Site Ed. Note: The front page
reports that allied troops had been informed by General Walton
Walker, ground commander, that soon they would be engaged in
offensive operations—with the as yet unknown imminent landing
on Inchon. The allied gains of the prior three days were the greatest
in nearly a month, sealing much of the gap through which the North
Koreans had threatened breakthrough from Kigye near the east coast.
American and South Korean troops, led by a task force under the
command of Brig. General Gar Davidson, the former West Point football
coach and star end, had closed off a three-mile gap also in the
southern gate of a mountain corridor, in the area south of Pohang and
northwest of Kyongju, trapping 3,000 enemy troops. The "left
end run" had forced the enemy to return to their lines or face
death. American big guns had also wiped out 200 enemy troops as they
stormed a peak near Masan in the southern sector.
On the Masan front, a North Korean
soldier surrendered with a leaflet dropped by the U.N. forces, and
asked for more "tickets" to enable surrender of others
who wanted to do likewise. He was given a handful of the leaflets and
ten minutes later, four more North Koreans surrendered.
Front line troops would continue to
receive beer for free, according to an unidentified Army official,
following removal of the one small can per day ration the previous
day, provoking a howl of protest heard as far as Washington, where
Representative John Dingell of Michigan asserted that the free beer
was essential for the front line troops. But Representative Joseph Bryson of
South Carolina believed beer should not be served to the troops or to
civilians at home during wartime, and introduced a bill to prohibit
the practice to conserve alcohol for medicinal purposes. The beer was
not made available to soldiers in the rear—no rear beer.
Following the accepted resignation
of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, effective the following
Tuesday, the President had asked Congress to make exception under the
1947 National Security Act to allow for appointment of General George
C. Marshall to become Secretary of Defense. The Act prohibited anyone
who had been in active military service during the prior ten years
from so serving. The Senate Armed Services Committee had already
approved the change, 10 to 2, and the House Armed Services Committee
was expected to take up the matter shortly. The proposed bill would
allow the General to retain his rank and continue to receive pay and
allowances for that rank. The original provision of the Act had been
designed to prevent undue influence on military men as Defense
Secretary from those being supervised at the Pentagon.
The resignation of Mr. Johnson and
appointment of General Marshall had strengthened the hand of
Secretary of State Acheson, meeting with the French and British
foreign ministers in New York to discuss rearming of Western Europe.
The policies of General Marshall were more closely aligned with those
of Secretary Acheson than had been those of Secretary Johnson.
Diplomatic authorities said that the
subject of the treaty with Japan, not yet formalized, would be
discussed between Secretary Acheson and British Foreign Secretary
Ernest Bevin, probably the following week.
The Senate Foreign Relations
Committee approved appointment of former New York City Mayor William
O'Dwyer as Ambassador to Mexico, by a vote of 8 to 0.
The Committee also unanimously voted
to ask the Senate to issue contempt citations against Earl Browder,
Frederick Vanderbilt Field and Philip Jaffe for contempt of Congress
for refusing to answer questions before the subcommittee
investigating the charges brought by Senator McCarthy of Communists
in the State Department, subsequently denounced by the Senate as a
"fraud and a hoax".
The House Rules Committee bypassed
the controversial excess profits tax to speed final action on the 4.5
billion dollar tax increase bill.
Maj. General Lewis Hershey, head of
Selective Service, told the Senate Appropriations Committee the
previous day that he was making plans to induct between 370,000 and
500,000 men before July 1, 1951.
In Pittsburgh, the engineer of the
Pennsylvania Railroad train which had crashed into the rear of the
troop train near Coshocton, O., killing 33 National Guardsmen,
testified at a hearing before the Interstate Commerce Commission that
he was trying to make up time when the crash occurred, after being 29
minutes late leaving Pittsburgh and losing another minute en route.
He said visibility was restricted by fog. He guessed his speed to be
50 mph at the time of the crash, whereas ICC regulations required
that speed be reduced to 30 mph at an approach block, which the train
had passed just prior to the collision. He also admitted that he had
not applied his brakes properly at a stop-and-proceed signal just
before the crash. He applied his emergency brake as soon as he saw deployed
flares and a flagman before the stalled train, but it was
too late, with the stalled train only 50 car lengths away.
A Presidential emergency board,
formed to investigate disputes between the New York Central Railroad
and its employees, accused four railroad unions of an effort to
extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from the carrier.
Another earthquake was reported from
northern Assam in India, possibly more violent than the one which had
taken 5,000 lives in the same area the prior August 15. The new
tremors had lasted 90 minutes.
On the editorial page, "Exit
Johnson, Enter Marshall" praises the appointment of General
Marshall to replace Louis Johnson who had just resigned as Secretary
of Defense after months of controversy regarding his economizing
program on defense, which many believed had emboldened the Communists
to wage war in Korea.
While others found that Mr. Johnson
was only being made a scapegoat for economizing policies of the
Administration to make way for spending on Fair Deal domestic
policies, or that blame should be cast on Congress and the American
people for supporting these moves, he had become ineffective as
Secretary of Defense in time of war and it was time for him to go. He
had been the victim of circumstances, no doubt, but had also brought
about much of his own trouble by bragging of superior defenses on an
economized budget, when the opposite had proved true when war broke
out.
General Marshall, who had been
Secretary of State from early 1947 to early 1949, would bring a
history of stable administration practices to the job, first having
been Army chief of staff during the war. While the Congress would
have to amend the National Security Act of 1947 to accommodate the
appointment, to eliminate its prohibition of any Secretary of Defense
from service who had been on active military duty during the previous
ten years, General Marshall had demonstrated his ability to divorce
himself from his military service in his administrative capacity, as
shown when he had been Secretary of State.
General Marshall had been the first
architect of Far Eastern policy, finding the Communist Chinese
administration no worse than the corruption and inefficiency he
observed in the Chiang Kai-Shek Government, while serving as the
President's envoy to China in 1946. Thus, his appointment would
likely be opposed by those in Congress who favored Nationalist China
over the Communist regime. It asserts that such opposition, however,
would likely not delay amendment of the Act to permit him to serve or
his subsequent rapid confirmation for the post.
General Marshall, it concludes,
would provide relief from the confusion which had enveloped defense
policy and caused great consternation since the start of the
Korean war.
"Crime and Politics" finds that the withdrawal of Morris Shenker, the criminal defense
attorney from St. Louis, from the appointment to be a member of the
DNC Finance Committee for the fact, as suggested by Senator Estes
Kefauver, that prosecutors might show lenience to his clients in
deference to his political position, had not explained why he was
appointed to the position in the first place. Senator Alexander Wiley
had also criticized the appointment.
Mr. Shenker represented William
Molasky, top racing news distributor in St. Louis, and James Carroll,
former St. Louis betting commissioner, among others, the activities
of both of whom had been investigated by the Senate.
It finds the withdrawal proper but
that it still left unexplained why he had been selected in the first
place.
"A Coach's Garden of Verses" provides verses for coaches of such institutions as Slippery Rock
Teachers College and Spearfish Normal, who routinely fielded football
teams pressed to come up with a single victory.
Samples:
"There's a destiny shapes our
ends." —William Shakespeare (The line, from Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2, is actually, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends..." And it was so as far back as the line existed in print. If ye darest dispute it, have on.)
"These lines made I. Another
steals my honors." —Virgil
"My wants are many, and, if
told Would muster many a score."
—John Quincy Adams
"A pretty foot is a great gift
of nature." —Goethe
While about it, though we mean no
insinuation that the 2017 UNC football team will not win its fair
share of games eventually, a beginning toward which, however, having
not yet been made manifest, we suggest emendation of the new slogan
adorning the entry tunnel to the field at Kenan Stadium, from "The
ceiling is the roof," to "The ceiling's roof is the Blue
sky aloof." We offer this suggestion without intending in any
manner to criticize the slogan's author, a well known former athlete
of the University, but it was uttered off the cuff and, in truth,
makes no sense, now, does it?—the less so, the more one considers
it, especially as Kenan Stadium has no roof beneath the heavens, on which also, insofar as we are aware, there is no roof. Just paint slashes through the other words so as not to obliterate them and insert the new
ones, so that the double lines will supply the dual force of power
henceforth through the season.
Take our word for it. We have been
around for centuries supporting the Tar Heels. Don't mess with a good
thing.
There's no power in a limp defense.
John P. McKnight, brother of News
editor Pete McKnight, and formerly for 20 years an A.P. foreign
correspondent, presents the second of three pieces on efforts to stop
the spread of domestic Communist propaganda, this time stressing the
conflict with civil rights under the Constitution in bringing about
such control. The fact that Communists had invoked these civil rights
had led to suspicion by Americans that every time someone did so,
they might be Communists. In that manner, Communist propaganda had
seeped into the society to produce suspicions by Americans of each
other, no matter how loyal.
But to allow the Communists to
maneuver the American people into laying aside these freedoms
expediently for the duration of the cold war was to enable them
fatally to impair the chance of victory for democracy, as its
foundations rested on these very freedoms. The rights protected by
the Constitution could be denied to no one, no matter how demanding
the circumstances or unpopular the cause being protected.
The test case in Durham of the young
man who had deliberately defied the Recorder Court Judge's order to
police to arrest for vagrancy anyone caught distributing the
Soviet-backed Stockholm peace treaty petition stood as an example of this
conflict, which, when boiled down, was an attempt to deny a citizen
basic rights under the First Amendment.
To allow freedoms to be eroded
little by little in such manner would potentially so inure the people
to the process as to subject them eventually to tyranny.
He quotes the unknown "Junius",
who in 1769 sent a letter to London's "Public Advertiser",
saying: "When the constitution is openly invaded, when the
first original right of the people, from which all laws derive their
authority, is directly attacked, inferior grievances naturally lose
their force, and are suffered to pass by without punishment or
observation."
Drew Pearson tells of the details of
the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get Lieutenant Governor Joe
Hanley of New York to withdraw from the Republican race to make way
for the draft-Dewey movement which had resulted in the Governor
declaring for a third term after previously announcing his retirement
from politics. Mr. Hanley had been promised a job on the Throughway
Commission, with a $25,000 salary, should he lose the Senate race to
former Governor and incumbent Senator Herbert Lehman. He also would
receive another $15,000 in income from an oil company, making his
total salary about what he would have received as Governor. The Dewey
camp had also pledged to repay the $30,000 put up by Frank Gannett,
Kingsland Macy, and one other to pay off Mr. Hanley's debts.
Chief British U.N. delegate Sir
Gladwyn Jebb had suddenly become a recognizable television star after
becoming the president of the U.N. Security Council for the month of
September, causing people to approach on the street to shake his
hand. It made him feel uncomfortable as no member of the British
Foreign Service was supposed to be recognized publicly. A newsman had
insisted that he was second only to Milton Berle in importance to the
public of late, to which Sir Gladwyn responded by asking who Milton
Berle was.
After Senator Andrew Schoeppel of
Kansas had been challenged openly on the Senate floor by Secretary of
Interior Oscar Chapman to repeat his charges that Mr. Chapman had
Communist ties, in an open forum where he enjoyed no Senatorial
immunity, and the Senator had then refused reply to the invitation,
only saying that Frank Bow, his assistant who had ghost-written the
speech denouncing Mr. Chapman, was out of town, columnist Robert
Evans, former partner to Mr. Pearson, aptly whispered loudly,
"Another cockroach down the drain."
The Committee for Constitutional
Government, a right-leaning lobbying group supported by such powerful
Republicans as Frank Gannett and whose executive secretary was Edward
Rumely, jailed in World War I as an agent of the Kaiser, was
operating at taxpayer expense while distributing material which
opposed public housing and other Fair Deal measures. It did so
through friendly Congressmen who allowed their franking privilege to
be used to send out reprints of the material published by them in the
Congressional Record.
Marquis Childs discusses the Big
Three foreign ministers meeting to discuss rearming of Western Europe
to meet the threat from Russia. Secretary of State Acheson had to
contend along the way to this point with Secretary of Defense Louis
Johnson's economizing policies, relaxed since the start of the Korean
war. Secretary Acheson had long believed that the key to peace lay in
maintaining the peace in Western Europe, that rearming Europe, as he
recently had explained, would serve as a deterrent to Russian
aggression. Secretary Johnson and Secretary Acheson had differed on
the degree of commitment to Europe versus Asia.
The threat existed that Russia would
begin aggressive moves before Western Europe was strengthened. But
the Soviets had already taken the risk of general war by approving
the action of North Korea, and so it was time to act in Europe,
regardless of potentially triggering a reaction from the Kremlin.
The primary question therefore was
the speed with which the rearmament plan could be effected. General
Mark Clark, chief of the American occupation forces in West Germany,
was optimistic, that the first troops to augment the existing forces
would arrive within four months, and that five new divisions would
eventually be sent. But other military planners were not so
optimistic, asserting that divisions to be sent within a short time
would have to be National Guardsmen. Moreover, there would be a
problem with dependents of these troops were they, more or less, to
be permanently stationed in Western Europe.
Furthermore, in addition to the
economic strain on the country, as years would pass after such
mobilization, the psychological incentive present in wartime would be
lost if nothing happened. But at least Secretary Acheson was now
moving forward with a definite plan of action, dependent on the
compliance of Britain and France in contributing substantial numbers
of troops to match the complement to be supplied by the U.S.
Robert C. Ruark finds the present
stories in the news troubling, including the longshoremen taking into
their own hands the decision not to load Russian ships in defiance of
Presidential orders, the decision by General Foods to fire actress
Jean Muir for her supposed fellow traveling, and the unilateral
statements of Navy Secretary Matthews and General Orville Anderson,
favoring preventive war to establish the peace. (He leaves out
General MacArthur's withdrawn statement to the V.F.W. unilaterally
endorsing a policy of permanent support for Formosa, implying it as a
new policy of the Administration, apart from the U.N. policy of
neutralization for the duration of the Korean war only.)
Each of these matters involved
individuals or companies or trade unions taking matters of public
policy into their own hands, independent of Administration policy or
the legal framework. Government off the cuff was not appropriate, he
finds, even if the parties involved were correct.
He, personally, would advocate the
death penalty for Alger Hiss and convicted espionage agent Judy
Coplon, but, he admits, it was not his decision to make. He hated
also informants of the type of Whittaker Chambers, a reformed
Communist. Perhaps, he would applaud a decision to engage in
preventive war against Russia. But again, it was not his decision to
make. Likewise, it was not the decision of the longshoremen or the
V.F.W. or that of the Secretary of the Navy. Rather it was the
business of the responsible entities, the policy makers within the
Administration, the Justice Department or Congress.
He might have added today that it is
likewise not the business of the latest "press spokesperson"
for the White House, in off the cuff remarks, to suggest, one day, that
the Justice Department ought consider charges against the former FBI
director for "false statements", and then, the next, that
ESPN ought fire an announcer for tweeting that the "President"
is a "white supremacist" for having aligned and
surrounded himself with such persons.
The White House should not be
advising the Justice Department what to do, especially when the
ultimate basis for urging the charge is that the former FBI director
merely refused to play ball when attempted coercion was brought to
bear by the President to drop the investigation of collusion between
eventual Administration or Trump campaign personnel and the Russians
during the 2016 election, dangling implicitly the FBI director's job
and future in front of him as the bait, courageously not taken.
Furthermore, the White House, with
its duty to represent the entire nation, should not be telling a
private concern whom to fire or hire in any case, especially when the
reason asserted is merely an exercise in freedom of speech protected
by the First Amendment. It is wholly appropriate to call the
"President" a "white supremacist" when he has
gone around the country campaigning specifically to the rhetoric and
boot-stamp of such groups and individuals for the past two years,
repeatedly refusing, save half-heartedly when called out on the
matter, to condemn support by racist groups, dividing the country as
it never before has been divided in peacetime, prompting, even
promoting violence in that rhetoric.
But, we make room for the fact that
these people at the White House, including the "President",
are so incredibly amateurish and dumb, more so than the members of
any previous Administration in modern history, that they cannot
understand their official roles or the limits of their power, as
opposed to their rights as individuals to say whatever the hell they
want at a given moment. Yet, ignorance of the law and public duty and
the limits of power provides no excuse. They should have taken at
least a high school level civics course before accepting Government
employment or seeking public office. They know that their electoral
base did not, however, and so figure that it makes little difference, that a tour as a commentator on Fox News or starring in a reality tv show is sufficient preparation,
forgetting that the broad mass of American people do not support
them, never did, will not forget how this bunch came to power.
Good luck when the impeachment
proceedings finally begin in about sixteen months. You will have more
than earned the backlash which is going to take place in response to
your continued ignoring of the predominant will of the American
people, contrary to your ridiculous, short-sighted policies designed
to embolden white supremacists and their ilk.
