The Charlotte News
Friday, September 28, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Omar Bradley arrived at allied headquarters in Tokyo this night, with speculation running that he would map strategy with General Matthew Ridgway for the ceasefire talks should they soon resume. He was accompanied by the State Department expert on Russia. Meanwhile, Communist Chinese radio accused General Ridgway, in his statement the previous day suggesting a change of venue for the conference from Kaesong, of "carrying out orders from Washington to use the change-of-conference site question to block the resumption" of the talks. The Communists had not yet answered General Ridgway's suggestion. The Communists, themselves, had urged resumption of the talks, but had stated through liaison officers that they wanted the initial session devoted to their claims of violations of the neutrality zone, those claims having served as the reason for breaking off the talks on August 23.
In ground fighting, Communist forces launched a series of sharp attacks the previous night at widely scattered points across 50 miles of the battle front. The enemy took advantage of a moonless night to move a mass of men and supplies toward the front. Allied planes converged on the main arteries, destroying 508 enemy vehicles and damaging 613, a record for the war, breaking the mark set on Wednesday, when a total of 964 vehicles were destroyed or damaged. The movement of troops and supplies by the enemy had dramatically increased since the truce talks had failed to be revived.
In London, informed sources said that Britain might ask the U.N. Security Council to intervene in the oil nationalization dispute between Iran and Britain.
In Buenos Aires, Argentinian official radio announced that revolt and civil war, led by two former generals, had broken out against the Government of El Presidente Juan Peron but had been swiftly crushed within a few hours and its leaders in flight. The forces had captured an air base and an army garrison, but both had been recaptured. It was also reported that the Socialist leader and candidate for the presidency had been placed under arrest. One of the same two generals involved in the uprising had overthrown the Government of President Ramon Castillo in 1943 and was president for two days before being ousted. He had also been arrested and sent to prison for six months for being involved in a short-lived revolt in 1945.
Senator William Benton of Connecticut, as part of his resolution to oust Senator Joseph McCarthy from the Senate, accused, under oath, the Senator of "perjury and deception of the American people" in his continuing accusations of Communists within the Government, citing ten case studies of persons whose loyalty the Senator had attacked. He also said that if the subcommittee investigating the charge found that the Senator had committed perjury, the matter should be referred to the Justice Department. He said that the Senator's accusation on the Senate floor the previous June 14, accusing then-Secretary of Defense Marshall of Communist leanings based on the China policy, was either a lie or the product of an "unsound mind".
A reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whose articles had prompted the Senate inquiry into DNC chairman William Boyle's receipt of a payment from the St. Louis printing firm which had received a large RFC loan, object of the subcommittee's inquiry, testified this date, but the substance of his testimony was not yet known. Mr. Boyle had testified the previous day that he had received $1,250 from the firm in legal retainer fees which had nothing to do with the loan. Senator Clyde Hoey, committee chairman, said that testimony thus far had not shown that Mr. Boyle had received $8,000, as claimed in the Post-Dispatch articles.
Senator Richard Nixon, a member of the committee, told a reporter that he intended to see to it that "no newspaper is made the goat of a very beneficial investigation of the operations of influence in the Federal Government."
He sounds like he will be a staunch defender of freedom of the press and thorough investigations of any form of Government corruption to ensure that everything is shipshape and clean as a hound's tooth. We're voting for this nice young man.
In Poplar Bluff, Mo., a one-year old child was killed in a fall from a bed when he struck his head on a record player and his grandmother died of a heart attack while rushing to his aid, after which the undertaker called to remove the bodies suffered a heart attack and died as well. The coroner said he had never seen anything like it in his forty years as a funeral director.
Frost and freezing cold damaged corn and late garden vegetables in some Midwestern areas this date, as temperatures dipped into the 20's at some points in the Dakotas, Iowa and Nebraska.
News editor Pete McKnight, in the second of his articles on the State's Good Health program, tells of the largest project in the program being the new 400-bed teaching hospital at UNC in Chapel Hill, a 12-million dollar center still under construction and three-fourths complete. It eventually would have also an 80-bed south wing for psychiatric and alcoholic patients, a 100-bed chest disease unit, a student infirmary, an out-patient clinic and cancer research facility, and expanded basic science departments. Its faculty and staff would eventually number 1,200 persons and would teach 1,300 students in medicine, pharmacy, public health, dentistry and nursing. The facility was born in 1946 after a committee of national experts recommended the establishment of a four-year medical school, expanding the existing two-year medical college.
In New York, Allie Reynolds of the New York Yankees pitched his second no-hitter of the season to enable the Yankees to clinch a tie for the American League pennant, after defeating the Boston Red Sox 8-0 in the first half of a doubleheader.
On the editorial page, "The Kennan Viewpoint" discusses George Kennan's just-published book on his years as the principal State Department planner, as reviewed elsewhere on the page. Some of his observations and suggestions were at odds with the current positions of the Government and it focuses on two of those, one regarding Asia and the other regarding Europe. He wondered whether it would not have been better, in hindsight, to have tried to get Russia and Germany to have shaped their policies prior to World War II in such a way that they would have fought only one another. He had applied that thinking as well to the current situation between China and Russia.
Joseph Alsop had concluded in a column the previous month that there was evidence of serious trouble between Russia and Communist China. It suggests that while it would be difficult to exploit the differences between the two countries while fighting a war against the Chinese, the U.S. had not begun to exploit the possibilities of psychological warfare aimed at increasing those differences.
Instead, it finds that the Government was insisting on unconditional surrender, that which Mr. Kennan regarded as a "legalistic" approach to international relations, but which neglected the notion that "as a circle of military associates widens in any conceivable political-military venture, the theoretical total of available military strength may increase, but only at the cost of compactness and ease of control." The wider a political coalition became, the more difficult it was to retain political unity and general agreement on the purposes of the coalition.
It suggests that if that reasoning were applied to Europe, then NATO probably ought not admit Greece, Turkey or Portugal, or, perhaps, Italy. It adds that it did not propose that the philosophy of Mr. Kennan was necessarily the best course for U.S. foreign policy, but believed his views warranted consideration.
"The Fuss about Paroles" tells of Governor Kerr Scott having indicated his full confidence in his Paroles Commissioner, Dr. T. C. Johnson. The Governor apparently believed that the continued agitation about the parole system had been motivated by politics. No one had charged Dr. Johnson with impropriety in connection with the grant of disputed paroles.
In a recent case, an Asheville man, who quickly got into more trouble, had been granted parole on the recommendation of local court and law enforcement officials. A Whiteville attorney had been accused of fixing a parole with a $3,500 fee, but that had apparently resulted from unethical conduct on the part of the attorney, and the prisoner was not paroled.
Dr. Johnson wanted to reform the system by having a three-man board instead of just himself passing on paroles. Most paroles worked out well. It suggests that he conduct a study of recidivism among parolees to determine the effectiveness of the parole system.
"Autumnal Observation" comments on the House-Senate conference committees to reconcile differences in bills from each chamber. During the ensuing couple of weeks, the conference committees would pass on several measures, including the foreign aid bill, the differences in which it indicates, the rivers and harbors bill, the tax bill, and other bills pertinent to the Defense Department, postage rates, and postal worker and Civil Service wages.
It sees one bright spot in these conference reports, that if a new matter was contained in either chamber's bill, a point of order might be raised prolonging consideration of the bill. But it believes that Congress, in its urge to adjourn, would likely finish its business without attempting to cut a few more million dollars from the budget.
A piece from the Shelby Daily Star, titled "Eye Education", tells of a High Point-area Highway Patrolman having come up with an excellent idea for education of drivers, utilizing his 8 x 10 pictures of fatal accidents he had investigated in the past few years, placing them in frames to hang on the walls of the Patrol offices where people went to obtain their driver's licenses. While gruesome, it finds that it might send a good message to drivers, reminding them to be more careful on the highways.
Vic Reinemer of The News, as indicated in the above editorial, reviews American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 by George Kennan, a collection of six lectures and two articles reprinted from Foreign Affairs. He found that the nation's foreign policy had been too dedicated to a legalistic-moralistic approach, winding up largely powerless against puppet regimes. Professionalism in the conduct of foreign policy had been frowned on.
Starting with the "Open Door" trade policy toward China at the turn of the century, the U.S. introduced a policy which characterized the approach for 40 years, despite the policy having produced no practical results, without any force employed by the U.S. to enforce it, and having been abandoned by its architect, Secretary of State John Hay. It nevertheless had persisted as a myth among the American people that it had struck a great blow for extension of American principles on the world stage. Efforts by the Government to obtain endorsements from foreign governments for the policy had received only reluctant and evasive responses, indicating that while no one denied the principles, most also believed it a matter of interpretation as to how they should be applied.
The general result was a willingness to become involved in the affairs of the Far East, the opposite of the policy toward Europe. Mr. Kennan believed that there was no more dangerous delusion than the concept of "total victory"
He believed that the better approach was to adopt the attitude of a doctor treating a disease, one of detachment and sobriety, with a readiness to reserve judgment, along with the modesty to admit that the national interest was the only thing which the nation was really capable of knowing and understanding.
Drew Pearson tells of Washington witnessing the most "nauseating spasm of large and petty graft" which he had ever seen. One of the reasons, he posits, was that Government officials, including the President, had lost their sense of smell for such odiferous matters. Another problem was the system of political campaign contributions, obligating members of Congress to positions favoring the contributors, usually big business and labor unions. The practice had become so widespread that many otherwise conscientious members of Congress came to owe so many political favors that they no longer made up their own minds. He provides the example of the Harvey Machine Company in Los Angeles which had contributed to several Congressmen, most of whom were Democrats, because they were the party in power. The company also had backed some Republicans. At the same time, the company wanted a big loan to build an aluminum plant, for which a lot of wires were pulled, prompting Congressmen who had received funding from the company to go to bat for it. The result was that Harvey received a 46 million dollar loan from the RFC.
During the campaign for re-election of Senator Styles Bridges, Alfred Kohlberg, the central figure in the China lobby, had contributed a thousand dollars despite the latter living in New York, whereas Senator Bridges hailed from New Hampshire. Another contributor to Senator Bridges was Edward Heller, a Democrat and director of the Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco, who gave $3,000 to Republican Bridges. The Bank was the repository for Chinese Nationalist money and Senator Bridges had made a special effort to defend Chiang Kai-Shek.
John L. Lewis of UMW had contributed $500,000 to the reelection campaign of FDR in 1936, and labor all over the country had contributed money in the Ohio Senate race in 1950 to try to defeat Senator Taft for his co-sponsorship of Taft-Hartley.
He points out that under modern campaigning, candidates could not afford to pay for billboards and radio time, or exposure via the new medium of television, without these large contributions. He recommends having a national campaign fund appropriated by Congress to be allocated to each party state-by-state on the basis of population, thinks it would go a long way in eliminating the graft and favoritism.
Robert C. Ruark tells of being quite amused by the news that Senator Joseph McCarthy had suggested to the Senate investigating subcommittee looking into RFC influence-peddling that a witness for the St. Louis printing firm, who had a martini for lunch and was in no condition to testify, ought be expelled from the hearing. He says that he would not have wanted to check the breath of the members of the committee dismissing that witness as Washington was a town noted for devotees of the three-hour martini lunch. He recommends dropping into the Occidental or Harvey's or O'Donnell's or any of a dozen other popular luncheon spots on any day of the week to see some of the nation's bulwarks "pearl-diving after the onion in that Gibson, the very dry one with the dividend in the little jug."
He suggests that a great deal of heavy legislation had been born over oysters and roast beef and a considerable amount of statesmanship originated from the office bottle, when the solons did not have time to go downtown for lunch.
He says that he did not fancy the martini lunch, himself, "being a person of considerable purity", but it had "come to be as much a part of the American big-wheel scene as the expense account and the softening-up celebrity party."
He recommends that at least four martinis be force-fed to witnesses before they testified before Congress as it would loosen their tongues "to wag violently". "The fourth martini strikes off the shackles of inhibition, and encourages forgetfulness of planned caution. It induces a man to regard himself as a giant whose word is law, and whose every deed is a monument to his ego. It breeds monetary invincibility and involuntary honesty." He thinks it might come in handy to expose subjects who had "made up a pretty scenario and are perjuring themselves pink."
Mr. Ruark says that he would not recommend a small amount of marijuana to these witnesses as it might lead them into "too lofty flights of total recall". But he advises not sending the witness away when "the air is tinctured with the aroma of grog". He favors keeping them pinned down such that their defenses would be weakened by the wassail.
After the performance of Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in the extended hearings on Thursday regarding his alleged assault of a girl two years his junior while drunk during the summer after his junior year in high school, the piece appears particularly timely. He may like beer a little too much to be a Supreme Court Justice.
We also have to ask why it is that, if he has such a weak stomach, as he claims, he was engaging in so much beer drinking while in high school and college, not exactly conducive to good digestion or the equivalent of Alka-Seltzer or Pepto-Bismol. It would not be a pretty sight to have a Justice throw up during oral arguments, and might prove distracting to both the Court and the lawyers arguing the case, prompting unnecessary delays in the provision of justice. And justice delayed, as they say, is justice denied. In other words, we have our doubts whether he has the stomach for this job.
Moreover, it sounds to us like he wants to say to the Democrats of the Judiciary Committee, the Senate at-large and across the country, "Take this job and shove it." We feel sorry for him and we think the Senate ought to accommodate his feelings on the basis that he has a too tender stomach.
At the end of high school, we read The Peter Principle, which we recommend to all high school graduates.
Marquis Childs tells of Italian Premier Alcide de Gasperi having just received "the treatment" during his three-day visit to Washington, similar to that given to the Shah of Iran and Prime Minister Nehru of India in recent months. The visitors usually wanted something from America and needed it urgently, just as was the case with Premier De Gasperi, whose minority Government was existing on a shaky basis, caught between Communism and an aggressive force on the right bearing similarities to Fascism. The right was reported to be trying to force out the one member of his Cabinet who was both non-Communist and had the support of the people, the Defense Minister Randolfo Pacciardi, an active worker in the anti-Fascist movement in Paris and in the U.S. while in exile during and prior to the war. If he were to be forced out, the Government would be greatly weakened. His American admirers were disturbed by what might have been an unintentional slight when he was not invited to a luncheon given in New York by Cardinal Spellman in honor of the Italian Premier.
The Italian Government was putting considerable hope in a conference to be held under the auspices of the International Labor Office in Naples on October 2. The countries attending either needed to send out emigrants or needed immigrants to help build underdeveloped areas.
Ten million dollars had been earmarked for this program by Congress as part of military and economic aid for Europe. But Senator Pat McCarran may have blocked that assistance by sending a letter out to members of Congress which said that no American funds should be expended through any international agency in which Communists participated. Mr. Childs clarifies that while the ILO did have members from Russia's satellites, they were not scheduled to participate in the Naples conference or in the project to move 1.7 million Europeans to new homes, the goal of the conference.
A letter writer finds America to be drunk in the face of increasing peril. Washington, he says, was the most liquor-saturated city in the nation. He thinks the men in power were being used to transfer the Government to the pro-Soviet interests in the U.N. All Christians, he urges, should take the reigns of government and rule by prayer.
You could make a pretty decent start by just getting rid of the dipsomaniacal Senator McCarthy, who, as Mr. Ruark suggests, probably consumed more of it than most.
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