The Charlotte News

Friday, September 29, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that South Korean forces had chased broken North Korean units to the 38th parallel this night and then were commanded to halt, as no word had yet come from the U.N. as to whether they were authorized to pursue the units beyond the border.

It was also not clear whether any pursuit across the border would be left only to South Korean and other non-American forces, as suggested in diplomatic circles. It was thought that by keeping American forces out of any such fight, it would be less likely to trigger Soviet or Chinese response.

General MacArthur turned over Seoul to President Syngman Rhee in a ceremony at the Capitol on Friday. Ground commander General Walton Walker said that as far as they were concerned the war was over, as the enemy's army had disintegrated into ineffective pockets without offensive power.

India had informed the U.S., Britain and other Western nations that it would oppose U.N. forces going beyond the 38th parallel.

At the U.N., high officials believed that resolutions regarding Korea would be completed by the start of the General Assembly meeting this date. The Indian delegation said that it wanted to wait until Monday or Tuesday to consider the resolutions. A move was being pressed to keep the political committee in session to vote on another resolution to give express authority to General MacArthur to cross the parallel.

The Security Council voted 7 to 4 to permit Communist China to participate in the Council's Formosa debate after November 15, and the proposal was adopted. Nationalist China, however, challenged the resolution on the ground that it had vetoed it as a member of the Big Five. The U.S. had voted against the resolution. The decision was made to postpone, until November 15, consideration of Communist China's charge that the U.S. had been an aggressor against Formosa.

The State Department, in a 100-page booklet, titled "Our Foreign Policy", officially described Russia as a "power-hungry government" bent on spreading its power by "force and terror". The policy outline said that the Soviets had annexed 7.5 million square miles and taken control of 500 million people since the end of the war, and was now trying to extend its empire into Asia. It said that the Soviets had wiped out the three Baltic states and reduced to servitude Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania and Czechoslovakia, and had marked Communist China for the same fate. The President had suggested the work.

A North Korean medical officer told American prisoners who had just been rescued at Chinju that he had seen and treated General William Dean, missing since July 20. General Dean would be held as a prisoner by the North Koreans until the armistice in mid-1953.

Total American casualties in Korea, as of September 22, had reached 17,220, including 2,441 dead, 11,050 wounded and 3,959 missing. Of the missing, 167 had been returned as liberated prisoners. The Army accounted for 16,087 of the casualties and all except 220 of the dead.

General Lewis Hershey, director of Selective Service, told the House Armed Services Committee that he recommended extension of the draft from 21 months of service to 30 months, to maintain an Army of 1.5 million men.

West German police in Bonn undertook hurried preparations to meet expected rioting by thousands of Communists in at least nine cities of the industrial Ruhr during the weekend. They were protesting the strengthening of Western defenses in Germany. Agents of East Germany had been reported flowing into the Western sectors disguised as refugees.

Both employment and unemployment dropped in the country between August and September, as large numbers of students left the labor force to return to school.

In Santa Monica, California, Nancy Sinatra won a separation decree from husband Frank, including custody of their three children. She received temporary maintenance of over $50,000 per year, a new Cadillac and the couple's mansion.

On the editorial page, "Yield Not to Temptation" asserts that the President was so resistant to implementing economic controls because he had gone through the momentum to demobilize rapidly after World War II, which had produced the unreadiness for Korea. He did not want the same reaction to controls to take hold again after the Korean war ended.

Secretary of Defense Marshall was also urging America's continued responsibility and need for sacrifice after the end of the Korean war.

It concludes that the future pattern was being shaped by Korea, as the country had established a policy of resisting Communist aggression by peaceful methods, if possible, and by armed force if necessary. The oceans no longer afforded protection, and the luxury of time to prepare for retaliation to a first strike was no longer available in an era of the jet, the guided missile, the long-range bomber and the atom bomb.

"Mr. Gifford Goes to London" finds that Washington was bewildered by the fact that the President had appointed the head of A.T. & T. to become Ambassador to Great Britain, as he represented the big business interests which the President had so often railed against and was also a Republican who had supported Governor Dewey in 1948. While Mr. Gifford had outstanding abilities and had served the Government previously, Ambassador to Argentina James Bruce had been thought to have the inside track on the position.

The fact that the President had also appointed Robert Lovett, a Republican, as Undersecretary of Defense was further indication that the President was genuinely committed to putting in place the strongest team possible to implement diplomatic and military policy.

"End of a Champion" tells of the failure of the attempted comeback by the retired heavyweight champion Joe Louis, who, at 36, had tried to defeat a much younger boxer, Ezzard Charles, Wednesday night. He was overweight and wound up bloodied and battered. It suggests that the image thus conveyed had been hard for people to reconcile with the former image of the champ who had pummeled Braddock and Schmeling. People around Charlotte the day before had expressed pity for the once indomitable "Brown Bomber".

It concludes that it would take a few months for the feeling to wear off before the old image of Mr. Louis as the champ would return and be preserved.

"Why Don't You Vote, You Bums?" wonders whether insult would work to end the apathy of voters on local issues enough to get them to vote the next day on the 5.3 million dollar school bond issue, and so it asks the question posed in the title.

A piece from the Atlanta Journal, titled "Lewis Rings Down Own Iron Curtain", tells of John L. Lewis threatening that UMW coal miners would walk out of the mines if Senator Taft, as he had indicated he would, visited the mines in Ohio during his fall campaign. Mr. Lewis had said that the Senator, with Taft-Hartley, had riveted an "iron collar" around the necks of the workers.

The piece thinks, however, that Mr. Lewis was creating an iron curtain by disallowing the Senator the right of free speech without repercussions. It favors giving him unfettered access to the miners, for, otherwise, it appeared that Mr. Lewis was fearful that the Senator might convince the miners that the Taft-Hartley law was not so bad after all.

Drew Pearson finds that the new anti-subversion bill allowed for criminal penalties of any journalist who published secret documents, but that he was going to publish anyway a confidential State Department instruction which he deemed to be one of the most important issued since the war. It was an instruction to the U.N. General Assembly delegates to take the organization out of the debating stage and enter it into action when effective defense was frustrated in the Security Council, and to organize the Assembly to deter further aggression. It represented a shift in policy from making the Council the dominant power at the U.N.

The smaller nations at the Charter conference in 1945 had sought to curtail the veto power of the Big Five in favor of majority rule in the Assembly. The U.S. had then sided with the Russians in favoring the veto.

The British and French, however, were dragging their feet on coming aboard the U.S. proposal.

Washington Post reporter Al Friendly had put the effort of Senator George Malone of Nevada to music regarding his filibuster in favor of slot machines. The verse, sung to the tune of "Home on the Range", is provided, first line of which is: "Oh give me a Malone/ Where the pomposities roam..."

The new anti-subversion bill, he suggests, allowed the Justice Department to investigate Republican Senators, such as Senator Taft, for having a voting record similar to New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry had interrupted twice ongoing proceedings to deny a story published by Mr. Pearson that he had cut the Kefauver Committee's appropriations in half. Mr. Pearson, however, reveals that his source on the matter had been Senator Wherry, himself, having whispered that he had just pulled a fast one on Senator Estes Kefauver and cut the appropriations in half.

Though fiscally conscious Robert Rich of Pennsylvania was retiring from the House, he had bequeathed formally to Congressman Leon Gavin of the same state the perennial question he had routinely asked: "Where are we going to get the money?"

Joseph Alsop, in Pusan, tells of the Korean and American officials present in the provisional capital getting ready for the triumphant re-entry to Seoul. As most of the front line fighting units of the North Koreans would likely be destroyed in the fight, the war was quickly moving from the military to the political phase, the war's future dependent largely on the decision at the U.N. whether to proceed beyond the 38th parallel into the North in pursuit of the North Korean forces and whether to have the U.N. forces occupy the North.

The representatives of the nations in South Korea and General MacArthur and his subordinates favored taking that course. The only risk would be that it could cause the Soviets or the Communist Chinese to enter the fight, leading to general war. But that risk, he posits, was very small, as the Russians could have entered the conflict from the beginning and enabled the North Koreans to succeed against the tenuous defensive arc around Pusan, but had not. Moreover, the Soviets probably assumed that the U.N. forces would occupy the North and it was unlikely they would come to the aid of North Korea when it was crumbling.

Furthermore, if Korea were again unified, he suggests, the chances of another world war would be reduced for the first time in two years. And if Russia felt strong enough to wage general war, they probably would soon do so anyway.

Assuming non-participation, the abandonment of a pawn by the Soviets would send doubt through Asia and Europe and hope through the free nations. And the new atmosphere thus created would make it possible to get on with the process of organizing a permanent defense against Soviet aggression.

Joseph C. Harsch, in the Christian Science Monitor, discusses the passage over the President's veto of the anti-subversion bill, sponsored by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada. No more than a handful of Senators and Congressmen actually supported the bill, but the super-majority went along with it because of election-year expediency, so as not to appear soft on Communism.

Most, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, believed that the bill would make it more difficult to track domestic Communists, who would naturally resist registration under the bill. Most in Congress of both parties thought it probably unenforceable.

The Republicans, with the exception of Senator William Langer, who had staged a filibuster against the veto override vote, were solidly in favor of the bill and so the Democrats felt compelled in an election year to go along.

He notes that the Congress had not bothered to appropriate money for enforcement of the bill and so not much was likely to be done toward enforcement unless that omission was remedied.

A letter writer from Raleigh tells of having attended the new Alcoholics Rehabilitation Center at Camp Butner the prior week out of curiosity and finding that there were 21 patients, not just one, as an editorial on the subject had reported on September 26. He concludes from what he had observed that the program would be a success.

A letter writer objects to Dr. Herbert Spaugh, as a clergyman, having quoted from a "pseudo-political" column by local writer T.D. Kemp, Jr., who regularly inveighed against everything liberal.

A letter writer finds the need for the school bond issue to have been greatly exaggerated by its promoters and urges voters to consider the rise in taxes it would cause before voting for it.

A letter writer congratulates Wade Ison, Jr., for joining the sports staff of the newspaper. He had been a close friend to his father who had been sports editor.

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