The Charlotte News

Saturday, September 9, 1950

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. forces had managed to close the five-mile gap in the northeastern sector of the defense arc which had threatened to allow a major tank breakthrough by the North Korean forces east of Taegu, between Yongchon and Kyongju, following a three-day assault. South Korean forces gained more than two miles to link with the Americans moving westward from Kyongju, 18 miles southwest of Pohang. Yongchon, the gateway to Taegu, 20 miles away, had been recaptured by the allies on Friday. Aerial support was available for the first time in 36 hours, prevented previously by heavy rain.

The outnumbered allied forces, however, lost their foothold at the other end of the 120-mile defense arc, as Battle Mountain, two miles from Haman, again fell to the enemy, 3,000 strong, the twelfth time the mountain had exchanged hands during the previous 16 days, and the third change during this day. North Korean losses were heavy in the battle to recapture the bald peak, but their greatest losses were in the areas near the mountain above Masan, as the U.S. 25th Infantry Division reportedly killed 1,500, raising enemy losses on the southwestern front to 15,000 for the week. The enemy losses during eight days had reached 27,000 on all fronts, 18 percent of the total of 150,000 committed to the offensive.

American fighter-bombers drove the enemy troops from their foxholes in the Naktong bulge, northwest of Yongsan, after two days of bad weather had prevented much air cover. The forces flew 140 sorties this date in close support of ground troops in the sector, with another 104 in the northern sector.

Don Huth, with the U.S. Second Division, tells of at least eight American soldiers having returned after being trapped by the North Koreans on a hill west of Yongsan with 52 others for six days. A lieutenant was the only surviving officer. The Americans had resisted at least 20 attempts by the enemy, one occurring about every two hours, to take their position on "Cloverleaf Hill" with mortar and machinegun fire, until half of them had been killed. They then split into smaller groups to try to reach friendly lines. It had taken the lieutenant and another soldier two days to escape the trap.

The President would give another "fireside chat" to the nation this night at 9:30, this one regarding economic controls. He had addressed the nation on the war the previous Friday night.

A close adviser to the President said that Louis Johnson was on the way out as Secretary of Defense, possibly before the November midterm elections. There was no official confirmation of the claim. The source said that Secretary of State Acheson would remain. The report was correct, as Secretary Johnson would be relieved ten days later.

The Federal Parole Board granted parole to former Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, former chairman of HUAC during 1947. He had served six of his eighteen month sentence as of June 8, making him eligible for parole on his conviction for defrauding the Government based on taking kickbacks from salaries of bogus Congressional staff. His ailing health was a factor in the parole decision, in addition to his excellent conduct and work record.

Three former members of Chicago's Al Capone gang, Paul DeLucia, Louis Campagna, and Charles Gioe, were called before the Kefauver Crime Committee investigating gambling and organized crime, meeting in executive session. The focus was on whether paroles were being granted on the basis of payments to persons who granted the clemency, working through the two attorneys for the men, who were said to be personal friends of the President and former Attorney General Tom Clark, now Justice of the Supreme Court. The three men had been granted paroles after serving 40 months of ten year sentences for an extortion plot against the motion picture industry, for which they had been convicted in 1944. Mr. DeLucia testified that he and Mr. Campagna each gave their attorney $5,000, following their release from prison on parole. The attorney had been retained through Mrs. Campagna, who "knowed somebody in St. Louis". He testified that he did not know anything about the Mafia beyond what he read in the newspapers. Mr. Gioe testified that he never met the attorney and did not pay him anything or pay anyone to obtain his parole. The attorney, in earlier testimony, confirmed the payments as a retainer fee, and testimony of the U.S. Attorney showed that parole after completion of one-third of the sentence was the norm.

In New Cumnock, Scotland, one of 118 men trapped in the Knockshinnoch Castle mine emerged to safety after being trapped in deadly black damp gas since Thursday. Rescuers gave breathing apparati to the other men to permit them to emerge through the gas. Ten were believed dead and eight had escaped.

In Paris, about 180 American students and teachers were stranded following a summer European tour, after their travel agency which booked their roundtrip flights on chartered Tiger Airlines failed to pay the return fare. Another 60 students and tourists were stranded in England in the same predicament. The Travelers Aid Society was making arrangement for loans for the hardship cases.

The Atlantic hurricane, losing its power quickly, was moving westward and southward during the morning, centered about 700 miles east of Jacksonville, Fla., with top wind speeds of 55 to 65 mph, after having been recorded as packing speeds as high as 160 mph, having made it one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes recorded to date.

In Atlantic City, N.J., fifteen finalists were competing this night for the Miss America Pageant, with the winner to receive a $5,000 scholarship, a new car, and several lucrative offers for entertainment contracts, with the potential for $50,000 of earnings in the year of her reign.

On the editorial page, "McCarran's Bluderbuss Bill" tells of a young soldier, wounded in Korea, being interviewed from a V.A. hosiptal on a recent newsreel and stating that he wondered whether if the country was going to fight Communism overseas, it was willing also to fight it at home first. While sensible, the problem was figuring out the best way to wage that fight at home. The bill of Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, to register all Communists and Communist front organizations, subject to criminal penalties for failure to comply, appeared short-sighted for not accounting for the persons who simply would deny being Communists despite insistence by others to the contrary. The bill did not specify how such membership was to be ascertained.

Senator McCarthy had the dangerous habit of calling anyone a Communist with whom he disagreed. As the Greensboro Daily News had pointed out, the "blunderbuss" bill might miss the real Communists and hit the Constitution. There was no point in becoming hysterical about security to the extent of sacrificing the Constitution.

A substitute measure, sponsored by West Virginia Senator Harley Kilgore, would provide for detention of Communists or other home-front enemies in the event of war or other emergency. J. Edgar Hoover had assured that the FBI knew where the 12,000 most dangerous Communists were and what they were doing—witness Dealey Plaza, 13 years hence, regardless of acceptance or not of the single-shooter theory.

The piece thinks, in light of the problems and holes within the McCarran bill and the stated decision of the President to veto it if passed, the people would be better served to adopt either the Kilgore bill or some other remedy.

How about, instead, placing common sense before hysterical fear and dropping all efforts to exorcise a demon which did not in fact exist until created as a political shadow-rabbit by such persons as Congressmen J. Parnell Thomas and Richard Nixon along with Senator McCarthy, to chase down imaginary holes and enable them to appear manifestly busy at protecting "national security", not threatened in the first instance? Since when was there ever a single documented instance of Communist sabotage within the United States during the Cold War?

And please don't start talking about the Weathermen, you uneducated, radio-surfing dummy. They were anarchists and political exhibitionists, not Communists.

"Investment in the Future" praises the endorsement by the Chamber of Commerce of the three-million dollar coliseum-auditorium complex proposed by the Mayor's special planning committee, set to go before the voters on a bond issue in mid-October, finding that the Chamber understood the benefits to the business community from having such a complex.

"Ode to Congressmen" comments, in some degree of rhyme, on the suggestion made by Congressman Robert Rich of Pennsylvania that the House hire a staff psychiatrist to give each member a turn on the couch.

"Editorialettes" finds a valid defense of democracy from Ben Benson, leader of the Hobo Fellowship Union of America, urging hobos to join the military to help win the Korean war, for the fact that hobos were not allowed in Russia or North Korea or in any of the other Russian satellites.

A headline from the Greensboro Daily News, "Dropped Handkerchief Wrecks School Bus", prompts the comment, "Driver have a roving eye?"

And so on...

A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "Profane Diplomacy", favors the suggestion of the New York World Telegram and Sun to have the President appoint the verbally raucous and dexterously vituperative John L. Lewis as a U.S. delegate to the U.N., to meet the fire of Russian chief delegate Jakob Malik with American fire, in substitute for the rhetoric of the overly mannered Warren Austin.

A piece from the Minneapolis Star, titled "An Assault on Summer", takes exception to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial, "The Lovely, Lovely Summertime", in which some "sourpuss" writer suffering from a "complex" had sneered at the "'would-be Thoreaus'" and the "'enormous amount of nonsense that gets written about the Summer season.'"

That piece had carped: "Show me any bank on which the wild thyme grows, and I will show you a spot on which you can neither sit nor lie in any comfort without rugs and cushions."

The Star posits that the piece equated summers in St. Louis, with its chiggers, perspiration and mosquitoes, with those elsewhere, suggests that the writer for the Post-Dispatch come to Minnesota in summer, where it was a "privilege and pleasure" to mow a lawn amid its "air-conditioned, pine-scented, lake-bordered point of view".

Drew Pearson tells of reports from various parts of the world, via, for instance, the British Embassies in France, Spain, Belgium and Holland, that American military prestige was being lowered as a result of Korea. Frenchmen talked of capitulation to Russia. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in West Germany said that West Germans needed three more divisions of American troops within three months, with a total of ten divisions later, to support them rather than West German troops supporting the United States, for, he asserted, it was now believed, in light of Korea, that the Russians might take over West Germany, notwithstanding the previously assumed strength of the U.S. The reports from less friendly states, as in the Arab world and the Orient, were even worse.

Senator Lyndon Johnson, tapped to be chairman of the Senate Investigating Committee on military efficiency, would be asked to inquire on several matters in the upcoming investigation of Korea. Those areas would include: the lack of training of the troops in Japan under General MacArthur prior to the Korean war; why no new bazookas had been developed to replace the two-inch models known to be inadequate as anti-tank guns after World War II; why stronger tanks had not been developed adequately to meet the German tanks after which the Russians had patterned their designs; why 70 percent of General MacArthur's air force, the most powerful in the world, remained grounded in the days after the start of the war on the premise of fear of an air strike on Japan, despite Korea being only an hour away by air; why troop transfers across the 120 miles from Japan to Korea had been so slow in the opening weeks of the war, again premised on fear of a Russian attack on Japan, though the risk of atomic retaliation was regarded at the Pentagon to be an adequate deterrent; why the Air Force in Japan was commanded by General George Stratemeyer, who had a relatively noncombat role during World War II in the China-India theater; and why General Walton Walker, not seen as one of the Army's top generals, was the ground force commander, more noted for his luxurious surroundings in Japan than anything else.

The old jungle commanders, who had served under General MacArthur in the Pacific campaign and were familiar with guerrilla warfare of the type being encountered in Korea, were no longer with him, and General Robert Eichelberger had made it clear that he would not serve under him again. Many Senators were convinced that hundreds of American lives could have been saved by better planning at the top.

Joseph Alsop, in Korea, tells of the reason for the troops suffering a sudden reverse at the defense arc being the program of economy in defense undertaken by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. The enemy had mounted a "primitive but massive offensive" within the previous week, using their limited stocks of heavy military equipment only in big areas, while expending in great quantity its manpower everywhere. The offensive had been frustrated by the American defenses, albeit with great cost in casualties, justifying a new American confidence in the action. Within the South Korean sector, however, a major breakthrough had been achieved by the enemy, with the outcome uncertain at time of writing.

He suggests that the Pentagon would thus likely revive its "silly canard" from the early days of the fighting that the South Koreans were ineffective, but the truth was that these troops had been fighting at the front for 60 to 90 days continuously. One regiment had lost 3,000 men, three times the number on its muster rolls, had nevertheless continued the fight despite lacking adequate supplies of small arms ammunition, food and water, compounded by poor communications in obtaining artillery and air support. The question then became why so much burden was imposed on these troops.

The answer, he suggests, was that Lt. General Walton Walker, the ground commander, had done his best to remedy the deficiencies of the South Korean troops but had to take the risk, because of lack of adequate American troops to relieve them, of shortening the defense perimeter and consequent supply lines. It was a fallacy to attribute to the President's statement that there were now five American divisions in Korea the notion that these divisions were at anywhere close to full strength, though their actual strength could not be revealed for security reasons. It was, he suggests, analogous to a "half empty shell", as manifested by the fact that the American foxholes were spaced at 60-yard intervals along the lines.

He goes on then to criticize the economy program of Secretary Johnson as being responsible for this latter condition, in contradistinction to the planned military strength put forward by the late Defense Secretary James Forrestal during his last months in the position in early 1949.

General Walker had done remarkably well to hold the shortened perimeter for so long under such poor conditions. At Taejon, he had saved his whole position from disintegration. Later, when the enemy first threatened the approaches to Pusan, he blocked the threat with a single regiment, three tanks, and his own Army headquarters security company. Through such tactics, he had enabled a little to go a long way. Were he to fail, it would be the fault of those who "defrauded" the American people by claiming strength when there was weakness in the military, producing the present "chaotic" crisis.

"When one has seen these young men, hopeful and brave and full of good gifts, fall thus in battle, it is hard not to demand a just and ruthless penalty from the guilty men, the tellers of untruths, the organizers of weakness and disaster."

Marquis Childs finds the legislative stampede on in Congress in the final days before the election recess. While understandable, it had unhappy consequences. As example, the House had passed the Alaska and Hawaii statehood bills but the Senate would not act on them before the recess, despite the efforts of the President to urge Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas to do so. Senator Lucas had resisted because he believed that the bills would invite a filibuster by Southern Democrats who did not want four more Senators in the chamber, especially one or two of Eurasian descent, to dilute their strength. Action on the bills in the last days of the session would not be considered hasty for the fact that a half dozen committees had held hearings on these measures during the course of the prior three or four years.

Meanwhile, measures to be undertaken in haste included those on espionage and subversion, which should have been studied months earlier. The current McCarran bill before the Senate would place undue burden on the FBI to supervise the registration of Communists, such that, according to Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, dangerous agents could escape its net. It also would give to a subversives control board power to determine subjectively which groups were subversive and who was a fellow-traveler, giving it power to control freedom of thought and dissent. It also raised a question as to its constitutionality, leading to long contest in the courts, delaying implementation of the law.

Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of Senator Clyde Hoey favoring the McCarran bill, that which the Washington Post had found to be "as dangerous to the national security as to the American tradition of personal freedom it utterly ignores." But Senator Hoey found it to be the same sort of objection raised whenever the country sought to do anything to the Communists. He found no objection in the fact that the bill made the Communist or front organization subject to criminal prosecution when failing to register. He agreed that it might be difficult to define within the framework of the bill what a Communist was. He said that he thought that former Vice-President Henry Wallace would have been forced to register under the bill, until his recent reversal of stance, endorsing the U.N. action in Korea and renouncing his Progressive Party ties for its opposition.

Meanwhile, Senators Kilgore, Frank Graham of North Carolina, and William Langer of North Dakota, were working on the Kilgore substitute detention bill. Senator Graham believed the McCarran bill would be ineffective for its designed purpose.

Senator Graham suggested that the President's statement about the Marines having a propaganda arm equal to that of Stalin was a simple mistake, deriving probably from his getting up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Senator Hoey thought it "uncalled for" and "unwise". He added that he doubted Marine Corps propaganda was nearly so effective as that of the Air Corps.

Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon gave a tribute to Senator Graham on the floor recently, as Senator Graham was in his last days in the Senate after defeat in the June primary by Willis Smith, having been appointed to the seat in March, 1949 by Governor Kerr Scott. Senator Morse said that he was the most "Christ-like" man he had ever known.

Many members paid tribute to recently deceased Congressman A. L. Bulwinkle of Gastonia, who had served 28 years in the House. He provides various quotes.

The House had been on vacation during the week, and he tells of those who ventured the greatest distance away from Washington, including North Carolina Congressman Harold Cooley who went to Dublin, Ireland to attend the Conference of the Interparliamentary Union.

The Congress was preparing for a two-month recess as of September 15, leaving time after the elections to consider such matters as the Alaska-Hawaii statehood bills hanging fire in the Senate.

That would take only until 1959 to accomplish.

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