The Charlotte News
Friday, June 8, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that Secretary of Defense Marshall had paid a surprise visit to the Korean front this date, as allied artillery fought a day-long long-range duel with heavily bulwarked Chinese artillery in front of Chorwon, a key point on the "iron triangle" which the allies were seeking as an objective for its strategic road junctions on which the enemy depended for maintaining their position in Korea. In the west, three Chinese battalions blocked allied attempts to move closer to Chorwon, though eventually gaining two miles in mud and slime. In the east, the advance over ridges was grudging or not at all.
U.N. warplanes dropped napalm on Chinese entrenchments and fragmentation bombs on the "iron triangle".
The Army reported that total enemy casualties through June 3 were 1,115,111, reducing the figure from the previous week's estimate of 1,133,000, after some errors and miscalculations had been removed.
Secretary Marshall said that any peace moves would have to be initiated by Communist China and that he was seeking more U.N. troops to support the allied drive. He said that the war was not a stalemate but a "military classic". He found enthusiasm among the troops as he toured the front and spoke with commanders. He brought with him no new directives to supreme commander General Matthew Ridgway and said that the reason for the visit was "purely military".
Secretary of State Acheson again testified before the joint Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, saying that he did not know Secretary of Defense Marshall was going to Korea, causing Republican members, notably Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, to question whether the two men were working together as they should. Secretary Acheson said that because of his continuing testimony for the previous six business days, there had been no reason for Secretary Marshall to alert him of the trip. He assured the Senator that the trip did not suggest anything in the winds regarding peace negotiations with the enemy, a point confirmed by Secretary Marshall.
The President called in key Congressional leaders to urge extension and strengthening of price, wage and other stabilization controls, set to expire at the end of the fiscal year. The previous day, the President warned that before the end of the year, inflationary pressures would grow rapidly under the influence of increased defense spending by 30 billion dollars per year.
Price director Mike DiSalle said in a written report to the Senate and House Banking Committees that the failure to control beef prices would wreck ceilings on all food.
The worst beef shortage in markets since during the war was threatened as cattle were being held from the nation's major livestock markets, with shortages of meat, according to some packers, set to start in markets by the following week.
No beef, no play. We take our chips and go home.
That boy better put down that knife though.
In Kansas City, Congressman Leonard Irving, representing the President's home district, was indicted by a Federal grand jury for use of labor union funds in the 1948 election campaign while he had been president and business manager of a local union of the International Hod Carriers. The financial secretary and treasurer of the local was named along with him.
In London, the Foreign Office still had no clue as to the whereabouts of the missing two employees who were in possession of State secrets. The messages the previous day to family members from Paris were believed to have been composed by the missing men but were not in their handwriting. A French newspaper said that French Army intelligence believed that they were in Warsaw. The French police said that they did not know where the men were but believed they had departed France. They suspected no foul play. Both men had reputations for getting along well with Communist diplomats, leading to speculation that they may have defected behind the iron curtain.
Robert Vogeler, speaking to the National Press Club in Washington, repudiated his "confession" of sabotage made to Hungarian authorities after he had been arrested and accused of spying for the U.S. in latter 1949 and held in custody for 17 months until his release the prior April 28. He said that his post-release press conference statement, in which he said "there was some truth" in the confession, had been misunderstood and was meant to be only an ironic reference to the basic information of his name and other such identifying matter. He said that he had been grilled for 78 hours without sleep when he finally was presented with the statement, with which he then argued line for line, prompting twelve more days of questioning for eighteen hours each day. He was forced for ten days to live on black bread and water and on one occasion was dumped naked into a bath of ice water. He thanked the U.S. press for keeping his case alive.
James Farley, former adviser and Cabinet member to FDR, said, while speaking at St. Anselm's College in Manchester, N.H., that he believed that if the country had an alert, vigorous leader at Yalta in early 1945 and Tehran in late 1943, then some of the problems currently besetting the world would not have arisen. He said that his former boss was weary and overburdened, having given his all to solve the problems of the nation and the world. He explained that he had opposed the third term of the President in 1940, announcing for the nomination, himself, because he believed the President was "listening to courtiers and coattail riders" by that point. He was convinced that he had been right though would have been happier had he been wrong. He urged that younger leaders be trained for such important tasks in the future.
On page 3-A, News reporter
Emery Wister provides an account of his interview from Hollywood
with actress Ruth Roman
On the editorial page, "Another Year of Sugaw Creek Halitosis" tells of local residents around Sugaw Creek having to put up for another year with the unpleasant odors emanating from the creek during summer, especially bad on warm evenings, as the City Council had postponed action on the problem by setting the effective date of an ordinance designed to eliminate dumping into the creek for more than a year hence. The previous year, it had provided for waste handling by authorizing expansion of the Sugaw Creek disposal plant to permit absorption of industrial waste into the sewage but it had yet to be undertaken, though it would presumably be constructed within the ensuing year.
"Germ War Could Be Worse Than A-Bomb" tells of biological warfare potentially being a greater hazard, for its capability of being used in stealth, than the atomic bomb. U.S. military intelligence had studied it since 1941 and the secret research continued, with a view toward potential use by the U.S. if necessary. The prior December, a report from the President stated that it could be used effectively against the U.S., infecting water supplies or air conditioning systems in buildings used for vital military projects. Major General Anthony McAuliffe, of "nuts" fame at Bastogne in December, 1944, had been chief of the Army Chemical Corps and warned of its potential use as a weapon of sabotage, said chlorination and filtration would not counteract bacteriological agents. It could also be used to infect food supplies and spread deadly diseases.
The piece urges the public to become aware of the problem through materials disseminated by the Civil Defense Administration to enable local cooperation in detecting and preventing its occurrence.
Orange alert... Get your duct tape down 'ere at the hardware store and seal them winders.
"Serge Koussevitsky" laments the passing on June 4 of the conductor of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra who had inaugurated the Boston Pops concert series and
presented at Tanglewood
A piece from the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News, titled "Preparing the Budgets", tells of Congressman Jamie Whitten of Mississippi having said recently that he believed Government agencies were preparing their budgets with cuts in mind and so overstated their needs accordingly. He compared it to the case of a lawyer who prepared his cost bill with due deference to an opposing attorney known to contest cost bills, and so had deliberately placed an inappropriate item in the list as a red herring to give the opposing lawyer something to which to object.
Drew Pearson tells of it not apparently paying to tell Congress how G.M. obtained favorable treatment on steel allocations, as had Col. William Knight, who had now been forced to resign from his job with the National Production Authority, after being advised by his associates at the agency not to testify. Melvin Cole, vice-president of Bethlehem Steel and a non-salaried Government adviser, had authorized the allocation, as had Henry Rankin of Republic Steel, similarly employed. Both steel companies did a huge amount of business with G.M. Meanwhile, a locomotive company which needed steel had its applications to NPA "lost" two times after Col. Knight, a New England railroad man, had twice approved the allocations.
He notes that a steady stream of men from industry, being paid by their companies and not the Government, had been operating at NPA, with their first loyalty therefore to their companies. Some companies made it a policy to plant men inside Government agencies.
Foreign military attaches and diplomats were reading and studying the testimony of the MacArthur hearings to glean ideas of what the U.S. would do in the event of future war. Friendly diplomats had expressed concern over the revelatory nature of the hearings. It was estimated that the hearings would save the Soviets millions in intelligence work.
One of the matters revealed in the release of the previously suppressed report from 1947 regarding the B & O Railroad matter and its Government-approved bankruptcy enabling default on an 87 million dollar RFC loan while it made substantial profits, was the activities of Federal District Court Judge William C. Chestnut, who had voted bonds in favor of the bankruptcy plan of B & O in 1939, when it received the RFC loan, and then sold his bonds just before the B & O case came to court, then issued an opinion in favor of the bankruptcy plan, saying that with the RFC loan, B & O could meet its obligations by 1944, the scheduled payoff date on the loan. But in 1944, he again voted for approval of the B & O bankruptcy.
Mr. Pearson notes that some Senators who favored suppression of the report in 1947 believed that because the matter had been reviewed by the courts, there was no reason to publish the report. But while the courts had dealt with whether B & O could repay its debt, last judicially reviewed in 1945, the 1947 Banking Committee hearings dealt with the political maneuvering and wire-pulling which siphoned off money from the railroad and put it in the position of not being able to pay the debt.
Marquis Childs, writing from Clinton, Iowa, tells of being asked to provide a commencement address at the high school where he had graduated in the spring of 1918, as World War I was fast coming to a close, while the graduates perceived Europe as "unbelievably far away", as if on "another planet".
He had told the students in 1951 that which he would not have conceived to say in 1918, that in the age of mass communication, big labor, big business, and big government, the country was in danger of losing that which was at base of Western values, the sanctity of the individual. He clarifies that such was not to be confused with its very antithesis, the cult of personality worship as demonstrated and brought to full flower in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Thirties and early Forties. It meant self-discipline as an individual, accepting responsibilities as well as rights.
Such a framework for existence was contrary to Communism which formed a "functional" state to achieve a perfect society, denouncing along the way anyone perceived as a "class enemy", "Fascist beast", or "bourgeois wrecker", reducing that person to subhuman status and so subject to elimination, even as a duty of citizenship. Its final perfection was a society of ants or bees acting on blind instinct to perform tasks to which each was biologically suited.
He had told the graduates that the society, however, could not afford to be self-satisfied on this basis, as he recalled differences in individuals being more sharply pronounced in his youth and that there was a greater willingness to recognize and understand the differences. In those earlier times, as a person walked down Main Street, he ran into a half dozen people who had a separate character, not "characters" or "types" but rather individuals who led shared but separate lives.
He suggests that the prophecy of the Nazis, that the world would finally follow the example set by their demonic totalitarianism, with the current "vicious business of labeling people and thereby dehumanizing them", had spread so far that it appeared at times that the prophecy might be about to come true.
Robert C. Ruark tells of a story that Lucky Luciano had been spotted at a theater in Naples watching an old gangster movie in which the gangsters were shot up by the cops, and apparently he had enjoyed it. He was virtually alone in the world, divorced from his former rackets and dope smuggling operations. He should have long ago been dead but it was still, Mr. Ruark suggests, possible to feel some degree of sympathy for his plight.
He had once lived in the same hotel as Mr. Luciano in Rome and they rode the elevator together several times, though Mr. Ruark never spoke to the convicted and deported gangster. He knew that Mr. Ruark had caused him trouble in Cuba when he was trying to effect a return to the U.S. and had good cause to hate him, but never let on.
He concludes that there was some grim humor in the fact that he was in a Naples theater trying to expiate his past sins by watching a gangster movie with James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson playing hoodlums. "This is a true example of criminals returning to the scene of the crime."
A letter writer from Pittsboro says that he was not surprised by the recent decision of the Fourth District Court of Appeals in McKissick, et al. v. Carmichael, upholding the right of admission to the UNC Law School of three qualified black applicants based on there being no substantially equal State-funded black law school, but wonders what was next. He adverts to the 1927 Supreme Court decision of Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78, delivered for an unanimous Court by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, which upheld the rights of the states to determine the method of education of their children, holding that refusal to allow a Chinese-American student to attend an all-white school in Mississippi, in contravention of State segregation laws, was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection clause under the Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal doctrine.
He finds it futile, however, of the State of North Carolina in 1951 to try to effect changes in its facilities to render them substantially equal under Sweatt v. Painter because the New Deal since 1933, he posits, had produced a host of "nonsense" which was bound to eliminate God's ordained segregation of the races when the black man was in Africa and the white man in Europe and the yellow man in Asia and the red man in the Americas. He thinks that segregation preserved racial purity and that inferiority complexes arose in peoples with no racial pride.
No, that's not right. The red man was in Roosha and in Mississippi, only, in the beginning. That there is when the trouble started.
This here's Amur'ca, for Amur'cans only. Send them all back 'ere where they done come from.
A letter writer wonders how long the country could keep giving everything away and get nothing in return other than "idle promises". He thinks the "5 and 10 percenters and the piano players in Washington" were not going to pull the country from its "present economic international chaos". He wanted men of vision capable of making decisions and who would stand by their convictions. He quotes Abraham Lincoln, that "the impartial administration of justice was the foundation of freedom".
Well, the one you undoubtedly seek is in the wings, on the horizon, already a Senator, soon to be Vice-President. But, unfortunately, he, too, plays the piano.
This date fifty years ago, the
funeral
It presented a way that Saturday for the shocked of the country to begin to heal—but also inevitably brought back painful and sad memories of the funereal procession through Washington from the White House to Arlington on Monday, November 25, 1963, four and a half years earlier.
The present was in color; the earlier had been in black and white. School was out now and it was a Saturday; before, we had watched part of the day's proceedings on the television in the schoolroom in a half-day of school, with the overhead lights out, then went home to watch the remainder.
As in April, 1964, when we first went to Arlington, we returned in mid-June, 1968, and in August, went to Memphis and the Lorraine Motel.
In a bit of strange irony, this same day, James Earl Ray, accused assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., two months earlier on April 4 in Memphis, was arrested by Scotland Yard officers at Heathrow Airport in London while trying to board a plane for Belgium. He had managed somehow to escape the United States undetected through Canada and live in Britain and for a time in Portugal in the intervening period. He would plead guilty to the assassination the following March but would quickly seek to withdraw the plea, claiming it had been coerced falsely by his attorney to avoid the death penalty. He would continue, until his death in April, 1998, to deny that he shot Dr. King, albeit not denying that earlier in the afternoon of April 4, he had been at the boarding house from which the shots were believed to have been fired, to deliver a rifle for his contact, "Raoul", and claimed to have left sometime before the shooting occurred at around 6:00 p.m. The rifle he left, which bore his fingerprints, was the one recovered by Memphis police shortly after the shooting, in a duffle bag stashed just outside the doorway of the boarding house, a bag so full of additional evidence linking its contents to Mr. Ray that many have posited with credulity that it appeared as part of a frame. It was believed to have been the rifle used to kill Dr. King.
In another twist of strange irony, Samuel Yorty, Mayor of Los Angeles at the time of the shooting of Senator Kennedy, someone, though a Democrat, who was inimical to the Senator, accusing him in August, 1966 of using his position as brother of the late President to attack President Johnson in furtherance of his own presidential ambitions, and to whom the Senator jokingly referred, moments before the shooting, as sending word that they had stayed too long in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, died on June 5, 1998, thirty years to the day after the shooting of the Senator.
As a result of these two violent deaths by gunfire would come, in October, 1968, the toughest Federal gun control law passed to that point, banning interstate sale or transfer of guns as well as sale to those known to have been convicted of or under indictment for crimes punishable by more than a year in jail, those who were fugitives from justice, those who had been adjudged mentally defective or committed to a mental institution, were users of or addicted to narcotics or were illegal aliens.
But that job, the elimination of rampant gunplay from our society, is obviously far from finished. The best way to go about it would be to follow the advice of former Justice of the Supreme Court John Paul Stevens and repeal the Second Amendment as an anachronistic holdover from frontier days in the country, days long gone by and to which no one in their right mind would wish to return—the Old Frontier
Framed Edition
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