The Charlotte News

Thursday, June 16, 1949

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President attributed the spy hysteria to the postwar period, occurring after every major war. He suggested that reporters read the history of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790's, when similar hysteria abounded but eventually died out without crippling the republic. The Klan, he continued, had wanted to clean up the country after World War I, was especially active in Indiana. But a good defense had proven the best offense—as at the University of North Carolina.

Responding to questions whether J. Edgar Hoover had resigned his post as director of the FBI because of the court order to reveal secret FBI reports in the Judith Coplon spy case, he stated that he had not resigned and consulted with him and Attorney General Tom Clark from time to time. In response to a question whether Mr. Hoover had his confidence, the President said that the director had done a good job.

By the way, any lunatic who seeks to compare Harry Truman with the 2016 Republican nominee, who does the precise opposite of Harry Truman, that is whip up through demagogy the worst prejudices and fears of the least educated morons of the country, is fit to be institutionalized. Go back to throwing chairs across the hardwood floor and stay out of politics. Aside from there never having been at any one time "billions of Americans", you don't even know what year FDR died, let alone what year World War II ended, and you were alive at the time. The defense estimate at the time, in August, 1945, was that the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and Japanese civilians and soldiers would be saved by not having to conduct a land invasion of Japan, planned for November, 1945. That was why the bombs were dropped 1,339 and 1,342 days after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, to end a world war, after the Emperor would not capitulate to due warnings—not to sound and act tough. Truly pathetic beyond words that such basic information is not within your capacity to regurgitate accurately. Maybe it's the onset of senility. Nobody but a moron or senile old goat would wish to vote for that sleazy, lying, divisive moron, bait-switch artist, who crawled out of a sewer. It's awfully hard to make Richard Nixon appear angelic and pure, but the Republicans this cycle, after a certain segment of the party have spent decades trying, have finally found someone who seeks even lower depths.

The Senate voted to put a requirement for a non-Communist oath into the Administration labor bill. The body had also approved amendments to require both unions and management to file financial reports and to guarantee free speech in labor relations. The President did not approve the amendments to the basic bill which would repeal Taft-Hartley and substitute a modified Wagner Act of 1935.

Congress completed action on the Reorganization bill to authorize the President to reorganize the executive branch. The Senate, by voice vote, approved a compromise measure worked out in conference by the Senate-House reconciliation committee. The House had just passed the measure. Majority Leader Senator Scott Lucas said that the White House was ready to sign the bill. The reconciled measure allowed a majority vote of either house, within 60 days, to stop a reorganization proposal by the President.

The Council of Foreign Ministers met in Paris for 90 minutes in a secret session. Andrei Vishinsky then departed the meeting and returned an hour later. The meeting then resumed in secret. The goal was to resolve both the issues of Berlin and Austria before the meeting adjourned.

Before the Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper questioned whether the University of Chicago atomic laboratory had actually discovered the U-235 container which had gone missing the previous February. Lab officials, including the director, had produced an ordinary fruit jar, saying it had been the container. The FBI concurred with that opinion. But prior reports had described it as a brown bottle. An ounce had gone missing and seven-eighths of the ounce had been recovered.

In New York, in the perjury trial of Alger Hiss, an FBI agent testified that all save one typewritten document which the Government had placed in evidence had been typed on the typewriter which the Government claimed belonged to the Hiss family. The document examiner used exemplars known to have been typed by Mrs. Hiss to compare to re-typed State Department documents which wound up in the possession of Whittaker Chambers and which he claimed to have received from Alger Hiss.

Henry Julian Wadleigh, formerly of the State Department, testified as a surprise Government witness that he had given to Mr. Chambers departmental documents, confirming the claim of Mr. Chambers. Mr. Wadleigh said that he had begun taking Government documents as soon as he entered the State Department in 1936. He also admitted collaborating with the Communists but said that he had never been a party member.

Mr. Wadleigh had, the previous December, refused to answer questions of HUAC regarding Mr. Chambers, whether he knew him or passed any State Department or other documents to him at any time.

But, unless you testify this way, pal, we're going to send you up the river for perjury along with Hiss. Ye fala?

We note that the Dick and Karl show at the time of Mr. Wadleigh's December HUAC testimony at pages 1430-1436, and again, with John Rankin entering the act, at 1446-1448, perhaps reached a new low in coercive tactics regarding a witness pleading the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. It is well known to every lawyer in the criminal justice system that standard jury instructions are to take no inference from the exercise of the Constitutional privilege not to testify, the notion that no one may be compelled to testify or make statements against their own interests—which includes the prospect of perjury through prior inconsistent statements or contradictions by another or admissions of facts which, standing alone, would be innocent but which might form with other evidence to tend to incriminate the declarant. The later prophylactic warning required in 1966 by Miranda v. Arizona and that absent advice of the right to remain silent at time of arrest, statements made by the accused pursuant to questioning by government functionaries cannot be used in evidence, is premised on that concept, one which has been around since the Founding. Yet, following Mr. Nixon's and Mr. Mundt's thinking, one would simply ignore the Fifth Amendment, regard it as a technicality and haven for the guilty, that the only inference to be drawn from assertion of the Fifth Amendment was guilt of the accusation implied by the questions, thus falling into a trap of being damned if one did answer and damned if one did not. Mr. Wadleigh, unfortunately, did not have the screen of "executive privilege" behind which to try to shield himself from questions and production of evidence, as did later his interrogator, even so, to little effect. The only thing HUAC did not do to try to coerce Mr. Wadleigh's testimony, in the desperate attempt to trap Mr. Hiss and thus insinuate Communist-inspired espionage within the New Deal to try to drag into the mire and diminish the public's admiration for FDR, immediately following an election effectively to the fifth term of the Administration, was to bring out the rubber hoses.

Obviously, in the Committee's eyes, to contradict Whittaker Chambers, the admitted Communist spy and, by the time of the Hiss perjury trial, admitted perjurer, was to commit perjury. Indeed, by the end of the Wadleigh testimony before HUAC, one would have to deduce from Mr. Rankin's statements that the only fitting conclusion to the matter would be execution for treason of Whittaker Chambers, along with, perhaps, as an accessory after the fact, an unindicted co-conspirator, Mr. Nixon.

Democratic presidential nominee in 1924, John W. Davis, also testified this date to the good character of Mr. Hiss. In deference to his schedule, though he testified for the defense, he was allowed to appear out of order, interrupting the Government's case. Mr. Davis, trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had known Mr. Hiss personally as president of the Endowment.

In the trial of Judith Coplon in Washington, the defense examined the prosecutor on the witness stand. Ms. Coplon would follow in her own defense.

In Winton, N.C., an ailing couple, ages 33 and 29, were being forced to place their seven children in an orphanage.

Tom Fesperman of The News reports on the reunion at the Hotel Charlotte of the 30th "Old Hickory" Division of World Wars I and II.

Photographs of the Soap Box Derby winner and runner-up appear, with Thomas L. Robinson, publisher of The News, co-sponsor of the event. The winner won a trip to Akron, O., to compete for the national title and a chance for a college scholarship, plus a Bulova watch and a trophy. The runner-up got a Columbia "De Luxe" bicycle.

On the editorial page, "Rising Opposition to the Klan" finds the Klan to be more active than in recent years. For the first time in decades, a Klan chapter in North Carolina had burned a cross and in Gastonia had marched into churches singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers". While not yet engaging in violence, its creed dictated that such would likely soon follow.