The Charlotte News
Monday, January 1, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that 200,000 enemy troops, with an estimated 30,000 in the first wave, smashed into South Korea this date along the entirety of the 150-mile front, as had been anticipated by MacArthur headquarters for more than a week for the enemy troops having amassed along the 38th parallel. The Eighth Army made limited withdrawals along a 20-mile sector of the Imjin River front northwest of Seoul, with the heaviest fighting reported at Yongchon and east of Kaesong. Censorship prevented precise pinpointing of the action, but correspondent Jack MacBeth reported that it had been a decisive "Chinese victory". By nightfall, the enemy, he said, were only 20 miles from Seoul, driving wedges several miles deep into the allied lines. According to correspondent John Randolph, the attack had begun just before dawn to avoid detection and interdiction by U.N. air power. He said that the Chinese poured through a mine field until their dead bodies marked a pathway through the exploded mines.
Correspondent Elton Fay reports that the Russians had not risked sending into battle in Korea their most modern equipment, that captured materiel showed that only tanks, artillery, machine guns and small arms designed and manufactured some ten years earlier were being used in the war. Other than the new MIG-15 fighter jets, a good copy of the F-86, only communications equipment captured by the allies appeared of more recent vintage, with radio equipment appearing similar to that of the U.S.—perhaps based on captured designs of the Telefunken. The Communist air forces, in skirmishes with U.N. jets near the Manchurian border, had been careful not to allow any MIG-15 to go down over allied territory.
General MacArthur, in a written statement to the Japanese people on New Year's Day, said that it might become their duty, operating within the principles of the U.N., to join in concert with others who cherished freedom to repel force with force.
The British Foreign Office in London reported that the Russians had responded to the Big Three proposal for a peace conference which would concern more than just the German question. The Foreign Office, however, declined to say at this juncture what the response was. The proposal had come in reply to a Russian proposal for a conference only on the German question.
The House was meeting this night in a final short session to pass the reconciled excess profits tax bill, previously passed in different versions by each chamber, before the new session would begin at noon on Wednesday. It appeared to be the first time in history that either house of Congress had met on New Year's Day. The excess profits tax bill would place a 77 percent tax on business income exceeding 85 percent of the company's average income during the base period 1946-49, with all other earnings taxed at 47 percent, and an overall tax ceiling established at 62 percent, estimated to raise 3.3 billion dollars in new revenue. The other pending matter was the emergency defense appropriations bill, to add 20 billion dollars to the 25 billion previously appropriated for defense spending in the current fiscal year.
The President's Council of Economic Advisers urged in their annual report that the Government provide the country a defense production target and that the people prepare for a pay-as-you-go tax burden for defense. They said that greater wage and price controls would be inevitable, along with possible rationing.
Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer reported that production had risen in 1950 to about 280 billion dollars, increased some by inflation, such that further increases were required to combat inflation.
In London, Paris, Berlin and throughout Europe, even into Czechoslovakia, the New Year was greeted with merriment and traditional rites.
In Glasgow, Scotsmen expressed their satisfaction over the theft from Westminster Abbey of the Stone of Scone on Christmas morn, with still no suspects having been detected by Scotland Yard.
In West Germany, the new national anthem was unveiled, replacing the discredited "Deutschland Uber Alles" for its excessive nationalism.
There were also sober warnings from many European leaders regarding the danger of the world stage. Many, throughout the world, resorted to prayer in lieu of celebration.
Despite New Year's Eve falling on
Sunday, celebrations were noisy as usual in New York
In Chicago, the world famous gorilla, Bushman, was found dead in his cage at the Lincoln Park Zoo at 8:30 a.m., having died of a heart attack after 22 years of entertaining visitors.
It was probably some Commie who went up to Bushman and said, "Boo."
On the editorial page, "New Year's Greetings" finds 1951 to offer little hope for normal, relaxed living, with anxiety and sacrifice being the watchwords for the coming twelve months. The worst to be faced would be total war, including germ and atomic warfare, war in the country's own backyard, impacting millions of fighting men and millions of civilians.
Instead of greeting the new year with revelry, black-eyed peas and hog jowls, it recommends prayer to meet the challenge of the coming year.
With that prognosis, we should say that oblational prostrate obeisance is certainly in order. Duck and cover, in the gutter, if no underground refuge is immediately available.
"An Explanation" tells of the Durham Herald editorial on the page being in error in its attribution to the News editorial of December 18 a determination that Secretary of State Acheson had to be sacrificed, however unjustified, to restore confidence in foreign policy. The News had, in fact, said that no man was indispensable to the nation's continued security but that it had consistently urged that Mr. Acheson be retained in his post and continued to do so.
It says that it firmly opposes "the Kennedys and Hoovers who would hand over the whole free world to Russia in the false assumption that we could then sit back in our own hemisphere and enjoy monopoly of that most precious possession of all, human liberty."
Its main concern was not for Mr. Acheson personally but rather for the sound policies he espoused. If at any time it believed that Mr. Acheson had to go to restore reasonable debate on foreign policy, then it would not hesitate, it adds, to say so.
The piece compliments the Herald editorial, despite the error, for uncommon excellence.
Parenthetically, the reference to "the Kennedys" was obviously to former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's speech before the University of Virginia Law School—wherein his son, Robert, was attending at the time, in his third year. He had advocated pulling out of Korea and from every other point in the Far East which the U.S. did not intend to hold for the country's defense, then applying the same principle to Europe, starting with Berlin.
We thus correct our previous misunderstanding that the reference by the Alsops on December 27 to Mr. Kennedy as favoring an "abject program of surrender", similar to that favored by President Hoover, regarding the latter's recent isolationist radio speech to the nation, had apparently intended to revisit Ambassador Kennedy's prior stances, misunderstood or not, during late 1940 and at Munich in September, 1938. We are not privy to the full array of stories appearing in the media of the time, whether on radio, television, or in the back pages of The News. But, when a point, contentious or lacking clarity in meaning, is mentioned a second time in a matter of days, we take our better instincts from that fact and pursue it to the ends of the earth until the Truth is finally revealed.
Perhaps, the ultimate motivation for the viewpoint was that Ambassador Kennedy, having already lost one son to a war and nearly a second, did not want to lose another.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, President Kennedy would invite Dean Acheson, considered at the time the leading living expert on the Soviet mind and intentions, as a principal adviser on what action to take in the face of the discovery of the soon to be active offensive missiles being mantled in Cuba, capable of accurate nuclear strikes virtually anywhere within the continental United States, especially along the East Coast, posing a bargaining chip for the Soviets to use to obtain the sacrifice by the West of West Berlin, undermining thereby the defense of all of Western Europe. The Russian venture in Cuba, of course, was in part designed to probe and test the young President's mettle and to thwart aborning any further efforts at destabilization of the Fidel Castro regime, as attempted in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April, 1961. Whatever might or might not have been ascribed properly to the elder Kennedy in 1950 or 1940, President Kennedy was certainly no appeaser or isolationist, quite the contrary.
Yet, his words, echoing from his inaugural address of January 20, 1961, still ring true in the nuclear age, as adherence to them perhaps saved the world from nuclear holocaust in that fateful period of October, 1962: "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate."
"A Gold Star for Tarheelia" tells of Congressional architect David Lynn having originally determined to place only eleven stars above the mantel behind the dais of the House Speaker rather than thirteen, for the original states of the Union, because Rhode Island had not at the time George Washington became President ratified the Constitution and North Carolina had not until the Bill of Rights was included.
Mr. Lynn had, however, changed course, when the North Carolina delegation, aided by the State Archives, had challenged his determination on the basis that North Carolina had fought in the Revolution, signed the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, as well the Constitution.
The refusal to ratify until the Bill of Rights was included, the piece urges, was even more ground to give North Carolina special recognition for standing for the individual freedoms therein specially enumerated, and so counsels giving North Carolina a gold star alongside the other eleven green ones.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Pearson and McCarthy", finds that while normally Drew Pearson was able to defend himself in controversies, in the current one with Senator McCarthy, it feels obliged to take up his case against the defamatory remarks of the Senator made against Mr. Pearson on the Senate floor under cloak of Congressional immunity, that he was a Communist tool who accepted and obeyed Kremlin orders. It urges the Senate to take action against the plainly defamatory statements of the Senator, and to the extent to which Senate rules did not allow it, that they be amended to do so in the new Congress. For if the Senator got away with his statements, then others would try the same course of conduct. While Mr. Pearson had not thus far lost any of the 640 newspapers which carried his column in syndication, one sponsor of his radio program, the Adam Hat Company, had, by a coincidental preceding plan or otherwise, pulled out.
Perhaps, the pre-arranged pull-out was Adam's sin.
A piece from the Durham Herald, as indicated above, finds the News editorial of December 18 sound for having putatively counseled that Secretary Acheson would have to go to restore political harmony in the country—though the editorial had not actually so concluded. It takes the assumed straw man and counsels contra, saying that the enemies of Mr. Acheson should not be allowed to drive him out, that to do so would turn the country's back on the five-year plan to thwart Communism to which most of the rest of the free world had subscribed, and would give the war in Korea an importance it might not have.
It would also revive world speculation about the continuity of American foreign policy and would undermine world trust in American support of the U.N.
It would allow change to foreign policy and ouster of a principal Cabinet representative to result from pressures exerted by one political party, not even in the majority in either house of Congress.
It would further "enshrine McCarthyism", to confirm mud-slinging as a tactic to enable power, following on the attack of the Secretary for his continued defense of his old friend, Alger Hiss—notwithstanding Mr. Hiss's conviction the prior January in his retrial for perjury for claiming to the Grand Jury in New York in December, 1948 that he was not a Communist, as alleged by Whittaker Chambers, and had no contact with the latter during the critical period when he was accused by Mr. Chambers of providing him secret State Department documents for transmission to the Soviets.
Finally, it urges, it would "sicken good Americans with the pigsty of politics; to make it even harder to get good men into government; and, as the Alsops pointed out many months ago, to return to the morality 'that begot the follies of the 1920's.... [the] unbuttoned, squalidly easy-going, Hardingesque 'normalcy' which alone can destroy this country.'"
If Mr. Acheson were to be thus forced out of his position, it concludes, then it would be the Republicans who would ultimately be blamed for placing party politics above the good of the country, a position for which they would one day have to pay at the polls. It adds, however, that it believed that such would not come to pass, that the more sober leadership in the Republican Party would turn away from this position and favor instead support of Mr. Acheson.
Drew Pearson tells of Reynolds and Kaiser aluminum companies, despite receiving preferential treatment from the Government, guaranteeing loans and purchase of the aluminum the companies would produce, plus Government purchase of the plants built with the Government loans if the purchases of aluminum by the Government decreased within two and a half years, still wanting more, exemption from any price controls. Their own counsel, however, former Secretary of War Robert Patterson, convinced them to abandon that demand as unfair. The contract was signed. The two companies had been reluctant to increase production for the defense effort, especially necessary for airplane production, despite being aided substantially by the Government during and after the war.
The American Legion tide of toys was important for building Western European morale, the area in which the U.S. had failed since the end of the war. The toys were for the children of soldiers in Korea and the indigent children of Europe.
About 50 of the Army's lightweight tanks, possessed of radar fire-control, guaranteeing a strike on the first or second shot, would be ready for combat in the ensuing few weeks. They were supposed to be better than anything the Russians had.
The Russians were reported to have struck a new, large vein of uranium and had in consequence begun closing down the uranium mines of East Germany.
Prime Minister Nehru of India finally had become, according to the American Embassy in India, disillusioned with the Chinese Communists.
The Chinese were attempting to indoctrinate with Communism a hundred and fifty American prisoners at Tunghau prison camp, surrounding them with pictures of prominent American Communists, but reportedly without effect.
Senator Hubert Humphrey ended all of his letters to his Minnesota constituents by asking them for prayers to guide him in his Senate work.
Only ten percent of American commercial planes were usable as transport for military purposes, meaning that with all of the military transport planes tied up in Korea, if the Russians initiated another blockade of Berlin, an Anglo-American airlift could not be used again to break it, as in 1948-49.
Because of the international situation, the Labor Government in Britain believed new elections ought be delayed until the fall.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, "whose irresponsibility can always be relied on", recently having said that the Soviets did not in fact have the atom bomb.
To dispel this false claim, which had received increasing currency, they provide the facts of how the detonation in August, 1949 was detected.
The net of detection had been established shortly after the end of the war and consisted of three armed service staffs, the Joint Research and Development Board, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the CIA. A chain of seismological detection stations were established to sense a violent shock occurring anywhere in the world. The radioactive cloud which ascended from an atomic explosion was detectable with Geiger counters in the stratosphere. High-flying aircraft or balloons could take samples of radioactive particles released by an atomic explosion and analyze them to determine the nature of it. Properly trained scientists then could analyze the collected data and form conclusions.
The AEC board responsible for that analysis included such experts in atomic energy as Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, Dr. Enrico Fermi, Oliver Buckley of the Bell Laboratories, and James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard. The entire team had received their training during the Eniwetok atomic test and so was ready when the Soviet bomb was detected.
The air samples had provided the decisive evidence that an atomic bomb had been tested, as certain metals were present which distinguished between an accidental detonation of an atomic pile, as at first believed by some scientists to have been the source of the data, and an actual deliberate detonation of a bomb.
The Joint Chiefs sat with the scientists shortly before the latter issued their report to the President, indicating in September, 1949 that the detonation had occurred. They concluded that the chances were 999 to one that the source of the data had been an atomic bomb.
The Alsops therefore compare Senator Brewster's claim and those who were drifting back toward isolationism to those in Britain in the 1930's who had claimed that their country was too weak to resist Germany, while, behind the scenes, were preparing for the country's "abject surrender".
Robert C. Ruark tells of being, at the close of 1950, fresh out of solutions for anything. His brain was addled and he suspects that it was a feeling universally held in the country. One editor he knew said that his whole staff had been afflicted with "acute listlessness of the intellect."
He provides the day's dreary headlines and concludes that there was too much there for "one weary medulla oblongata to cope with, without tying into the problem of color television." One who attempted to think through the events of such a cluttered news day would never reach page two.
He recapitulates some of the highlights in the news of 1950, from Alger Hiss to Senator McCarthy, from Russia's boycott of the U.N. in the first half of the year followed by obstructionist tactics after return in August, to the character assassination of Anna Rosenberg, recently confirmed as Assistant Secretary of Defense. And on top of it all had been the Korean war.
Despite his fairly comprehensive litany of dreary events, he leaves out the attempted assassination of the President at Blair House on November 1 by two Puerto Rican nationalists.
"What about the A-bomb and the H-bomb, and the draft, and taxes, and what's made the weather so peculiar, and how come the shortage of Scotch whisky? You tell me. This tired old brain is worn slick with the contemplation of mice, men and Margaret's music, and I aim to send it to the cleaners over the week-end."
That was the "good old days"
at the end of 1950, as 1951 came into view. It may have looked nice
and glossy and swell, just swell, in all the Hollywood movies and
sounded so in the cheery little ditties
A Quote of the Day: "A Communist is a guy who borrows your pot to cook your goose." —Fernandina (Fla.) News-Leader
Well, we suppose that it just goes
to show that it does not pay to be too hip
Eighth
Framed Edition
Links-Date — Links-Subj.