The Charlotte News
Wednesday, July 12, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the tank-led North Korean troops pushed forward further against Americans in South Korea but, according to advance American headquarters, were cut off from their supply lines by allied air strikes. The Communists, however, had already built up a large supply of tanks and men along the front. A veteran of the European war said that some of the Russian-built tanks looked like the German Tigers.
General MacArthur said that North Korean pressure might cause withdrawals behind the Kum River defense line. Late dispatches said that Chochiwon had been taken by the Communists. Pressure northeast of the main battle front, between Chungju and Umsong, had required planned withdrawal to the Pogang River. A North Korean force was reported to be attempting a crossing of the Han River at Ganyang, 25 air miles east of Chungju, now held by the North Korean forces.
North Korean radio claimed that 700 Americans had been killed and 200 captured at Chochiwon and that 15 American tanks and five armored cars had been destroyed during the drive. The claim was met with skepticism in Tokyo.
Correspondent Elton C. Fay tells of a dread feeling pervading the Pentagon that hordes of volunteers would soon come from Communist China and Russia to join the fight of the North Koreans, and that even without their joinder, it could take until fall for the U.N. forces to win the war. They had reached the latter conclusion on the basis that it would be better to approach the conflict in a slow, deliberate manner than to push for quick victory, costing many casualties in the process, that the North Koreans were tough fighters, having fought for the Russians at Stalingrad and for the Japanese, that a three-month campaign had been necessary to wrest from the Japanese Okinawa, and for the fact that North Korea had short supply lines compared to the U.N. nations. Another three weeks of bad news, the Pentagon cautioned, could be expected before the build-up of strength would begin to show results.
It had been reported the previous week that some 200,000 Chinese Communist troops were assembling along the Korean border with Manchuria and there was belief at the Pentagon that those were only the beginning.
The need for 20,000 new troops in the U.S. Army suggested that soon the problem of manpower would become so acute that reserves or units of the National Guard would be called into action, notwithstanding the denial of that intention by Pentagon officials the previous week.
The Army said that draftees would be given fourteen weeks of training and then assigned initially to posts within the U.S. before some of them would be shipped overseas, and that the number in the latter category would not be large. If the first call for 20,000 draftees, to be filled by local draft boards by September 30, brought in sufficient volunteers, then it might not be necessary to have a second call to bring the Army to its current ceiling of 630,000, a ceiling subject to increase. Present strength stood at 593,000. The draft would not entail a lottery but would take the men over 19 closest to age 26 who were classified 1-A and without dependents. Men over 26 were ineligible for the draft.
Secretary of State Acheson said that conferences were taking place to determine which other U.N. nations might join the Korean fighting. He did not identify which other countries had offered troops beyond the 30,000 offered by Nationalist China and previously refused by the U.S. because of leaving Formosa without adequate protection in the event of invasion by the Communist Chinese. He said that of the 58 U.N. nations, 53, with the possible exception of Egypt, had given at least moral support to the resolution to stop the aggression in Korea. The Secretary denounced the Soviet "peace petition" being circulated, calling for banning of atomic weapons under terms proposed by Russia, terming it a propaganda trick, especially so in light of the ongoing Communist aggression in Korea.
Canada sent three destroyers in aid of the U.N. forces.
The House passed a bill guaranteeing 250 million dollars of private funding to support the Point Four program of technical assistance to underdeveloped nations. An effort by Republicans to send it back to committee failed.
Senator Joseph McCarthy sent to the President signed statements of former and present State Department employees which he claimed proved that State Department files had been stripped of derogatory data in 1946. He also produced a letter from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover which he contended proved that Senator Millard Tydings was not being truthful when he said on June 21 that an FBI study showed that the 81 State Department loyalty files being examined by the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee showed nothing to sustain the charges of disloyalty made by Senator McCarthy. The letter of Mr. Hoover said that the Bureau had made no such examination of the files and thus could not verify whether the files were complete.
Administration leaders and Congressional leaders were reported to have agreed to put aside the billion-dollar excise tax cut bill, pending developments in Korea.
The Senate killed the FEPC bill for the session by refusing to vote for cloture, voting in favor of it by 55 to 33, nine votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Forty Senators had signed a petition to bring the bill to the Senate floor. It was the second failed attempt during the session.
In South Carolina, former Secretary of State and Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes easily won the Democratic gubernatorial primary and Senator Olin Johnston won the Senate primary over incumbent Governor Strom Thurmond. Both won by majorities, thus obviating the necessity of a runoff. During the caustic Senate campaign at one point, Senator Johnston had called Governor Thurmond a liar and the latter offered to meet the Senator outside. Nothing happened. Both had said they believed in segregation. Governor Thurmond would eventually win election to the other seat in 1954, in a special election following by two months the death of Senator Burnet Maybank.
In Fairview, Okla., seven gasoline and kerosene storage tanks in the center of town caught fire after a chain explosion, spreading to three nearby oil storage warehouses. Twelve persons were injured.
In Bethlehem, Pa., a man who killed himself in a barroom had a note in his pocket which said that he had planned to kill the bartender but found that he could not commit murder.
On the editorial page, "Health Consolidation Threatened" tells of tax-ridden residents of the Charlotte being dismayed over the proposal to separate further the City and County Health Departments rather than moving toward consolidation, endorsed by the County Medical Society and recommended by the Institute of Government report as the most economical and efficient means of providing health care to the community. Yet, the County Commissioners resisted the effort because it would increase taxes to rural dwellers, notwithstanding that city dwellers had to foot most of the bill for the separate health care of rural residents at present, as they paid 80 percent of the County's tax revenue.
"Looking Backward—and
Forward" tells of the news from Korea being bad and likely to
continue so for the fact of so many mistakes
The piece agrees and finds that what had happened in Korea could occur in Yugoslavia, Indo-China, Formosa, Greece or West Germany. The State and Defense Departments, everyone else in Washington responsible for national security, and General MacArthur were all to blame. Russia, it was now apparent, would seek to use a series of hot wars as stepping stones to world domination. It was incumbent on the U.S. therefore to strengthen its diplomatic and military policy throughout the world.
"War Unthinkable?" finds
that given the facts that the V.A. psychoneurotic hospitals were full of patients from
the last war and that the devastation of war remained evident abroad, inclusive of Russia, it was
unthinkable that anyone would undertake another war after only five
years. But war was not reasonable and the men who had started wars,
Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Stalin, were not of good will or even
good sense, having fallen prey either to an obsessive form of
nationalism
It concludes that while war was unthinkable at present, it was no more so than at any other time.
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Extending a Welcome", welcomes to the state 352 nurses, 199 of whom were newly licensed and the remainder recognized from licensure in other states, hopes that many more would follow as the need for qualified nurses was critical.
Bill Sharpe, writing in State Magazine, tells of rural weekly or non-daily newspapers no longer deserving the nickname "weaklies", as they had been labeled in the past. They now operated with modern presses, as in the cases of the Waynesville Mountaineer and Smithfield Herald. The state had 160 such non-daily newspapers, most of which were weeklies. The largest circulation of a weekly appeared to be enjoyed by the Durham News-Journal, with nearly 4,000 readers. The semi-weeklies had up to 7,400 readers.
In 1751, James Davis had established
the first newspaper in the state, the North Carolina Gazette, published at the seat of the Royal Governeur, New Bern, in turn
giving rise to other newspapers in Fayetteville and Wilmington.
The state had five counties still in 1950 without any newspaper, all
in the extreme Eastern part of the state save Clay County. The events
in those counties were covered, however, in special sections
Drew Pearson tells of Senators Malone, Kem, and Watkins, all Republicans, asking floor leaders not to call for a record vote on the draft so that they would not be embarrassed by voting no. Senator Wayne Morse then, with disdain, told Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of their desire, whereupon the latter called for a record vote. The three Senators then voted for the draft.
He finds four things which had recently occurred to be potential harbingers of the future. An American commander had said in Korea that after observing the tenacity with which the North Koreans fought, he no longer had contempt for them. Senator Lodge proposed two billion dollars more in arms aid. General Eisenhower requested more money for the Voice of America to support morale. The Senate Appropriations Committee ignored that advice, along with like advice by General Omar Bradley, General Marshall, General Walter Bedell Smith, and General David Sarnoff of RCA, instead cutting the 1951 VOA budget by 1.3 million dollars, ten percent of the amount cut from the State Department budget. Meanwhile, propagandized North Koreans were having an easy time of it against unpropagandized South Koreans.
The best propaganda, he exhorts, as with the Marshall Plan and the late 1947 Friendship Train supplying goods to France and Italy before Marshall Plan aid kicked in, was the truth.
Senator William Benton, while Assistant Secretary of State in charge of VOA three years earlier, had failed to convince the 80th Congress in 1947 that VOA was important enough to provide to it significant funding. The status left the country without the means to promote its considerable spending abroad and the benefits of democracy. Senator Benton now was determined to help the State Department put across the significance of the VOA, but while having the support of the aforementioned military leaders, he had to convince some short-sighted members of Congress bent on false economy.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop find that the President soon would ask Congress for something akin to national mobilization, or at least authority so to declare in an emergency, and increased military appropriations to enable taking a "first slice" from a five billion dollar fund, even if he had not yet officially determined to take this step. Secretary of State Acheson and Ambassador Averell Harriman had both determined, along with State Department adviser John Foster Dulles, that Korea had exposed the country's defense weakness, and were urging the President accordingly.
Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, with his program of economy, stood alone in opposition to an adequate defense effort. Since he controlled the Joint Chiefs, chairman of the Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, could not do what the Secretary ought do, though the Chiefs knew that the country was in perilous condition.
The Alsops conclude that in the end, unless the President's sense of decency and common sense would be overborne by Mr. Johnson, and the nation, in consequence, led to destruction, he would make the decision to proceed to Congress for the necessary authority to make the country militarily strong again.
Marquis Childs tells of Republican Senators up for re-election in the fall meeting with RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson to discuss raising funds. Senator Wayne Morse explained that his Republican opponent in the primary had spent large sums supplied by out-of-state interests attacking his liberal voting record, and that he was thus required to spend such that he incurred a deficit, hoped that the RNC would tell the contributors to supply him enough funding to make up that deficit and at least refrain from contributing to his Democratic opposition.
The contributors, as Senator Morse knew, were fat cats, spurred on by news that unions would be active in the campaign. But, ironically, unions were having trouble raising funds and so might prove not such an important factor.
The evidence of spending by conservative big business interests was growing, as in the recent Oklahoma primary where utilities and other groups reportedly had spent over a half million dollars in an unsuccessful effort to re-elect Senator Elbert Thomas in the initial primary, a runoff having been triggered by the plurality victory of Congressman Mike Monroney.
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