The Charlotte News

Friday, June 30, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had authorized General MacArthur to use certain American ground troops in Korea and that they were already on their way. The precise forces to be used remained a military secret. The President had also expanded authorization of use of the Air Force to include not just flights over South Korean areas overrun by the North Korean forces but also wherever militarily necessary against specific targets in North Korea as well. He had authorized also a naval blockade of the Korean coasts.

The announcement came following a National Security Council assessment of the situation in which it was determined that North Korean forces had broken through Southern defenses south of Seoul.

General MacArthur had at his command four divisions, consisting of 123,500 men in a high state of readiness and training. The troops were stationed in Japan, Okinawa and other islands in the Ryukyus, as well as in the Philippines.

Congressional reaction to the President's announcement was generally positive and enjoyed bipartisan support. Senators Taft, Knowland, McClellan, Lehman, Hendrickson, Lodge, and Russell supported the action. Senator Knowland said that he believed it was time to eliminate the 38th parallel and permit all Koreans to determine their government in a U.N.-sponsored election.

Only Senator Harry Cain of Washington voiced criticism, saying that the President should have provided more aid to Korea and called Congressional leaders to the White House sooner. He actually meant Blair House, as the White House was a hollow shell at this point.

In Korea, an armored column of North Korean forces had penetrated at least fifteen miles south of the Han River, the primary natural barrier between Communist-captured Seoul and the provisional capital set up at Taejon 90 miles to the south of Seoul, and was threatening the American headquarters position of the military mission at Suwon, having reached to within eight miles of the position. Suwon had the only substantial airstrip north of Pusan, 175 miles away. General MacArthur said that there had been a breakthrough southwest of Seoul but did not confirm the fifteen-mile penetration. The Air Force announced destruction of fifteen North Korean tanks this date.

According to a South Korean official, not confirmed by General MacArthur, North Korean air bases at Pyongyang had been hit by the U.S. Air Force the prior night and this date, along with transportation routes northward of the 38th parallel, following authorization of the flights by General MacArthur, an order which was confirmed by U.S. officials.

Russia turned down a request by the U.S. to help rid South Korea of the North Korean forces, saying it did not approve of "interference of foreign powers in the internal affairs of Korea." The note, from Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, also said that South Korean authorities and those who stood behind them shared responsibility for the attack, provoked, he continued, by attacks of South Korea on the frontier areas of North Korea. He reiterated the Soviet claim that the Security Council action was illegal for absence of Russian participation, based on its boycott for refusal to seat the Communist Chinese and continuing to recognize the Nationalist Chinese.

The U.S. had withdrawn its occupation troops from South Korea the previous July 1, save for a contingent of military advisers. The Russians had claimed to have withdrawn their troops at the end of 1948 but North Korea had subsequently refused access to verify the claim by the U.N. commission assigned to observe the situation.

The U.N. Security Council was to meet this afternoon to review developments in the campaign to save South Korea.

The Senate approved the 1.222 billion dollar foreign military aid bill, including 16 million for South Korea and the Philippines. It now would go to the House.

In Columbus, O., a 20-year old man had been arrested the previous May 17 for starting the Ringling Bros. Circus fire of six years earlier in Hartford, Conn., which had killed 168 persons. The man had confessed to setting that fire and more than twenty others in Maine, New Hampshire, and Ohio, plus four separate homicides. He said that a flaming red Indian came to him in the night and ordered him to set the fires. He would then black out and regain awareness as the fires were blazing. The Grand Jury had reviewed the confession and believed it tracked sufficiently with the facts surrounding two small fires near Circleville, O., to which he confessed that it issued indictments. Though only 14 at the time, he had been employed by Ringling Bros. on July 6, 1944 when the Hartford fire occurred, after joining the circus on June 30. He also confessed to killing a nine-year old girl when he was nine, a night watchman who had caught him setting a fire when he was 13, a 12-year old boy the same year, and a Japanese boy in 1949 while he was in the Army of occupation in Japan. Investigations showed that the last three slayings had actually occurred.

Later in the year, though he would be convicted of setting the two small fires near Circleville and sentenced to between four and forty years in prison, eventually serving eight years, he would recant the confession regarding the Hartford fire and maintain the recantation until his death in 1997, claiming instead that he was downtown in Hartford watching the movie "The Four Feathers" at the time the fire occurred, stating to Connecticut authorities in 1993 that he was "nuts" at the time of the confession and had been brainwashed into making it through sleep deprivation and continual hounding by psychiatrists at the Lima State hospital and by local authorities.

On the editorial page, "Taft Sticks Out His Neck" reacts to the call by Senator Taft for the resignation of Secretary of State Acheson, while supporting the President's action thus far in Korea. The piece assesses whether Secretary Acheson had in fact been discredited for not defending Nationalist China to the point of favoring armed intervention, finds that the American people would have never supported such an effort to rescue a crooked, reactionary regime which had largely brought on its own fate.

By contrast, American reaction to the invasion of South Korea instantly supported intervention. America's reputation among the other nations was also stronger because of its action being taken within the U.N. Charter. Furthermore, it was Secretary Acheson's advice which had urged the President to act after military advisers expressed doubt of the military significance of Korea and whether it could be defended.

Finally, it finds that Senator Taft had been mistaken regularly on foreign affairs, from the time when he was an isolationist prior to World War II, considers him second only to former North Carolina Senator Robert Rice Reynolds in that respect, and so was hardly the one to start casting stones.

"No Time for Jitters" tells of Charlotte suffering war jitters, or something close to it, in the wake of the Sunday invasion of South Korea. Employees and patrons of shops and cafes uptown listened closely to their radios when the President had spoken on Wednesday afternoon, anxious over whether they or their relatives might soon be departing for war service. Street sales of newspapers had boomed. The newsmen were rushing to snatch news from the wires, especially awaiting word from Moscow, largely silent thus far on the matter, save for declaring the U.N. resolution to be illegal for the absence of Russia from the Security Council.

The consequent crisis could flare up again in other spots, Iran, Berlin, or Yugoslavia. It hopes that peace would prevail but also prepares for an inevitable "fight to the finish" between East and West, counsels that it was not time for war jitters but rather constructive thinking, prayer, and, above all, bolstering of defenses at home and abroad.

"The Problem of Jonathan Daniels" tells of its assumption that a state Democratic national committeeman had the job of representing the state on the DNC and helping to defeat Republicans in the state. Jonathan Daniels, the state committeeman, had received a great deal of criticism for having actively campaigned for Senator Graham over Willis Smith. Mr. Daniels had said in the Raleigh News & Observer, of which he was editor, that Mr. Smith was running on the Republican platform.

The newspaper, despite having endorsed Mr. Smith and having endorsed in 1948 Governor Dewey for the presidency, would not join in the campaign to oust Mr. Daniels from his position, though it thinks he had made a mistake in campaigning for Senator Graham, hurting him more than helping him. It also asserts that in stirring the animosity of Smith supporters, he had impaired his usefulness to the party in the state, though still able to be of help in Washington because of his ties to the Administration. It defers to the state committee which elected him to determine his fate.

A piece from the New York Times, titled "Tale of Two Cities", relates of efforts to bring about better race relations in both Roanoke, Va., and Greenville, S.C., the latter having been beset by racial violence and tension when the 30 cab drivers lynched Willie Earle after he had been accused of killing a cab driver in 1947, after which, they had been acquitted. Following that episode, the community got busy in conducting surveys of race relations to try to ferret out the problems blocking and inhibiting opportunity and equality for its black residents.

In Roanoke, there were some 30,000 people gainfully employed, five out of six having contributed to a hospital development fund of 2.2 million dollars to build a black hospital and add a wing to the white hospital.

It suggests the two towns as models for the South.

Drew Pearson tells of the emergency Cabinet meeting called by the President on Korea to have been one of the most dramatic since V-E Day. He arrived from Missouri to find Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and the Joint Chiefs waiting for him. Secretary Johnson counseled that he expected the South Koreans to hold the line, but Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley cautioned that the country was difficult to defend, that after an initial thrust by the Communists, he expected the South Koreans to form a line below Seoul. He had also raised the possibility that the drive was merely diversionary for a main Russian thrust elsewhere, as in Iran, to meet Russia's need for oil. As Iran was weak, he warned that the U.S. should not over-commit its forces in Korea.

Secretary Acheson tipped the scales in favor of commitment of Air Force and Navy forces to the defense effort, by warning that if Korea fell to the Communists, then the rest of the region, especially Indo-China, would be destabilized by the crippling defeat, as other nations would lose confidence in American resolve to stand behind its commitments. If Indo-China fell, then the Communists could proceed to take over Japan internally.

The President determined that the invasion might portend the start of the third world war but that the presentation had convinced him that it was likely not the case that Russia was prepared to send supplies and men to the conflict, as Korea lacked strategic importance, having no oil. But, nevertheless, he determined that the U.S. could not let Russia get away with the action and must utilize the U.N. to the extent possible to stop the invasion. He thus determined to send all the supplies the country could into South Korea and buy time thereby to determine what was behind the attack and how deeply Russia was committed to it, before sending in further forces.

Mr. Pearson notes that the State Department believed that American troops would be necessary to resist the attack.

The President said that he understood the Russian mentality, had seen it in action since Potsdam in mid-1945, that they would exploit the slightest weakness and that therefore firmness was the order of the day, the only way to obtain their respect and prevent a world war. He said that he would take full responsibility for decisions reached.

The following day, the President decided to send air and naval forces to protect the South, with General MacArthur in command. General MacArthur wanted to make the announcement, but the President insisted that he do so as the decision had been his.

Senator Taft had told the Republican caucus that he did not want the nation "stampeded into a war".

American ground forces, according to military advisers, were weaker than the Russians in the North Pacific, while air and naval forces were superior. The advisers also informed of suspicious Russian troop movements on the border of Yugoslavia.

Mr. Pearson finds the meeting to have been as historic as that of the Hoover Cabinet following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September, 1931. Secretary of State Henry Stimson had tried to get the President then to enlist the League of Nations to stop the attack, but President Hoover had held back. Mr. Stimson still believed that had the U.S. then moved vigorously, the Japanese would have backed down and the eventual war in the Pacific could have been avoided.

Another crisis moment had taken place in 1936 when Hitler invaded the Ruhr, prompting debate by the French whether to take action, favored by the French Cabinet but resisted by the military. Many diplomats then believed that had the French acted decisively to repel the action, the subsequent war might have been avoided. Captured documents after V-E Day showed, indeed, that the German troops had been given two sets of orders, one being to march and the other to retreat in the event of French resistance.

Some believed that the Russian-inspired invasion of South Korea was a similar probing operation to determine American resolve.

Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the purpose of the President ordering air and naval forces into action in South Korea being to persuade Russia that the U.S. meant what it said, to convince it to call off the invasion by its puppets. If it did not work, then the President and his advisers knew that it would be necessary to commit ground forces to the action.

Yet, the Army might resist the commitment of ground troops for the fact that the Army, along with the Air Force, had been opposed to that idea when the Security Council had determined a contingency plan months earlier after the evacuation of occupation troops from the South, under which it was determined that two courses of action would be followed should the Communists attack, both an immediate appeal to the U.N. and supply by General MacArthur of surplus arms to the South. Thus, when the attack had occurred on Sunday, that order was immediately put into action.

But as to any subsequent action, disagreement had arisen, with the State Department and Navy supportive of use of any means necessary to protect South Korea, while the Army and Air Force resisted use of ground troops. The latter opposition was based on the notion that Korea could not be defended and was of little strategic value. That position, however, disregarded the political consequences of not standing behind the country's commitment, weakening resolve then in the rest of the region.

On Sunday night, after the attack, Secretary Acheson had told the President that the fall of Korea would only be prelude to general disaster. No decision was reached on use of American forces, as it was hoped that the Koreans might hold the line. But by Tuesday, it had become clear that they could not maintain their positions against the well-planned, heavy assault from the North and so the President had wisely ordered U.S. air and naval forces into action.

Robert C. Ruark tells of having been watching a Dodgers-Pirates baseball game on television Sunday afternoon when the announcement came that the invasion of South Korea had taken place. Suddenly, his thoughts were returned to December 7, 1941 and the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor, as he covered a football game at Griffith Stadium while a sports reporter. It was the last time he wrote sports and he never found out the score. He joined the Navy for three years and his entire war experience had passed before him as if in a dream state, even when he witnessed death and destruction before his eyes. Then it was over.

"And so it occurs that this is the way wars start, for common folks. You are playing tennis or sipping a drink or watching the Dodgers or covering a ball game and the little bulletin smacks you in the eye. First the bulletins are about incidents and then they are about small intramural wars and then they are a major invasion and, all of a sudden, boom! You are a number in a fish bowl, a bunk on a crowded transport, a scared hero, a bored technician, and finally either a corpse, a casualty, or something called an ex-GI."

"It was yesterday all over again."

He had not found out who won the game Sunday, but he imagined that Brooklyn had lost to Pittsburgh. The score, however, was unimportant, "all over again."

A letter writer comments on the editorial "Why the Delay?" of June 26, wondering why it had taken so long to address the problems of crime and poverty in the alley called Howell's Arcade. She agrees.

A letter from Harry Golden says that long after people would have forgotten whether corporate lawyer Willis Smith or a pig-raiser had gone to the Senate in 1950, the name of Frank Graham would resonate alongside that of Washington, Jefferson, Robert E. Lee and FDR.

Let's leave aside General Lee, if you don't mind, Mr. Golden.

Unfortunately, the state would forget both names and the origins of the ugly, racist politics which would give rise to Jesse Helms in 1972 and pervade the state for another 30 years, casting its national reputation, in the process, into the dumper. But most of Mr. Helms's core supporters have the distinct inability to see beyond themselves or be too much concerned with how others, persons they conveniently label pejoratively as "liberal" or "Communist" or "retarded" or whatever other label they might fancy of the moment to cast them as the "other", might see them. The same sort of people voted for the current "President" in 2016.

A letter writer, presumably the father of News reporter Dick Young, objects that Willis Smith had commented on the Korean invasion by saying only that he had been too busy after his victory the prior Saturday to study the situation. He finds that Mr. Smith would be better off being more attuned to foreign affairs and less to such issues as obstructionism anent the FEPC and other domestic issues. Such ignorance was the more objectionable in having been displayed in the context of his attendance of the American Legion convention in Charlotte earlier in the week. All he needed to have done, says Mr. Young, was to embrace the 30-year policy of preparedness to which the Legion adhered.

A letter writer tells of the news of Senator Graham's congratulatory call to Willis Smith after the primary victory having reminded him of the cartoon in the Baltimore Sun which appeared after the nine-game World Series in which pitcher Christy Matthewson lost the deciding game, and the caricature showed him with Connie Mack's arm around his shoulder accompanied by the caption: "Christy, we just had to win this game, but we hated like Hell to beat you." The author's wife had then commented that if she could move him up and Senator Graham back, they would make an invincible team.

He apparently conflates the six-game 1911 World Series, in which Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics faced the New York Giants, with the eight-game 1912 World Series between the Giants of Mr. Matthewson and the Boston Red Sox, the second game having wound up a tie because of being called for darkness after eleven innings.

Whatever...

If you build it, they will come.

Nice story, but what's the point?

A letter from the chairman of the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections thanks the newspaper for its assistance during the the registration process for voters in advance of the primaries, especially reporters Bob Gibson and Tom Fesperman. He also commends the registrars and others involved in the registration process.

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