The Charlotte News
Monday, January 14, 1952
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that Communist negotiators charged this date that allied planes had flown over Mukden, Wushien and other Chinese communities on Sunday, albeit not claiming that any attack had occurred, a charge denied by the Fifth Air Force. They had also accused the allies of perpetuating a "big lie" regarding the claim that the allied voluntary prisoner repatriation plan would be advantageous to the Communists as well as the U.N., in allowing those prisoners who did not wish to repatriate to stay.
Regarding the truce supervision subcommittee, allied negotiators changed tactics this date after failure for three straight days to obtain an oral statement of the Communist position on a ban of construction of airfields during an armistice, asking the Communists to agree to restrictions on such construction. The request was met with a chilly reception.
Both subcommittees would meet again the following day.
In the ground war, South Korean infantry clashed with Communist Chinese troops in a series of battles on the western front, in the heaviest of which, the South Korean troops fought for four hours in an unsuccessful attempt to retake hill positions west of Korangpo, lost December 28. Northeast of Panmunjom, the truce negotiations site, other South Korean troops recaptured one of two hills which had been lost to the enemy Sunday night.
In the air war, a U.S. Fifth Air Force spokesman said that snow, fog and haze had reduced fighter and bomber activity this date. F-86 Sabre jets spotted about 40 enemy MIG-15s on the Manchurian side of the Yalu River, but no contact was established. Pilots of other U.N. planes reported that they had caused 85 enemy troop casualties in close support of ground troops along the war front and had cut rails in 31 places in North Korea.
A U.S. Fifth Air Force B-26 bomber pilot, who was temporarily blinded by an exploding anti-aircraft shell over Korea, was brought into a safe landing through the verbal instructions of his navigator, over the course of a full hour.
An unnamed source in the Government indicated that the President's budget message, due to be sent to Congress in a week, would entail 15 billion dollars in deficit spending, three times larger than any deficit since World War II. The result would push the national debt close to or beyond the legal limit of 275 billion dollars. The source had given included details.
The President sent to Congress his plan for reorganization of the IRB. It would abolish the offices of the 64 collectors and place all collection employees except the commissioner under the Civil Service system. Commissioner John Dunlap called a meeting of all revenue collectors around the country to discuss what might be expected should Congress kill the plan.
In Fort Knox, Ky., Army chief of staff, General, J. Lawton Collins, in a prepared statement issued to the U.S. Armor Association, stated that major problems had been found during the initial production of new light and medium tanks, hurried into production to meet the demands of Korea, most of the 15 or so defects in each type of tank having been in the turret and all having been corrected before issuance to troops in the field.
Howard W. Blakeslee, Associated Press science editor, tells of an announcement by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis that their three-year worldwide research, funded by March of Dimes money, had found three viruses which caused polio. The discovery was considered a milestone as the trials of the polio vaccine, available for the previous six years, had awaited the results before testing could be completed. The vaccine had worked to afford nearly complete protection from the disease in tests with monkeys. The three viruses were said to be so different, however, that vaccination against one would not necessarily immunize against the others. The three viruses had been discovered in 1937-39 and dubbed Leon, Lansing and Brunhilde, the first named after a boy who had died in Los Angeles of that particular virus, the second after Lansing, Michigan, where the virus had been taken from a polio victim who had died, and the third after a chimpanzee which died of that virus obtained from seven human polio cases in Baltimore in 1939. There were other viruses which resembled polio but were not causes of the crippling disease.
Gambler Frank Costello rested his case on contempt of the Senate for refusing to answer questions of the Kefauver crime investigating committee the prior spring. He had been indicted on eleven counts and faced a maximum of eleven years in prison plus fines.
A Northwest airliner, seeking to land in dense fog by radar, crashed in the East River in the middle of New York City, with all 33 passengers and three crewmen rescued alive. The airliner had crashed into the river a half mile short of LaGuardia field. The passengers had exited the aircraft and huddled on a jutting wingtip or thrashed about in the water as a dozen rescue craft rushed to their rescue. The plane had sunk immediately to the rocky bottom nine feet below the surface, leaving only its wingtip exposed above the water. The river was much deeper a short distance away from the crash site. The pilot of the aircraft was the last to leave the ship.
In Deal, England, a lifeboat landed 37 crewmen from the wrecked French steamer, Agen, and then returned to the ship and persuaded its captain to leave, after he had initially refused to enter the lifeboat with the rest of the crew. He complied on the second occasion.
In London, Captain Kurt Carlsen, hailed as a hero for sticking with his stricken American freighter, the Flying Enterprise, until it finally sunk in heavy seas after being nearly capsized by a large storm December 28 and spending a week stranded before being towed for six days to within 50 miles of its destination at Falmouth Harbor, received a decoration from the King of his native Denmark, one of the highest honors bestowed by the country.
Tom Fesperman of the News tells of a statewide rally of "recognized leaders" among Republicans supporting General Eisenhower for the presidency being in the planning stage. Before the meeting, a one dollar per plate dinner for Republicans would be held the following Saturday night in Greensboro.
In Lexington, N.C., former Superior Court Judge Hubert Olive announced this date that he would seek the 1952 Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Other announced candidates were Manley Dunaway of Charlotte, Ernest Gardner of Shelby, and the eventual nominee and Governor, William B. Umstead of Durham.
On the editorial page, "General Clark Resolves an Impasse" tells of General Mark Clark, by having requested that his appointment as ambassador to the Vatican be recalled, having resolved a political and religious issue of growing import. The President could appoint someone else as ambassador to the Vatican but, at least for the time being, the General's action had ended the controversy.
It suggests that perhaps such an emissary did not violate the American principle of separation of church and state, but millions of sincere and deeply religious Americans believed that it did, the appointment of General Clark having threatened to provoke disunity at a time when all Americans needed to be unified against Communist aggression. The Vatican was one of the world's best listening posts and it would help to have a trained observer there properly to interpret the information which reached the Vatican from behind the Iron Curtain. But it favors the sending of a personal, unofficial emissary rather than appointing an ambassador, to avoid the conflict and division which had ensued in the wake of the appointment of General Clark.
"An Invitation to Disaster" tells of a member of the Republican state executive committee, Frank Patton, having declared that he was for Senator Taft because he would be free to attack corruption in government, champion free enterprise, stop the "creeping paralysis of state socialism", and criticize past U.S. policy toward Russia. He opposed General Eisenhower because he could not attack the Democratic Administration, having been a part of it.
The piece finds the latter criticism unwarranted, as the General would not be restricted in any way in his freedom to criticize the Administration's policies, though personally friendly with the President. Mr. Patton failed to realize that the Republicans still faced an uphill battle to win a presidential election, and it was not certain that they could win with General Eisenhower, but was quite unlikely with Senator Taft as the nominee. The Republicans would have to capture the majority of independent voters, in addition to the bulk of Republican voters, to win. General Eisenhower inspired much more support from independent voters than did Senator Taft.
Columnist Walter Lippmann had indicated that the Republicans could more easily come to power without causing a convulsion at home and abroad and could thereafter govern successfully with national support by having General Eisenhower as the nominee.
In five straight elections, the American voters had demonstrated that their philosophy of government was much closer to the Eisenhower faction of the Republican Party than to the Taft faction. It concludes that ignoring that fact could lead to another Democratic victory.
"Justice Keeps the Brake On" tells of the Justice Department and the Treasury Department being at odds over a part of the drive to step up the enforcement of income tax laws, that being that Treasury had dispensed with high level reviews of tax cases before referring them to Justice, while Justice wanted the high level review continued to avoid unwarranted prosecutions.
It allows that no one wanted unjust prosecutions of taxpayers but recalls that in the past, as recently elucidated in the Congressional investigations, the IRB and the Justice Department had essentially adjudicated tax cases, determining whether to proceed civilly or criminally, decisions often influenced by a political or personal bias. Prosecutions had been dropped based on an individual's physical or mental health, in addition to political influence. The lengthy reviews often delayed cases. The acceleration by Treasury would reduce average time from almost 300 days to 100 days before the case reached Justice. It thus favors the action by Treasury.
"The Happy, Tax-Relieved
'Farmer'" passes on information from Business Week,
indicating that to take advantage of the tax breaks provided farmers,
the gentleman farmer needed to establish a clear intention and not a
mere hope of running his farm for profit, to convince the Government
that it was not a sham operation for tax avoidance
Drew Pearson tells of NBC
The U.S. Government had still not done anything about the Hungarian Minister in Washington, Dr. Emil Weil, despite the demand by the Hungarian Government that the four American airmen, who had been forced down in Hungary after straying over the border during a flight from West Germany to Yugoslavia, pay a fine of $120,000, or face 90 days in jail for allegedly aiding spies, a fine paid by the U.S. Government. Dr. Weil had directed the drugging of Cardinal Mindszenty to extract a confession of espionage and, during his time in Washington, had been assigned by the Hungarian Government to build up an underground among the many thousands of Hungarian immigrants within the U.S. It was believed that he would be able to organize the Hungarian intelligentsia within the country and take advantage of religious differences to stir discord among Hungarian-Americans. After that organization effort, he was supposed to break officially with the Communist regime and declare himself to be a non-Communist, becoming an exile, while continuing his underground organizing effort—not unlike the putative pattern in reverse ascribed to Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 by his ostensible activities in New Orleans on behalf of the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" while in the background allegedly associating with extremist anti-Castro Cubans, orchestrated by former FBI agent Guy Banister, consistent with the organizational plans for "Operation Northwoods", approved in 1962 by then-Joint Chiefs chairman General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, before being nixed by President Kennedy prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, shortly before which General Lemnitzer was relieved as chairman and reassigned to become supreme commander of NATO.
He next provides a bit of doggerel by Pat Patterson of the Atlanta Journal regarding taxes, as January 15 marked the day on which a lot of taxpayers paid their quarterly income tax installments.
It begins:
I suppose that
I am a failure
In a minor sort
of way,
Haven't made
Drew Pearson's column,
Never mentioned
in 'My Day';
Haven't had a
deep-freeze offered,
Never been
accused as pink
And I've
certainly no connection
With the thing
that's called a mink
Joseph & Stewart Alsop provide a hypothetical Cabinet for Robert Taft, were he to win the presidency, one based on popular opinions, not reality. (His most important pick would have been his vice-presidential running mate, as he would die in mid-1953. Who would it have been?)
They suggest that within this parlor-game guessing, General MacArthur would become Secretary of State, isolationist Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, Secretary of Defense, and Senator Joseph McCarthy, Attorney General, the latter making sure that "no subversives infiltrate the new Administration". Secretary of Commerce would be Senator Owen Brewster. Secretary of Labor would be former Congressman Fred Hartley, co-sponsor with the Senator of the Taft-Hartley legislation in 1947. Sewell Avery, head of Montgomery Ward, who resisted the Government seizure order by FDR during 1944 to the point of having to be bodily removed from the plant by the Army, would be Secretary of the Treasury. And they go on with other prospects for lesser positions.
They conclude that no one really expected these kinds of persons to be named to those positions, although some of those mentioned, such as General MacArthur, might be called to service in a Taft presidency.
Marquis Childs indicates that most of General Eisenhower's supporters believed he would win the New Hampshire Republican primary on March 11, providing a demonstration of his popular support. Signs pointed to such an outcome, with Governor Sherman Adams of New Hampshire leading the General's campaign in the state and Senator Charles Tobey of the state supporting the General, along with one or two of the state's Representatives.
It was thought that General MacArthur might also have a slate of delegates entered for him in the primary, requiring no assent by the candidate, but the member of the Legislature who had proposed the entry had now backed away from the effort and would only submit an unpledged slate, presumably because General MacArthur or someone close to him had so requested. This slate would seek to concentrate on the anti-Eisenhower sentiment, those in the camp of Senator Styles Bridges. His administrative assistant, Wesley Powell, had run unsuccessfully in 1950 against Senator Tobey, and had made several anti-Eisenhower statements since. The effort would probably give little concern, however, to the Eisenhower forces.
Most of the opposition centered on having a military man as President, but the General had a broad range of diplomatic experience during the prior decade, as well being president of Columbia University from 1948 through 1950.
A letter writer from Hamlet comes to the defense of the President on the matter of the increase of the cost of a postcard from one to two cents, suggesting that Congress had caused this increase, as the President could not be blamed for everything.
A letter from Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina acknowledges receipt of a letter from a reader on January 9, enclosing the News editorial "Reform Bills Rot in Committee", on which the Senator briefly comments, saying that his Committee had given full consideration to the bills which came before it and had sought to deal with them on their merits. None of the reform measures still pending had been before the Committee very long and it was hoped that action would be taken on them by the end of the current session. He therefore takes issue with the editorial's claim that the Committee had allowed bills to "rot". He indicates that he believes some of the measures were good and should be adopted, while there were others he disfavored, and that each bill would be determined on its merits. He thanks the newspaper for the interest shown in the measures.
A letter from Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia, father of later televangelist Pat Robertson, addresses the same editorial, tells of having been assigned to two committees when he arrived in the Senate in 1946 after the death of his predecessor, Senator Carter Glass, those being Appropriations, and Banking and Currency. After the 1950 elections when the Democratic majority was reduced to the point where the percentage of Democrats on major committees had to be adjusted, he was removed from Appropriations and assigned to the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, the McClellan Committee on which the editorial had opined. But in the new Congress in 1951, he was reassigned to Appropriations.
He had received a letter from the newspaper dated January 8, condemning him for alleged failure to keep certain bills recommended by the Hoover Commission from rotting in a committee of which he was not a member.
The editors note that the Senator had received a copy of the editorial because the March, 1951 official Congressional Directory had listed him as a member of the Committee, but that since that time he had been reassigned. They add that it was to be hoped that with his dander up, he might join the effort to push the Hoover Commission recommendations through Congress.
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