The Charlotte News
Monday, April 30, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that allied artillery had fired nearly 46,000 rounds north of Seoul on Sunday and more on this date against the enemy line, estimated at 20,000 strong with nearly 3,400 vehicles, gathering to seize the former South Korean capital as a May Day prize. Only probing attacks were reported early Monday. Previously, General MacArthur and Lt. General Matthew Ridgway had made no effort to save Seoul during prior withdrawals. Lt. General James Van Fleet, the new ground commander, announced his intention to save it this time, but that U.N. forces would not be unnecessarily sacrificed in the process.
Distance of the enemy from Seoul was censored but was believed to be less than seven miles.
The enemy had suffered 70,000 casualties in the seven-day old offensive.
The President sent to Congress a 60.68 billion dollar defense budget for the coming fiscal year. He justified it on the basis that if Russia unleashed a general war, the free world had to be prepared to meet it. The bulk of the proposed expenditures, 56.1 billion, would be for direct expenditures and letting of defense contracts. The revised estimate of 1951 expenditures, the report said, was 19.4 billion, compared to 20 billion estimated in January. During the current fiscal year, 47.6 billion for defense had been enacted or recommended. (Whoever wrote this press report did not make it very clear.)
In Washington, Senator Taft, addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce meeting, urged a half-million man cut in the projected U.S. military forces and a commensurate twenty billion dollar reduction in the defense mobilization budget. He also called for a more aggressive war in Asia, disfavoring the Administration policy of neutralizing the Nationalist Chinese for the duration of the Korean war and the "stalemate war", carrying the danger of ending in "appeasement peace".
Earlier, Secretary of State Acheson addressed the same meeting, stating that the best chance for victory in Korea lay in adhering to the policy of limited war.
General MacArthur would be questioned by the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees in executive session. A censored version of the General's testimony, however, would be made available to the press after each session.
General MacArthur and his family visited his wife's former home in Murfreesboro, Tenn., from which she had last departed in 1937. They were greeted by cheering crowds lining the roads. The piece speculates that it was likely the largest crowd seen by the small town since 81,000 Confederates and Yankees met there in battle in 1864.
In Chicago, a father said that he had smuggled his sick soldier son out of Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., the previous day because he had been unable to obtain medical attention. The Army private was now in an armed forces hospital at Great Lakes, Ill. He was diagnosed by the family doctor as having peritonitis.
The Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision to enable the Government to fire Federal workers without a trial, the Court having wound up tied four to four, thus a nugatory decision. The case had concerned firing of a woman after a loyalty hearing, based on secret FBI reports never disclosed to her. Justice Tom Clark took no part in the decision and the votes of the individual justices were not disclosed.
In a 6 to 3 decision, Anti-Fascist Committee v. McGrath, 341 U.S. 123, the Court, in an opinion delivered by Justice Harold Burton and joined by Justice William O. Douglas, ordered the D.C. Federal District Court to grant a full hearing to three organizations deemed subversive by the Attorney General, to determine whether the loyalty program was constitutional and thus whether the organizations should be eliminated from the list. The three dissenters were Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Justices Stanley Reed, author of the dissent, and Sherman Minton.
Former President Herbert Hoover told the Senate Banking Committee that he believed RFC, formed in early 1932 when he was President, should be eliminated because its "original purpose had become submerged in support of risky business." He favored having small business loans administered by Federal Reserve Banks.
The American Red Cross issued another urgent call for 192 pints from Charlotte of Type "O" blood to be sent to Korea by Friday. They've got to have that blue stuff.
On the editorial page, "Preventive War Talk" finds discouraging the advocacy of a Durham attorney, speaking recently in Henderson, urging striking Russia first on the basis that the U.S. and its allies were not prepared for defensive war. It finds the sort of talk to play to Russia's hands.
Navy Secretary Francis Matthews had made such a statement the prior August, largely forgotten, except in Russia.
Talk of preventive war was not in line with achieving victory for peace and was morally corrupting, substituting emotion for intelligence, as former ERP administrator Paul Hoffman had said in Peace Can Be Won. Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times had said that it was "the course of political bankruptcy and moral frustration", losing the values which the U.S. was seeking to defend.
Moreover, most schooled observers and virtually all military leaders agreed that quick victory could not be achieved over Russia.
The News believes that most thoughtful Americans agreed with Mr. Hoffman's view on the subject.
"MacArthur Sidelights" supplements the piece on the page by William R. Matthews, anent General MacArthur, with the facts that during his address to Congress, he had said that he favored the intervention initially in Korea, thus giving the lie to those Republicans who had tried to call it "Truman's war". It finds interesting the vacillation in his opinion between the prior November 6 and November 24 regarding the strength of the Chinese Communists, as brought forth by Mr. Matthews. It also finds intriguing the General's reported delineation in August, 1949 of the Pacific defense line, omitting Formosa and Korea.
Republicans had criticized a January, 1950 speech by Secretary of State Acheson in which he had set forth a defense line precisely on the lines of General MacArthur's. It supposes that the Republicans would also therefore drop the idea that Secretary Acheson's failure to include South Korea was an invitation to aggression.
"Congress Ignores Hoover Reforms" tells of nineteen bills and one concurrent resolution having been introduced six weeks earlier in the House and Senate to pass key parts of the Hoover Commission reforms to make the Government more efficient, but none having so far received any action. It favors action on the reforms more than ever, as the cost of the war mandated that costs of government be reduced.
A piece from the Wall Street Journal, titled "Tea and Crumpets", tells of the Labor Government in Britain handing the tea business back to the private market on Mincing Lane. It finds that the statement by the Ministry of Food, that the system of government purchasing did not give consumers the widest possible choice of teas, to be applicable to other areas of Labor policy, such as crumpets. Yet, the Government considered purchase of other foodstuffs still appropriate.
It reads coming events, however, from the tea leaves.
Drew Pearson tells of former President Hoover and General MacArthur having gotten together in New York for a talk, giving rise to speculation that they talked of General MacArthur entering politics. But word was that the General had said that he was not interested in politics and President Hoover had said that the best qualified man for the Republicans in 1952 was Governor Earl Warren of California, the vice-presidential nominee in 1948.
The present Chinese offensive in Korea was preceded by several conferences, between February and April, with the Russians, attended by Mao Tse Tung and Soviet Armed Forces Minister Vasilevsky, in which the Chinese made a long list of demands for arms, including Russian planes, heavy artillery, tanks and replacement troops. Russia had agreed to provide ten divisions of trained men from Mongolia, plus captured Japanese troops and a limited number of Russian technicians, 100 jet planes and training of a thousand jet pilots, and heavy tanks and guns.
The inside word was that General MacArthur had tried quietly to nix the promotion of three-star Lt. General Matthew Ridgway to four stars, resulting in the new supreme commander of the U.N. forces in Korea being no higher in rank than six of his subordinate admirals and generals. The Joint Chiefs, however, were arranging to get him his fourth star. Speculation for the resistance by General MacArthur was that he was jealous of the success of General Ridgway as ground commander since the prior December.
As stated in the above editorial, William R. Matthews, editor and publisher of the Tucson Arizona Daily Star, writing in The Freeman, having spent a great deal of time in the Far East, relates of four interviews with General MacArthur in Manila and Tokyo. The General had remarked to a reporter that he was in Tokyo restoring a country he had destroyed, found war to be an outmoded method of settling international disputes. At that same moment, on the prior June 25, he was preparing to resist the aggression of North Korea. He believed at that time that Chinese Communists strength was vastly overrated.
His greatest weakness, opines Mr. Matthews, was political in nature. He underestimated what people could be made to do under strict discipline, as in Communist countries.
He had, however, expressed alarm on the prior November 6, following the entry of the Chinese Communists to the war in Korea. He found it to be "one of the most offensive acts of international lawlessness of historic record." By November 24, however, he was optimistically preparing the launch of the final offensive to get "the boys home by Christmas".
Mr. Matthews believes that the change in attitude was from a tragic mistake in intelligence gathering or from someone having mollified the General's fears.
In August, 1949, he had told Mr. Matthews that from Alaska through Okinawa and the Philippines, the U.S. could, with its air and sea power, break up any amphibious operation of an aggressive nation embarking from the Asiatic mainland, and with the atomic bomb, could destroy the cities from which the operation was based. He had not mentioned Korea.
Joseph Alsop, in Ankara, Turkey, finds it a breath of fresh air after leaving Tehran. The American aid program under the Truman Doctrine in Turkey had achieved great things, the economy being protected from heavy military burdens to resist the Soviets, the Turkish Army having been transformed into a 25-division fighting force. But the same American paralysis in policy that plagued relations with Iran also affected Turkey. The shirking of responsibility was in line with that hesitancy on the part of Congress to commit fully to NATO, of which Turkey was a member.
The most important American strategic air bases were in the Mediterranean and thus an attack on Turkey would be an attack on those bases. Turkey was also in the region of Yugoslavia, where it would help to have an ally. Turkey also had the strongest army in the region among Western countries.
Yet, rather than embracing Turkey as an ally, these many benefits it brought to the table were in danger of being lost. If the U.S. continued to delay and defer on establishing the alliance, it would eventually come with conditions and if war came before it was sealed, Turkey would insist probably on independence from both sides. He finds it to be another folly.
Robert C. Ruark feels sorry for 13-year old Arthur MacArthur, son of the General, whose childhood, he ventures, had been lost. Everywhere he went with his parents, a circus ensued with reporters and photographers and a crowd of spectators gathering around. He had to follow in the shadow of his famous father and thus had no life of his own. Generally, Mr. Ruark ventures, such could do damage to the young. He hopes that now that young Arthur was in the U.S. for the first time, his parents would place him in a school where he would not have his path cleared by military officers and his friends screened. He also hopes that he would earn a nickname in school and give and receive a black eye.
What school did you go to in Wilmington, Mr. Ruark, one down on the bowery?
In any event, young Mr. MacArthur still lives in 2018 and so more power to him—and to his erstwhile pet of 1942, General Tojo.
Within two months after the funeral of General MacArthur in April, 1964, the first State funeral in Washington after the somber occasion of the prior November following the assassination of President Kennedy, we visited the tomb of the General in Norfolk.
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