The Charlotte News

Thursday, December 7, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the allied troops were dug in along a new 70-mile long defense line in the hills of northwest Korea, 25 miles south of Pyongyang, seeking to resist the approaching 100,000-man vanguards of the million-man Chinese force. The Eighth Army was less than its 110,000-man force which was present when forced to retreat in late November.

In the northeast sector, U.S. Marines and two regiments of the Seventh Infantry sought in a blizzard to break out of the trap into which they were pinned by Chinese troops south of Changjin reservoir. They had escaped one trap at Hagaru following a 25-hour battle in zero-degree weather and had to escape yet another at Koto into which they had entered, forty miles from Hamhung along a road on which seven Chinese divisions were reported to be deployed. There were no defined allied lines in the sector.

The American garrison at the port of Wonsan had withdrawn, covered by naval bombardment of three U.S. destroyers and shore batteries of South Korean Marines. The Marines trapped below Changjin had landed at Wonsan on October 15, five days after it was captured by the South Korean forces. Hamhung and Hungnam now afforded the primary escape route for the allies in the northeast sector.

The Defense Department released the latest casualty figures for Korea, showing a total of 32,242, an increase of 1,414 over the prior week, including all reported to next of kin through December 1. Of those, 5,038 had been killed in action, 22,337 wounded, of whom 573 had later died, and 5,067 missing, of whom 4,334 were still missing.

The President and Prime Minister Clement Attlee of Britain were reported to be seriously considering a naval blockade of the China coast in the event that the U.N. forces were long stymied or driven from the peninsula. Negotiation of a settlement short of appeasement was also being considered. The President was reported to be taking a tougher stand than Mr. Attlee and his aides, both as to negotiations and application of direct pressure on the Chinese. The President had made it clear that he would not engage in bargaining on issues extraneous to Korea, such as membership of China in the U.N. or regarding control of Formosa. Mr. Attlee's aides believed, however, that such bargaining, if necessary to achieve peace, ought be undertaken. The British advocated that in the event of expulsion of U.N. forces from the peninsula, the conflict should be wound up as quickly as possible and attention concentrated on Western Europe.

The British Defense Minister, Emanuel Shinwell, told Commons that there was no thought of withdrawing from Korea.

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky told the U.N. General Assembly this date that the "American intervention in Korea" was the basis for the third world war and had to be stopped to prevent it. He also accused the U.S. of aggression in Formosa and Manchuria. Meanwhile, in the political committee, France led the Western powers in a move to make Communist Chinese intervention in Korea and the demand that they withdraw the top priority item before the Assembly, as Russia opposed the move. U.N. diplomats awaited word of whether the Chinese were willing to accept any of the proposals communicated through the Indian representative re peace.

Maj. General Claire Chennault, in the first of three articles, examines whether the Chinese onslaught in Korea made world war three inevitable, tells of Formosa being uppermost in the minds of the Communists in Russia and China as a target of conquest after Korea. He assures that they would strike when the time was right, at the earliest opportunity. If Formosa became a Communist outpost, it would point a dagger at Japan from the south, and against the Philippines. Formosa, he says, was the key to anti-Communism in the Far East. He maintains that it was not impossible to stem the onslaught in Korea. At that point, Formosa would be of central importance to Pacific defense.

Joseph C. Goodwin recalls the ninth anniversary of Pearl Harbor and what had transpired in the world since, the development of the atom bomb and long-range aircraft. The allies were now being rearmed and American industries were stronger in war-waging potential than in 1941. Russia and its satellites had twice the manpower of the West and were geared to war-making. This time, in the event of general war, the Pearl Harbors, according to the experts, might be American cities.

The Republican Senate policy committee decided to let all of its 43 members vote on a formal request to have Secretary of State Acheson resign. The vote would be held at a meeting on Tuesday.

Gut luck.

A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss and his sentence to five years in prison. Against a claim that there was insufficient evidence to support the verdict of perjury, requiring corroboration of only a single witness averring the factual basis for the perjury, the Court said that the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, which had obviously been believed by the jury, was substantiated by other evidence supporting the verdict:

"Tending to substantiate Mr. Chambers' testimony was the concession that all the copied documents produced by him were, save one, copied on the Hiss Woodstock typewriter. According to the testimony of appellant and his wife, that typewriter had been given to one of their servants and taken away from their home before the dates of any of the documents of which Mr. Chambers produced copies, but there was sufficient contradictory evidence, other than that of Mr. Chambers, to enable the jury to find that the typewriter was in the Hiss home during the time when the documents might have been copied on it. Nor does the lack of any direct evidence of when the copies were typed (other than the dates of the originals) affect the sufficiency of this corroboration. It was, of course, possible that the copies were typed later either from the originals or from micro-filmed copies of them stored away for this purpose. That, however, was properly a question for the jury, not for this court."

The Court also found additional substantiating evidence under the second count of perjury, Mr. Hiss's claim before the December, 1948 Grand Jury that he did not meet Mr. Chambers at all during the period in question when he was alleged to have passed the secret documents for transmission to the Soviets, in or about February and March, 1938, or at anytime after the beginning of 1937. For both Mr. and Mrs. Hiss testified that they had last met Mr. and Mrs. Chambers on a social occasion in December, 1937, after January 1, 1937, the cutoff date stated by Mr. Hiss before the Grand Jury for any further contact with Mr. Chambers, thus lending the additional corroboration for the second count from the testimony of the Hisses, themselves. The Court rejected as inconsequential Mr. Hiss's contention that the December date was nevertheless prior to the indictment's period of time stated for the document transfers and therefore not corroborative, as the "in or about" language of count one permitted inference by the jury of transfer during a time period reasonably close to early 1938, and the Government had stated expressly during trial that it did not intend to limit the time frame to those months if it could show other times of contact when the transfers might have been transacted. It further noted that since the sentences ran concurrently on each count, either would suffice to support the resulting sentence.

The Court also rejected his claim of error on the part of the trial court in allowing each of two witnesses to testify for the Government, when the Government knew they would plead the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer certain questions, that such was unduly prejudical to his case. The Court found that while some authorities supported the contention and there could be circumstances under which such calling of witnesses could be an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, there was no such abuse in the present case.

UAW president Walter Reuther accused the Government of bungling conversion to defense mobilization while using the meat-axe approach to try to control runaway inflation. He advocated complete mobilization at once, including price controls. He criticized the steel price hikes of the previous week, which had resulted in G.M. price hikes.

The mother of a G.I. from Camp Pickett, Va., received a letter from her son in Europe saying he would not be home for Christmas, but it had been sent in 1947.

New snow, rain, and cold weather again plagued a large section of the country, from the Midwest to New York, with 29 inches of snow recorded at Duluth, Minn. At Fayetteville, Ark., the temperature reached seven below zero, the coldest mark since the same temperature had been recorded in 1917.

On the editorial page, "Pearl Harbor Anniversary" recapitulates the history preceding Pearl Harbor from the time of the appeasement in Munich in September, 1938 and the Nazi invasion of Poland eleven months later on September 1, 1939, just after Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with Russia, to the German backstab invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, a year after the fall of France, Belgium and the Low Countries, following which came the first Blitz of Britain, from August, 1940 through May, 1941.

For a full year prior to the attack on December 7, 1941, there had been signs of war with Japan on the horizon, but no one knew when or where it might come. While the draft had been put into effect in fall, 1940, the Army was still undermanned when war came, the result, it posits, of the great Giant being asleep at the switch.

At present, it suggests, the signs were even clearer of approaching general war. But the allies were not under attack such that the country had mobilized its industry for war production, as during the early phase of World War II. Geographic isolation was much less important in the present world because of advances in technology, long-range jet aircraft and missiles, plus the atomic bomb.

It posits that the country needed strong leadership now more than ever, especially since there was no Pearl Harbor to galvanize the country to action. The citizens, it asserts, were more sensitive to the acute risk of war and less given to panic than nine years earlier, were waiting to be told what the leaders needed them to do.

Lie down in the gutter and cover their eyes, after running fast away from the big blast. That's what you just told them to do earlier in the week.

"Faith and the Stockpile" finds that Barbara Ward, writing in Atlantic Monthly, had made good sense in advocating having faith in the country's European allies, in Britain, France, and Italy, rather than viewing the British as duplicitous, the French as cowards or the Italians as irresponsible. For if such perceptions persisted, nothing could be accomplished in a common enterprise.

Without that faith, counsels the piece, the President could not have hoped that the meeting with Prime Minister Attlee would reach success. It was as important, it concludes, as the stockpile of atomic bombs.

"Bob Ruark Declares War" finds that Mr. Ruark's column of this date, refusing appeasement as a viable alternative in Korea, sounded as the opinion of many Americans not accustomed to seeing the country pushed around.

But the piece differs with him when he expressed the belief that any temporary concessions would be catastrophic. Edward R. Murrow had recently discussed appeasement from the perspective of having witnessed Munich in 1938, saying that while that appeasement had been terrible, it had given the British and French time to build up their defenses for a year, the trouble having been that they had not utilized the time for the purpose, and even after Hitler had invaded Poland in September, 1939, continued to talk of the "phony war" on the Western front through winter, 1940, only waking up finally when the Wehrmacht crashed into France.

It finds a lesson in that history, that the country should engage in concessions to buy time and then use the time to mobilize its resources, all in the effort to avoid a general war in the Far East so that a war, if it would occur with Russia, could be fought at a time and place of America's choosing rather than that of Russia's.

A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Readin', Writin', and Televisin'", tells of the FCC trying to preserve some television rights for education while many educators appeared uninterested in utilizing the medium for the purpose, just as they had not used radio. Television was more complicated than radio as it cost more to produce and present programming, and most institutions did not have the money to do it.

The FCC could, as requested, preserve a share of the channel band for education or could provide, as in radio, for sharing of time between commercial and educational stations. It ventures that television could become a magical gift to mass education, and thus the FCC should at least see that the availability of it should be preserved for that purpose.

Bill Sharpe, in his weekly "Turpentine Drippings", snippets from newspapers across the state, tells of one from the Montgomery Herald which found that the Republicans of the county had done well in the midterm election because they had fed their voters food while the Democrats seemed not to give a damn.

The Zebulon Record tells of an undertaker who embalmed a corpse with Hadacol and it got up and walked away.

The Goldsboro News-Argus provides the Formula for Escaping Responsibility, which started with, "Don't think", and ended with, "If you have to sign it, write a denial."

Pete Ivey of the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem imparts of a four-year old girl who had named a list of 14 things she wanted Santa Claus to bring her for Christmas, when her mother interrupted to remind her that St. Nick had to deliver toys to all the children of the world and that she might, therefore, want to curtail her list only to a couple of items, whereupon the girl inquired whether Santa could not just wish it and it would come true, as God, at which point her mother replied in the negative, that Santa did not wield that kind of authority, to which the girl responded that they should therefore simply skip Santa and appeal directly to God.

The Roxboro Courier-Times tells of only nine persons having checked out the Works of Shakespeare from the Person County Library since 1943, while 27 had signed for Ellery Queen's Ten Days' Wonder, answering the question as to how many educated people were in the county.

And so forth, so, so, so more.

Drew Pearson tells of both the President and Prime Minister Attlee being left-of-center liberals who had spent much of their lives in government, working for the less-privileged sector of society. Neither was considered strong in his own country and neither had much imagination, or the force, flair, or genius of each of their predecessors, FDR and Winston Churchill.

But Mr. Attlee did have the support of Mr. Churchill and most of the Conservatives on foreign policy, unlike the President, who did not enjoy full bipartisan support any longer. Before Mr. Attlee had left London, Mr. Churchill, who was personally a friend to Mr. Attlee, who had served in the war Coalition Cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister, had advised him how to force the President's hand to accept the conference by announcing it in advance of acceptance. Mr. Churchill also promised Mr. Attlee that there would be no attempt to overthrow the Labor Government while he was away.

Mr. Attlee's manner of speech, unlike the President's, was refined, as his father had been a respected Tory lawyer. Mr. Attlee had also written poetry regarding the working class district which he represented in Parliament. He and his Cabinet were regarded as the most vigorous opponents of Communism and would likely be the first to be executed in the event of a Russian takeover of Europe. Personally, Mr. Attlee had also vigorously fought Fascism. He refused a post in the Cabinet of Neville Chamberlain because of the appeasement at Munich and he was one of the first to go on record against the Japanese war lords, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and the Franco revolution in Spain.

Marquis Childs tells of John Foster Dulles leaving his U.N. post where he had specialized in seeking a resolution of the Korean situation and, of late, in the Chinese intervention. He would now return to the State Department where he was the principal adviser on the Far East.

Mr. Dulles had visited Seoul three days before the Korean attack on June 25, had told the Korean parliament that if the Communists invaded, South Korea would not have to stand alone. He was in Tokyo when the invasion took place and said then that both the U.S. and the U.N. would resist any aggression across the 38th parallel. On the way home, however, he admitted that he hoped he had not spoken prematurely and out of turn. For many military men thought Korea indefensible in the event of all-out Communist attack. The National Security Council had concluded two years earlier that all American troops ought be withdrawn from Korea because a limited force could not hold the peninsula.

Japan, because of the preoccupation of the American forces in Korea, was now vulnerable to attack by the Chinese Communists. It was one reason why a tentative decision had been made to defer the conclusion of a peace treaty, to avoid complicating matters with the Chinese at the present time. Mr. Dulles would soon go to Japan to assess the situation.

If the Republicans were wise, they would follow the lead of Mr. Dulles. Senator William Knowland of California, by contrast, was advocating, in effect, full-scale war with Communist China on the basis that he had supported all of the Western European aid and that the free peoples of Asia were no less important.

But American resources would not permit waging a war 10,000 miles from home against such a large army. It was no time for pride, he counsels, no matter how noble the motive. Reaching beyond the military capability of the country would not help anyone.

Robert C. Ruark, as indicated in the above editorial, finds that, notwithstanding the mire of bad policies in the Far East, the country, once it had committed to the Korean war, could not back down from the fight with the Chinese without giving the clear indication of appeasement, which would send negative echoes throughout Asia and would encourage further Communist aggression, just as the appeasement of Hitler by the British and French had done in Munich in 1938.

France and Britain, nevertheless, appeared to want to call it quits.

But the U.S. still had a bargaining chip in the form of the atom bomb and he advocates using that with Stalin as the basis to venture an ultimatum.

He tells of the people who frequented the bars believing that it was possibly stupid to have become involved initially in Korea and in the U.N., since the U.S. had to finance the whole thing and, largely, implement its directives.

He concludes that to kowtow to the Chinese or Russians or "to our weak-kneed conspirators for peace without honor" would be deferring a showdown and that no one in history had ever satisfactorily done so.

He really needs, as some of his counterparts of today in the press, both "mainstream" and sewage overflow, to jettison the bars and their habitues as the source of his opinions.

That advice, we venture, also applies equally to the Congress of the United States, both parties, to whom we address the central question of the day and the week: Have you lost your minds?

Is it proper to bully someone from office, as a Senator or Congressman, proclaiming the while some vague, unfathomable "principle" of "empowerment" of women as its basis, while premising it actually on half-baked allegations, uncorroborated, unsubstantiated, logically inconsistent with common experience, as many of the claimed episodes occurred around numerous other persons, even husbands of the alleging gropee, who nevertheless failed to witness or remark contemporaneously, "Hey, you, hands off the software", anent the alleged conduct, all having the same inherent common thread, arising from instances years earlier, not therefore subject to easy refutation or corroboration of a bald denial—not to mention the fact that in the case of Congressman John Conyers, the revelation derived from a two-bit, alt-right crazy person, who offered $10,000 for information on the matter after apparently abnormally quick fulfillment of his FOIA request for the list of Congressional settlements with former staff employees, and who, having been, himself, once accused of and formally charged with rape in 2003, reduced to a battery, is now making it his life's mission to drag down into his sewer anyone with whom he disagrees politically, just as is his good pal, Ales, of Infowars.

We offer congratulations, therefore, to the Democratic caucus for, however unwittingly, having now given much credence and tacit approbation to the alt-right media, by any other name, the neo-Fascists of our society, to produce and encourage more of the same. We hope that you are quite proud of yourselves today as you have, this week, made a mockery of due process, the right to be heard and present evidence countering scurrilous accusations, the U.S. Constitution and its honorable protections of those accused of any form of wrongdoing, civil or criminal. That is a prudent lesson to impart to the young of our country, that bullying wins the day, that making any old claim, no matter how absurd, lacking in inherent credibility, and from years earlier, trumps all fairness and reason, that ends justify means in getting your political enemies. Have you lost your minds?

It should not be lost, in viewing the organized effort toward this end of things, that Garrison Keillor, days after presenting a good essay in the Washington Post, (shame on which for its ex post facto facile, juvenile disclaimer and preemptive dissociation), on why Senator Franken should not resign his post, became then, himself, the object of one of these hit-and-run claims from years earlier and was terminated summarily as a result by Minnesota Public Broadcasting after an association since 1969.

This form of accusation is the new HUAC, the new McCarthyism.

If we were of your number, Democratic caucus, we would think about begging both Mr. Conyers and Mr. Franken to reconsider their decisions to step aside and urge them, instead, to stand firm in contesting these outrageously absurd accusations, giving thereby two of your esteemed colleagues the benefit of the doubt, including challenging the credibility of the originator of the silly Franken allegation, herself a former Playboy model in the nude—we mean really naked—the little babe in the woods who was shocked, shocked to find him taking uninvited liberties with a rehearsed kiss for an onstage pucker during preparation backstage for a USO show in 2006, three years before Mr. Franken became a Senator. And again, unless you are blind, there was no picture of any actual groping, only a joke simulated grope of a Playboy model, who, according to reports, voted in 2016 for the Groper-in-Chief. The rest is window dressing, those who run forward in the established herd pattern for their fifteen minutes of media recognition, feeling comfortable in numbers, probably with agent in tow, possibly to score an interview on tv or even a book or movie-of-the-week deal, bolstering that increasingly flabby career or lifeless home life, without any corroboration whatsoever, yet claiming events so old and without special contemporaneous significance that it is hard to contest them with anything more than a bald denial. How would you react to someone you did not know, who, years ago, asked you in a public place to appear in a picture with them surrounded by others, and then, suddenly, years later, claims that you grabbed them by their posterior parts or otherwise while the picture was being snapped? Or that what was intended then as a mutually understood joke or ironic statement no longer is so understood, for want of the Money shot?

Should you fail to reconsider your emotional, precipitous reactions, you, Democrats of the Congress, may wind up a year from now, after the midterm elections, greatly regretting your conduct of this week, obviously undertaken for political expediency given the outrageous situation with the Republicans in the Alabama Senate race and their reversal of their earlier condemnation of their candidate regarding old but more serious, far more serious, accusations of misconduct with underage children. In any event, you are playing right to the hands, the groping hands, of the Groper-in-Chief, who is smiling like the Cheshire Cat he bragged of grabbing.

Our advice is to conduct a thorough investigation of these claims against Mr. Conyers and Mr. Franken and follow the money obviously being paid presently to these accusers to make the allegations from years earlier, concertedly, suddenly, and most determinedly against those with a liberal track record or at least against those recently opposing the Groper-in-Chief, and find out the source of that money trail—probably somewhere between the White House, Breitbart and other alt-right personages, not illegal but speaking volumes regarding the credibility or lack thereof of the "principled" sources of the claims, crying all the way to the bank regarding their alleged gropes.

Time will tell, and we have the distinct impression that time will thoroughly discredit these recent groupie gropees for their tawdry and false claims, their payoffs, their shilling for right-wing media outlets, and their cheapening, in inevitable equal and opposite backlash, of genuine claims of sexual harassment, rape or molestation into the future.

And if you do not like what we say, would like to lash out at us for exercising freedom of the press and speech, go grope yourself.

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