The Charlotte News
Thursday, September 27, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Matthew Ridgway's public information office said that the Communists might be trying to force the U.N. to break off Korean ceasefire talks "out of sheer frustration and futility", following by a few hours a proposal by General Ridgway of a new conference site in no-man's land, where the conference could resume discussions regarding the location of a military buffer zone, the point on which the conference had become stymied before talks had been cut off by the Communists on August 23 based on claims of violations by the allies of the neutrality zone around Kaesong. Headquarters criticized the Communist liaison officers for refusing to discuss anything but a time and date for a new meeting. It was believed by the allies that the Communists planned to draw out resumed talks by endlessly discussing the allegations of the violations of the neutrality zone. The remedy, the allies believed, to the charges lay in acceptance of General Ridgway's suggestion for a new site, near the village of Songhyon, 6 miles southeast of Kaesong.
Navy and Air Force fighter-bombers hit Communist artillery dug in along the rugged mountain slopes of eastern Korea, as 32 F-51 Mustangs and 24 Navy Corsairs dropped napalm and high explosives in the "Heartbreak Ridge" area. Communist artillery and mortar fire, one of the heaviest barrages of the war, immediately diminished. In the third straight day of jet dogfights, 34 F-86 Sabre jets fought with 50 Russian-type MIG jets, damaging two of the enemy planes, while one allied plane was damaged but returned safely to base. In three days of dogfights, the allies had shot down five enemy planes, probably destroyed two more, and damaged nineteen. The allies had one U.S. jet destroyed and one Australian jet damaged but returned to base.
The Senate voted 77 to 11 for an amendment to the 5.5 billion dollar tax bill to eliminate the tax exemption on expense allowances of the President, Vice-President and members of Congress, to become effective January 3, 1953 at the start of the 83rd Congress.
The President urged Congress to require its members and all top Government officials to provide a public accounting each year of their total income.
The second of the Gallup polls published in the News finds General Eisenhower to be the preference for the presidency in 1952 among both Democrats and Republicans, with more Democrats liking him than Republicans, as 40 percent of Democrats stated him as their preferable nominee to only 20 percent stating the President. The General was favored by 30 percent of Republicans, while Senator Taft was the preference of 22 percent, followed by Governor Dewey, Governor Earl Warren and former Governor Harold Stassen. The General also led in popularity among independent voters, with a 2 to 1 majority over any other candidate.
DNC chairman William Boyle testified this date before the Senate investigating subcommittee looking into influence-peddling with the RFC, and stated that he accepted eight cases involving Government agencies, with fees estimated at $158,500, while serving as the "acting chairman" of the DNC. He denied that it was improper, stating that he was a practicing lawyer at the time and was only representing clients before Government agencies or in court. He said that he had never asked a favor of any Government agency in his life. All of the cases arose prior to August, 1949 when Mr. Boyle practiced law in Kansas City before becoming chairman of the DNC. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas inquired as to whether or not the sale of his law practice to an attorney in St. Louis without a written contract of sale did not imply that there was an arrangement whereby Mr. Boyle would receive some of the fees, while the attorney who bought the practice did all the work, a suggestion which Mr. Boyle denied was the case. Mr. Boyle also said that he did not believe Government agencies yielded to political influence, a statement which caused Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota consternation.
The collector of internal revenue in San Francisco and eight other tax office employees were suspended this date by the President, after one of the eight was accused of embezzlement and another charged with juggling accounts.
Informed sources in London stated that Britain would stand firm in the hope that Iran would accept President Truman's request to cancel an order expelling 300 British technicians from the Abadan oil refinery. The President had sent a personal message to Prime Minister Clement Attlee urging caution in the situation. He had also sent a message to the Iranian Government urging that it back down in its ultimatum and assured that the U.S. was ready to help both countries find a peaceful settlement to the oil nationalization crisis.
Princess Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, had postponed their American-Canadian tour by a week, until October 7, because of the recent serious lung surgery undergone by King George VI. They would arrive in Washington on Halloween and remain through November 2.
In Pittsburgh, a convicted swindler was composing songs which he hoped could be sold to repay victims of his $212,000 housing fraud, for which he was serving 10 years in prison. The former contractor was convicted for accepting down payments on homes which were never built, and had been arrested in May, 1950 after a nationwide search for him ended in Los Angeles.
What do the tunes sound like?
In Seattle, a shortage of clams in
the Pacific Northwest had eliminated clam-eating in the 1951
International Pacific Freestyle Amateur Clam Eating Contest. Chop
Suey
Somehow, we get the feeling that
this story connected to convicted gambler Harry Gross and his refusal
to testify at the New York City trial of the eighteen police officers
who had been accused of accepting bribes from Mr. Gross to protect
his gambling syndicate. But we do not know how yet
News editor Pete McKnight looks at the State's Good Health program, designed to improve healthcare for its people, begun under deceased former Governor J. Melville Broughton, and continued under his successors, Gregg Cherry and current Governor Kerr Scott. (They had better find some Good Health for the state's Senators and Governors, as they were and will continue to be dropping dead at relatively early ages for several years to come.) Five years earlier, bandleader Kay Kyser had begun campaigning for the program, stirring public opinion to the point that the 1947 General Assembly provided the appropriations to begin the program in earnest, establishing the Medical Care Commission. Since then, 24 general hospital projects, providing 1,207 new beds, had been completed, along with nine new nurses' homes with 371 beds, four health centers with a total of 17,200 square feet, and seven State-owned hospital projects with 527 beds. Thirty other general hospital projects, along with other facilities, were under construction, while eight general hospitals were approved and in the planning stage. Over 50 million dollars had been spent, 20 million from Federal funds, 11 million from State appropriations, and 19 million from local funding.
Since World War II, the state had provided more new hospital beds, 3,939, than any other state, save Texas.
On page 10-A, the tenth of the twelve-part serialization of Dr. Evelyn Millis Duvall's Facts of Life and Love discusses the dilemma presented by love for a person already married, presumably, based on the list of topics from September 15, "Love Out of Bounds".
Speaking of being out of bounds, we have to question where all that Republican righteous indignation exhibited yesterday in the extended confirmation hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court was in 2016 when Grassley, McConnell & Co. refused even a single hearing to President Obama's nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, unquestionably well-qualified for the Supreme Court, in filling the vacancy left in February, 2016 by the sudden death of Justice Scalia—unprecedented in the history of the country to deny a hearing, whether in a presidential election year or not, to a Supreme Court nominee, indeed some nominations of a lameduck President after the election, either after defeat or not running, still having been considered and confirmed by the Senate. But that was before Fox News started running the show, right?
Where was all that South Carolina fire and brimstone then, boy? You seem to have a load on now, for some odd reason.
Talk about jackasses showing
hypocrisy beyond belief. Quiet down, little fellow, before you win
the award for the best Barney Fife impression of the last four or
five decades. We watched it, too, but had enough sense not to instill the characters
And what about the Clinton family, Judge Kavanaugh? What kind of hell did you and your boss, Ringo K. Galaxy, put them through in 1998-99? all for political gain, not accompanied by one whit of hope of success to gain two-thirds of the Senate and not one speck of precedent in the history of the country to suggest a high crime or misbehavior significant enough for removal of an officeholder. But with a Republican majority in the House, why, you Republicans had a field day with that little smear job, didn't you?
But, as once was said, Time wounds
all heels, and so, perhaps, if he is confirmed, Time will Tell,
seduced
Drink, drink, drink to Judge Kavanaugh. He likes Beer. That is the one definite, unequivocal statement which we got from his testimony in all the sessions.
That, undoubtedly, went over well
with the Stars in Bars, huh?
He may have been drinking a little beer before that performance yesterday, given the tenor of some of his utterly disrespectful remarks to the Democrats of the Judiciary Committee, in an unprecedented performance of nominee hubris and arrogance in televised Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
But to hell with more than half the country... Right, Judge Kavanaugh? Those silly Democratic voters don't matter. Never did, not after 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, or 2016. They will reap your whirlwind for many years to come. Isn't that right?
You, after all, went to Georgetown Prep.
And by the way, Georgetown beat Louisville 50 to 46 in that game when you were too busy partying and boufing with your classmates to mind much the outcome—but then that following Monday night was another story, one which we shall never forget.
On the editorial page, "Poor Local Leadership" comments on a report from Raleigh on the State's hospital building program, which, it posits, ought give deep satisfaction to the people of the state, as many of the basic health deficiencies were being corrected for the first time, and it was possible to look forward with confidence to an era of better health. In one respect, the program had fallen short, by failing to provide hospitals and health centers in many of the poorest counties of the state.
The Medical Care Commission had sought to interest local groups in those counties in sharing in the costs, but local leadership in that regard had been found wanting.
It suggests that the State should help only those communities willing to help themselves and that no county in the state was so poor that it could not afford the 16.7 percent share of the cost of a health center or a small general hospital, the amount which was to be borne by the locality.
"The Security Curb on Information" finds the President's sweeping executive order which applied tight military security to information from Government civilian agencies to be undesirable and unwarranted. It would effectively defend incompetence and stifle attempts to obtain legitimate news. The order required any agency which originated an item containing secure information to mark it "security information" plus designate it by one of four classifications, "top secret", "secret", "confidential" or "restricted". It would apply only to officials and employees of the Executive Branch. That meant that it would apply to two million persons employed by the Federal Government, only excepting Congress and the Federal courts.
Press secretary Joseph Short had indicated that the order had not developed because of publication of secret information in the press and was not intended to block any of the information being disseminated by Government agencies, but rather was intended only to organize the "handling of information" within the Government. Given that limited purpose, the piece struggles with the necessity to enable thousands of officials to restrict access to newsworthy information. The order made no attempt to define what information should be classified, leaving it to the judgment of agency heads and security officers. It had been shown repeatedly that if an agency head had the power, he or she would likely classify information, even though the same information might be available in a bookstore or library. There was a tendency to withhold information which showed the agency in an unfavorable light and now it could cloak such information by placing it under the broad rubric of national security.
During the MacArthur hearings, the Administration had released certain previously classified material, declassifying it, to suit the Administration viewpoint. Such a practice might become commonplace.
It concludes that the regulation would likely increase the number of news leaks, innuendos, planted charges and suddenly declassified counter-charges, practices which had already sickened the American people.
"Politics in the Post Office" indicates that in 1947, the President had appointed Jesse Donaldson, a long-time postal official, to become Postmaster General, breaking the precedent that the head of the Post Office had been the national chairman of the party in power. The move was widely applauded by postal workers and the public at the time. But now, the Postmaster General had been criticized by the head of the letter carriers' union, who demanded Mr. Donaldson's resignation for reducing the deliveries of the mail from twice per day to once and cutting back on some of the rural routes, in efforts to save money.
It finds that Mr. Donaldson could share some of the blame for mismanagement because he had not vigorously enforced some of the minor reorganization plans put forward by Congress, but the primary reason for the problems was that Congress, and particularly Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina, head of the committee which oversaw the Post Office, had not done their job in eliminating politics from the Post Office. Neither the President nor the Postmaster General could, by themselves, eliminate the patronage practices.
A piece of from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "No Tinkering with the Pole", tells of a person in Alaska trying to get the Air Force to drop a literal pole to mark the North Pole. It suggests that the same type of mind would demand banks for the Gulf Stream, brackets for the Continental Shelf, and a hog-tight fence for the Great Divide, even extending over time to insisting on two bottles for the Milky Way. It hopes that the Air Force would stand firm against "the whole subversive business".
A piece from the N. C. Motor Vehicle looks at the fact that the Outer Banks had managed to do without jails, policemen, mayors, and tax collectors for the most part, as well as bureaucrats. But now that the Federal Government was planning to establish a National Seashore Park there, rules, regulations and crowds might soon intervene with the heretofore pastoral splendor accompanying isolation from the mainland. Thus, the National Park designation was not being greeted with approbation, and local residents of Hatteras wanted to limit the Park to the area immediately around the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
Those who lived on the Outer Banks had among them descendants of survivors of long-forgotten shipwrecks and had lived in isolation for so long that they felt a need to welcome visitors only a few at a time, and had little trust in bureaucrats.
The proposed Park had been initiated prior to World War II, but had taken a backseat to the more pressing war mobilization, and since the war, thus far, the people of the Outer Banks had resisted it. The present emergency had stalled further development of the project for the time being, but it remained in the offing. Despite opposition by the majority of local residents of Hatteras, Ocracokers appeared to welcome it. The Government had promised that the villages would not be touched and the proponents continued to hope that the nation's only National Seashore would eventually materialize.
It concludes, however, that it was hard to change an Outer Banker's mind.
Drew Pearson tells of the Administration having a problem with whether to prosecute Republican Governor William Beardsley of Iowa for tax evasion, for failing to report about $50,000 over a four-year period. Per routine practice, the Treasury allowed him to come in informally and explain the discrepancy, but he had not turned over his full records regarding the unreported income from his drugstore and his farm. The Governor had made many speeches about taxes and so was quite aware of what was considered income.
A Republican scout had been conducting a survey of Illinois and found the results to appear favorable to General Eisenhower. The Chicago Tribune's Colonel Bertie McCormick was losing out in Cook County, with Simon Murray of Cicero likely to become the local Republican power. The Republicans were in agreement that it would not be easy to defeat popular Governor Adlai Stevenson in the next gubernatorial election.
With the Congress having thrown a monkey-wrench into the anti-inflation program and now the Senate having thrown one into the tax bill, the Congress was being dubbed the "Monkey-Wrench Congress".
One person not at the San Francisco Japanese peace treaty conference who deserved a bow was former Ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, who had worked out the idea, later followed by General MacArthur, to trust Emperor Hirohito, in reliance on the love and trust reposited in him by the Japanese people. Many people had criticized Ambassador Grew for this advice during the war years, including Mr. Pearson, and so he feels that he owed him tribute for the wisdom of the policy, which had culminated in the peace treaty in San Francisco.
Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming had quoted from President Warren G. Harding regarding special privilege in a tax bill, such as the currently pending one, when the late President had said that there was "something inherently wrong, something out of accord with one's ideals of representative democracy, when one portion of our citizenship turns its activities to private gain and defensive war, while another is fighting, sacrificing, or dying for national preservation."
Marquis Childs discusses again influence-peddling being revealed in the Senate investigating subcommittee, looking into both Republican and Democratic national chairmen, Guy Gabrielson and William Boyle, respectively. He finds that in the case of Mr. Gabrielson, either he was simple-minded or he assumed that most people were, when he said that a telephone call from him had no particular influence over the RFC, when he had phoned them to try to delay payments on his company's loan.
Mr. Gabrielson was unpaid in the position of chairman, as were his two predecessors, former Congressman Carol Reece of Tennessee and Congressman Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania. But both had been in Congress and had independent means of support, whereas Mr. Gabrielson devoted three or four days per week to his job as chairman and provided one day per week to his company. The chairman before Mr. Reece had been paid $25,000 per year and, opines Mr. Childs, that was the proper way to do things, to pay for professionalism in the handling of the job on a full-time basis.
The demand for Mr. Gabrielson's resignation from such high-ranking Republicans as Senator Homer Ferguson resulted from the feeling of being let down, taking away in the coming election year the issue of "Trumanism"—as he had defined the previous day—, now neutralized because the Republicans were shown to have been doing the same thing the Democrats had been doing in terms of exerting influence.
Joseph Alsop again looks at the trip of Henry Wallace to China in 1944 when he was Vice-President, in relation to the recent testimony of former Communist Louis Budenz before the McCarran Internal Security subcommittee and the demonstration by the report of Mr. Wallace that Mr. Budenz had lied about the supposed Communist ties of John Carter Vincent of the State Department, who had accompanied Mr. Wallace on the trip. The recent revelation by Mr. Wallace, which Mr. Alsop finds to have been courageous, provided the documentary proof that Mr. Vincent had not been, as Mr. Budenz had asserted, providing Communist-inspired advice to the Vice-President during the trip.
For those documents showed that Vice-President Wallace had recommended to FDR that General Joseph Stilwell be replaced by General Albert Wedemeyer, a move recommended by Mr. Vincent. They also demonstrated that General Stilwell had favored the Chinese Communists over the Nationalists and wanted to be in charge of distribution of all American military aid to the Chinese, so that it would be distributed to the Communists and not just to the Nationalists. He had also wanted to concentrate the Chinese military effort on Burma, rather than mainland China, leaving the latter vulnerable to the Japanese by not providing the Nationalists in China any American military supplies.
The efforts of Maj. General Patrick Hurley, sent by FDR as his liaison to Chiang Kai-Shek, to obtain for General Stilwell these powers of distribution, had failed, for reasons which Mr. Alsop promises to put forth in a later column.
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