The Charlotte News
Thursday, April 12, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that American warplanes had shot down five enemy jets, probably destroyed two others and damaged fifteen in two dogfights over northwest Korea. All American planes emerged safely from the action. One of the two clashes, both occurring near the Manchurian border around Sinuiju, was the largest jet fight in history, involving 152 jets, 80 Russian-built MIG-15s and 72 American F-86s and F-84s, plus about 40 B-29s. In 672 sorties flown against troop columns near Anak and Chaeryong, the allies reported 500 enemy soldiers killed.
Heavy fighting took place near Yanggu on the southeastern edge of the Hwachon Reservoir but censorship prevented reporting of details.
Two Chinese divisions, after fiercely opposing the allied crossing of the Hantan River south of Chorwon, withdrew suddenly on the central front and in their wake, U.S. troops pushed cautiously forward against no opposition.
On the east coast, South Korean troops moved 26 miles into North Korea, to Kansong, the deepest penetration of the current drive.
The President gave an address to the
nation via radio and television
General MacArthur might soon come back to the U.S., according to Congressman Joe Martin, who, along with Senator Kenneth Wherry, had proposed a resolution to have him speak before a joint session of Congress in three weeks. The General had not been in the U.S. since 1937.
Correspondent Russell Brines reports from Tokyo that General MacArthur was making plans to return to the U.S. if invited by Congress to speak. General MacArthur's closest adviser, Maj. General Courtney B. Whitney, said that the General believed he had violated no Presidential directives, including in his statements regarding use of the Chinese Nationalist troops and the offer of peace settlement with the Communist Chinese field commander.
Senator Joseph McCarthy, according to the Milwaukee Journal, said that "treason in the White House" had occurred by "bourbon and benedictine" in the firing of General MacArthur. White House press secretary Joseph Short, when read the statement, had no comment. Correspondent Robert Fleming of the Journal reported that the Senator had said, in reference to the President: "The son of a bitch should be impeached, but on the other hand he's not important", that it was the crowd around him who caused the trouble. The Senator, not given to hyperbole, also said that the President had signed "the death warrant of Western civilization" and did not know what he was doing, was surrounded by the "Jessups, the Achesons and the old Hiss crowd" who worked their wares on the President at between 1:30 and 2:00 in the morning when they had time to "get the President cheerful".
They were giving bourbon and benedictine to that son of a bitch to beat him down into bastardy, betrayal and Benedict Arnoldism.
Senator Charles Tobey said that the President accused him over the telephone of being behind an effort to impeach him over withholding evidence from the Senate Banking subcommittee investigating the RFC and that the President had said to "go right ahead" and impeach him. Senator Tobey, however, said that he had told the President that he intended nothing of the sort and had kindly feelings toward the President.
Before HUAC, screenwriter Richard J.
Collins testified that he and screenwriters Ring Lardner, Jr., Budd
Schulberg, John Howard Lawson, Lester Cole and Albert Maltz had been
members of the Communist Party ten years earlier. All except Mr.
Schulberg and Mr. Collins had been members of the "Hollywood
Ten" in 1947, each of whom having been sentenced to two years in
jail for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify under the Fifth
Amendment before HUAC as to whether they had ever been Communists.
Mr. Collins said that he drifted away from the party in 1947 and that
Mr. Schulberg
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington postponed contempt proceedings against Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer and nine others for not following the Court's order to turn over the President Steamship Lines from the Government to its original parent company, the Dollar Co.
In Raleigh, the proposed amendment to prevent any county of the state from having more than one State Senator was killed in committee. Most of the opposition came from Guilford and Mecklenburg counties, the two most populous in the state.
What happened to the law on legalization of caps for cap pistols?
On the editorial page, "Test of the Free World" tells of the former foreign editor of the London Economist having written in the New York Times Magazine several weeks earlier of the three weaknesses of the free world, that it was unable to produce a coherent defense policy, that there was a temporary military imbalance created by Russia's refusal to disarm after the war, and that it was susceptible to the Soviet propaganda that the democracies were weak and outdated and the Communist system more adaptable to modern life.
The piece thinks the U.S. was complacent regarding these weaknesses, as exemplified by the debate in Congress on whether to approve the sending of troops by the President to NATO. Senators Wherry and Taft certainly did not produce a coherent policy on defense for the world to see or encourage unity among the free nations.
Russia's arms were still dominant in Europe and the Far East, though the U.S. was catching up.
The nation was giving Russian propagandists new fodder to feed the world on the notion that capitalism was outmoded in modern times, as the Congress refused to pass the necessary taxes or make the necessary budget compromises to provide a pay-as-you-go defense program.
The Administration's policy of containment was wise as it was the only policy which could prevent a third world war, in contradistinction to those who wanted to have a showdown with the Communists. But such a policy needed a leader and it did not have one. Yet the policy was not wrong and it was not necessarily condemned to failure. It hopes that Americans would emerge into reason and realize their global responsibilities.
"How Good Is Chiang's Army?" finds that notwithstanding the urging by Representative Joe Martin, Senator Taft, and General MacArthur, Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist army was not capable of presenting a formidable fighting force in Communist China. They were reportedly poorly trained, clothed and equipped and lacking in resolve to fight the Communists after previously having been licked by them and forced to retreat to Formosa.
Walter Lippmann had said that the only way the Nationalists could invade China would be with an American army in front of them.
It suggests that the time might come when it would be to the advantage of the U.S. to fight a general war against China but that time had not arrived. The seat of Communist power was in Moscow, not Peiping. A third world war could be avoided and if not, could be fought more advantageously in Europe, North Africa or in the Near East than in China.
"Compounding an Error" again urges defeat of a pending bill in the State Legislature to send a State Constitutional amendment to the people, which would prevent any county from having more than one Senator. The existing provision required that every ten years, the Legislature reapportion the State Senate such that each Senatorial district would be approximately equal in population. That not having been done in the current Legislature, it was compounding the error, antithetical to democracy, to suggest such an amendment.
Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers around the state, provides one from the Roxboro Courier-Times which tells of walking down the street with a friend, whereupon the police chief walked by and suggested that he was damaging his character by walking with this friend, who then said that when the chief was building his house and needed lumber for which he ultimately could not pay, he had called him "Mr. Bullock". The piece concludes that his friend and the chief parted friends.
The Southern Pines Pilot
tells of Southern Pines dogs being train-wise, one never reported
being killed despite the tracks cutting through the town. A dog was
observed recently standing still for the warning bell of the train,
until an elderly couple began crossing the street, at which point the
dog followed...
The Pinehurst Outlook complains of modern singers not enunciating well, with the result that one little girl, hearing "world without end", thought it was "world without men".
The Montgomery Herald tells of a woman going to a doctor for an examination after which the doctor informed her that he had some very good news for "Mrs. Jones", whereupon she informed him that she was Miss Jones, at which point the doctor told her that in that event, he had some very sad news.
The Greensboro News comments on a story that the children would visit the School for the Blind and the State Prison, where they would be allowed to visit the gas chamber but nowhere else in the prison. It finds children being subjected to so much horror in modern times that it was not determinable whether they would turn out to be fiends or saints. It says that it reminded of the old story of the shipwrecked men who had been lost at sea many days and upon approaching a strange seacoast and seeing a gallows, bowed to their knees thanking God that they had reached a civilized country.
And so more, so on, more on and more.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator William Benton, owner and founder of Muzak, now working hard as a Senator and wanting the FCC to mandate 25 percent of television channels to education and public school functions rather than the current provision for only ten percent. Senator Ed Johnson of Colorado had agreed to give the resolution a hearing before the Commerce Committee.
After the scandal-prone U.S. Grant Administration, concluding in 1877, the Republican Congress voted to pass a law which prohibited a Government employee for two years after termination of service from transacting any private business with the Government. The law remained in effect through World War I and reduced scandal to a minimum. But then in World War II, both Republicans and Democrats decided to abrogate the law and since that time, scandals had flourished, with people coming and going between Government service and private business, doing business at will with the Government, resulting in favoritism.
He tells the story, imparted three years earlier, of indirect help from Maj. General Harry Vaughan, the President's military aide, provided to British ex-convict George Dawson, now telling additionally of how Mr. Dawson had made 30 million dollars selling U.S. war surplus goods and trying in the process to ship U.S. Army trucks into Communist countries.
Marquis Childs finds that ghost writers in Washington were doing well preparing the memoirs of various personages who had either recently stepped onto the stage prominently or who had been there for awhile and were retiring. In the former group were Senators Estes Kefauver and Charles Tobey, both of whom had made impressions on the public during the televised hearings into organized crime.
The military also was dominating the literary field, with a book set to be published the following month regarding the personal story of General Omar Bradley. General MacArthur also might be a hot candidate for a memoir on World War II and the occupation of Japan.
Paul Hoffman, who had been the administrator of the Marshall Plan, would shortly publish Peace Can Be Won.
J. Edgar Hoover had reportedly agreed to produce three articles for Reader's Digest, to be called collectively, "The Crime of the Century".
The President had a row with one of his biographers, Jonathan Daniels, regarding the latter having intimated in a Collier's article that the President wanted to have twelve-year term limits on members of Congress in each house and lengthen House terms to four years, which the White House said was a distorted rendering and that Mr. Daniels did not speak for the President. John Hersey was also coming out with an intimate profile of the President.
Mr. Childs suggests that the President might get his revenge when he wrote his own memoir, as publishers were offering him large sums on the hunch that he would not run again in 1952.
He concludes that the sound heard in Washington were typewriters clicking late into the night.
Robert C. Ruark tells of the Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, England, First Sea Lord and naval chief of staff during World War II, having taken issue with Admiral Ernest King, U.S. Navy chief of staff during the war, for lack of cooperation during the latter phases of the Pacific war. Mr. Ruark had been the overall security person for the combined operations in the Pacific and as such spoke for Admiral Chester Nimitz. It had been a rough public relations job, but he feels competent to provide the skinny on the British naval contribution late in the Pacific war, which he concludes was scant, more harmful than good. The British were allowed into the Pacific operations only so that they might recoup face from losses to the Japanese early in the war. By the time they entered, in spring, 1945, however, the Pacific naval war was won.
He says that he agrees with Viscount Cunningham that Admiral King was difficult to get on with and ruthless but that Viscount Cunningham also was not so easy to accommodate. He finds that the British were in the position of the man who brought his harp to the party, which no one asked to him play, but that the Americans had paid union scale for the harpist.
Framed Edition
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