The Charlotte News
Saturday, July 29, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that two American infantry divisions, the 25th and First Cavalry, operating under orders from ground commander Lt. General Walton Walker to stand fast or die, had beaten back repeated Communist assaults this date on mountain defense positions in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula. General Walker, visiting the front, had vowed that his men would not give up another inch of ground to the Communists, saying that there would be no Dunkerque-type evacuation or surrender. General MacArthur's headquarters reported that the result was no appreciable change in the Yongdong sector lines, but that slight gains had been made by Communist forces in two drives, in the Yongju-Andong and Tanyang-Yechon areas, 45 and 60 miles northeast of the Yongdong sector.
The enemy flanking maneuvers toward Pusan made some small gains but Navy and Air Force air strikes and increasing numbers of U.N. ground forces had contained the threat. The enemy was placed near Kochang, 75 air miles from Pusan, and east of Hadong, also 75 miles away from the crucial supply port. Some American and South Korean forces had made slight gains in the area around Yongdok.
More than 3,000 enemy troops had been killed in the action in the Yongdong area. Some 31,000 Communists had been killed or wounded in action in the war to date and 170 tanks had been destroyed with another 100 damaged.
A British carrier plane was inadvertently shot down along the Korean west coast by an American B-29 after the plane was not recognized.
MacArthur headquarters urged war correspondents to use discretion in reporting to avoid harming morale of the troops and the prestige of the United States, such as stories of American soldiers running down the road from the enemy while sobbing. When a spokesman for General MacArthur was asked why headquarters did not engage in censorship of stories it felt were inappropriate, he replied that it was not possible. The previous week, General MacArthur had said, after General Walker had supended briefly the press credentials of three correspondents for what he deemed inappropriate stories, that he had decided that he would leave to editors and reporters the job of censorship.
Several members of Congress, including Republicans after conferring with John Foster Dulles, voiced the belief that four billion dollars would be added to the foreign military aid program, which had recently been funded with 1.222 billion. The U.S. would insist, however, that the recipient nations bear a substantial share of the burden of rebuilding their own military capability. One military leader said that if they received twelve billion in aid over four years, they would need contribute eight billion or 40 percent. Total appropriated foreign aid at present for the fiscal year was 4.5 billion and so the proposed additional military aid would nearly double that amount.
The Senate approved the House-passed bill giving the Government authority to order searches of ships entering American harbors, to prevent sabotage.
A rising sentiment was taking place in Congress for complete mobilization along the lines suggested earlier in the week by Bernard Baruch, including price and wage controls, rather than only the limited controls requested by the President.
At the Long Range Proving Ground in Cocoa, Fla., a 14.25-ton two-stage rocket was launched from a concrete pad at Cape Canaveral into the Atlantic in a successful test of a guided missile during the early morning. As with the rocket launched on July 19, this one was a German V-2 topped by a 700-lb. Wac Corporal. The unofficial estimate of the top speed of the Wac Corporal was 3,000 mph.
The State Department reported that American Vice-Consul Douglas Mackiernan had been killed on April 13 by Tibetan border guards who apparently mistook his camel-borne caravan for bandits while they tried to escape 1,200 miles across the Himalayas from Communist-held northwest China in Sinkiang Province, having started the journey the previous late September. The Tibetan Government had expressed apology for the two killings and wounding of a third member of the party. The only other American had escaped injury.
In Brussels, the Government of Belgium declared a state of siege in Liege after protests erupted anew regarding the return from exile of King Leopold III. Liege was the heart of the opposition to the King, who was perceived as having sold out Belgium to the Nazis in 1940 and for his having married a commoner after the war. Protesters wandered through the streets singing the "Marseillaise".
Calipatria, California, in the Imperial Valley, suffered its tenth earthquake in three days, damaging much of the business district of the small town. No injuries were reported.
Tom Fesperman of The News had
tried the Army's new "Ration, Individual, Combat, C-3",
replacing the C, K, and Ten-in-One rations of World War II. It had
just been approved by the Army and would likely soon be shipped to
Korea. His verdict, having served in the Army during the war, was
that the ration, which consisted of three meals, while not the
cuisine of a quality restaurant, was not bad. A photograph shows him
chowing down
No wine or candles? At least, with all those cans rattling about in your pack, you don't need to worry about the bears not hearing your approach up the trail
On the editorial page, "Russia Returns to the UN" tells of former Secretary of State James Byrnes stating his belief that Russia ending its boycott of the U.N. after six months was the result of it not wanting to precipitate a world war at the present time, and predicted that the return of the Soviets to the Security Council would mean an end to the Korean conflict.
Other unidentified spokesmen saw other motives, the Russian determination to block in the Security Council action on the Korean war, a desire to oust the Nationalist Chinese from the Council, a plan to use the organization as a forum for attacking U.S. involvement in Korea as an act of "imperialism" and "aggression", or as a basis for preventing U.N. action against another planned aggressive move elsewhere.
But, it predicts, if the Soviets returned with the object of obstruction in mind, it would only hasten the day when the democracies would set up a new organization incorporating the "hard and bitter lessons" of the previous five years.
"Pork-Barrel As Usual" finds the Senate refusing to go along with the dedicated effort by Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, joined by Senators Leverett Saltonstall, Homer Ferguson and Styles Bridges, surgically to remove from the non-defense spending 365 million dollars for pork-barrel projects. The vote against it was 47 to 28, and it finds the Senate in so doing had shirked its responsibility to exercise economy, even in a national crisis.
"The Farm Bloc Wins Again" finds that the farm bloc in Congress and the American Farm Bureau Federation had managed to steamroll the President's sensible proposal to allow the Government to sell its farm surpluses at support prices as long as it was not below market price, rather than the current minimum of five percent above support prices, to hold down food prices during the war. But enough objections were made that the support price might become the ceiling price and that the surpluses ought instead be turned over to the Army that the Administration had decided to withdraw the proposal. The farm bloc, it finds, won all of its proposals while the consumers inevitably suffered, despite paying for the farm supports.
A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "The High Cost of Speeding", tells of tests conducted in Iowa showing that driving 65 mph cost $6.48 more in gas and oil over the course of a thousand miles than the $12.95 while driving at 35, $1.56 more at 45, and $3.70 more at 55. The chances of a serious accident also multiplied with higher speed. Meanwhile, the higher the cruising speed was on a trip, the lower was the average speed, dropping to an average of 53 for a maximum cruising speed of 65. It recommends cruising speeds in the range of 40 to 50 to reduce the chance of accidents and maximize fuel economy.
Those were the days when you could go 100 miles on two dollars worth of gas.
But thank President Obama for the fact that you can now go 100 miles in a comfortable hybrid vehicle for about five dollars worth of gas.
Meanwhile, the present Idiot promises to protect you from boogie men who were never menacing you in the first place, except out of your mind from watching too much of the Fox News Agenda. And while he fiddles, building a wall to maintain our Southern border, North Korea threatens with virtual impunity our security in the most fundamental way possible, with an ICBM which can carry a nuclear warhead as far as Chicago. He does nothing because he is basically stupid and powerless, more concerned about whipping up demagogic hatred regarding breaches of visible borders and appealing to the prejudices of his remaining political base of idiots than the more serious types of international governmental breaches of protocol with nuclear weapons, preferring to tweet his pettifoggery of personal frustrations and vanities rather than acting as even a quasi-leader of any substance and creativity, expressly leaving it to the Chinese to deal with North Korea—out of sight, out of mind.
Hey, dummy, they can hit Chicago and Los Angeles and are not accountable to anyone at present in the international community. It may be awhile yet before they could penetrate our antimissile defenses, but the time may come sooner than we think when that will begin to be problematic. Then what?
He behaves as a deer caught in the headlights, as he understands nothing of politics or leadership—just as everyone with sense a year ago, including many prominent Republicans, tried to tell the idiots who voted for him would be the case with a person who has never before served in a political or governmental capacity. Being a businessman is no resume for being President of the United States, as it never has been before in our history. His reaction to any hint of crisis or disfavor is to fire somebody or hide behind his tweeting machine like a little boy pouting in the corner office for not getting his way about who gets the most donuts for dessert at supper.
The Chief Moron should be making a speech to the American people of the imminent danger posed by that lunatic in Pyongyang and what he intends to do to counter his insanity rather than tweeting daily his asinine, disconnected, irrelevant non sequiturs about nothing of consequence to anyone but idiots and creeps—his daily entertainment for the deplorables. He should have done so a month ago upon the first ICBM launch. Maybe no one has informed him, as he may well have never read a genuine history book of substance, that this crisis is real and ought be priority number one, taking precedence over everything else right now until resolved by agreement on the part of North Korea to join the community of nations and stop threatening the rest of the world or be completely reduced to an island and possibly one of rubble.
Where are all the big, bad, brave Republicans who were so ready 14 years ago to carry us into an already emasculated and relatively harmless Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction which did not exist? They are busy in midnight sessions trying to take away everyone's health care insurance, acting on behalf of their buddies, the insurance companies and drug companies, while trying to give a neat little sales pitch to their dummies back home who vote for them on how bad the Affordable Care Act is, which they have been trying to derail in such sales pitches for seven years lest they lose the support from their well-heeled campaign contributors.
The sum of it is dumb, absurd and ridiculous. If we get through the next three and a half years under governance by this crowd of rich, disconnected, dissociative dumbbells whose sole raison d'etre in life is to make money and serve moneyed interests, without a nuclear warhead hitting us from afar, we will be doing well.
What is wrong with these dummies who want suicidally to court disaster by electing to office such crazy people who appoint only rich, manipulative morons to serve in various significant positions? If you want to gamble with your own future, fine. Go to Las Vegas or Reno. But don't try to take the rest of us along on your self-destructive tour of hell because you cannot think, respect only money and people who make loads of it. Slash your wrists on your own time.
Drew Pearson explains of the efforts of the past peace conferences to stop war. He had attended the 1928 Havana conference at which President Coolidge, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes had proposed to the Pan American nations the creation of an organization to keep the peace through international arbitration. The nations had agreed but when the treaty went before the Senate for ratification, Republican isolationists called it an act of treachery and refused to approve, defeating it.
He had also gone to the London Naval Conference, where Secretary of State Henry Stimson sought to put forward a consultative pact whereby the U.S. would agree in the event of threatened war merely to consult with the other nations. But when President Hoover got wind of the proposal, he quickly disavowed it and the proposal failed.
In 1931, when China invaded Manchuria, Secretary Stimson again sought international cooperation to avert what he foresaw correctly as the beginning of a world war. Even so small a step as having the U.S. Consul in Geneva sit in on the meetings of the League of Nations, however, was met with a chorus of protests from the Republicans in Congress. President Hoover even finally replaced the U.S. Consul with former Vice-President Charles G. Dawes, trusted by the isolationists.
The French and British meanwhile eschewed the intervention of the U.S. in the matter and the League of Nations proceeded to debate the issue for months, putting forth a report after a year, by which time it was too late to stop Japan which had by then gained a foothold. Japan realized then that it could thumb its nose at the League. The "return to normalcy" called for by President Harding in 1921 was dying away. Secretary Stimson continued to wage the fight in 1932 against the Japanese aggression but got nowhere.
Now, North Korea, on the Manchurian border, was starting a fight which had the potential for leading to general war. But this time, the President and the U.N. had taken decisive and immediate action against the invasion. And the Republicans were onboard, including former isolationist Senators Taft and Knowland, who had been critical of the President's neglect of the Far East, specifically China. He finds that the cooperation on Korea would likely be a milestone toward preventing future wars. This smaller war was, he says, an international gamble aimed at preventing a greater war.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop find that what was happening in Formosa and on the China Coast opposite the island was at least as ominous as that going on in Korea. All of the information available to the U.S. suggested an imminent attack on Formosa by the Chinese Communists. Yet, the Government had not reached a consensus on a policy for dealing with the situation.
An armada of 5,000 junks, most capable of carrying masses of troops, was collecting in Fukien Province for the purpose. The armada was supported by hundreds of fast Soviet-made jets which could challenge the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
And, complicating the situation even more, there was no effective liaison between the American forces and the Nationalist Army and Government on Formosa, creating fierce anti-American feeling there.
Still, U.S. officials believed that the Fleet was sufficient to repel the armada and its air support in the event of attack, which would, if it happened, occur at night. The armada could be dispersed sufficiently by American forces so that those troops which would land could be effectively defeated by Chiang Kai-Shek's forces.
Yet, there was hope that the Communist Chinese, not desirous of a fight with the U.S., would not attack Formosa. But there was no plan in place for the contingency of Formosa falling or what the reaction would be if American ships were sunk, or for the possibility of Communist Chinese appeal to the Soviets for direct intervention under the Sino-Soviet mutual defense treaty.
The Alsops thus urge resolution of these issues and setting of a firm policy on Formosa and warn that if the Government continued to stumble along from crisis to crisis, disaster would result.
Marquis Childs discusses the recent primaries, including the defeat in the runoff primary in Oklahoma of Senator Elmer Thomas by Congressman Mike Monroney. Senator Thomas's political career had spanned back to 1907 when Oklahoma had first achieved statehood.
In Arkansas, the President's friend, Governor Sid McMath, had defeated former Governor Ben Laney, leader of the Dixiecrats in that state.
When James Byrnes had received the gubernatorial nomination in South Carolina, prior to the Korean war, Northern conservatives had rejoiced, believing that he would lead the Dixiecrats against the Fair Deal. But Mr. Byrnes also believed in social and economic democracy, as he had advocated upon return from Paris in 1946 while Secretary of State. He quotes extensively from Mr. Byrnes and finds that his words of unity were instructive for the present crisis and recommends bringing him back into the Government as a symbol of unity.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of neither Senator Clyde Hoey nor Senator Frank Graham having yet joined the chorus trying to place blame for Korea on the economizing policies of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. Senator Graham had pointed out that the economy bloc in Congress had applauded the moves. Senator Hoey could not understand why, with the 50 billion spent on defense, the U.S. was so unprepared for war, but stressed that he was not blaming any particular person. He pointed out that Army privates in the U.S. received $900 per year while the Russian brigadier general got only $300 per year.
The late adjournment of Congress was interfering with the workers who were refurbishing the Senate and House chambers, begun the previous summer.
Senator Hoey's investigations into homosexuals and perverts had gone through three private hearings. He said the hearings would be ongoing for some time.
Both Senators Hoey and Graham believed that the report of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee condemning Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges against the State Department as a "fraud and a hoax", adopted by the full Senate, had taken care of the matter.
The latest books on Senator Graham's desk were Ordeal by Slander by Owen Lattimore, one of the central figures charged with disloyalty by Senator McCarthy, William Henry Belk: Merchant of the South by LeGette Blythe, and Treasury of Southern Folklore by B. A. Botkin. Missing was John T. Flynn's The Road Ahead, which had disparaged Senator Graham as being sympathetic with subversive organizations.
Senator Graham had supported the defeated four million dollar increase in funding for the Voice of America while Senator Hoey opposed it.
Administration leaders believed that Willis Smith, who had defeated Senator Graham in the June 24 primary runoff, would join the Fair Deal opponents but that Congressman George Smathers, who had defeated Senator Claude Pepper in the Florida primary, held promise for being an ally on many matters.
Rumor was that Senator Graham would replace chief U.N. delegate Warren Austin if he could be persuaded to retire.
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