The Charlotte News

Saturday, December 2, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a 100,000-man Chinese Communist force was swarming forth in an attack on Pyongyang and the exposed right flank of the allied line this night as refugees from the city fled south ahead of the advance. About half the total Chinese force of 500,000 men were engaged in battle and the other half were moving to the front. A spokesman for the Eighth Army, trying to hold a defense line 30 miles north of the former North Korean capital, said it would not withdraw from any position until forced by enemy action to do so, at which point it would destroy everything of military value. Inside Pyongyang, enemy leaflets appeared, apparently distributed by fifth column elements in the city, promising freedom from the enemy soon and urging citizens to sabotage transportation and communications systems in the meantime.

The Eighth Army would soon be outnumbered by six or seven divisions to one. The U.N. troops had withdrawn forty miles in the northwest sector.

Enemy troops had entered and occupied Songchon, the right anchor of the new allied defense line, and American troops were fighting desperately to recapture the town. Field dispatches did not explain how or precisely when the enemy activity had taken place.

In north central Korea, the U.S. Tenth Corps said that Seventh Division units trapped on the east side of Changjin reservoir had fought their way back to Hagaru, incurring heavy losses of personnel and equipment. The Chinese were massing troops in that region to make a drive on the northeast sector, seeking to isolate U.N. troops there.

General MacArthur said in a statement in answer to press questions that the U.N. forces were in a state of undeclared war against the Chinese Communists. The Chinese generals, the statement said, were expending men at a high rate to try to destroy the U.N. forces.

Three unnamed, informed Senators in Washington said that General MacArthur would not receive substantial reinforcements anytime soon and that a decision on whether to allow him to bomb Manchuria would await conclusion of talks between the President and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, beginning Tuesday in Washington. The President had informed Congress of only token reinforcements on the way to Korea, with no additional American units involved, as no reserve units were yet deemed combat ready. The three Senators said that the strategy of General MacArthur would be to dig in along a new defense line against the Communists, without any hope at present of forming a counteroffensive. At present, the General had under his command seven U.S. divisions or about 100,000 men.

Congress appeared ready to approve the 17.85 billion dollars in additional defense spending proposed by the President, aimed at increasing the size of the military to combat Soviet aggression. A billion of the money would go to the Atomic Energy Commission and the rest to the military branches. Both Republicans and Democrats said there was little choice but to approve the expenditure, despite it meaning higher taxes. There was little inclination to try to trim the new military budget of 42 billion dollars for the current fiscal year. Figures are supplied regarding the planned boosts in manpower of each of the branches, with total strength to be 2.8 million men, compared to the present 2.25 million.

House Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Vinson of Georgia said that he saw no reason for any change in the draft call-up during the remainder of the year, as there were enough men in the current age groups subject to call to meet requirements.

Chief of staff of the Army, General J. Lawton Collins, accompanied by Air Force director of intelligence, Maj. General Charles Cabell—eventual deputy director of the CIA, forced to resign in early 1962 by President Kennedy following the failed Bay of Pigs operation of April, 1961, and brother to Earle Cabell, Mayor of Dallas, Tex., in 1963—, flew to Tokyo to conduct a firsthand inspection of the war situation and to meet with General MacArthur. It was the third trip to the Far East by General Collins since the outbreak of the war on June 25.

Chief U.S. delegate to the U.N., Warren Austin, flew to Washington to confer with Secretary of State Acheson and receive a briefing on the Far East situation from Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk. It was believed the consultation was to communicate to Ambassador Austin what course of action the U.S. wanted the U.N. to follow on the Chinese question.

Informed sources said that the General Assembly would be asked to condemn the Chinese for aggression and request their withdrawal from Korea. If they refused and if the resolution were to pass by a substantial majority, then the Assembly member nations would be asked to use their military units to enforce compliance.

Meanwhile, the Communist Chinese chief delegate, who had arrived as part of a nine-person delegation to discuss the six-power resolution claiming Chinese aggression in Korea and the claims of the Chinese that the U.S. had been the aggressor in Korea, China and Formosa, met for thirty minutes with Secretary-General Trygve Lie. It was not clear what the precise nature of the discussion was. The Indian delegate also had met with the Communist Chinese delegate the previous day.

In Philadelphia, the President attended the Army-Navy football game, arriving by train, and police and Secret Service agents picked up two men for questioning after one reportedly remarked to the other, while standing 20 to 25 feet from the President's railroad car, that if he had a gun, he could bump the President off. After the November 1 assassination attempt by two Puerto Rican Nationalists in front of Blair House, temporary residence of the First Family during White House renovations, security had been doubled on the President's detail. The President's twelve-car train, carrying the President's bullet-proof passenger car at its end, was now preceded by a pilot train to spot broken rails and split switches, as well to run interference for the President.

In Prague, nine Roman Catholic churchmen, including a bishop and two abbots, were convicted by a seven-judge tribunal of espionage and high treason in an alleged Vatican plot to overthrow the Communist Czech Government. They received sentences ranging from ten years to life. Each of the convicted churchmen said that they accepted the judgment and would not appeal. They had confessed to the charges and declared their repentance, claiming that the church hierarchy had led them into anti-state activities.

In Singapore, the Supreme Court parted a thirteen year old Dutch girl from her Moslem husband, annulled the marriage, and provided custody of the girl to her mother, whom the girl said she hated. The reason for the action was that the girl was not a Mohammedan in the eyes of the court. Her mother contended that she was stolen away by the foster mother who gave her away to her husband, whom she had known for three days. A demonstration of some 2,000 Indians, Malayans and Moslems had occurred November 24 in support of the foster mother's claim and was repeated again outside the Supreme Court building this date.

On the editorial page, "The Test of Our Defense Program" finds that Secretary of State Acheson's address on Wednesday night to the nation had provided a measure of the nation's defense program by comparing it to the danger faced by the country, finding it, by that test, inadequate.

The piece assesses the current danger to be the half million men of the Chinese army pouring into Korea, plus hundreds of thousands in reserve, without adequate means to defend against that manpower and materiel in the Far East and resist attempts to invade Korea and possibly Indo-China or Burma. The presence of many Russian divisions in Europe posed a potential threat which could not at present be met by Western forces. The same was true with respect to the Near East, should Russia suddenly seek to grab the oil reserves of that region, especially of Iran. Nor was the country prepared sufficiently in its fledgling civil defense program to meet the threat of long-range nuclear threat to cities posed by Russia's atomic bomb program.

Prior to the war, Secretary Acheson had stressed in the spring the need to build "situations of strength" to resist the Soviet military build-up, but was ignored by the President and the defense budget-cutting of then-Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson—a situation described in greater detail by the Alsops the prior Tuesday.

It concludes that unless the American people were willing to accept the necessary sacrifices entailed in meeting these dangers, the country would lose many more military engagements and perhaps lose the third world war if and when it came.

"Mr. Attlee's Visit" suggests that the British Prime Minister's impending visit should remind everyone that the British, too, were concerned about the state of world affairs and the threat of Soviet expansionism. The U.S. had to consider France and Britain in mapping its diplomatic and military strategy to combat the effort, as the nations of Western Europe would suffer the most in the event of a war, one which would inevitably take place again in their backyards.

It stresses that the mantle of responsibility was not a comfortable one, but one which world events had placed on the shoulders of America.

"Atlanta Shows the Way" tells of the Atlanta Housing Authority announcing plans recently for a multi-million dollar project to clear and redevelop 180 blocks of slums to make way for industrial and commercial areas, new housing for whites and blacks, schools and other public facilities. Atlanta had asked early for 2.7 million dollars of the 500 million available to cities for urban redevelopment. They spent a year studying the general areas to be tagged for redevelopment and had requested $300,000 for a more detailed assessment of the areas chosen. Atlanta expected to be among the first cities to use the funds.

In North Carolina, the General Assembly had not yet passed the enabling legislation to allow cities to participate in the program. Plans for redevelopment had been prepared by the League of Municipalities and the State Real Estate Board to be presented in the 1951 session to urge the authorization. It predicts easy passage.

Charlotte had reserved about $750,000 in Federal grants and should go forward, in the direction of Atlanta, it suggests, when the authorization was in place.

"For an Adopted Tar Heel" tells of Carl Sandburg's Collected Poems having been published the previous month. It finds the adopted North Carolinian to have written beautiful poetry at times, as in "Our Prayer of Thanks", from which it quotes.

Some was angry, as the lines:

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.

And some was plain-spoken wisdom:

Death sends a radiogram every day:
When I want you I'll drop in—
And then one day he comes with a masterkey
And lets himself in and says: We'll go now.

It concludes that it was time somebody collected his poems.

A piece from the Durham Herald, titled "GOP Future Is Not So Dark", tells of there being plenty of Republicans in the state, including some who were nominally Democrats. It was especially true in the western section of the state. In Pinellas County, Florida, with over 50,000 registered Democrats and only 14,000 registered Republicans, Republicans had won every county office in the most recent election by putting up the best persons they could find against the mediocrities fielded by the Democrats.

It finds, in the close loss of the Republican opponent to Congressman Ham Jones in the Tenth Congressional District around Charlotte, a moral: that if the South's Republicans abandoned defeatism and put their best foot forward, the era of the "solid South" would soon end. The issues cut so deep that party labels were fast becoming meaningless.

Drew Pearson tells of Secretary of State Acheson, in secret conference with the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees, warning that a third world war was imminent if not already begun. The Korean war could easily spread to Yugoslavia and other points in Europe and Asia. He said it could be avoided only by prompt and concerted action via the U.N. against the Russian-Chinese Communist entente. Trade sanctions would be one possible approach but aid was also necessary for Yugoslavia to continue to resist Moscow. Under questioning by the House, he said that the war in Korea was largely the result of bungling by General MacArthur's military intelligence, who had estimated that the largest number of Chinese who would invade Korea would be 60,000 to 65,000 troops, whereas the Chinese had brought to bear nearly four times that number. Secretary Acheson had urged that having a centralized and alert intelligence agency in Washington would have avoided this problem, rather than being almost wholly reliant on G-2 out of Tokyo.

The prior summer, Governor Dewey had secretly discussed with Secretary Acheson the possibility of becoming Ambassador to Britain, before the Governor changed his mind not to run for a third term. The Governor had told Mr. Acheson that he was troubled by the lack of bipartisan foreign policy of late and wanted to help. He said that with Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the chief GOP proponent of bipartisanship in foreign policy, ill, he felt responsible as titular head of the party to take up the mantle. Mr. Acheson made no actual promise of the Ambassadorship to London, but said that he would discuss it at the White House. When the Governor chose to run for a third term, the idea was abandoned.

But Winthrop Aldrich, who had convinced Mr. Dewey to run again, was aware of his foreign policy plan and urged appointment of Walter Gifford of A.T. & T. to the post of Ambassador to Britain. Mr. Acheson had long been attorney for J. P. Morgan and the various Wall Street interests, knew Mr. Aldrich and the Rockefeller group which dominated Chase Bank. So when Governor Dewey changed his mind, he and his banking friends convinced Mr. Acheson that Mr. Gifford should become Ambassador.

Mr. Pearson notes that, notwithstanding these facts, Governor Dewey had spent his time on television the day before election day denouncing the Acheson foreign policy in China.

The President had then told James Bruce, to whom he had promised the Ambassadorial post in London, that he had been outmaneuvered and had to ask him to release him from his prior promise of the appointment. He told Mr. Bruce that "they" had given him somebody for the job whom he did not know and whose name he could not recall, the fellow who headed the telephone company, remembering Mr. Gifford's name only after Mr. Bruce called it to mind after reeling off several possibilities.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop find that the country had come very nearly to the end of the postwar years, as evidenced by the fact that the President, who had always said that he would meet Stalin only in Washington, had proposed, upon receipt of the news of the Korean disaster, that he would go to Stalin and lay on the line the issue of peace. He had been dissuaded from doing so by advisers who told him that the only thing he had to lay on the line was the atomic bomb.

The country had to say good-bye to the three prior decades and enter the "iron decade", where its accustomed pleasures would have to be sacrificed to the necessities entailed in independence and survival.

The early drafts of Secretary of State Acheson's address during the week had originally contained statements, following meetings with the National Security Council, providing for something akin to a conditional declaration of war with the scope left undefined. In the end, it asked for the Chinese to come to their senses. There were few reasons, however, to hope that they would do so, after charging at the U.N., along with the Russians, "imperialism" by the U.S. and the U.N.-force nations.

A few weeks earlier, American military experts had been of the opinion that China and Russia would not wish to take the risk of general warfare with the U.S. to have China intervene in Korea at such a late date. But these experts had been wrong and the danger of general war was now present. Nothing could be worse for the U.S. than to become involved in a war with China, with its vast reserves of manpower and presenting few if any targets susceptible to effective use of the atom bomb. Most officials in Washington preferred a showdown with Russia.

The world struggle had now entered a new phase, even if not including world war. It would require nearly complete mobilization during peacetime, a payment, they suggest, for the failure in the past, since the end of the war, to have begun that effort earlier.

Robert C. Ruark, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, tells of Nationalist leader Albizu Campos having a very good barber who believed in the anti-American principles of Sr. Campos, who had masterminded the attempted assassinations of both President Truman on November 1 in Washington and Governor Munoz Marin the same week in San Juan.

After some of the revolutionists had shot up a post office near the barbershop, attention turned to the establishment as a Nationalist hangout. The barber then began shooting at the police in resistance of arrest, whereupon a radio broadcaster obtained a garbage can as a shield and took his transmitter right up to the door of the shop and broadcast via his station and a hastily assembled network of 18 others the entire two-hour battle.

The barber stood off several dozen police and National Guardsmen while the broadcaster occasionally interviewed some of the men. Once, a police sergeant exhorted a fellow officer, who was taking too much time to throw a smoke bomb into the shop, to hurry it up, using colorful language in the process. The broadcaster then took the time out to apologize to listeners for the profanity and explained that the sergeant was excited by the battle and the closeness of the combat.

Several thousand had gathered to watch the battle. When it ended, the barber had 27 wounds and was taken to the hospital where he was recovering. He had asked God to forgive him and was repenting his sins of Nationalism.

The barber sounds like an Infowarrior. Fat and stupid, seeking to repeal reality, is no way to go through life, son.

Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capitol Roundup", tells of newly sworn-in Senator Willis Smith having made an astute move in selecting John Slear, former secretary to Congressman Hamilton Jones, as his secretary. Originally from Pennsylvania, he had been a veteran of North Carolina politics, was as foxy as he was friendly. He had managed well the career of Mr. Jones, and so was well-suited to doing so for Mr. Smith. He had also managed Alfred Bulwinkle's first successful campaign for Congress in 1930, a job in which Mr. Slear remained until redistricting in 1940, at which point he continued on with the district's new Congressman, former Governor and Senator Cameron Morrison. In 1946, he had gone to work for Congressman Robert Doughton of the House Ways & Means Committee, with whom Mr. Slear was a close friend. When Mr. Doughton initially decided not to run again in 1948, Mr. Slear joined Mr. Jones.

Secretaries generally viewed Senate jobs as a promotion over those in the House, and the salary would be better.

In March, 1949, Senator Frank Graham had inherited from deceased new Senator J. Melville Broughton an able staff but one inexperienced in the ways of the Hill. As a result, Senator Graham, while managing to get things done, had to expend an enormous amount of effort to do so.

Mr. Slear was also well regarded by the press.

The Senate, meeting in the old Supreme Court chamber, while the regular Senate chamber was being renovated, served as the informal setting for the swearing in of Mr. Smith as Senator. It was done amid other Senators milling about the chamber, congratulating each other over the election results, to the extent that Vice-President Barkley had to bang the gavel so that he could hear what was taking place above the din, as the chamber had no amplification system.

The House chamber was in nearly equal confusion, meeting in the House Ways & Means hearing room while its chamber was being renovated. House members gave one-minute speeches via microphones having little effect.

Apparently everyone was glad to return for the post-Thanksgiving special session, even the lame ducks.

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