The Charlotte News

Monday, September 25, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that allied forces had penetrated deep inside Seoul this date against stiff enemy resistance, fighting from mud-hut to mud-hut and from high ground, including the 700-foot South Mountain. The latter position was being attacked by the Seventh Division, crossing the Han river under cover of dawn mists. On Sunday, American Marines, under the command of Col. Lewis "Chesty" Puller, had planted the American flag on a hilltop in Seoul, in the Tong Mak Sang district, less than two miles from the Duk Soo Palace at the city center, a goal which Tenth Corps officers said they hoped to reach within a few hours.

Four forces were converging on the palace, as fresh allied troops entered the front, after an unidentified American airborne unit of 2,400 men had landed at Kimpo airfield on Sunday, following a quick trip from the U.S. via Japan, entering action a few hours later as ground troops.

To the southeast, First Cavalry armored patrols, which had driven 70 miles in four days, entered Chongju, 40 miles from the allied second front along the Inchon-Seoul beachhead. A link of the two forces would threaten thousands of enemy troops in the south. Seventh Division patrols struck 30 miles south from Seoul through Osan, where American troops first entered the war in early July.

The Defense Department released another casualty list, containing the names of 231 servicemen, of whom 55 were dead, including nineteen passengers who were killed when a Navy transport crashed into the sea near Kwajalein on September 18. Of the others, 116 were wounded and 50 were missing, while ten were injured in war zone accidents.

At the U.N., Yugoslav Vice-Premier Edvard Kardelj, in a speech to the General Assembly, called for re-establishment of the 38th parallel as the demarcation line between North and South Korea and attacked those supporting North Korea's aggression, implying Russia and Communist China, though mentioning neither by name. He also said that Russia had accelerated its aggression against Yugoslavia by provoking new border incidents. Yugoslavia introduced a resolution to establish a permanent mediation commission consisting of the small powers, and another, requiring a nation involved in an armed conflict to issue a ceasefire order within 24 hours and withdraw its armed forces from disputed territory, failing which would cause the nation to be branded an aggressor.

Robert Hanes of Winston-Salem, head of ERP in West Germany, reported that industrial production was up in Western Europe by 30 percent over that of 1938, the year before the war. He said that food supplies were increasing and rationing was nearly a thing of the past. He attributed the success to the Marshall Plan.

The Government's receipts were running ahead of spending for the first time since the start of the fiscal year on July 1, primarily because of quarterly income tax payments in September. A year earlier, the Government ran a deficit of 1.89 billion dollars, finishing the year with a 3.1 billion dollar deficit. Some officials believed that the Government would end the 1950-51 fiscal year with a surplus, notwithstanding increased defense spending.

Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan charged the leadership of the American Farm Bureau Federation with making "untruthful and vicious" attacks on him in their fight against his farm plan to lower consumer prices on food while maintaining farm prices at support levels. The president of the Federation, to whom Mr. Brannan addressed the letter making the charge, had made several speeches attacking the plan, claiming it would dissipate the reserves of corn, cotton, wheat, and other storable crops. Mr. Brannan described it as an attempt to use the Korean war as a means of destroying confidence of all Americans in the Administration's farm program. He said that he had been aggressive in advocating large reserves.

Parachutists were dropped to effect rescue of 16 U.S. airmen after the crash of their B-50 bomber in the Labrador wilderness on Thursday, following discovery of the bomber the previous night, 95 miles southwest of Goose Bay, from which it had taken off for a flight to Tuscon. It was hoped that the helicopter evacuation of the crew and four passengers would be completed this date. The cause of the crash remained undetermined. The navigator aboard the bomber, Captain James Joyner, was from Pittsboro, N.C., and a former teacher in Robeson and Brunswick Counties.

Emery Wister of The News tells of 120 men from Mecklenburg County being inducted into the Army, the first since late 1948. They were told to take one step forward, and when done, they had obeyed their first order and were in the Army. Some were cheerful, while others appeared despondent. They would be bused to Fort Jackson, S.C., where they would be given adaptability tests before beginning training, likely on Thursday.

In Miami, twelve persons, including girls with "well-modulated 'telephone' voices" were under arrest for theft from the Southern Bell Telephone Co. They had been taking money collected from the Bell counting room for several years, amounting to hundreds of thousand of dollars. The girls stuffed quarters into their bras before putting them in the counting machine.

On the editorial page, "The Record of Congress" finds the President's remark that he was generally pleased with the record of the 81st Congress to ignore the fact that, while it had passed most of the President's favored foreign policy, it had failed to reach most of his Fair Deal domestic program, with the exception of expansion of Social Security and public housing. But such things as compulsory health insurance, Federal aid for medical training, Federal aid to education, the anti-lynching bill, the anti-poll tax bill, the FEPC bill, the repeal of Taft-Hartley, and establishment of universal military training had all been left to founder.

The Congressional Quarterly had summed the 1950 session by saying that the Congress had passed most of the Administration's foreign policy bills while refusing to pass most of the domestic measures, after forcing the Administration to fight every step of the way for the things it wanted, with Congress being controlled by a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans.

"The Law of the Land" hopes that the override of the President's veto of the anti-subversion bill passed by Congress, which required registration of Communists and front organizations with criminal penalties for failing to do so, while also providing for emergency internment of subversives and preventing Communists from Federal employment, would result in a law which would be administered fairly to prohibit true abuses of democracy rather than serving to chill freedom of speech by Americans who were merely dissenting. It warns that no nation could remain free if it did not allow its people to speak their minds without being labeled Communists or fellow travelers—and in 2017, it might be added, without having the "President" of the United States label them "sons of bitches".

This "President" is the royal son of a bitch who knows not his place in our democracy, for he is an amateur without experience in governance of any kind, obviously having never taken so much as a civics course to understand what the chief executive of the land is supposed to do and from what, in humility, honor, and discretion, he is supposed to refrain. Next time, at least run for dogcatcher in New York City before seeking the presidency, moron.

"The First Team Takes Over" echoes the finding of Stewart Alsop in his column of September 16 when he said that the Administration had managed, despite the President's decided tendency toward cronyism, to collect an excellent team of foreign policy experts in Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of Defense Marshall, Averell Harriman, new CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, Air Secretary Thomas Finletter and Army Secretary Frank Pace, among others. It suggests that this first team would do better than the "scrubs", including former Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and former CIA director Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter.

A piece from the McDowell News, titled "With Eyes to See", tells of the last vestiges of summer disappearing in McDowell County, being replaced by the variegated tones of fall, while the grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets sang their song of farewell to summer.

Max Ascoli, in a piece from The Reporter, provides a statement of The Reporter's purpose and editorial positions, stating that it was not moderate, was conservative on American democracy, advocating that it follow the form intended by the Founders while expanding democracy to include international labor and race relations, was very much anti-Communist but also not willing to allow Communism to become such a nemesis that the basic tenets of democracy were ignored. The bi-weekly magazine, he says, tried to cover the issues and stories which mattered most for the building of peace in the world and living up to the responsibilities which the nation had undertaken on the world stage.

Drew Pearson tells of Kim Soo Im, the Korean Mata Hari who had lived with an American Army Colonel, John E. Baird, and provided the Communists with key details of American Army strength. She had been executed by South Korea as a spy the prior June. Col. Baird was the provost marshal in charge of maintaining order among American occupation troops in Korea and thereafter was a top adviser to the South Korean Army. It was well known that Kim Soo Im was married to one of Korea's top Communists, Lee Kang Kook, who had been hiding from the military government. No one protested the relationship to Col. Baird because of American prestige in Seoul.

At Kim's espionage trial the prior May, Col. Baird claimed that he was using her as an interpreter to try to obtain information. But it turned out that the North Koreans knew a great deal about American military operations while the U.S. knew little of the North Korean operations. She had confessed her entire espionage scheme during the trial and made Col. Baird look foolish for not having known of it. Eventually, Lee Kang Kook, having evaded police capture for a year in the South, fled to North Korea through the efforts of his wife, who used a jeep from the U.S. Army motor pool to transport him, with Lee disguised as a doctor to provide care for Kim's supposedly ailing mother.

Col. Baird had left Korea on June 3, at about the time of Kim's execution, and was on leave from the Army.

The Army was concerned that other such situations could occur with American officers in Germany or Japan, where officers were apart from their families for long periods.

The President appreciated the help of liberal Congressman Andrew Biemiller of Wisconsin in trying to get enacted the Fair Deal policies. Mr. Biemiller had thus won the enmity of the powerful lobbies, including the AMA, a source of pride to him. The President had told him that he had been fighting these interests since 1920, when he had been a county judge in Missouri, where it was practically impossible in that time to enter a hospital without putting up $200. He fought to get a hospital for the indigent, was opposed by the major interests, but finally succeeded. He said that he would carry on the fight for compulsory medical insurance and the bill to aid medical schools until they became law.

Robert C. Ruark discusses the career of Congressman Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who had been considered as a candidate for Governor of New York and was now being considered for the position of Secretary of the Navy, finding that while he had, as his brother, James, the FDR smile and charisma, he had done little to demonstrate his fitness for high office otherwise. James was the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in California, a position for which, Mr. Ruark finds, he also had demonstrated no particular attribute beyond being the son of the late President.

He remarks that if a smile were the chief qualification for high office, then Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, or Joe E. Brown ought run for President.

He urges both Franklin, Jr., and James to go out into the world and first make a name for themselves in law or business on their own hook, and then run for higher office. Senator Taft had developed his own political identity apart from his father. The late General Roosevelt had done so apart from father Theodore.

Marquis Childs again urges the need for the West, and especially the United States, to cultivate the goodwill of India and the willingness of Prime Minister Nehru to condemn Soviet imperialism in the Far East, as a path to peace in that region of the world. Pandit Nehru had convinced the Communist Chinese that the U.S. had no territorial aims in Formosa and intended no aggression against the Chinese mainland, going a long way toward getting the Communists thus far not to intervene in Korea.

India had great problems internally from floods, drought, and an earthquake in the Assam region. There was a general feeling that Asians were not consulted on matters affecting their destiny, as when the British Ambassador to the U.S. was shown the advance draft of the President's June 27 statement on Korea, Formosa, and the Far East, but the Indian Ambassador was not.

A major opponent of Prime Minister Nehru had been elected head of the Congress Party in India, having a different view on the India-Pakistan conflict from that of Nehru, who was working to bring a peaceful resolution. As long as the conflict persisted, Nehru's attentions were divided from being a mediator for the West in Asia.

Mr. Childs finds that the centrality of the conflict between India and Pakistan to peace and world cooperation in the region was so significant that he was traveling to India and Pakistan to interview both Nehru and Pakistani Prime Minister Ali Khan, to try to understand what they perceived as the mutual responsibilities of East and West, of Europe, North America and Asia.

A letter writer finds that Drew Pearson had commented on his Sunday night show of the million dollar fund of the AMA to defeat liberal candidates in the November election. He wonders why Mr. Pearson never commented on the millions spent by AFL and CIO to defeat conservatives in Congress.

Well, it's because they are a bunch of lying sons of bitches who want to pad the pockets of the rich, to get themselves continually elected with big campaign chests, while selling snake oil to the gullible voters they seek to delude with promises of trickle-down economics as they make pretense of catering to every little whim and fancy the voters might conjure on their wish lists of "change" back to the way things 'twere when ol' grandpappy was alive—when the bullwhip and noose kept people in line.

When are you Trumpies going to start to think for a change, sit down and consider where your interests actually lie, compared to those of the clown in the White House? and realize that, as with the dupes of Trump U., you've been brainwashed and sold a load of worthless goods through a bunch of jingoistic phrases that are devoid of any substance, just a lot of blowing of steam and trying to hold back the ocean with a broom.

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