powerful
form of Soviet propaganda, far exceeding any minor advantage from
the wartime "espionage" with a wartime ally being
revealed, would have been to plant the seeds of disunity and
distrust both in Canada and the U.S., especially the latter, and sit
back and watch the destructive parade, much as it in fact played
out. HUAC, in other words, played into the Soviet strategy perfectly
well in its public revelations, inspiring little more than distrust
by the American people of their Government.
A quarter century later, when considered in this light,
Watergate and its related scandals and subsequent Congressional
revelations of them would be a mirror image of the 1948 HUAC
hearings and not surprisingly so, given the man in the White House
at that later time, a quarter century hence. Did that latter episode
damage permanently trust in the Government? Probably so, insofar as
we find the matter still gestating fully forty years on. But whose
fault was that?
The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot finds Mr. Gouzenko
to have proved his case by having taken documents in his role as a
cryptanalyst for the Russians. In contrast, Ms. Bentley had no
documentary proof. Neither, apparently, did Whittaker Chambers. The
FBI had not come up with proof in its investigations, save as a
basis for the indictments of the twelve American Communist Party
leaders.
—Yeah, Bob. Get to work on that, too. Documentary proof.
—Yeah, then we can stick it to 'em.
—Typewriter. You know a little man who repairs old
typewriters for a living. Okay, get to work on that.
—Yeah. Right. Well, find out the brand.
The Hartford Courant posits that proof of Ms.
Bentley's allegations would probably be hard to find and the absence
thereof did not necessarily discredit her. But also the fact of
being a Communist did not necessarily imply espionage or illegality,
that a Government official could aid the Soviets without being a
spy.
The New York Herald-Tribune finds that the
Congressional committee, while never perfected to protect individual
rights, was the only device currently available to probe the charges
made by Ms. Bentley and Mr. Chambers.
The Memphis Commercial Appeal suggests that the
New York grand jury should either render indictments of those
accused in the hearings or provide a report which would reveal the
facts, even if lacking evidence on which to indict. At present, it
believes, the executive and legislative branches were working at
cross-purposes, ultimately obstructing revelation of the facts.
A letter writer finds it inconceivable that both Governors
Herbert Maw of Utah and Ernest Gruening of Alaska would have made up
the statement they attributed to Governor Dewey at the Governors'
Conference, stating that he had referred to the teachers' lobby as
the "biggest lie since Hitler". The letter writer
believes that the denials of this statement by the Dewey campaign
were consistent with the Republican tradition of supporting the
major lobbies, such as real estate, steel, and the National
Association of Manufacturers, while finding the teachers vicious in
their demands for higher pay and lower student loads.
