The Charlotte News
Thursday, June 14, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that allied tank columns were roaming over the "iron triangle" area this date but small groups of Chinese troops opposed infantry attempts to mop up the area. Advances extended into Pyonggang, the apex of the triangle which had been the Communist base of operations for the two spring offensives. By contrast, in some sectors of the eastern front, allies were forced to beat off counter-attacks by North Koreans, with only one allied advance reported of as much as a mile.
Fifth Air Force pilots reported that enemy troops poured heavy fire on U.N. troops in the Pyongyang sector, but the airmen responded with fire bombs and machine gun fire, silencing the enemy.
The Department of Defense reported that U.S. casualties in Korea reached 70,317, an increase of 1,965 since the prior week, based on reports to next of kin made through June 8. The casualties included 10,432 killed, 48,133 wounded and 11,752 missing.
The Navy reported that an underwater explosion off the east coast of Korea, presumably from a leftover Japanese mine from the war, damaged the destroyer Walke and resulted in the deaths of 26 men and injuries to seven others.
Former Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, testifying before the joint Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, said that the U.S. went to the aid of South Korea on the motion of Secretary of State Acheson. He said that he believed the decision would have been the same had the Communist Chinese and Russians been the invading forces. He said that the military gave no recommendation on the situation at the initial meeting on June 26, 1950 after the North Korean invasion the previous day. He and Mr. Acheson agreed, after a debate, that the U.S. Seventh Fleet should be sent to protect Formosa. He said that he wanted in 1949 to send a military mission to Formosa but that the President overruled him because of protests from the State Department. He said that there were no intelligence reports given to Washington that anything was going to happen in Korea before the attack. He had heard nothing of a potential invasion while visiting General MacArthur in Tokyo just before the attack, but added that Korea was not the General's responsibility. He said that a message from General MacArthur had prompted the decision to send ground troops into Korea.
The U.S. and Britain had agreed on a draft treaty with Japan. It was not disclosed how the issue of Chinese participation would be resolved, but informed sources said that it would be left to the Japanese to determine whether to sign the treaty with Communist China, Nationalist China or with neither.
Congressman Edward Hebert of Louisiana described, in a series of articles written for the New Orleans States, an atomic test he had witnessed on Eniwetok Atoll the prior month, as appearing as "the gates of hell looking into eternity". He said that everything which had been constructed on the island for the test had been obliterated including a steel tower. He apparently had returned to the U.S. several days before the final test, which was rumored to have been an hydrogen bomb, as much as ten times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945.
The President was set to speak to the nation this night at 9:30 urging continuation of economic controls, set to expire at the end of the month, and also urging a consumer crusade on Congress to pass the extension and widen controls.
The House Ways & Means Committee wound up its work on the bill raising taxes by 7.2 billion per year, raising individual income taxes by 12.5 percent as well as corporate and excise taxes.
For the third consecutive day, a near normal run of cattle was received at Midwestern livestock markets. The 18,500 head surpassed by a third the total of a week earlier and matched the number shipped a year earlier.
In Washington, the crime investigating committee made public testimony from inmates at the house of correction in Jessups, Md., regarding drug addicts' parties in Washington and Baltimore and that dope could be bought as easily as soft drinks.
Mary Curry of The News tells
of 14-year old Betts Huntley of Charlotte winning the Soap Box Derby
championship for the city, before 4,000 spectators downtown, setting a new record of 35.1 seconds—not, we take it, 35 minutes and ten seconds, as the report states, unless the cars were moving in slow-mo
Where Ford art thou?
On the editorial page, "Why MacArthurism Is Losing Force" tells of Lt. General Albert C. Wedemeyer's testimony in favor of General MacArthur's Far Eastern policy having created only a small amount of public excitement, indicative of the waning enthusiasm for General MacArthur's viewpoint among Republicans.
James Reston of the New York Times had noted in a story recently that the old strategy of insinuation, popular with the GOP in 1950, had worked better than the current strategy of investigation, with General MacArthur's initial testimony having receded after the testimony of General Omar Bradley, the other Joint Chiefs, Secretary of Defense Marshall and Secretary of State Acheson had eclipsed it.
The piece finds also that General Wedemeyer's agreement with the strategy of delay to buy more time in Korea had also tended to bolster the Administration position. It suggests that while the strategy might prove to be wrong, the Joint Chiefs were in the best position to see the whole picture and thus the public and press could do little but that which General Wedemeyer had done and yield to their judgment.
"Congressional Hocus-Pocus" tells of Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen having explained recently why economy proposals often did not have lasting effect, that old-age assistance appropriations had been cut seven years in a row, only to have the agency in charge of administration of it then coming back for deficiency appropriations, which were then granted. The piece finds therefore that it was premature to praise Congress for budget-cutting as it might turn out to be hocus-pocus.
"Better Late Than Never" finds that the bill to loan grain for India passed during the week by Congress had many things in its favor. Of the 190 million for the loan, 100 million would come from funds previously appropriated for the Marshall Plan and the balance from a public debt transaction. The ERP administrator was instructed to obtain, insofar as practicable, raw materials from India, especially those which were critical and strategic to the U.S. The terms of the loan would be lenient. The final version did not differ greatly from original versions and the differences could have been worked out in less than the six months it had taken Congress to act, as much of the propaganda value of the loan had been lost. Yet, the humanitarian aspect of the matter was more important, to prevent starvation.
A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, titled "What Is Contempt of Court?" says that while it had great admiration for Federal District Court Judge Wilson Warlick, it could not fathom why he had sentenced a woman school teacher of Asheville, a witness in a criminal case, to five months in jail for contempt for allegedly having a conversation with a juror in the case, when the juror in question was found not guilty of contempt because of inadequate evidence that the woman had talked to him about the case. It cannot understand why one could be found guilty and not the other.
It's simple. The court undoubtedly found that the juror was merely a passive party to the conversation and had not voluntarily participated in it, encouraged it or said anything significant in response.
Use your head.
Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers across the state, provides one from Estelle Loomis of the Richmond County Journal, who had found that the old wives' tale that the moon made people engage in certain aberrant behavior had turned out to be true.
The Morganton News Herald tells of an item in the Christian Science Monitor relating of a Dr. Everett of Boston having remarked, when told of the local newspapers printing stories critical of him, that half the readers of the newspaper never saw the story, half who saw it failed to read it, half who read it did not understand it, half who understood it did not believe it, and half who believed it were of no consequence.
But that still leaves over three percent of the readership who read it, understood it, believed it and were of consequence.
The Twin City Sentinel of Winston-Salem tells of Mayor Marshall Kurfees not being popular with Governor Kerr Scott for the former's efforts in lobbying for the bill to supply a portion of the highway gas tax fund to local streets, bringing Winston-Salem a quarter of a million dollars per year for repair and construction. Mr. Kurfees had said that half the Governor's 20 minutes at the podium recently in Winston-Salem had been spent shaking his finger at the Mayor, who, when asked, said he had not thought of biting it.
The Harnett County News tells of Fuquay's Independent reporting that a candidate for office who was an undertaker had promised, in response to his opponent, a haberdasher, subtracting $10 off a suit of clothes if the patron would vote for him, that he would knock $10 off the cost of the funeral of the voter for casting a ballot in his favor.
The Southern Pines Pilot, reading in the Raleigh News & Observer that 20 percent of the damage to South Carolina's "preach crop" had been done by a fungus, wonders whether it meant that ministers had athlete's foot.
And so forth and so on, more, more,
more, more, mo
Drew Pearson tells of chief of staff of the Air Force, General Hoyt Vandenberg, having hired aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran as an adviser on the WAFs and that she had reported back that they lacked glamour, were too short, fat and unattractive. So General Vandenberg reported to the head of the WAFs, Colonel Geraldine May, that they should recruit women who were taller and stress secretarial work rather than mechanical and the like, to which Col. May objected. As a result, she was being eased out in favor of Mary Jo Shelly of Bennington College. But the WAFs were mad at General Vandenberg for the implied insult to their appearance.
He follows up the story on Congressman Frank Boykin from earlier in the week, indicating that Stuart Symington, head of the RFC, had found that Mr. Boykin had helped secure an RFC loan of $450,000 for a lumber company to which his paper business in Mobile, Ala., sold lumber.
Sir Keith Murdoch, newspaper publisher in Australia, on visiting the U.S. recently had found that the U.S. was the best informed nation in the world and had the freest discussion of problems, bringing things out into the open. He deplored the MacArthur hearings, however, for giving away priceless secrets to the Russians, having a bad effect on the country's allies. He believed the head of soil conservation, Hugh Bennett, to be doing a splendid job preserving the country's soil from erosion, which Mr. Pearson notes was, nevertheless, rolling into the sea at the rate of 500 million acres per year.
Marquis Childs tells of Senator Paul Douglas having in a recent speech said that Washington suffered from "administrativitis", based on either agencies lapsing into stale and profitless routine or gradually becoming infiltrated with representatives of a given industry which the agency was designed to regulate, resulting in the agency being governed by the very special interests it was supposed to control.
He looks especially at the airline industry and the Civil Aeronautics Board, following up on his previous day's piece, as being infiltrated in this manner. Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Banking subcommittee which investigated the RFC, had been questioning Harold Jones, a CAB member, regarding the importance to the air industry of the hidden subsidy in airmail pay granted by the Government, and Mr. Jones had responded that it was substantial, amounting to an estimated third of the total amount of the payment and that the creditors of the airlines relented on forcing bankruptcy because they assumed the Government subsidy would bail them out. The RFC underwrote bank loans of 21 million dollars to Northwest Airlines, of which 4.8 million had been repaid, providing the Government an interest in making sure the airline remained solvent. Afterward, CAB, having approved the loan, authorized domestic airmail routes of nearly 15 million dollars between late 1947 and late 1950 and an even larger amount for trans-Pacific operations.
Thus the Government had become both lender and guarantor of the loan, making it hard to determine how efficiency and economy were being promoted.
He suggests that the Civil Aeronautics Act, if it was not going to be used for its intended purpose, ought be repealed to save money.
Robert C. Ruark tells of Armenian-born Sarkes Tarzian of Bloomington, Indiana, who had come to the country at age 6 and eventually obtained a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an engineering degree and eventually, during the war, went to work for RCA on several Government defense projects. In 1944, he struck out on his own and eventually developed the basic television tuner now used by most manufacturers, building a business worth 20 million dollars per year. He eventually built a television station which he owned in Bloomington, and within six months, was operating at a profit. He used WTTV to disseminate information about the PTA, the Red Cross, Indiana University and other such worthwhile operations.
Mr. Ruark posits that the Communists would find him dull, not able to exploit his plight as part of the oppressed masses of immigrants to the U.S.
Framed Edition
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