Site Ed. Note: The front page reports further details of the
assassination the previous day of Count Folke Bernadotte, U.N.
mediator, and French Col. Andre Pierre Serrot in the Katamon section
of Jerusalem, taken from the Arabs prior to the departure of the
British in mid-May. All sources agreed, including a Jewish U.N.
liaison officer with Count Bernadotte at the time of the murders,
that the two assailants were Jews of the Stern Gang. The two gunmen,
apparently not four as reported originally the previous day, were
dressed in military uniforms. The car in which Count Bernadotte was
riding was stopped by a jeepful of irregular troops at an abandoned
roadblock. Nothing was said and, after some milling around, the two
men approached, one with a tommygun, and opened fire. The bullets
entered Count Bernadotte's heart. Col. Serrot was hit in the temple
and forehead. As the killers ran, the Count was still alive. But he
died as he was being taken to the hospital. U.S. Col. Frank Begley,
who provided the details, narrowly missed being hit by one of the
bullets after he had struggled with one of the two gunmen.
U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie, condemning the killings,
placed the Palestine question before the full membership of the U.N.
The Security Council approved the appointment of Dr. Ralph Bunche to
be the temporary successor to Count Bernadotte as Palestine
mediator. Dr. Bunche insisted that Israel take full responsibility
for the killings and breaking the truce. The Security Council was
reported to be discussing implementation of stricter measures in
Palestine.
Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok condemned the killings
in strong language and promised that the assassins would be caught,
called them "desperadoes and outlaws … execrated by the
entire people of Israel and the Jewish community of Jerusalem".
More than 40 persons had been arrested this date in Tel Aviv
as part of the Israeli crackdown on terrorists, the Government
saying that it was committed to wiping out the "criminal gang"
responsible for the assassination. A curfew, the first since Israel
had become a state in mid-May, was imposed by the Government on the
Jews of Jerusalem, and roadblocks were erected throughout the Jewish
section of the city. Sound trucks warned residents to stay at home.
A spokesman for the Irgun organization said that its members
had nothing to do with the incident and also said that he doubted
that the Stern Gang had anything to do with it.
"The Fatherland Front" sent a note claiming
responsibility for the killings. No one in Jerusalem had ever heard
of such an organization.
Jerusalem was mostly quiet this date.
Hyderabad formally surrendered to India, following the
five-day invasion of the princely state by the Indian Army to bring
an end to Moslem rule over the 80 percent Hindu population of the
state.
In Ascona, Switzerland, Emil Ludwig, 67, German-born
biographer, playwright and political essayist whose books had been
burned by the Nazis, died the previous night at his home after
suffering for years from a heart ailment. He had resided in the U.S.
during the war. He had written biographies of Christ, Abraham
Lincoln, Wilhelm Hohenzollern, and Napoleon, among others, the
latter having been made into a Hollywood film in 1933. He told a Los
Angeles conference in 1944 that the greatest music ever composed was
done under tyrants, prompting hisses from the audience. He said that
he had met and interviewed three tyrants, Mussolini, Stalin and
Kemal Ataturk, and each had been a lover of music.
In Dexter, Iowa, the President kicked off his "give 'em
hell" campaign with a nationally radio broadcast speech to a live audience estimated at between 75,000 to 100,000 cheering
Iowa farmers, telling them that they had to elect the Democrats to
"avoid catastrophe". He said that Wall Street
"reactionaries" were putting up "fabulous sums"
to elect the Republicans, who had already "stuck a pitchfork
in the farmer's back" and intended to let the bottom drop out
of farm prices. He charged that the GOP had killed the international
wheat agreement which had given wheat growers a large export market
in recent years, had started a move to put a "death-tax"
on farm cooperatives, had ruled out the grain storage bins which helped to
make the granary effective in times of excess production, had invited depression by refusing to
curb inflation, and had started attacking the farm price support
program. The occasion was a national plowing contest held on ten acres near the
community of 800 population.
The President used the term "fair deal" for the first time in the campaign at Dexter, the phrase which would come to characterize his Administration in the second term, an extension of the New Deal, adjusted to the times and changed conditions.
At Rock Island, Ill., a crowd of 3,000 showed up at 5:45 a.m.
to hear the President lay into the Congress for being subject to the
lobbies. A man in the crowd yelled, "Give it to 'em."
The President continued that he thought that the Congress really
liked to have "boom and bust". He appeared on the
platform with former Senator Guy Gillette, running for the Senate in
Iowa, and Professor Paul Douglas, running in Illinois, both of whom,
he said, would take back the Government from the special interests. He urged the voters not to stay home again as so many had in the mid-term elections of 1946 when the "do-nothing" 80th Congress was elected.
The President was traveling on the cross-country tour by
train with his daughter, Margaret.
In New York, an officer of the abandoned British freighter,
which an Atlantic hurricane had caused to list to 70 to 80 degrees,
told of four crewmen being swept overboard while others clung to
deck rails as they sang to maintain their courage. He and 38 others
had been rescued after leaving the ship to the gales and whorling
wiles of the Atlantic hurricane. Six were lost.
John Daly of The News tells of proposals for formal
intervention by Charlotte before the Federal Power Commission on
September 26 to support the Piedmont Natural Gas Corp. and its 75
million dollar project to build a 990-mile pipeline for natural gas
from Texas into the Carolinas, being scheduled for consideration
before the City Council on Wednesday.
We hope, for the sake of that family living in a tent,
that they get it completed by winter.
On the editorial page, "Count Bernadotte's Death" tells of unrest in Israel preceding the assassination the previous
day of Count Folke Bernadotte, U.N. mediator for Palestine. Egyptian
troops on a mountaintop near Bethlehem had lobbed shells into
Jerusalem during the week and Jews were being killed, despite the
truce, effective since June. Many Jews blamed Count Bernadotte for
the continuing violence and attrition of the Jews during the truce
period. The Jews had soured on what they termed the "patient
mediation" of the Count.
Israelis primarily objected to his position that Jerusalem be
turned over to Arab control.
The assassination, it posits, would not bring peace to the
Holy Land; instead, it would only fan the flames of war and possibly
lead to a conflict which could produce world war.
It finds Folke Bernadotte to have been a good man who sought
peace, but lacking power from the U.N. It was no wonder that he had
failed at his task and been killed.
It hopes that the tragedy would cause the nations of the U.N.
to wake up to the fact that without an international police force,
the organization had no real power. Perhaps in that, his death might
find meaning, in saving the U.N. from being relegated to a role of
impotence.
"'Shout Freedom' Again in 1949" tells of the
outdoor drama, celebrating the Mecklenburg Declaration of
Independence, supposedly signed May 20, 1775, which had been
presented for the first time the previous May and would come again
the following May. It says that the pageant was well worth seeing
and urges those who had not attended in 1948 to see it the following
year.
Next year, they might devote a special section of the program to freedom of speech and portray egg and tomato throwing as not equivalent to tea dumping, especially when the object of the hurl had nothing to do with the relatively high cost of eggs and tomatoes.
"'Air Power Is Peace Power'" marks the first Air
Force Day after the Air Force had been made a separate branch of the
military, apart from the Army and Navy. During that year, the Air
Force had grown from 55 groups to its newly authorized 70 groups,
though not yet realized. That increase had come about from the
trouble with Russia, causing the air wing's largest peacetime
expansion. Presently, it was consumed with the airlift for Berlin.
As the Air Force was a modern creation, it was not hemmed in
by the traditions of the other services, relied more on science and
technology as well as paying attention to psychology.
Millions of Americans were hoping that the slogan forming the
title of the piece constituted more than idle words.
A piece from the Hickory Daily Record, titled "Old
North 'Border State'", tells of GOP leaders recognizing North
Carolina as a "border state" in the election and
preparing to campaign accordingly in the hope of carrying the state.
But the Democrats were also becoming more optimistic and the
President was scheduled to speak in the state along with
vice-presidential candidate Alben Barkley.
News that Texas Democrats had committed the state's electoral
votes to the President was cold water for the Dixiecrats and tonic
for North Carolina Democrats.
Also, several local meetings of Democrats in the state had
been enthusiastic, as one held at Danbury, where the courthouse
square was packed at a rally.
So it remained to be seen whether the GOP hope would prove
valid.
Drew Pearson tells of the DNC having been drifting
rudderless, perilously close to bankruptcy. Mismanagement was
evident as, for instance, the maintenance of 50 rooms at the
Biltmore Hotel in New York, despite remaining empty except for desks
and stenographers.
The previous week, however, the DNC had come to life finally
with a money-raising campaign at the White House. The President had
invited 30 top Democrats to tea and then made a little speech from
atop a chair, in which he made a direct appeal for financial
assistance. He told of having to cut an important portion of his
Labor Day speech in Detroit because the party did not have the money
to pay for the extra radio air time. The President appeared pathetic
and alone. A special committee then met and obtained pledges for a
half million dollars, with one man pledging $100,000.
The DNC finance chairman, Louis Johnson, began cleaning
house, lecturing the son-in-law of deceased North Carolina Senator
Josiah W. Bailey, telling him to get some work done or get out.
Others received similar tongue-lashings. Mr. Johnson raised the
fund-raising goal to 2.5 million from the 1.5 million set by DNC
chairman J. Howard McGrath.
Ed Pauley, former DNC treasurer, giving an example of
incompetence, told of walking into the DNC headquarters and telling
a worker that he wished to contribute "five", at which
point the worker wrote out a check for $5. He had intended $5,000.
The President's military aide, General Harry Vaughan, was
prone to political boners, costing the Democrats support. Recently,
he had sent black aviator "Colonel" Hubert Fauntleroy
Julian, who had been Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's one-man air
corps during the war, to Europe on a good will mission, insuring
that he got VIP treatment wherever he went. But it soon became
apparent that Col. Julian wanted to arrange a cigarette deal whereby
he would replace all of the Army's eleven million dollars worth of
"stale cigarettes" with fresh packs, at the rate of one
fresh for every two stale, netting him about five million dollars.
General Clay heard about the scheme and promptly sent Col. Julian
packing.
GOP leaders were said to pray every night that the President
did not transfer General Vaughan to other duty prior to the
election.
Marquis Childs tells of the united front of the Big Three in
dealing with the Berlin crisis having shown some frayed edges in the
speech to Commons earlier in the week by British Foreign Secretary
Ernest Bevin, echoed by acting Conservative leader Anthony Eden. Mr.
Bevin had said, in effect, that Britain needed to become the nucleus
of a balancing force between the powers of the U.S. and Russia.
Britain had been irritated with the U.S. determination on the next
step regarding Berlin, the U.S. suggesting the British position to
be appeasement.
Whereas the U.S. saw the danger of war over the crisis, the
British counseled more patience and caution. Bertrand Russell a year
earlier had asserted that the only way to avoid the end of
civilization was to attack Russia in the ensuing 18 months before it
achieved development of an atomic bomb. Most Britons did not view
things that way, believed in compromise.
In recent days, American policymakers also had suggested
caution and patience. U.S. military occupation governor in Germany,
General Lucius Clay, had said during the week that he did not
believe war was imminent.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop foresee that Russia would forcibly
incorporate the Eastern European satellites into the USSR within the
ensuing year or so. Throughout negotiations on Berlin, the Russians
had sought to upset the Big Three plans to make a separate Western
German government and to join in control of the industrial Ruhr.
They also sought to expel the Big Three from Berlin, the overriding
goal.
One interpretation of the crisis had it that the presence of
the West in Berlin represented a threatening wedge to Russian
consolidation of its Eastern empire. Similarly, Yugoslavia,
insisting on independence, presented such an issue. Such was
confirmed by intelligence reports showing that Andrei Vishinsky had
gone to Rumania to transform the Balkan country into a Soviet
republic. Other similar reports emanated from Poland, Eastern
Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Until recently,
Washington had paid little attention to such reports. But with the
Berlin crisis and the pattern of duality set in the negotiations,
blowing hot and cold, these reports suddenly fit the pattern.
A high official in the Czech Foreign Office who had fled the
country said that he had seen a contingency plan for holding a
rigged plebiscite, to make Czechoslovakia a virtual satrapy of the
Soviet Union. Premier Gottwald had ordered the elimination of 5,000
to 6,000 officers of the Czech Army. Purges of a similar type were
also reportedly taking place in other Eastern European countries.
As Kremlin policies forced down the living standards in
Eastern Europe, rebellion was increasing. Thus, the need existed for
the Soviets to put down this rebellion by assuming direct control of
the satellite armies and police.
A letter from a member of the Central High School Booster
Club takes umbrage at the letter of the previous Thursday from the
Southern Railway Freight Station fans who found it opprobrious that
they were being charged $1.25 for Central football games while the
other high schools, Harding and Tech, stuck to $1 admission prices,
especially given the lopsided loss of Central to Fayetteville. The
author thinks that the fans were getting their money's worth,
especially as Central had won on September 3 against New Hanover. He
further states that football was a game of ups and downs and
sometimes losses, even lopsided ones, could occur on an off night.
We demand perfection for $1.25 and we shall have it or else
do away with the program. If they can't win every game, what's the
point of paying out good money? Might as well catch the freight with
that $1.25 to some other place, where they know how to play.
A letter writer says that Central was living off its past
prowess and the fans who had written from the Railway Station should
attend games of Harding or Tech to obtain their money's worth.
A letter writer comments on the woman's letter re the
Northern reaction to the South always having been positive in her
experience when she had lived in the North. This writer thinks the
woman was out to lunch, finds other writers who had injected the
race issue in comment on the letter to have found something which
the original writer had not even mentioned. One of the comments had
suggested that the writer's black maid did not have a bath and hot
water and so was embarrassed to invite her Northern friends to visit
her. This writer thinks that writer ought raise the pay of her maid.
