The Charlotte News
Saturday, July 8, 1950
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that correspondents at the front in Korea, late on the previous night, early morning Saturday, EST, told of the fall of the large town of Chonan, 60 miles south of Seoul, to the North Korean forces, penetrating to their deepest southern point yet, but that the drive had been temporarily halted while the invaders were amassing troops, armor and artillery for a renewed offensive.
Angry and weary American troops, according to A.P. correspondent O. H. P. King, had retreated again during the day. The troops were mad and frustrated that no heavy artillery, tanks, and aircraft had reached them. The retreat initially had been orderly, but later became rushed, on foot and in vehicles. The enemy had not followed the retreat but were using heavy artillery to sustain the fall-back. American "equipment", according to Mr. King, presumed to include tanks, along with fresh troops had arrived at the front, albeit not yet in action. According to American field headquarters, no major unit of American forces, larger than battalion strength of about 400 to 500 men, had yet been committed to the fighting.
General MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo suggested that the reported retreat was the same one reported the previous day by A.P. correspondent Tom Lambert, probably completed Saturday morning. It added that between 40 and 60 enemy tanks, accompanied by a thousand troops, were crossing the Ansong River heading southward through Songhwan, six miles south-southeast of Pyongtaek. The enemy front appeared to be irregular along a 52-mile course from Pyongtaek northeastward to Wonju. Enemy forces were steadily building from supplies coming from the north, with a drive indicated in the direction of Pusan, the location of the major southern supply port at the extreme southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula. The enemy also appeared to be flanking the main battle area to sever the supply route from Taegu, 58 miles northwest of Pusan. Blown-up bridges by the U.S. Air Force and flooded streams from heavy rains were the most serious current obstacles to the North's advance.
Defense officials in Washington reported the first loading of F-51 propeller-driven Mustangs, drawn from the Air National Guard, for shipment to Korea from the West Coast. Some of those planes were already in action.
The President, acting pursuant to a U.N. Security Council resolution passed the prior day authorizing him to name a supreme commander of the U.N. forces in Korea, named General MacArthur to the position and ordered him to operate under the U.N. flag along with the flags of the participating nations, thus far including 45 countries, six of which had authorized use of their armed forces.
The Philippines had joined the group of U.N. nations supporting the action, agreeing to send supplies and medicine.
A veteran Navy flier, Commander Harvey Lanham, told a press conference that he believed the North Koreans were withholding their air power for use in desperation, as few planes had been flying in recent days. The enemy had small dirt fields with planes hidden under netting all over North Korea. They apparently had a couple of submarines, as spotted by American fliers at Chinnampo. A two-day American carrier-based mission had targeted planes and airfields. During the first day, two enemy planes had been downed and eight destroyed on the ground. After no further planes could be located, the U.S. airmen turned to destruction of locomotives, blowing up 12 and puncturing 11, one of them pulling a troop train from Pyongyang.
Leading Republicans in Congress appeared willing to authorize the sending of men and materials to Korea and to meet any outbreak elsewhere. They approved the President's emergency use of the draft induction power included in the bill Congress had just passed to extend selective service by a year. The President, according to Senator Styles Bridges, had told lawmakers the previous day in conference that he would not ask for new legislation until the situation in Korea jelled.
The House Veterans Committee was set to consider extension of the G.I. Bill of Rights to all military personnel engaged in the Korean fighting.
The Senate Appropriations Committee completed action on a 34.7 billion dollar omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 1951, 77 percent of which was devoted to defense and war-connected spending. Of the total spending, 32.7 billion was in cash and the remainder in contract authorizations. It would now go to the full Senate for action.
The President ordered seizure of the strikebound Rock Island Railroad and told the Army to run it, urging striking Switchmen's Union members to stay on the job. But four hours later, the National Mediation Board in Chicago announced that the Switchmen's Union had refused to send its men back to work on the basis of the Government's seizure order, effective at 4:00 p.m. The union president, saying that he believed the order to be a "token order" as in the May, 1948 seizure, said that the union would restore service when the Government seized profits, as well as labor, on the line, that as there were parallel lines along the Rock Island tracks on which other railroads could run, there was no peril to national security, as claimed by the President in making the seizure. The union had called off the strike on Thursday of four other railroads to avoid seizure, leaving only the Rock Island switchmen still on strike.
On the editorial page, "The Time Is Now" tells of the country starting to realize that the Korean situation was a war which was not going to be over shortly, as originally hoped. Military observers had praised the tenacity with which the North Koreans had fought. U.S. forces were handicapped by the fact that the North Korean supply line was practically unlimited from Russia and Communist China, whereas U.S. supplies had to come ultimately from the U.S.
Communist Chinese Foreign Minister Chou En-Lai had said that China was dedicated to "liberating" Formosa from the Nationalists. Under the President's new policy enunciated the prior week, the U.S. was dedicated now to defend Formosa. If the Chinese Communists opened a second front, the U.S. position would be considerably weaker than it already was.
Defending the Far East, including Indo-China and the Philippines, would be a job of immense proportions, requiring the strengthening of American defenses and expanded production of the tools of war. Meanwhile, the country had to continue to devote considerable resources to strengthening Western Europe.
The combined task, it concludes, would be the greatest of any U.N. nation and, it warns, the time was ripe for mobilizing industry, the economy, and manpower against Communist Russia, as delay could mean defeat.
"Useful Word" tells of an article titled "Can Civilization Survive?" by Stanton A. Coblentz, appearing in Duke University's South Atlantic Quarterly, having defined the word spinescence as "the diversion of life energies to the production of unprofitable excrescences". The author had cited the stegosaurus as an example of a prehistoric creature which, while well-armed against attack by other animals, had but a tiny brain weighing just over two ounces.
The point made by Mr. Coblentz was that Twentieth Century man was spending so much of his productive capacity on such things as atomic power, the jet and rocketry that his very survival was endangered.
The piece agrees that democracies and dictatorships alike spending too much of their potential on war goods ran the risk of perishing without war if the normally positive processes of their bodies politic were thus squelched. The unproductive excrescences had to be periodically eliminated, just as in the case of a business which spent its profits in times of prosperity for gewgaws might find itself eventually in a bad case. It lets the American driving his or her fancy automobile complete the thought.
It thus finds the word spinescence useful.
"To Save a Life" urges
response by the community to the call of the Mecklenburg County
chapter of the Red Cross for contributions of blood
Drew Pearson tells of General Eisenhower being addressed as "Professor" by Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to FDR, who added that it was too early to call him "Mr. President". The General had flushed and changed the subject.
He explains how, despite a ten million dollar allocation of aid to Korea having been passed and signed into law in October, 1949, after the President had proposed the aid package that January, only $200,000 had actually been sent to Korea. The National Security Council on advice of the Joint Chiefs, plus General MacArthur's headquarters and the CIA, had found that Korea's problem was one of "internal security" and that an enemy attack was improbable. The program had been effective, eliminating 5,000 guerrillas in recent months. But based on those assumptions, aid to Korea was placed in low priority by the NSC and haste was ordered only after Ambassador John Muccio urged that an emergency existed in Korea. Maj. General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, future chairman of the Joint Chiefs from 1960 until October, 1962, just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, sought to persuade General MacArthur to release supplies in Japan to Korea, that such would knock two to four weeks off the timetable in the event of an emergency. But General MacArthur had refused, saying he could not afford to release the materials. The result had been that only $200,000 worth of supplies had left U.S. ports by June 26, the day after the Sunday attack on South Korea.
Furthermore, Congress had been in no hurry to push military aid, as it had taken eight months in 1949 for the bill to pass. Also, the treaty with Korea had not been signed until the prior January and only then did arms aid begin at all. General Lemnitzer had to fight a military bureaucracy which had not been alert even in getting aid rolling to Europe.
He notes that those who had been complaining the loudest about "shocking disclosures" of negligence in intelligence gathering having led American forces to being caught by surprise by the Korean attack, had sought to stop aid to Korea, including Senators Homer Ferguson and William Knowland, who, along with Senator Walter George of Georgia, had voted to cut the evenutally passed 1.1 billion dollars in military aid to 400 million dollars. Senator Knowland had sought to cut it even more deeply, to 300 million. Other critics were Senators John Bricker and Robert Taft, who, along with 22 other Senators, voted against the military aid bill. Senator George Malone, who had attacked the Administration for incompetence in aid to Korea, had voted against the aid and called it a waste of money.
California Democrats were upset regarding a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner given for Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman, for which the California DNC had paid, only after the treasurer had protested for the fact that GOP oil interests who despised the President had attended the dinner, saying that he felt that the Democrats should not have to pay the $634 dinner bill. He reluctantly paid it only after George Lucky, the President's top California Democrat, ordered it done.
The Kefauver crime investigating committee was set to hold hearings in Miami, Kansas City, St, Louis and Chicago during the month.
The salmon industry had raised $150,000 to fight Alaskan statehood on the belief that it would hurt their industry.
An Ohio political survey found that Senator Taft's endorsement of Senator McCarthy's campaign against Communists in the State Department had been his worst political blunder since March 9, 1941, when he had said, "War is even worse than a German victory."
The DNC would purchase a seven-story office building opposite the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, whereas only a few months earlier, the Committee had been having trouble paying its telephone bill.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of the primary error in American foreign policy which had resulted in the Korean invasion being the failure to spend enough money on the effort to contain Soviet expansionism, leading the Russians to authorize the action as a means to test the resolve of the West, believing that there would be no response. Conditions of strength had not been created to deter such an assumption and resultant action.
While the failure of leadership in the Administration over the previous two years was, they posit, the primary reason for the status, blame also had to be cast on the Republican Party, especially Senators Robert Taft, Kenneth Wherry and such Senators as James Kem of Missouri, all of whom took the same basic stance as the Communist Party on American foreign policy. Other Republicans such as Senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Arthur Vandenberg, as well as former members of the Administration, Robert Lovett and deceased former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, both of whom were Republicans, had taken a positive stance, agreeing with Administration programs. But the conservative Republicans were aligned with the Communists on such things as opposition to the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the "Point 4" program of technical assistance to underdeveloped countries, and the Military Aid Program.
While the Communists had adopted a different tone in their opposition, the basic positions were similar if not identical on these key issues of foreign policy. When Senator Taft had attacked the idea of NATO and military aid, he nearly adopted the Kremlin position that the U.S. was being "provocative" by enabling free nations to defend themselves. This position, they find, delighted the Daily Worker.
Robert C. Ruark finds that a case out of Bronx County in which a man was found guilty by a jury, after twenty minutes of deliberation, for murder of an eight-year old boy after sexually molesting him, and then sentenced by the judge to death, had stood in bold contrast to the trend of late of finding such persons insane and committing them to mental institutions. He applauds the result and hopes that others who might commit similar crimes would take note and thus be deterred.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of the House having taken a long July Fourth vacation, not planning to return until Monday, while the Senate had returned Wednesday. The President had also taken a holiday weekend on the Potomac and did not appear overly concerned with the Korean invasion. The Pentagon, however, was another story, as military planners were troubled about the slow progress in Korea. But there was little talk in Washington of Korea developing into a third world war.
Paul Green's drama, "Faith of Our Fathers", centering on the life of George Washington, in celebration of the sesquicentennial of the nation's capital, was scheduled to start on August 4 and run for seven weeks.
Senator James Eastland of Mississippi had commented in a speech on the Senate floor of North Carolina having tripled its spending on black schools since 1942, that by way of suggesting progress in the South.
Senator Frank Graham had been presiding over the nearly empty Senate recently while Senator Tom Connally was speaking, when Senator Graham banged the gavel, causing Senator Connally to inquire whether it was meant for him, to which Senator Graham said that he was only trying to quiet the gallery. Senator Connally then looked toward the gallery and said that he saw no one but a fly.
The column provides the North Carolina Congressional delegation's stance on the rent control extension law, which had recently been signed, extending it for six months, with community option then available to extend it another six months through mid-1951. That would be the end of rent control unless the Korean war intervened to necessitate extending it further.
Senator Clyde Hoey's subcommittee investigating kickbacks under ERP had found no widespread violations. The subcommittee was now starting its investigation into reports of homosexuals and "other moral perverts" in the Government. Senator Hoey admitted that he had not read the Kinsey report but did not laugh at a newspaper report the prior week which used some of the Kinsey statistics ` applied to Congress and Federal employees.
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