The Charlotte News

Wednesday, July 18, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert Eunson, that ceasefire negotiators for both sides in Korea had agreed on two points for the conference agenda but a dispute on one major point still blocked the start of substantive negotiations. None of the three points were identified.

Ground fighting was nearly absent from the fronts as only one allied patrol encountered enemy troops. Allied bombers continued to hit highways and railways to prevent the enemy from moving up new troops. During the prior 24 hours, no American had been killed in combat, the first time that had happened since U.S. troops first entered the fighting. The average daily U.S. death toll had been 30.

The Department of Defense announced that U.S. battle casualties rose by 413 during the week, the smallest rise since the first weekly summary released on August 7, 1950, bringing the total to 79,139.

The U.S. Army ordered all allied correspondents visiting Kaesong to remain within the half-mile neutral zone around the conference site and urged them to travel in groups by jeep rather than wandering individually within that area. Associated Press correspondent Nate Polowetzky had reported a growing hostility among Communist soldiers, police and Korean civilians within Kaesong. One Communist Chinese soldier gripped his gun when an Army photographer sought to take his picture.

Secretary of State Acheson said at a news conference that the Russian magazine News, which had carried an article saying that the U.S. and Russia could live in peace, was intended for foreign consumption as it was printed only in English and was quite contrary to the militant line being published in Russian newspapers, was for the purpose of lulling the American people to sleep with propaganda.

The Secretary also announced that the U.S. had opened talks with Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain regarding its possible role in defense of Western Europe. He conceded that France and Britain opposed any such association insofar as joining NATO. He said that the Spanish Government might make an announcement the next day regarding changes to some of its dictatorial policies. He assured that any agreement reached with Spain would not alter the flow of aid to the rest of Western Europe. He also said that there had been no objection by France or Britain to the ongoing talks between Admiral Forrest Sherman, chief of naval operations, and Sr. Franco regarding Spain's possible role in defense.

Elton C. Fay reports that nearly 25,000 Air Force radar operators were on duty at stations and control centers in the U.S. and Canada, to detect the approach of any strange or hostile aircraft. The warning system was now 97 percent manned, whereas three years earlier during defense cutbacks, only about 3,000 to 4,000 men were being utilized as monitors in a few isolated defense areas where radar was used only part of the time, and there had been no coordinated warning system. The number of warning stations and their locations now in operation were secret. They looked for the Russian version of the B-29, regular formations of bombers departing from Communist bases, and bomber missions with aerial tankers for refueling. The ideal point of detection would be far to the north, long before the planes could reach targeted U.S. cities. They looked at size of aircraft formations, the altitude and speed, and the general direction of approach. If a threat was perceived, the control center would warn the possible target and then scramble interceptor aircraft to meet the potential hostile planes.

The House voted 160 to 144 to forbid price controls on meat which did not allow packers and processors a "reasonable profit". The vote had upset the Administration, which had hoped after a victory the previous day which retained the ten percent beef price rollback, that other agricultural price controls would likewise be allowed. The anti-consumer measure passed through a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats.

The President urged that any increase in Federal relief payments should be matched with raises in Social Security benefits. The Senate was taking up a bill to raise the Federal share of welfare payments by 140 million dollars per year. The President said it was essential to keep the average benefits from Social Security at least as high as average payments for public assistance. At present, both averaged 43 dollars per month and the Senate proposed to raise pubic assistance payments for the blind and disabled by $3 per month and for dependent children by $1.60 per month.

St. Louis was bracing for flooding from the Missouri River into the Mississippi, which had already caused a million dollars of damage to factories and rail yards in the vicinity of the city. A flood stage of 40 feet was predicted by Saturday. There appeared to be no danger to the city, itself. The crest of the Missouri River was approaching Jefferson City, Mo., the state capital. Most of the damage in Missouri had been to farm land.

In Kansas City, flooding had subsided but major portions of the industrial districts remained under eight to ten feet of water in some places. The same was true of Topeka, where 8,000 persons were still consigned to refugee centers.

As anticipated, the President signed the emergency 25 million dollar flood relief bill.

In Los Angeles, Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz became parents of a new daughter, Lucie Desiree, their first child.

On the editorial page, "The Incredible Mr. Clark" tells of John Clark and Mark Lassiter, members of the UNC Board of Trustees, trying to ramrod a small minority of the trustees into denying admission of qualified black applicants to UNC graduate and professional schools, demonstrating in the process poor judgment. Mr. Clark was the only member of the executive committee to vote against admission of qualified students to the schools irrespective of race or creed. He had rebuked president Gordon Gray when the Board had voted on April 4 for the change in policy, claiming Mr. Gray had been influenced by "Northern race agitators" in urging adoption of the policy.

Mr. Clark had also delivered an angry outburst when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals admitted qualified black students to the UNC Law School, in its holding in McKissick, et al. v. Carmichael.

During the past week, he had moved that the University stop granting doctorates in Spanish rather than admit a University of California master's degree recipient seeking entry to the UNC graduate program in Spanish, because she happened to be black. Mr. Lassiter had said he would prefer the University shut down its Medical School rather than admit qualified black applicants.

UNC had one of the best Romance Language departments in the nation, producing graduates of distinction who were serving in positions of great responsibility. To do away with this prestigious department of the University would remove a keystone from its arch of learning.

It concludes that such men as Mr. Lassiter and Mr. Clark were in a distinct minority on the Board of Trustees. Yet, they served to remind that a university's purpose was to turn out graduates whose actions were dictated by reason and not by "blind animosities and incredibly illogical impulses", and so undergraduates of the University might profit from having the two men around as object lessons in how not to think and behave.

Well, then, they also might as well have a couple of felons, drunks, drug addicts and prostitutes on the Board. That does not sound, frankly, like sound logic, but rather a rationalization for lacking the power to remove these two idiots.

In any event, the editorial is demonstrating a great deal of wisdom overall, lacking sorely the previous day on the issue of race, likely the result of two different editorialists at work. Again, we remain mum on our guess as to who probably indited the one the previous day. We could be in error.

As we may have previously indicated, incidentally, we were blessed with the option of placing out of the two-course foreign language requirement via a competency examination in Latin at the start of our freshman year at the University, which meant that we could fulfill the foreign language requirement with two courses in mathematics. We then did so with two courses in symbolic logic, at least one of which was instructed in Dey Hall, the foreign language building, for apparently symbolic reasons, suggesting it also as a foreign language, thus obviating the necessity of stumbling through more foreign language after two and a half years of Spanish and two years of Latin in junior high and high school, both of which we obviously could speak and write fluently therefore by our freshman year in college. Thereby, we also fulfilled in the process two course requirements toward our philosophy major, thus applying the "rule of economy of requisites", as attributed to the author, well known among the literati of Buenos Aires and other parts unknown, Snikle W. Dos Passos. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

"Franco's Not Worth the Bother" advises, in the face of the visit to Spain by chief of naval operations Admiral Forrest Sherman, proceeding with great caution before the U.S. tried to get Generalissimo Francisco Franco to join NATO, against the wishes of France and Great Britain. Sr. Franco had supported Hitler and Mussolini during the war and had once remarked that it would be a joyful sight to see German bombers attack New York City. He maintained a dictatorship similar to the totalitarian states of Eastern Europe, replete with press censorship. To become too friendly with the dictator could produce a rift in NATO that even General Eisenhower would not be able to mend.

It finds that Sr. Franco was not on the U.S. team and the sooner the country stopped courting him, the quicker he might reform his Government so that it might qualify for membership in an alliance of free peoples.

"Why We Must Be Firm at Kaesong" finds that the Chinese, North Koreans and Russians were as eager to stop the fighting in Korea as was the U.S., placing the U.N. negotiators in a favorable position. To determine whether the peace suggestion was only a trick to lull the U.N. negotiators, it would be necessary to be firm. It might take time to achieve an armistice and even if it came, it would not necessarily mean world peace. The American people could not relax their vigilance against Communist aggression, lest there be a strike elsewhere. Peace in Korea would only signal that the Communists had come to realize that the Korean aggression had backfired.

"'Hit Them in the Pocketbook'" tells of a growing sentiment among newspaper editorials for invoking harsh economic sanctions against Czechoslovakia for convicting Associated Press correspondent William Oatis of espionage based on an obviously coerced "confession". Yet, the State Department had done little beyond denunciations, protests and stopping of all private travel to Czechoslovakia. The U.S was still selling 28 million dollars worth of goods to the country each year.

Editorials favored embargo of the large amount of Czech imports to the U.S. It urges the people to demand that the Government take more assertive measures.

Amy Bassett, who used to contribute occasionally to The News many years earlier, nine to be exact, now living in Huletts Landing, N.Y., provides a story about a chipmunk, which the editors find to be counterbalance to a negative story on same recently printed in the newspaper. (Sorry, we don't have it, only the ones, we'll be durned, about the groundhogs.)

She relates of Mrs. Chips taking over her house and having characteristics very nearly human. It started when Ms. Bassett fed the animal and its compadres corn in the late fall, to avoid having critters enter the house in winter and chew up rugs, books and other belongings. Chipmunks, she interjects, were too wise to bother with history or philosophy books, having seen the human species make such a mess of both. Since she began the activity, her house had ceased to be the object of chewing in the winter, as the animals were contented by their fall foraging.

Mrs. Chips, however, wanted more than food, appeared to desire friendship. The chipmunk stuck birdseed under her pillow or in her workbasket or the soapdish in the bathroom. When she discovered these caches, Mrs. Chips would often move them elsewhere.

She would enter the living room and stretch out on the rug before the fire, much as a dog. Some people could never get a look at her except at a distance.

Such friendly behavior proceeded for five years as Mrs. Chips became well known in the neighborhood and, by like strokes, possessive of the family abode, not allowing other chipmunks to enter, pouncing on those who tried.

Deserted cats of summer residents appeared, however, the prior fall around the place where Mrs. Chips entered, and suddenly one day, after a lot of screeching noises from the area, the chipmunk came no more. Mrs. Chips had lost all sense of fear of people and presumably of everything else around the house as well, including the stray cats, to her everlasting regret.

Now when Ms. Bassett viewed the raccoons and baby woodchucks eating their meals and responding to maternal warnings to flee, she was glad to see their wise fear. Her world and theirs had no business intermingling. She was content now in the knowledge that the critters were somewhere near, afraid but safe.

Don't feed the wildlife.

Drew Pearson provides some backstage highlights of the ceasefire talks at Kaesong. The Communist negotiators kept asking for recesses for prolonged periods, equal to the time spent conferring. The Communists surprisingly agreed on the vital point of having an armistice supervised by inspection teams, though they might only consent to "observer" teams.

General Ridgway had said to Washington that he would not withdraw from his present position north of the 38th parallel except to straighten out a bulge in the line. The General had excellent relations with the State Department, in contrast to the days when General MacArthur had been supreme commander of U.N. troops. Diplomats regarded General Ridgway as a level-headed negotiator, had even given him discretion to demand total withdrawal of all Communist troops from Kaesong before he would resume the talks.

Senator Spessard Holland of Florida had graciously consented to the appointment as Undersecretary of the Navy of his old political rival, Francis Whitehair, notwithstanding the latter's bitter, losing campaign against the Senator. But Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, when approached for approval of the reappointment of a volunteer to be counsel of the Senate Labor Committee, he declined based on the fact that the law firm of the appointee had a couple of cases pending against the Government, an exception usually waived, but not in this case, where the Senator had defeated former Senator Abe Murdoch, brother of the appointee.

Former Senator Harry Darby of Kansas, a prime supporter and organizer for General Eisenhower's campaign for the presidency, recently had visited Senator Frank Carlson in Washington and said that the grassroots of the Republican Party would carry the candidacy of General Eisenhower without a formal organization. He said that if the General wanted the nomination, no one could stop him, that he would receive convention votes from Maine to Mississippi and votes in the general election from the deep South. But Senator Darby also admitted that he had no assurances from the General that he would run and no commitment as a Republican. But the General believed that the only way to clean up the Government was through the party out of power and Senator Darby thought that, eventually, the General would decide to run.

Marquis Childs tells of the Taft-MacArthur wing of the Republican Party, via the Chicago Tribune, having described supporters of General Eisenhower for the presidency in 1952 as "un-American". He regards it as the "final note of absurdity on an epithet that has been flung about more loosely than any other in our time." It would apply to Governor Dewey, former Senator Darby of Kansas and many ordinary citizens, with the polls suggesting the General as the most popular potential candidate for 1952, regardless of party.

He suggests that a contest between the President and Senator Taft, increasingly a likely prospect, would arouse such bitterness in the country as had rarely before been seen. The McCarthyites would seek to smear the President and the Administration foreign policy as Communist. The outcome would probably be close, with the President narrowly winning. With the Senate and House still dominated by the current Republican-Southern Democratic coalition, and their bitterness enhanced by the campaign, they would be determined to defeat every piece of major legislation, foreign or domestic, coming from the White House. A Taft victory by a small margin would result in a similar problem.

General Eisenhower could usher in an era of comparative goodwill, the likely reason for much of his support. He had remained above the smear tactic and big lie. He appeared to favor a strong foreign policy backed by the development of the military and economic strength of the Western world as bulwark against Communism, while also believing in civil liberties as the heart of the American system. He would likely be conservative on domestic policy and his view of states' rights versus Federal intervention, Mr. Childs suggests, would resemble that of conservative Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia.

The General, he believes, would also receive the votes of moderates for the sake of uniting the country so that it could concentrate on security abroad. They also viewed his candidacy as a way to avoid a calamitous conflict between the President and Senator Taft. That belief, he ventures, was a factor which the professional politicians favoring Senator Taft for the GOP nomination might ultimately override but had better not ignore.

Robert C. Ruark, writing from Tanganyika, tells of establishing camp a few miles outside Ikoma, a native village of about 500 people by the Grumeti River, overcrowded with leopards. They set up tents and were enjoying themselves. White hunter Harry Selby's Land Rover, dubbed "Jessica", and their truck, dubbed "Annie Lorry", were part of the family. So were the gunbearers, Kidogo and Adam, and the carboy, Chaboni. An assortment of others were also along, riding on top of Annie Lorry while the Ruarks, Mr. Selby, Kidogo, Adam and Chaboni rode in Jessica. Mr. Selby thought as an animal when not thinking as a machine.

The grass was high and predators could easily hide within it, causing the beasts to take to the area around the Grumeti, where the grass never grew very high. There was plenty of evidence of the presence of lions, ready to pounce on some of the grazing beasts, as well as scavengers such as hyena and jackal which fed off the lion kills.

The nights were almost bitter cold. They hunted in the Rover during the day within a radius of 60 miles from the camp. They then took hot baths in canvas tubs full of steaming water, prepared by their "personal boys", who also washed their garments and awakened them each morning with a cup of chai, or tea.

They had a good cook named Ali, who fixed them Tommy-ram steaks and crepe suzettes on the first night, against the backdrop of animal noises so loud as to drown out ordinary conversation.

He concludes that he was as happy as a man could be and understood how Adam must have felt in the Garden, "before the snake fouled up the detail." But Adam did not have Ali as a cook or his personal boy to fetch him a bath.

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