Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that HUAC investigators
stated that Elizabeth Bentley, confessed Communist espionage agent
for the Soviet Union, was ready to tell of another Soviet spy ring,
to be the third which she had identified, which had pursued
America's wartime industrial secrets. The Committee had asked the
Defense Department to appoint a liaison officer for this phase of
the spy hunt. An unidentified member of HUAC said that he believed
that the Communists might have been highly successful in the
operation.
Which, after all, would have been a good thing, so that
several hundreds of thousands of Americans did not have to die
fighting a bloodier European war, Mr. Rankin—with white or
black blood transfusions in play.
No hearings were held before HUAC this date, but would resume
the following day.
Soviet Consul-General in New York Jacob Lomakin was reported
by a Swedish-American shipping company official to have booked
passage on one of their ships back to Moscow via Gothenburg six
weeks earlier, prior to the expulsion from the country by the State
Department in response to his handling of the Oksana Kosenkina case,
accusing the U.S. of complicity in kidnaping her and fellow Russian
teacher Mikhail Samarin and his wife.
Workmen, meanwhile, were packing crates of belongings at the
consulate. An attache, however, said that none of the belongings
were of Mr. Lomakin. He did not inform to whom they did belong.
Ms. Kosenkina had been removed from the critical list at
Roosevelt Hospital on Saturday in her recovery from injuries from
her jump from the third floor of the Soviet consulate in New York to
effect escape, and was said to be improving, but would have to
remain hospitalized for three months.
In Berlin, the Russians released three AMG officials who had
been seized by Russian and East German police in Berlin and in
southern Germany. The British, in response, released the head of the
criminal division of the East Berlin police, whom they had seized
Sunday at a boxing match for his having abducted West Berlin police.
He remained accused formally of "assumption of authority"
or acting outside his jurisdiction. One of the released AMG
officials had admittedly crossed by mistake into the Soviet zone of
Germany at Mellrichstadt. Another said that he and his family had
driven to Potsdamer Platz to take pictures when he was seized. He
was uncertain whether he had crossed from the British to the Russian
sector, had been careful to remain behind the white line demarking
the British sector, but said that he could have accidentally stepped
back a foot or two into the Russian sector while distracted with his
photography. He was accused by the Russians of photographing Soviet
troops, verboten. He said that he was not mistreated, but
interrogated.
Meanwhile, Russian soldiers crossed into the American sector
of Berlin this date to arrest a German photographer.
In Greece, the Greek Army routed guerrillas moving toward the
Vitsi area, in the triangle between the borders of Greece,
Yugoslavia and Albania, seeking a new home for the "Free
Greece" movement, having been driven from their stronghold in
the Grammos Mountains. Guerrillas had entered Greece from Albania at
Kastoria. The Greek Army had killed 2,000 and captured another
thousand prisoners in the fighting in the Grammos Mountains. The
General Staff proclaimed that the rebels had been thoroughly routed
and that the Free Greece movement was no more.
Jews asserted that two wounded Israeli soldiers were killed
and their bodies mutilated while prisoners of the Arabs in
Jerusalem's International Red Cross zone. A third prisoner died or
was killed.
The Dean of Canterbury, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, a defender of
Soviet life, stated that he had been denied a U.S. visa to enter the
country for the purpose of holding lectures. He was a member of the
editorial board of The Daily Worker. The American-Soviet
Friendship Society was sponsoring his tour and he claimed that the
denial was based on the fact. The State Department confirmed that,
while it had no objection to Dr. Johnson per se, a tour under the
auspices of that organization would not be in the best interests of
the country at the time, that he would probably obtain a visa if he
wished to come to the country on his own.
Defense Secretary James Forrestal stated that weekend
meetings in Newport, R.I., with the Joint Chiefs had produced the
opinion that the Army, Navy, and Air Force had to work cooperatively
to promote economy of operations. The meeting continued discussions
begun at Key West, Fla., the previous March.
The World Council of Churches, meeting in Amsterdam,
expressed regret that the Eastern Orthodox Church of Russia had sent
no representatives, believed it was a misunderstanding regarding the
goals of the Council, that it was apolitical and devoted to spread
of peace in Christ's name. Also absent were the communions of the
Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Church and the Missouri
Synod of the Lutheran Church.
In Columbia, S.C., the police had arrested two youths from
Fernandina, Fla., in the murders of a couple and the rape of the
woman at Ormund, Fla., on the previous August 14. Ballistics tests
were being performed on a .22 rifle found in the car in which the
boys were riding.
In Asheville, N.C., a judge addressed the grand jury
investigating gambling, lotteries and the like in the community, by
telling them that the overlord of the local gambling syndicate was
worth over a million dollars and was walking around as a king
because the citizenry had allowed the scourge to gain a
foothold—until you had Trouble with a capital "T".
A little girl of Statesville, N.C., pictured, lost her doggie
as her mean old father, who wanted to raise chickens to combat the
high cost of living, sent two of the three family dogs "to the
country"—which we know to be a euphemism for the sake of making
the child feel better about the dog becoming another form, eternally. The
little girl had considered running away but, in the end, decided
that the chickens were fun to be with, too—until the mean old
father cuts their heads off so's you can fry them up and eat them.
On the editorial page, "Prelude to Russia's Retreat"
finds that the Soviets appeared to want an early end to the cold
war, despite the bitter relations of late between the West and
Russia, in Berlin, in Belgrade, the confrontation with the Soviet
Consul regarding the Russian teachers in New York, and at the
Danubian Conference in which the Russian-bloc nations ran roughshod
over the rights of the West insofar as navigation on the Danube. In
recent weeks, the Russians had been placed plainly on the defensive.
The fact that the Russians had responded with the Berlin blockade
demonstrated their recognition of this fact and that their expansion
in Eastern Europe had run its course, could not easily be extended
to the West.
It asserts that the Russians would attempt to keep the West
off balance and under tension in a game of bluff which would end
only when the West convinced the Russians that it did not serve to
intimidate with the threat of war. The advantage in the game was
clearly with the U.S. and the Western allies, so much so that it
expects Stalin soon to call a halt to the contest.
"Dewey Runs from the GOP" tells of pollster Elmo
Roper contending that Mr. Dewey was not only running against the
President but also away from the Republican Congress, an effort to
prevent the electorate from holding him responsible for the
do-nothing record, save for Taft-Hartley and the tax cut largely
beneficial to the corporations.
The piece thinks it a difficult task but that Mr. Dewey could
perform it if anyone could. He was proposing some changes to
Taft-Hartley and would support continued farm subsidies, a product
of the New Deal. Senator Taft had championed not only the bill which
bore his name but reduction and ultimate abandonment of farm price
supports, setting the stage for a contest with President Dewey.
It is reminded that the Governor's chief claim to his
reputation as an efficient clean-government Governor was based
largely on maintaining and even extending the New Deal philosophy in
New York, as pioneered by former Democratic Governors Al Smith, FDR,
and Herbert Lehman, prior to Mr. Dewey coming to the office in 1943.
Earlier in the campaign, Mr. Truman had said that vice-presidential
nominee Governor Earl Warren of California was actually a "good
Democrat"—who had won re-election as Governor in 1946 by
winning both the Republican and Democratic primaries pursuant to the
cross-over law then extant in California, permitting a candidate to
run on both party ballots. Mr. Warren also had a New Deal-type
program. Before the campaign was over, it ventures, the President
might include Governor Dewey in his assessment of nominal
Republicans as "good Democrats".
We have no real choice. It's unconstitutional. We want Strom and
Fielding.
"North Carolina's Mountaineers" tells of Holiday
Magazine presenting a piece in its issue of this month regarding
the hardy mountain folk of North Carolina, who gave birth to some of
the pioneers of the eighteenth century and beyond, who ventured
westward past the Appalachians. They remained proud of their
British, Dutch and German heritage, some still using dialect heard
in Britain during the mid-eighteenth century.
Their songs also celebrated that past in ballads of
unrequited love and tragic endings. The magazine story had suggested
that tourists flocked to these hills as much for the folk tradition
of the people who inhabited them as for the scenery they afforded.
The piece believes that there was much truth in the statement.
Robert Allen, substituting for vacationing Drew Pearson,
tells of Dan Tobin, president of the Teamsters, squaring off with
Dave Beck, the West Coast Teamsters boss. The feud had developed
from Mr. Beck's desire for Mr. Tobin's job. The previous year, Mr.
Beck was appointed executive vice-president by Mr. Tobin, a position
created to placate Mr. Beck, and it sent the signal that Mr. Beck
was in line to become president. But Mr. Beck was still itching to
become president sooner than the retirement of Mr. Tobin. Mr. Beck,
a friend to Governor Earl Warren, sought therefore to build his own
West Coast labor empire, a move to which Mr. Tobin had recoiled,
making it clear that he was the boss of the union.
Mr. Beck, meanwhile, had encountered troubles with the rank
and file.
Mr. Tobin had been cool to President Truman. It was still not
clear what would happen in the battle between Mr. Tobin and Mr.
Beck.
He next tells of the air demonstration to celebrate the
opening of New York's Idlewild Airport having turned too real when
an L-5 Cub crashed. The pilot was unconscious but when he heard
himself referred to as a sergeant, he suddenly regained his
consciousness, corrected that he was a staff sergeant, not just a
sergeant, promptly lost consciousness again.
Marquis Childs, still in McCall, Idaho, discusses
conservation and the need for it to continue through a strong Forest
Service. It was essentially a Republican ideal, as Gifford Pinchot
and Theodore Roosevelt had been the founding fathers of conservation
at the start of the Twentieth Century.
A tension had developed through time in the boom years of
late whereby the stockmen and big ranchers wanted to have more
grazing rights while the Government wanted to preserve the land for
future generations and prevent overgrazing, in consequence
ultimately returning the Western lands to their natural desert
state.
He reminds that no watershed system of irrigation had ever
long sustained fertile land. It was historically the case that every
such system eventually was exhausted.
Governor Dewey would soon visit the West. He could, in the
Republican tradition, endorse vital conservation. Or he could merely
give it lip service while giving to the stockmen and ranchers the
hope that he would reduce regulation and Government bureaucracy to
their advantage. If he evaded the issue, he would leave a feeling of
confusion among those who hoped he would provide leadership. As
President, he would have to provide leadership to overcome the
forces in Congress who wanted to do the bidding of the big stock
raisers.
DeWitt MacKenzie discusses the State Department's reply to
the Soviet claim that Oksana Kosenkina and Mikhail Samarin, both
Russian teachers of the children of Soviet diplomats to the U.N.,
were kidnaped with the connivance of the Government. The reply had
given the lie to the claim, as Ms. Kosenkina said she wanted to
escape the Russian consulate in New York and so jumped from its
third-story window, and Mr. Samarin had also stated that he wanted
to stay in the U.S. and not return to Russia. The note rendered
Soviet Consul General Jacob Lomakin persona non grata in the
United States.
But the State Department had also adroitly provided the
Soviets with a face-saving device by allowing that the misstatements
had resulted from "misinformation", making Mr. Lomakin
the responsible party for it. Such a position would allow Foreign
Commissar Molotov to blame the Consul for the problem and simply
call him home, to face an uncertain future for having embarrassed
the Soviet Government.
The diplomatic talks among the Big Four in Moscow to try to
resolve the Berlin crisis hinged on enabling the Russians to save
face while the West made no significant concession. The German
situation could not be resolved until the Berlin blockade was
lifted. And that would not be done until Russia was provided a
graceful way to back down.
Mr. MacKenzie guesses that the negotiations in Moscow were
concerned primarily with that point, if not officially, then
tacitly.
A letter writer takes issue with the letter writer, about whom another letter writer had written positively, who
complained of the Highway Patrol riding around in new Buicks (or stalling Dodges at the climax) with
their girlfriends, asserts that those who took the least part in
civic affairs were most likely to criticize their government and its
functionaries. While the Highway Patrol was not perfect, it did,
says the author, have the best men available at the rate of pay
under the extant working conditions, dangerous as they were. He
congratulates the Highway Patrol, thinks the letter writer, whose
name was not in the Charlotte directory, was likely a lawbreaker
caught by the Patrol—out on Highway 51.
A letter writer thinks that Drew Pearson of late sounded more
as T. D. Kemp than Drew Pearson, citing his recent column in which
he had recommended treating Russians offensively, as that was the
only thing they understood, to that end, urged increasing Panama
Canal tolls charged Russian ships by 100 fold and freezing the ships
in American ports until lend-lease bills were paid in full. Mr.
Pearson had advocated that Britain do likewise in the Suez Canal.
Parenthetically, the letter writer actually refers to a column by Robert Allen, substituting for Mr. Pearson, not his alter-ego.
The writer thinks that Mr. Pearson was offended by Josef
Stalin not responding to his letter as he had to former
Vice-President Henry Wallace. He finds that the British were in no
greater prospect of using to advantage their control of the Suez
Canal than they had been against Italian ships in 1936 when Ethiopia
was being raped, and so would not do so against Russian ships. He
urges that if Mr. Pearson believed that America could survive a
nuclear war, then it should get on with it, but not make a
"sucker out of England" which could not survive such a
nuclear holocaust.
