The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 17, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that the Chinese Communists had smashed against strong allied defenses of Seoul, in part of their renewed spring offensive exploding all along the 100-mile front. After a 4.5-hour battle before Seoul, the enemy fled, leaving behind an estimated 400 casualties. Elsewhere along the front, enemy casualties were estimated in the thousands. Artillery had mowed down the enemy in their assault on American positions southeast of Chunchon. Even when allied planes dropped napalm on enemy troops, they made no effort to disperse but kept coming, dying by the thousands. Field dispatches said that 96,000 Chinese troops were attacking in the 25-mile front of the central sector and that another 25,000 were gathering in the Pukhan valley of the west central sector.

The breakthrough occurred south of Inje, north of the 38th parallel, as two South Korean divisions were retreating before the enemy attack, permitting elements of two Chinese regiments to slip through the gap; but every dispatch referring to the breakthrough was heavily censored.

At the U.N., the effort of Russia to veto in the Security Council the arms embargo against Communist China failed when they and other Soviet bloc nations refused to participate in debate before the political committee, assuring the absence of opposition to the embargo and speedy approval by the committee and then by a plenary session of the General Assembly. Russia claimed that the committee lacked competence in the matter and that it ought be heard by the Council.

The President, in a speech before the National Conference on Citizenship at the Hotel Statler in Washington, criticized General MacArthur and Senator Taft for seeking to have the country "go for an all-out war in China all by ourselves." He said a week of all-out war would cost the country ten times what it was costing to rearm and to fight in Korea. The President departed almost entirely from the text of his prepared remarks, did not mention Senator Taft by name but the implication was clear.

The joint Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees voted 18 to 8 to uphold chairman Richard Russell's ruling that General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, need not testify regarding his conversations with the President on the firing of General MacArthur.

Britain sent a stern note to Iran to settle the dispute over nationalization of the oil. A deputy of the National Front party, the party of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, said that the British pressure on Iran regarding the oil would lead to world war three.

Before HUAC, actor Lloyd Gough refused to say whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. Actors Sterling Hayden and Marc Lawrence had named him as having been at Hollywood party meetings. Mr. Gough also refused to answer questions regarding the whereabouts of actress Karen Morley, whom the Committee had been seeking but was unable to bring under subpoena. When asked whether he would serve in the military in the event of war, Mr. Gough said that the Joint Chiefs and others had said that the country would not be ready for a general war for two years or more and so the members were sending him to the firing line too early. He said, however, that he was law abiding and if called upon would re-enter the Army, as he had served in Belgium, France and Germany during World War II.

Fighting Nazis does not count. You have to be prepared to kill some Commies to be a real American.

At least HUAC is finally getting some more press coverage.

Dr. Joseph Weinberg, "Scientist X", was held not to have been in contempt for refusing to answer questions before a Federal grand jury but was suspended from his faculty position at the University of Minnesota, as the University president explained that whatever the outcome of the contempt proceeding, the professor's refusal to cooperate was outside the University's policy.

The Constitution does not have good standing there, huh?

HUAC had contended that Dr. Weinberg had passed atomic bomb secrets to the Communists during the war while a physicist at Lawrence Laboratories at the University of California in Berkeley. A Justice Department attorney conceded that three of the four questions propounded to the professor might be incriminating but that he ought be required to answer whether he lived in California in 1943.

The chairman of the House Labor Committee, Congressman Graham Barden of North Carolina, named a subcommittee to study the whole wage stabilization program. Many members had grumbled that the Wage Stabilization Board was using its emergency administrative powers to bypass Taft-Hartley.

Ralph Gibson of The News tells of unfounded rumors hampering the investigation into the murder of the Charlotte woman on Monday afternoon as she napped with her four-year old daughter, who described the assailant as a tall, thin black man. False rumors had circulated that the man had been caught and had confessed. Suspects were being questioned but no one had confessed. Another rumor had it that the woman's husband had been arrested, but the police clarified that he was not a suspect as he had been at work at the time. No motive had been established as nothing was taken from the home and no sexual assault had taken place.

In Winston-Salem, at the Industrial Safety Conference at the Robert E. Lee Hotel, Governor Kerr Scott attacked the 1951 legislative session as the most negative he had ever seen. After Mayor Marshall Kurfees welcomed the Governor, the Governor attacked the Mayor for having supported the Powell bill, to provide five million dollars each year for twenty years out of the State surplus fund to maintain city streets, which the Governor described as one of the most unstatesmanlike pieces of legislation he had ever seen. He decried the bill for the fact that there was not enough money to rebuild narrow bridges on the secondary roads of the state, leading to numerous highway deaths. The two men then left together from the rostrum and were last seen engaged in conversation in the lobby of the hotel.

They needed to go on over to the Coke machine and have a tête-à-tête and cool off.

In Leesburg, Fla., two youngsters battled each other for the watermelon eating championship, with both contestants consuming three and a half pounds in two minutes. Being too full for a runoff, however, a coin flip determined the winner.

On the editorial page, "Time to Bury the Hatchet" comments on bickering at the City Council meeting between Mayor Victor Shaw and former Mayor Herbert Baxter, defeated two years earlier by Mr. Shaw, regarding the appointment of a new City Recorder. The piece advises that the city's problems outweighed petty political squabbles and that the two men and those of the Council who might array themselves on one side or the other should therefore bury the hatchet.

"Strength in Unity and Vice-Versa" quotes extensively from the speech of Bernard Baruch honoring General Marshall at V.M.I., in which he had said that the country was trying to enforce a global doctrine of opposition to Communism with a military establishment presently preoccupied in one theater. He favored greater mobilization to remedy the problem. The country and its allies needed to grow stronger militarily before it could have a unified foreign policy. Even if the Korean war ended, there would still remain, he said, the need to rearm.

He described General Marshall as the global organizer, both presently and during World War II, whereas General MacArthur was the leader of troops, with the same qualities which made him a great leader acting also to make him impatient with limitations on his action.

Mr. Baruch championed global defense, despite the position aligning him with the President who had maintained his distance from Mr. Baruch after being criticized by him, another sign, says the piece, of Mr. Baruch's stature.

"State Financial Worries" tells of North Carolina, for long criticized for discouraging industrialization based on high State taxes, now reaping the benefits of its tax program, largely unchanged since 1933, while other states were being forced to raise taxes to find more revenue. Only a small number of the 45 state legislatures which had met since the start of 1951 had reduced taxes while the majority raised them, as 40 of the 48 states ran a deficit the prior year and faced larger expenditures in the coming year.

It concludes that North Carolina's finances had been managed wisely through time.

A piece from the Buffalo (N.Y.) Courier-Express, titled "Wide-Awake Driving", tells of the Kemper Insurance Co. advising that an extra hour of sleep before setting out on a journey by car might mean the difference between safe driving and having an accident. A year-long study showed that drivers who got less than seven hours of sleep per night were inviting trouble on the roads. Truck drivers understood this need well and usually adhered to it. But tourists did not always do so.

It suggests that motorists who drove until dark should stop periodically to rest or allow others in the vehicle to take over the driving chores.

Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers across the state, provides one from Roy Thompson of the Winston-Salem Journal, who was starting a "Benevolent and Protective Order of All Men With a Grudge Against Ava Gardner", who periodically visited her sister in the Twin City. Everyone still loved her and he admits that he had been crazy about her, too, until he wrote a story about her, which she did not appreciate, prompting her to call him a "small-town jerk". He says that he resented it as Winston-Salem was not such a small town.

Well, now, just look here now, just a minute. Miss Ava, she could not help herse-elf of being somewhat snooty, 'cause she done growed up down 'ere in 'e booming metropoliseses of Smithfie-eld, Nor' Car'lina, Newp'rt News, Virginia, and Wilson, Nor' Ca'lina. How could you not help but be just a little snobby toward small-towners? Besides, it won't be long 'til she'll marry that guy from Hoboken.

The Durham Herald provides an hypothetical quote from Rita Hayworth regarding her pending divorce from Prince Aly Khan: "Aly Oops!"

Mrs. Theo B. Davis of the Zebulon Record finds that the partitioning off of children from one another by age in school as well as in church and other places had widened the gulf between generations, as children were thus conditioned to interest in being only with other children their own age rather than being around adults on occasion. The same, she adds, was true of different generations of adults.

The Goldsboro News-Argus recounts of a farmer, seeing a school bus going by, saying that it was a strange world in which the taxpayers had to pay $3,000 for a school bus to keep the children from having to walk to school and then another $50,000 for a gymnasium so they could get some exercise while there.

The Camden Chronicle tells of a doctor being asked why he became a dermatologist, to which he replied that his patients never got him out of bed at night, never died, and never got well.

And so on, so on, so on and forth on so.

Drew Pearson tells of the worst allied air disaster of the Korean war having occurred the prior month when 40 B-29s seeking to bomb the international bridge linking Sinuiju in North Korea to Antung in Manchuria were attacked by 100 Russian-built MIG-15s from the Manchurian side, shooting down two, with a third missing, and forcing seven more B-29s to crash land in South Korea, with one more badly damaged. Most air missions, however, over Korea had been successful and the Air Force had done an excellent job generally.

Russia had capitalized on the propaganda surrounding their sale of 50,000 tons of wheat to India while the U.S. grain had been held up in Congress. As a result, Russia had made new friends in India, notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. had been selling 100,000 bushels of wheat to India per month for some time. Similar to the American citizens' Friendship Train for France in 1947 proposed by Mr. Pearson to meet the gap in winter food and clothing needs caused by delay in implementing the Marshall Plan, thousands of college students and others had raised wheat which they were shipping to India through its embassy in Washington. Meanwhile, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota had worked out an arrangement with the Red Cross so that anyone could send cash, to be used by the Red Cross to purchase food from Government surpluses and then sent to India.

In his testimony before the Senate committees, General MacArthur had stressed only four points contained in the January 12 memo he received from the Joint Chiefs, each favorable to his position on Korea. But he failed to mention the other sixteen points, one of which was the proposal to use anti-Communist Chinese guerrillas on the mainland and to buy off Chinese generals with silver. The Chiefs had also stressed the importance of stabilizing Korea and if unable to do so, to evacuate completely. General MacArthur had opposed evacuation for it appearing as military defeat, a point with which Secretary of State Acheson fully agreed. But Secretary Acheson believed that if withdrawal became necessary, then the world should be told that it was because the allies were greatly outnumbered and had done their best, thus diminishing any dishonor for such a withdrawal. General MacArthur, by contrast, believed that if withdrawal was required, it should be labeled a political and not a military decision. Shortly afterward, however, Army chief of staff General Lawton Collins flew to Korea and determined that the U.N. forces could hold.

Marquis Childs tells of the Republicans being all smiles regarding their prospects for 1952, with the proliferation of scandals aplenty in the Democratic Party, including questions of influence exerted on RFC loans by Presidential aide Donald Dawson, the RFC generally, the Kefauver committee's criticism of Ambassador to Mexico William O'Dwyer for allowing organized crime to go on unabated during his tenure as Mayor and District Attorney in New York City, plus the revelations of Communists in the Government. By contrast, the President was not so easily possessed of a smile as had been his usual routine in earlier years.

There was some ground for optimism at the White House, however, as the public was beginning to grasp, in the wake of the Senate hearings, the reasons for the President firing General MacArthur. There was contemplation of a summer trip by the President across the country by train to the West, culminating in the opening in August of a reclamation project around Tracy, California, fed by the Shasta Dam from the north, to provide a new food supply for the country, now reaching 150 million people. That would be right up the President's alley as it was in line with the public power and reclamation program he had championed, as well as increased production. The extent to which he could make such a trip would depend on where the Congress would be at that time.

Whether the President's determination to prove he had done the right thing in firing General MacArthur meant that he intended to run again in 1952, no one knew except the President, himself.

Democrats were predicting that the President might jettison his problems with Mr. Dawson and Ambassador O'Dwyer, but that, finds Mr. Childs, would be contrary to his habit of clinging to cronies long after they had become liabilities or worse.

Robert C. Ruark, in Miami, suggests that the country might be so inundated with information that it had become desensitized to news of horror and crisis.

It was possible for the leaders to threaten too often and too wildly that unless the country did a particular thing, something disastrous would happen in consequence. The American people were at that point of being jaded.

Secretary of Defense Marshall had said that the country was in immediate danger of attack by the Russians, but it was inconceivable that in the ensuing two years the Russians would drop bombs on American cities. Despite public knowledge that the Russians had many weapons of mass destruction, including the atom bomb, no one got very excited about civil defense preparation. Threats and warnings had worn thin.

The public had begun so much to suspect that the motivation for these warnings was to peddle something that the shock value had dissipated.

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