The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 7, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that allied forces had attacked along the 55-mile front in Korea behind a large artillery barrage but that thousands of the enemy had counter-attacked on the eastern end of the front. Six American and South Korean divisions had participated in the attack across the Han River east of Seoul, as two North Korean corps with an estimated 13,500 men counter-attacked in the mountainous eastern sector, all but decimating a Seventh Division attack which had started earlier in the day. One South Korean battalion had not reported by nightfall.
The Defense Department announced that American casualties in Korea had reached 52,448, an increase of 1,773 since the prior week. Those whose next of kin had been notified as of March 2 included 7,857 killed in action, 34,692 wounded and 9,889 missing in action. Army casualties accounted for 1,642 of the increased total number, bringing the Army total to 43,598. The Marines had suffered 7,838 total casualties, the Navy, 596, and the Air Force, 416.
The Western Big Three representatives at the preliminary conference to attempt to work out an agenda for the proposed Big Four foreign ministers conference were in agreement in rejecting the wording of a proposed Soviet agenda, including "fulfillment by the four powers of the Potsdam agreement regarding demilitarization and the prohibition of remilitarization of Germany." The Big Three said that to accept this proposal would mean that they would be abandoning the effort to rearm West Germany as part of NATO and accepting of the entire Soviet view on Germany. This date's third meeting might hold the answer, says the report, to whether the Big Three would seek to meet the efforts of Russia to turn the meetings into a propaganda contest.
The Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, meeting jointly, approved the resolution co-sponsored by Senators Tom Connally and Richard Russell, which supported in principle the sending of troops for support of NATO and the naming of General Eisenhower as supreme commander of NATO.
The Army explained that it had been able to cut the May draft call-up to 60,000 men from the prior months' 80,000 because General MacArthur's requirements for men in the Far East were being caught up.
Correspondent Robert B. Hewett reports from Tehran that American-supported Iranian Premier Ali Razmara had been shot to death this date in a Tehran mosque and that, in response, the Government had placed the armed forces on alert. The people appeared to take the news calmly. The gunman was arrested quickly but was not identified. An informed source described him as a member of a small, fanatical religious sect. All sources agreed that Communists were not involved in the assassination. The Shah named 70-year old Khalil Fahimi as acting Premier.
RFC director Walter Dunham testified in executive session to the Senate Banking subcommittee investigating RFC practices, that friends, including persons trusted by the White House, had sought to use him to obtain RFC loans. He specifically excluded from this group White House aide Donald Dawson, previously accused of exerting influence on RFC loans. Mr. Dunham said that he had received many calls also from members of Congress and from DNC chairman William Boyle, albeit only urging fair treatment to visitors to the RFC. He said that he intended to resign his post and that no further loans should be made at the current time by the agency except for production. He said that he was certain that no one had succeeded in exerting influence over his decisions.
The New York Cotton Exchange, closed for nearly six weeks since the January 25 start of price controls, announced that it would resume trading the following day, though the board of managers was not pleased with the recent order to fix a ceiling on raw cotton, asserting that they were unworkable. But at least they could operate now that the ceilings had been clarified.
The Government greatly expanded the list of items subject to the 20 percent cut in steel usage, including automobiles, private airplanes, and pocket knives.
News editor Pete McKnight was slated to speak to the American Press Institute, meeting at Columbia University in New York. He would, along with the editor of the Hartford (Conn.) Courant, Herbert Brucker, lead a discussion on what made a good editorial page. Among the other speakers at the two-week seminar for editors and publishers were James Reston of the New York Times and future Governor of New York and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, chairman of the International Development Advisory Board and formerly of the State Department.
Whether Mr. Rockefeller would provide his traditional salute to the press, remained to be seen.
On page 10-A appears installment 25 of the serialization of Fulton Oursler's The Greatest Story Ever Told, concerning "the most remarkable triumphal march of all time".
On the editorial page, "Another Licensing Board" finds the legislative proposal to license North Carolina real estate brokers to make more sense than some of the licensing boards in the state, but that it still smacked of a return to the Middle Ages when guilds abounded to prevent competition in certain trades. It favors a free, competitive society in which such boards were kept to an irreducible minimum.
"The Saxony Charm" discusses George D. Sax, owner of the Saxony Hotel in Miami Beach, recipient of a 1.5 million dollar RFC loan and which had provided free accommodations to White House aide Donald Dawson and to RFC official Hilton Robertson, as well, according to the Senate Banking subcommittee investigating the RFC, several Senators. But the names of the Senators were maintained in confidence as beyond the scope of the Senate investigation.
The piece regards the Senators as being well within the purview of the investigation and urges Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the subcommittee, to release the names and extend the investigation to these Senators, as the public had every right to know whether their public officials were being bribed.
"A Beacon Light Abroad" praises the State Department selection of the film, "A Beacon Light of Learning", anent Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte and its history, to serve as one of 36 films to be distributed abroad for viewing. It would serve as a positive information tool to counter Communist propaganda which attacked America as a land of inequality in race relations.
While the film tended to gloss over the history of racism in the country and the continuing injustices, it was closer to actual fact than the Communist claptrap which showed lynchings aplenty and application of whips to slaves.
It also posits that it might help Johnson C. Smith in its first public solicitation of funds to build a new gymnasium-auditorium, sorely needed to replace the 300-seat existing facility which the students had nicknamed "The Matchbox".
A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Serendipity", tells of the American Association for the Advancement of Science having determined that serendipity played a role in many scientific discoveries, such as the vulcanization of rubber by adding sulphur, as well the discoveries of penicillin, insulin, and dynamite.
In politics, serendipity had also played a role, it suggests, as when war bailed the bureaucrats out of the farm surplus crisis of the latter Thirties, as it had in the wake of the Korean crisis.
War had enabled the Government to get their big spending, higher taxes, and price controls. "War proved to be the sulphur to vulcanize anything."
Drew Pearson tells of the Army still holding back the actual casualty counts from Korea as nearly 12,000 men, most of whom were missing from the December retreat from Seoul, had not yet been listed among the casualties. The numbers also did not include the non-combat casualties numbering in the thousands. Many of the non-listed missing were believed AWOL and so the Army had withheld the names of all of them. Several had turned up in Pusan taking in USO entertainment and Red Cross hospitality. Others had bribed pilots to take them back to Tokyo for "recuperation". General Walton Walker, deceased ground commander, killed in a jeep accident in December, was not even listed among the casualties because of the nature of his death. The same was true of some 5,300 frostbite cases who had been awarded the Purple Heart.
The present casualty count of 50,675 supplemented by the others not included would increase casualties by nearly fifty percent.
He asserts that the American people could handle the truth and ought be given the actual counts.
He notes that the State Department was secretly negotiating through the Swedish Foreign Office to exchange Chinese prisoners for American prisoners.
With Bell System profits the highest in 21 years, an FCC-ordered hearing to explore reduction of rates was nixed by Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland of Arizona, resulting in postponement of the hearings until August. Because of past FCC policing, coast-to-coast day rates for long distance had been reduced from $10.25 in 1936 to $2.50 in 1951. The FCC was especially concerned because of the need of G.I.'s to speak with friends and loved ones via long distance from the Far East.
The National Production Authority had restricted use of aluminum in the manufacture of toys and household goods in deference to defense needs. But while it had banned the production of aluminum roofing and siding in homes, in which small businesses specialized, it had not done so for industrial siding and roofing, manufactured by Reynolds and Kaiser. Nor had it gone beyond placing moderate restrictions on production of aluminum pots and pans, made chiefly by WearEver, a subsidiary of Alcoa.
Marquis Childs discusses the preliminary Big Four conference to set the agenda for the subsequent foreign ministers conference and the reticence on the part of the Western participants to discuss the matter publicly. There was an understandable reluctance to build up public hope of a permanent peace coming from the conference, only to have disillusionment result.
U.S. representative at the preliminary conference, Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup had, before leaving for Paris, said that the viewpoint that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable suggested that the American people lacked the determination and courage, when faced with a "brutal enemy", to "hold out in the struggle for men's minds or in the struggle to save their bodies from destruction."
Former head of State Department planning, George Kennan, had similarly stated recently in a magazine article that as long as there was a thousandth of a chance for peace, that chance had to be taken, and that he felt there was considerably more than a thousandth of a chance.
Yet, while there was an understandable reluctance to discuss matters publicly, there was also the need to lay the cards on the table for the American people so that they could trust the negotiations and be prepared to accept any necessary compromise to achieve lasting peace. If the confreres entered the conference with a defeatist attitude, there was not only no need for a conference, it might even exacerbate existing problems by giving the Soviets new propaganda tools and convincing them that there was no choice except war.
The Soviets had viewed with alarm the statement of Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews the prior August that the U.S. should be prepared for a first strike. Most Americans had forgotten the statement but the Soviets did not understand that Secretary Matthews had little to do with formulating policy.
He urges that the country should not fall victim to paranoid fears as had Nazi Germany, that patience, persistence and fortitude would see the country through not just one but a dozen such conferences in the effort to gain peace and that nothing should be left untried in attempting to formulate that peace.
Robert C. Ruark discusses Josephine
Baker
After the war, she emerged from her "undead" status, as fit as she had been in 1925 when she wowed the tourists in France. She was wearing no bananas as in her earlier days because her wardrobe was subsidized by then by top Parisian couturieres. "This means that she can send back the Jacques Fath number that doesn't fit, and that for a woman is a parking space in heaven unclaimed by most."
A letter from Osmond Barringer, who had managed for several years the City Armory-Auditorium, writes regarding the proposed operation of the proposed coliseum-auditorium complex, as to whether to place it under the control of the Park & Recreation Board as had been the Armory, or to have it controlled directly by the City Council. He says that during the last year the City had controlled the Armory it had lost over $3,000, while after he was appointed manager under the supervision of the Park & Recreation Commission, it had shown a profit of over $2,000, and in the last year he had been manager, a profit of nearly $9,500.
A letter writer commends the editorial of March 1, "Death Traps—With Bars", regarding the need for legislation to provide constant supervision of jails to avoid the tragedy at Leaksville where seven prisoners had died in an untended mattress fire. She wants the issue kept alive until a remedy was provided.
A letter writer compliments the Central High School band director and football coach for putting Charlotte on the map, as the Central High football games had drawn high attendance. Yet, both men were now out of the school system, he informs, because of stupidity and petty jealousy. He favors getting rid of such "pinheads" within the school system responsible for the trend toward abolishing athletics, except as to intramural sports, as at Central High.
A letter writer from Pittsboro finds the country in trouble, with the dollar value low, labor at odds with the Administration mobilization policy and the farmers demanding higher prices. The only compliant members of society were teenagers who submitted to the draft. He wants to stop the wrecking of the country's economy by pressure groups and weak-kneed officials.
You can't do that without having Hitler and Mussolini in charge.
A letter writer says that he is not running for President but wanted Democrats and Republicans to vote for him, would promise that after he was elected, he would serve two masters well, "half and half", making him one of the most popular Presidents in history, "never to be forgotten".
No, it was not from Senator Nixon.
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