The Charlotte News
Friday, June 22, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that the enemy air force was beaten for the fifth time during the week, during two jet battles over North Korea this date involving a total of 89 jets on both sides. American Sabre jets had shot down two Russia-made MIG-15s and damaged three others. The total for the week were eleven enemy planes shot down and 17 damaged, with one other probably destroyed.
On the ground, U.N. patrols ran into what appeared to be the first line of defense on the Western front. Chinese troops launched artillery and mortar fire on an allied patrol north of Yonchon, forcing back for the second straight day U.N. probes of the "iron triangle" toward its apex at Pyonggang. The enemy continued not to interfere with probes around Kaesong in the west.
Senator William Knowland placed in the record of the hearings of the joint Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees a communication from General Matthew Ridgway, then ground commander of the U.N. forces in Korea, sent the previous late December to General J. Lawton Collins, chief of staff of the Army, saying that he was convinced of General MacArthur's logic that a Nationalist offensive in South China would relieve pressure on the U.N. forces in Korea.
Maj. General David Barr testified this date before the Committees, regarding the sudden Chinese assault on the U.S. forces the prior November when they moved toward the Manchurian border at the Yalu River.
Former Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes told a Senate Labor subcommittee seeking to draw up a code of ethics for Government employees that the most important question before them was the loss of confidence in Congress as a result of acts of its members of ether commission or omission. He said that most of the Federal workers were honest. But those in Congress seemed to compete for the spotlight to see who could do the most smearing. The largest issue seemed to be "who saw the most Communists the soonest", resulting in pretextual charges made on the floor of the Congress to bolster the boxscore. Many members also engaged in debate on legislation with undisclosed investment interests in the outcome.
In Tehran, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. warned the Iranian Government that its refineries at Abadan might be forced to shut down because of the mass resignations of British technicians in the wake of the Iranian Government takeover of the refineries, the largest in the world. The Government had given all non-Iranian employees seven days to say whether they would continue to work for the company and had ordered the new management to cancel all leaves of employees.
Congressman Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said that he was introducing legislation to establish a 20-million dollar Air Force Academy. Meanwhile, the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce said that Huntersville near Charlotte was still being explored by the site selection board as a potential site for the Academy.
The Senate and House Banking Committees both approved bills denying the President most of the broad additional powers he had sought with respect to economic controls, and the matter was set to go the floors of both chambers the following week, in advance of the June 30 expiration of the National Defense Act. Both bills limited price rollbacks to those extant during the month starting January 24, 1951. They also included restrictions on the President's authority to impose controls.
The President, speaking at the laying of the cornerstone for the National Institute of Health clinical center in Washington, promised to go along with opponents of his compulsory health insurance plan if they came up with a better solution for reducing health care costs.
A report from Dakar in French West Africa told of 40 persons aboard a missing Pan American Constellation which had vanished along the coast on a flight from Johannesburg to New York and was more than ten hours overdue for its scheduled landing in Monrovia in Liberia.
In Budapest, Archbishop Josef Groesz, Cardinal Mindszenty's successor as head of the Hungarian Roman Catholic Church, pleaded guilty along with eight other defendants to plotting to overthrow the Hungarian Government. Western observers believed the confessions were coerced as had been that of Robert Vogeler, the American businessman released earlier after 16 months imprisonment in Hungary for allegedly being a spy for the U.S.
A report from Gatlinburg, Tenn., tells of a missing 21-year old nurse with an interest in fasting having surfaced in good condition from the mountain wilderness, telling rangers that she had spent two weeks wandering without food or protection from the elements. She showed no signs of malnutrition and had been only half lost while search parties had sought her, saying that she heard them calling for her but did not have the energy to respond. She had been on a camping trip with her father when she wandered into the bear-infested wilderness on the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. She decided finally that it was "time to come out".
Ally, ally oxen free...
Elizabeth Blair of The News tells of a young woman who had graduated high school in Charlotte a year earlier but in the intervening year had suffered from meningitis, which wiped away her memory such that she had just finished grammar school again. She could hardly speak and was barely aware of her surroundings. She complained of headaches the prior September and then lapsed into unconsciousness for two weeks. When she gradually returned to awareness, she did not know how old she was or where she was. Fifteen years earlier, she probably would have died but advances in medical science in the interim had saved her life. Her recognition of basic things slowly returned and she uttered her first words five weeks after regaining consciousness. A group of community volunteers searched for someone to teach her basic fundamental educational skills again and she began the process February 1. She was promoted to the second grade after two weeks. The letter "y" had been especially difficult for her to learn and "yellow" was the last color she could recognize.
On the Feature Page, columnist Earl Wilson speaks with actress Joan Crawford regarding her latest romance, or movie, as the case may be.
On the editorial page, "No Pork Barrel, Please" issues kudos to the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce for its sensible attitude on a veterans hospital in the city. The Charlotte V.A. hospital, which had previously been nixed by the President as part of the cuts in 1946 to the V.A. hospital program, was included anew in a House appropriation for 16,000 new veterans' hospital beds. The Chamber had, however, said that it would wait until someone proved that the facility was truly needed before endorsing it.
Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi the previous year had pushed through a bill in the House to mandate the new beds, but it wisely was allowed to die in the Senate. The V.A. opposed the current effort as well and so it would likely also die.
It concludes that while Charlotte would like to have the hospital if truly needed by the V.A., economy, like charity, ought begin at home and the overriding need was budget-cutting of unnecessary Government expenditure.
"What's Your Life Insurance Worth?" finds too much attention directed to the effect of inflation on the everyday cost of living and too little on the steady depreciation in value of such things as life insurance policies and other long-term fixed investments. The solution, according to the president of Prudential Insurance Co., in a talk in Detroit, was to arrest inflation and restore stability to the dollar with a five-point program, which included increase in Federal taxes to reduce available money for consumer spending and put the Government on a pay-as-you-go basis, reduction of the non-military expenditures and spending military funds efficiently, tight monetary and credit controls, management of the public debt to reduce the money supply to the general public, and a vigorous wage-price control program. The piece thinks it a wise proposal to remove the threat hanging over the people.
What if you hain't got no life insurance against which to borrow to begin with, Porky?
"The Change in Our Fighting Men" tells of two correspondents for the New York Herald-Tribune having reported that U.S. forces had overcome the "bug out" psychology which prompted retreat the prior December and having become instead a tough, hard-hitting outfit. Correspondent David McConnell gave most of the credit for the change to General Matthew Ridgway, transforming the "whimpering weakling" into a "mature man". Correspondent Bert Andrews attributed part of the credit to officers and commanders in general, including, in addition to General Ridgway, Admirals Arthur Radford and Turner Joy, and Generals James Van Fleet, Gerald Thomas, George Stratemeyer and O. P. Wayland. He said that the leaders, too, had hardened.
Now that the Korean troops, unprepared, according to former Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson in his testimony the previous week to the joint Senate committees, for fighting at the start of the war, had been hardened by combat, dividends, concludes the piece, could be reaped should a larger war come.
"The Right of Mental Privacy" tells of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals having banned commercial broadcasting on Washington buses and streetcars based on the fact that passengers were a captive audience, upholding the right of the minority of such passengers to object to the broadcasts regardless of whether the majority favored them or not. The freedom at stake was the freedom of the passenger to have his or her attention on all of the faculties, an attention which forced listening destroyed.
The piece agrees that in a time when attention-getting devices were increasingly prevalent in the society, the right to exercise thought was to be cherished as preeminent.
That ought go also for the airplane pre-flight intrusion of commercial television.
Someone ought take out a gun and pop the damned screen. We have work to do on a long flight, moron.
The case would be reversed by the Supreme Court in 1952 in a 6 to 2 decision delivered by Justice Harold Burton, with Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black dissenting, though the latter finding no violation of free speech or due process in the record of the case at bench, consistent with the majority finding that the constitutional protections extended to governmental intrusions on freedom but not to those by private parties and that no sufficient intrusions of liberty interests had occurred in the case as passengers in public transport were subject to reasonable limitations in relation to the rights of others. Justice Felix Frankfurter decided not to participate because his "feelings [were] so strongly engaged as a victim of the practice in controversy". Justice Douglas based his dissent on the liberty interest of privacy, the right to be left alone.
Shoot the damned speaker out.
A piece from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, titled "Judge Goldborough's Fame", tells of just deceased Federal District Court Judge Alan Goldsborough, who had issued the contempt citations in 1946 and 1948 against UMW and John L. Lewis for disobedience to a court order to end strikes, having prior to that time been a friend of labor and the Roosevelt Administration, while in Congress from 1921 through 1939. FDR had appointed him to the Federal bench. He should therefore, based on that record, have been more friendly to UMW than the Government in the contempt cases. The piece finds that he had demonstrated not merely learning but conscience and common sense during his judicial career.
Drew Pearson tells of Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson having sent letters to about twenty Government agencies cautioning them on one of the worst scandals of mobilization, unjustified tax amortization, enabling manufacturers to write-off the cost of a new factory in five rather than thirty years. Mr. Wilson did so at the urging of Congressman Porter Hardy of Virginia and his committee investigating favoritism given certain big businesses in their tax treatment to encourage defense production. The committee insisted on a shake-up of personnel to eliminate the practice. Mr. Wilson, however, had told the Congressman that the problem was getting the right men to serve. The committee ended the hearing with the belief that Mr. Wilson would improve the situation.
Some of the largest German firms were guilty of smuggling materials into Russia, as confirmed by a confidential paper prepared by U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy, who estimated that 250 million dollars worth of such materials was going behind the iron curtain each year. An East German Communist had promised the Ruhr industrialists in late 1949 that in exchange for such goods, they would receive an unlimited market for steel products and machine tools in China, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, and Austria. Some of the same industrialists were present who had aided Hitler to build his war machine in the 1930's. All of this trade was being conducted openly and in violation of American prohibitions and included two firms receiving large amounts of Marshall Plan aid.
The President had privately advised Congressional leaders that he would veto all appropriations bills which provided for the ten percent across-the-board slash of agency budgets, even if it meant tying up the budgets for the entire domestic program. He asserted that Congress was not performing its duty of analysis of the budgets by engaging in such wholesale cuts and that the practice might even be unconstitutional. He said he had done his duty by submitting a carefully drawn proposed budget and the Congress should consider each item on its merits.
Marquis Childs discusses the British continuing to bargain over their "'rights'" in Iranian oil as though they had all of eternity to reach a compromise. He finds it the equivalent of fiddling while Rome burned.
The British position was founded on a treaty, the foundation of which had been swept away by the revolutionary force of nationalism in Iran, working to nationalize the oil. The British showed little awareness of this sea change.
The overriding respect for Western military and economic power had disappeared. The British had learned the lessons in some areas better than Americans, as in India. But in Iran, the British still thought in terms of force. He quotes one minor British diplomatic official as having scoffed at an American expert's prediction that the appearance of British paratroopers in southern Iran to protect the oil would result in armed insurrection by Iranians against the British and Americans in the country. He finds it tantamount to the prediction of one high-ranking American military official at the outset of the Korean war that the North Koreans would cower at the first sight of American planes.
Letters from Iran in recent days, from a member of an Iranian parliamentary committee who regarded himself as a friend of America, said that the Iranians would not deprive the West of the continued flow of oil—a statement consistent with that of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh as reported two days earlier. They would continue the same operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., with the same personnel receiving the same salaries and privileges. They sought only to end the "interference of the former company and its relentless agents in the internal policies and affairs of Iran."
Whether irrational and unlawful, it was, says Mr. Childs, the reality with which the British had to deal. In 1938, after Mexico had expropriated British and American oil interests in that country, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recognized the sovereignty of the Mexican Government so to act. While the situation in Iran was not entirely similar, it was close enough and with far greater stakes for the West such that a like recognition needed to be made.
Robert C. Ruark tells of his late executive editor at Scripps-Howard newspapers, John Sorrells, who had given to him a request that he fulfill Mr. Sorrells's own dream of going to Africa to bring back a "tush", which Mr. Sorrells, in his Arkansan pronunciation, called a tusk. He tells of his admiration for him and that he was going to fulfill the assignment, for which he would soon depart.
Good luck on your tush-hunting.
Catch a big one
A letter writer tells of the impressive article in the Saturday Evening Post regarding Charlotte and assumes the Chamber of Commerce would be overcome by its laudatory remarks. But he also notes a piece from House & Garden in the April, 1951 issue which had allowed only one sentence for Charlotte in its piece on North Carolina and wonders what the Chamber thought of that omission.
A letter writer from Pittsboro tells of his subscribing to the newspaper for its editorial page and finding R. F. Beasley's recent editorial on maintaining segregation in the public schools worthwhile and interesting, that he was correct in his statement that the prospect of Federal bayonets to enforce a recalcitrant white South to accept integration would only interfere with black education. (On Wednesday, the editorial had received a rebuttal from Kelly Alexander, head of the North Carolina chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.)
He also found the editorial of June 16 recommending hiring of more IRB agents to get at high-tax bracket cheats to be ignoring the fact that 94.5 percent confiscatory taxes were an invitation to cheat.
He also thinks the editorial of June 19 lauding the President's choice of UNC president Gordon Gray as the new coordinator of psychological warfare to have been interesting and analytical, but believes that Mr. Gray was not the only fit choice for the job. He had demonstrated tact and poise and so the President found him a good choice, but the writer worries that he would wind up devoting more time to his Government position than the UNC post with which he would split his duties, and in that event ought be replaced with UNC Chancellor Robert House.
A letter writer provides a letter he had sent to Drew Pearson in which he commended the columnist for his crusade in recent years against various forms of crooked behavior by the wealthy and people in Congress and other parts of government. He urges him to repeat his former revelations about the background of Senator Joseph McCarthy, as providing the best answer to the Senator's recent scurrilous attack on Secretary of Defense Marshall for his Far Eastern policy. He finds General Marshall an exponent of Christian leadership and Senator McCarthy just the opposite.
A letter from Stuart Symington thanks the newspaper for its editorial of May 23.
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