The Charlotte News

Friday, April 28, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Frederick Vanderbilt Field testified to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating the claims of Senator Joseph McCarthy regarding Communists in the State Department, that he knew Owen Lattimore but had never described him or his wife as a Communist and had never attended a Communist meeting with either one. He denied that he was a Soviet espionage agent but refused to say whether he was a Communist, claiming that the subcommittee had no right to inquire about his political beliefs. He persisted in the refusal even in the face of warnings from Senators of being held in contempt of Congress. He also said that to the best of his knowledge, neither John Service, John Carter Vincent, nor Haldore Hanson, all State Department officials, were Communists. But he then declined to answer whether he knew them.

Frank Erickson, reputed to be one of the largest bookies in the country, clammed up and refused to answer questions before the Senate Commerce subcommittee investigating whether to approve a bill to ban interstate transmission of gambling information. He did acknowledge acceptance of wagers from anyone who wanted to bet.

Prior to his testimony, Mayor William Kemp of Kansas City told the subcommittee that Charles Binaggio may have been murdered earlier in the month because he was unable to deliver on his promise to make the city "wide open" for gambling. The Mayor said that Mr. Binaggio and other "lawless elements" in the city had believed that they could influence the police to allow the conduct based on certain appointments to the City police board by the Governor, but that their hopes had not materialized. He said that Mr. Binaggio and his associates had been paid large sums of money on the premise that he could deliver on his promise.

The House Ways & Means Committee voted to recommend a cut in the excise tax on nightclubs from 20 to 10 percent, which would save patrons nineteen million dollars per year. It brought total cuts in excise taxes to 600 million—not the nearly one billion dollars stated the previous day.

From Jakarta in Indonesia came the report that a noted Yale sociology professor, Dr. Raymond Kennedy, 43, and an American correspondent for Time and Life, Robert Doyle, 30, were found slain in West Java. The bodies, found on a paved highway considered safe for daytime travel, may have been mutilated, according to reports. The road wound through tea and rubber estates and rice paddies thickly populated with natives. They had left Jakarta the prior Wednesday for Jogjakarta, the capital, spending the night in Bandoeng. A radio correspondent had related that they had been stopped in their jeep at noon the previous day by a gang of four or five men in uniform, taken to a clearing and then shot. The men then fled in a sedan they had commandeered on the highway. Frightened villagers reported the scene to Indonesian soldiers who then dug up the buried bodies of the pair.

Here, incidentally, are two sample editorials, at page four of each edition, by William F. Buckley, Jr., when he was "chairman", that is, editor, of the Yale Daily News in 1949 as a junior, taking to task Dr. Kennedy editorially for remarks he had made in class challenging the place of religion in the modern society—the operative verb being "to challenge", as we read it, perhaps having tried desperately to obtain some level of objective thought from freshman and sophomore university students, who, unless they are majoring in philosophy or comparative religion, more usually than not have not developed, from high school or even a prep school of good quality, any rationally grounded argument for or against religion generally, let alone for their own subjective view of it—tantamount to arguing whether a given color is actually perceived the same or similarly by each percipient receiver of the visual stimuli, without having first the slightest understanding of why the color forms, in the abstract, the way it does in the spectrum of light and is so perceived on a particular wavelength by the mind, not just as suggested by the diagram in a book of the rods and cones of the eye's retina interpreting the rainbow pattern cast by light passing through a prism. The greater the challenge, the stronger might become the rational, logical argument in support of the belief system, replacing the merely recitative, emotive form embraced by the young proselyte, full of symbols sans substance, whether of belief which admits of religion or which is strictly rationalistic in approach to the world. That more strongly grounded belief system then becomes less subject to being abandoned and cast aside when assailed by the inevitable incongruities which life's vagarious experience will hurl at it in mendicant vagrancy, apparently bereft of any objectively discernible moral consideration, whether shot in seemingly random, mercurial happenstance from causative sources emanating from nature or from mankind.

In sociological studies, there is a gauge called religiosity which seeks to place on a scale the degree of adherence of sampled groups to religious belief systems. Perhaps, Dr. Kennedy was seeking in his way to impart to bright introductory-level sociology students the concept, by means of casting them, however unwitting of the role, in participant-observer status as collectors of anecdotal data through the resultant dialectic process to inform future potential empirical studies of same should they enter on a major in the field.

In Paris, the French Government fired Frederic Joliot-Curie, Communist scientist, as chief of the country's Atomic Energy Commission. Earlier in the month, he had aroused a firestorm politically by saying that Communist scientists would never contribute to a war against the Soviet Union. M. Joliot-Curie had won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935 and had been appointed in 1946 by then President Charles De Gaulle to head the country's atomic energy program.

U.S. unemployment dropped by 1.1 million between early February and early April, to 3.5 million, the lowest level since the prior December when winter weather had curtailed the availability of construction and farming jobs.

At Fort Bragg, N.C., one man was killed and eight injured this date during the initial stages of the Army and Air Force "Operation Swarmer" exercises to demonstrate airborne invasion capability.

Tom Fesperman of The News tells of the surprisingly subdued campaign of former Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, in contrast to his flamboyance in days of old when he had been Senator from 1933 to 1945. Many had begun to wonder whether he was really trying to win the upcoming Democratic primary against Senator Frank Graham and Willis Smith, four weeks away.

Movie producer Cecil B. deMille, as edited by Norman Vincent Peale, provides the second "Guideposts" installment, begun the previous day by Eddie Rickenbacker. Mr. deMille relates of a time as a boy when a visiting minister came to preach during Passion Week at his church. When he arrived for the service, however, he found that he was the only person present. Yet, the minister conducted the service to him as if the church was full, and when it came time to provide his nickel offering, the minister stepped from the pulpit and received it personally, patting him on the head as he did so, affirming the young boy's faith for the simplicity of the act. He found it to be religion at its finest.

The Red Sea then parted and Mr. Heston walked forth...

On the editorial page, "ABC Revenue and Tax Rates" instructs on the detailed report issued by State ABC chairman Frank Sims, showing that Charlotte and Mecklenburg County would receive a half million dollars in revenue for the year from ABC liquor sales. That translated to lower City property taxes, 23 cents, 30 cents, and 25 cents, respectively, in the previous three fiscal years, as well as lower County taxes by 29 cents per hundred dollars of valuation for each of the prior two years.

The ABC program, since its approval by the voters of Mecklenburg in 1947, had thus been a success in terms of raising additional revenue.

"A Dramatic Program" praises State and local governments for undertaking a 125 million dollar school building program, with the State furnishing 50 million pursuant to Governor Kerr Scott's program, half of which was from a bond issue, proving, it finds, that Federal funding was not necessary to meet the expanding needs of education.

"Vote … Don't Just Talk" urges voters of Mecklenburg County to register and turn out, advises that only 37,627 had thus far registered when re-registration in the county had been required the previous year.

"Birds of a Feather" finds that John Maragon, having been convicted of two counts of perjury before Congress in connection with his testimony the previous year to the Senate Investigating subcommittee looking at the five percenter scheme, to have joined Alger Hiss, also recently convicted of perjury for his December, 1948 Grand Jury testimony denying that he had known Whittaker Chambers during the time Mr. Chambers claimed he provided to him secret State Department documents for passing to the Soviets and denying that he had ever provided such documents. Both had been found to be liars and despite widely variant backgrounds—Mr. Maragon having risen from a shoeshine boy in Kansas City to being a White House crony of Maj. General Harry Vaughan, military aide to the President, while Mr. Hiss had gone to Harvard and included his former Harvard law professor, Justice Felix Frankfurter, as well as Secretary of State Acheson among his friends and supporters—, both had been leveled by justice.

It suggests that there ought to be more perjury trials of the type, which would then send a message to witnesses who routinely lied in the courts that there could be severe penalties for it.

No, first, there has to be a political motive to pursue it, forced by the Republicans to embarrass Democrats. This is not a very wise editorial, even if it sounds good on the surface, standing for truth and loyalty and the American way—the Nixon Way.

And while there is demonstrable perjury which occurs in the courts, though not so regularly as the piece suggests, to prosecute for same merely on the basis of inconsistent statements or errant memories of events, especially those occurring some ten years earlier, as in the Hiss case, based on contested memories built purely on circumstantial evidence and documents which could have as easily been procured from other sources than Mr. Hiss by Mr. Chambers, who never alleged espionage before HUAC until the matter came to a head in a civil suit filed by Mr. Hiss for defamation based on public accusations that Mr. Hiss had been involved in the Communist underground while in the State Department, was and remains an outrageous abuse of prosecutorial discretion at the behest of Congressman Nixon, who, regrettably, then rose on its back to become Senator in 1951, then Vice-President in 1953, then President in 1969, as a direct result of the notoriety he achieved from the case, without which he, in all probablility, would never have become more than an obscure Congressman who had once sat on the House Un-American Activities Committee, itself an outrageously politicized, un-American travesty throughout its existence, flouting the Constitutional protections of free association and speech enjoyed by all citizens, in a supposed effort to root out that which threatened the pursuit of American values, from the time it was chaired by the reactionary Martin Dies of Texas

And had it been so, how much better, less grim, the country would be today can be calculated only by the incalculable damage done to it through time by the Watergate scandal and subsequent resignation under impending impeachment and certain conviction and removal from office, embracing not just the obstruction of justice regarding the break-in of Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate but all of the various obstructions of justice, perversions of justice and abuses of power which seemed to characterize his Presidency and, indeed, his entire political career, becoming a Machiavellian modus operandi for achievement of power by necessitous destruction of all of the perceived competition.

A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, titled "Company Coming", tells of Charles Parker, State advertising director, predicting that the tourist season in 1950 would be the greatest yet. Provided that there was no polio outbreak or other serious health menace or economic downturn for the summer, the piece advises citizens of the state therefore to be ready and make the visitors feel welcome.

An editorial from the Greensboro Daily News, denoting Mental Health Week, explains what was being done in North Carolina to advance mental health care, as mental institutions in the state had surpassed 10,000 in population for the first time the prior February.

Drew Pearson tells of about 60 American businessmen having been invited by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson to study the branches of defense recently, at Quantico, Fort Benning and Eglin Airfield, the latter while the President viewed the exercises. They came away impressed by the President's homeyness, even though most had been anti-Truman initially, found the cost of war prohibitive and that the B-36, designed to carry the atom bomb long distances, might soon become obsolete in favor of a secret weapon. At Fort Benning, they viewed the equipment for one infantry division, costing 180 million dollars, $55,000 per man. Nations such as France had in consequence decided that they could not afford another war. The F-86 could carry the same bomb load as the B-17 had during the war. Another secret weapon might soon make it impossible for Russia to invade Western Europe. Guided missiles were also making great progress.

State Department planner George Kennan candidly told the businessmen that the battle for Germany was the battle for Europe, but that the country was not doing too well there and that the State Department did not know any longer who was running things in Russia, as Andrei Vishinsky was a puppet as Foreign Minister. He said that some solution other than war had to be preached or no third power would follow. He also said that there had been nothing to lose in China as no one had ever controlled it. Thus, there was no real "loss", as many had suggested, when it fell to the Communists.

Exhibiting equal candor, Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley told them that if Russia won the Mediterranean, then nothing would happen, that the two sides would settle down to a war of attrition. He also said that the Aleutians were not worth defending, that the Northwest coastline of Alaska could not be used for troop movement and so would not be defended, and that Alaska's defenses would be provided from two interior bases.

Mr. Pearson sets forth other observations made during the President's inspection tour.

Marquis Childs finds that "perhaps the costliest bit of fiddle-faddling history has ever seen" was taking place as the chaos of revolt was rising in Asia while a divided Government quarreled over Communism at home.

In the Philippines, law and order was perilously thin as the Huks controlled large areas not challenged by the duly constituted Government. The U.S. had poured two billion dollars worth of aid into the country and much of it had disappeared, resulting in pleas for more.

In Indo-China, no one ventured outside the cities without a heavy armed guard and then only in cars moving at high speed, as banditry and Communism were steadily wearing away at the French Army's 150,000 men holding the line of the Bao Dai Government against the Communist forces of Ho Chi Minh. There was a real possibility that the U.S. would be called upon there for economic assistance on a scale for which the country was unprepared, potentially far more costly than the civil war in Greece.

Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup, upon his return recently from his inspection tour of Southeast Asia, reported that the bandwagon psychology was apparent, whereby peoples joined the group with power and success.

The Chinese Nationalists, despite double the number of troops, superior air and naval forces, had lost the capital on Hainan Island without a shot being fired against the invading Communists. At Tientsin, American military advisers had been present but the Nationalists had not taken their advice; there was no reason to believe, therefore, that had advisers been present on Hainan, as many Senators had insisted, they would have listened there.

There was a need for assertive moves, varying from country to country, to show that the U.S. meant what it said. But the State Department and Congress did not appear to be taking any initiative to make those moves, Congress not appropriating the money and the State Department not fully utilizing the resources already at its disposal. Overarching this inaction was Senator McCarthy's campaign at home "like a distracting blast on a steam calliope".

He concludes that it was not a cold war at present, for that implied a certain steadiness and resolution, willingness to sacrifice and the manifestation of some unity, all of which being presently absent in America.

Robert C. Ruark finds that the U.S. should take stronger action in response to the unarmed U.S. Air Force plane shot down by the Soviets over the Baltic on April 8 on the pretext that it had strayed into Latvian territory. That, combined with the sentencing in Budapest of American businessmen Robert Vogeler to fifteen years in prison for alleged spying, as well as other such incidents, called, in his mind, for some sort of retaliatory action, such as shooting Russian hostages or sinking a Russian submarine found close to the U.S. coastline, as one recently had been reported off Boston, though denied by the Navy.

He says that he did not wish for the country to go to war again, but that, being Southern, from Wilmington, N.C., he had his pride, and without such strong retaliatory response, he believed the country was inviting war from these unchecked Soviet actions, with only meek, ignored, State Department protests issued in reply.

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