The Charlotte News

Thursday, April 26, 1951

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that U.N. troops on the west-central front in Korea had withdrawn toward Uijongbu the previous day before the enemy masses numbering 300,000, extending their withdrawal to 27 miles in that sector, in the process pulling out of every western-front allied foothold in North Korea. Most of the withdrawals took place in daylight after holding steady against nighttime enemy attacks. Allied artillery was fired at point-blank range at the enemy to hold them back during the withdrawal. Enemy losses were placed at 30,000, though heavy smoke and haze cut aerial observation of the battle lines.

Munsan, site of the allied paratroop landing the previous month, fell to the enemy again during the retreat.

The allies remained in North Korea along the Hwachon reservoir on the eastern front, as forces withstood and beat back enemy attacks on both sides of the reservoir the prior day.

At the U.N., no objection was raised by the thirteen other U.N. nations fighting in Korea to the U.S. proposal to bomb Chinese supply bases in Manchuria should the Communists launch heavy air attacks on U.N. forces.

The President said, without elaboration, at a press conference that it was up to the Communists to choose whether the war would spread beyond Korea or whether a peace settlement would be reached. He refused comment on whether supreme commander Lt. General Matthew Ridgway had been authorized to bomb Chinese bases of supply in Manchuria. The President also said that the rumor that Paul Hoffman was in line to succeed Secretary of State Acheson was false. He said that General MacArthur was now free to go and say as he pleased, that while the President, as commander in chief, still had strings on the five-star General, he would not pull them. He said that the General could be recalled to active duty at any time, but added amid laughter that he had no such intention at the present time.

Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, rallied Democrats against a proposal by Republican Senator Styles Bridges to hold televised hearings of the investigation by the Committee into the firing of the General and Far Eastern policy. Senator Russell said that he believed the American people preferred "the facts to entertainment, however delectable," broadcast over radio and television. He said that he found it inconceivable that such an investigation could proceed in public without running into security issues regarding disclosures of military secrets, compromising the lives of the men fighting in Korea.

General MacArthur arrived in Chicago where it was expected that as many as three million people would greet him amid a prevailing holiday spirit, with all public buildings closed for the day and a large parade planned, culminating in a talk by the General at Soldier Field this night. The Chicago White Sox had played a doubleheader the previous day to leave this date open. Some businesses would close at noon.

Arkansas Senator William Fulbright defended the President's policy of limiting the war in Korea and in firing General MacArthur for his insubordination, although adding that the President had "misguided loyalty to unworthy friends", in reference to his Senate Banking subcommittee's investigation of RFC and Government influence on granting of loans by the agency.

The President declined to say whether his administrative assistant Donald Dawson would follow a request to testify before the Senate subcommittee investigating RFC.

The Senate Banking Committee approved the nomination of Stuart Symington to become the new RFC chairman.

The National Production Authority was planning to place new curbs on use of steel in construction of apartment houses and factories, such that every major project would need Federal approval.

A report from Formosa said that ten million persons had starved to death in Communist China during the prior two years.

Communist China announced it would send 50,000 tons of rice to India, having previously traded rice for India's burlap bags.

Another report from a Taipei newspaper said that half of Communist China's regular fighting force of three million men was present in the Manchuria-Korea area.

In London, a Reuters report from Prague said that the U.S. Embassy had been informed that Associated Press bureau chief William Oatis, missing since Monday, had been arrested on a charge of espionage. Mr. Oatis would remain in custody for the ensuing two years before the Czech Government would finally release him.

In Woodstock, Conn., Dr. Hamilton Holt, president emeritus of Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., died in his sleep at age 78 after suffering a coronary thrombosis the previous day.

In Paris, a 50-year old man, who jumped in the Seine River to save his two poodles, drowned. The dogs swam to safety.

The threat of continued flooding of the Mississippi River in Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri was subsiding, though waters remained high and heavy rains could change the situation. About 7,500 persons had been forced to evacuate their homes.

Off Key West, Fla., Navy divers recovered more wreckage and bodies from the crashed Cuban passenger airliner which had collided with a U.S. Navy fighter the previous day, killing 43 persons.

On the editorial page, "A Break with Tradition" applauds the action of the UNC Board of Trustees in accepting the application for admission of a qualified black student, attending North Carolina A & T in Greensboro, to the UNC Medical School. He became thereby the first black student admitted to any graduate or professional school in the South without intervening court action. The admission followed the recent determination by the Board to admit qualified students without regard to race or color to all graduate and professional programs at the University which were not otherwise offered in segregated black State schools.

The admission of the 30-year old student, Edward O. Diggs, also undermined claims that the State would seek to refuse admission to black students on the ground of lack of qualification, even when ostensibly qualified. Mr. Diggs had already been accepted to the Medical School of the University of Chicago and Meharry Medical College at Nashville, but preferred to attend in his home state, all the more reason, the piece suggests, that his application was properly accepted, to keep trained medical personnel at home.

"The Middle Way" finds the Administration foreign policy to be hard for the American people to palate for it being a compromise plan, whereas the tendency of the people was to favor the extremes, one way or the other, either all-out war or all-out peace and withdrawal from foreign entanglements. The people who favored all-out war could better follow the reasoning of General MacArthur for extending the war to China to avoid "prolonged indecision" in Korea, proceeding to bomb Chinese supply bases and the rest, rather than the restrained Administration policy of containment of the war to the Korean peninsula.

"Yet the orgy of hysterico-religious adulation attending MacArthur's return and his appearance before Congress does not alter the hard fact that, if the free world is to be finally victorious in the struggle with Communist imperialism, it must just now pursue some middle course between all-out war and abject appeasement." It asks whether the middle way could be made dynamic enough, however, to be acceptable to the broad mass of the American people.

It finds that the answer might lie in Peace Can Be Won, by former ERP administrator Paul Hoffman, as reviewed on the page by John P. McKnight.

"Scratch One Bottleneck" finds gratifying that a start had been made on relieving the traffic bottleneck on Stonewall Street by extending Stonewall from Independence Boulevard.

That sounds somehow ominous of things to come in the ensuing 23 years.

"Ode to '52" offers some doggerel regarding the news story that Governor Kerr Scott would like for President Truman to run again in 1952 for President, and that the Governor would like to join him on the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee.

Sample:

The Governor from North Carolina
Thought nothing could be fina
Than to put Harry back
In that little white shack
To keep us from conflict with China.

As we have suggested previously with respect to these offerings, we advise not giving up your day job anytime soon.

"Politics Takes a Back Seat" finds refreshing the City Council's appointment, without regard to politics, of five qualified men to a committee to plan the new coliseum and auditorium complex. The five men were Claude A. Cochran, James P. McMillan, Thomas A. Little, George F. Stratton, and Arthur Newcombe, each appointed to staggered terms of between five years and one year, respectively.

The complex on Independence Boulevard would be completed and opened in 1955.

John P. McKnight, brother of News editor Pete McKnight, reviews Peace Can Be Won by former ERP administrator Paul Hoffman, finding Mr. Hoffman to advocate the "waging" of peace, an aggressive program utilizing military, economic, political and psychological resources. He believed that the cost of doing so would be far less in the long-run than building a Fortress America and letting the world go by. He had estimated the cost of facing Russia alone at 125 billion per year versus current expenditures of around 25 billion for the U.S. and its allies. Furthermore, abandonment of the allies to Russia would mean their means of production could fall into Soviet hands.

Mr. McKnight concludes that with wide readership, Mr. Hoffman's book might be one which would take its place alongside Plato's Republic and the New Testament, as a work which could change the direction of history.

Drew Pearson finds that the various memos and messages between General MacArthur and the Pentagon exchanged during the Korean war could be cherry-picked to prove almost anything, thus making it difficult for the Senate Armed Services Committee to determine what the true facts were.

Secretary of State Acheson was actually much closer to agreement with General MacArthur's plan in January, while the Joint Chiefs had nixed the bombing of Chinese bases, though coming close to authorization of that proposal on February 28, giving five alternatives to General MacArthur, though instructing him not to encroach on Chinese territory without first receiving separate permission from the Chiefs. As to the proposed blockade of Chinese ports, the State Department and Joint Chiefs agreed with General MacArthur, but Prime Minister Clement Attlee of Britain, during his visit in Washington in recent months, had refused assent. Another point of agreement of the Chiefs with the General was the right of American planes to pursue enemy planes across the Chinese border when engaged in a dogfight, but without bombing any targets on the other side. The Chiefs had initially agreed to permit the bombing in such event, but either the State or Defense Department had disapproved.

General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had argued that Chiang Kai-Shek had offered his troops chiefly as a means of getting them equipped, reminded that most American arms given them during the Chinese civil war had wound up in Communist hands, and that equipping them would be very expensive. Admiral Forrest Sherman, chief of Naval operations, said that it would require an armada of ships to transport the Nationalist troops to the mainland from Formosa. Moreover, the claim of 600,000 Nationalist troops had not been borne out by the Chiefs' investigation, finding the number closer to 250,000.

Joseph Alsop, in Tehran, finds the present scene in the city to remind him of the times during the Iranian crisis of 1946 when Russia was bearing down on Azerbiajan, prompting recently deceased British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin then to disclose that the British Cabinet had decided to occupy southern Iran, if necessary, to prevent the oil, over which the British held the concession, from falling into Russian hands through a puppet government. He also had proposed a program of social reform and economic development to stop the progressive deterioration of the whole Middle Eastern structure. Then, however, he lamented that the program would take money which Britain did not have. Mr. Alsop finds it to sum up the inaction of Britain, which led to the recent nationalization of the oil in Iran.

But the U.S. did have the money and the interest in seeing that the oil resources did not fall into Soviet hands, with consequent destabilization of the whole region and balance of power. He finds, however, that since the war, the U.S. had committed every error in the region that it was possible to make. The U.S. had raised false hopes of promised aid which never came in any substantial amount. No policy independent of Britain had been developed and the U.S. had not worked with Britain because, as U.S. ambassadors in the region had been instructed, the Middle East was predominantly a British interest. The result had been dangerous Anglo-American disunity, with public criticism of the British attitude in the region.

He finds that the picture would be different in the present had Mr. Bevin's creative idea for the region, an idea independently developed by George Kennan, chief planner at the time in the State Department, had been undertaken by the U.S. in 1946 by providing sufficient aid. The united application of British and American influence could have reversed the trend in Iran. Instead, if serious action were not undertaken to escape inevitable disaster, the price to be paid would be considerable and the risks to be run, great.

Robert C. Ruark tells of the shoving match between Senators Homer Capehart, Hubert Humphrey, and Herbert Lehman the prior week after a radio show discussing the firing of General MacArthur and Far Eastern policy, in which the three, plus Senator Taft, had participated. He finds middle-aged and older Senators trying to engage in fisticuffs to be a rather pathetic endeavor, with the outcome akin to girls fighting one another. Correspondent Blair Moody, who had since been appointed by Governor Mennen Williams of Michigan to replace deceased Senator Arthur Vandenberg, had broken up the fracas.

He recalls a scrap between former Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones and Eugene Meyer, owner of the Washington Post, in the Mayflower Hotel. Mr. Meyer was a former amateur boxer and was able to deliver one blow before the affray was broken up.

He favors the horsewhip as a means of defending adult honor, as the whiphand could usually deliver one good slash before throwing a knee out of joint or wrenching the back.

A letter writer from Pinehurst compares various statements of Senator Willis Smith, as reported in the news, that he had said that General MacArthur might be sacrificing himself deliberately to prompt a national debate on Far Eastern policy, that he had received 500 telegrams protesting the firing, and that he was against American intervention in Korea at the start, to be contradictory to another statement by the Senator, that the civilian power of the Government had always to exert power over the military. The writer thinks in consequence that the Senator had not yet made up his mind on which side he was aligned, was straddling the fence.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>—</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date Links-Subj.