The Charlotte News
Friday, October 26, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert Tuckman, that the allies had quickly rejected a Communist proposal to establish the ceasefire buffer zone in Korean territory already won by the U.N. at great cost, including "Heartbreak Ridge", the "Punchbowl", and the "Iron Triangle". Notably, however, in the second day of renewed ceasefire talks since resumption after a two-month cessation, the Communists had not mentioned the 38th parallel as the demarcation line for the ceasefire zone, which they had previously demanded. The two sides were scheduled to meet again this date.
In air fighting, allied jet pilots shot down two Russian-made jets and damaged three others in the sixth straight day of aerial dogfights. The Fifth Air Force said that all of its jets returned safely from three separate battles in which 68 allied planes engaged with 121 enemy jets. In all, between 150 and 160 enemy jets were sighted in the air, but some of them had fled at first contact with the allies.
The Fifth Air Force said that its total kill of enemy MIG jets for the war was now at 96, with 20 probable kills and 227 damaged.
On the ground, U.N. infantrymen advanced in hand-to-hand combat against stiffening resistance northwest of Yonchon in the western sector and southeast of Kumsong in the central sector.
The U.S. Army estimated that through October 19, the enemy had suffered 1,414,635 casualties, an increase of 41,406 since the previous estimate made through October 10. Enemy battle casualties stood at 1,021,197 and non-battle losses at 226,507, with 156,931 prisoners of war. Through the same date, American casualties were reported as 92,997, including killed, wounded and missing.
In Alhambra, California, a woman who wrote a letter through Stars and Stripes to Korea seeking pen pals had received 2,000 replies, was now busy answering the letters, and, with the help of others in the community, was now preparing candy and other treats for the soldiers to meet the November 1 Christmas deadline for mailing.
Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, chairman of the joint Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee, told the American Institute of Physics in Chicago that it would probably be two to three years before tactical atomic weapons, currently being developed by the Atomic Energy Commission, could be put into use in combat.
In Britain, the Conservative Party
had achieved a narrow victory in Commons in the general election
Mr. Churchill, grinning after the victory, appeared at Conservative Party headquarters and congratulated campaign workers for a "magnificent performance". His primary goal would be to end the Cold War, and, at age 77, if achieved, according to rumor, he would likely step down in favor of Anthony Eden, who would resume his previous role as Foreign Secretary.
Mr. Churchill would continue as Prime Minister until 1955, at which time Mr. Eden would become the new Prime Minister.
It was anticipated that one of Mr. Churchill's first tasks would be to visit with President Truman, in an attempt to arrange a meeting with Premier Stalin, something which the President had said adamantly he would not do except in Washington, and would not negotiate terms of peace except through the U.N. Mr. Churchill, as he had during the war with FDR, was more likely than had been Mr. Atlee to engage in personal diplomacy at the highest levels. But President Truman, unlike FDR who engaged in personal diplomacy, tended to leave foreign policy decisions to his State and Defense Department advisers, potentially complicating the efforts of Mr. Churchill at personal diplomacy. Otherwise, foreign policy, itself, would little change with the change in Britain's Government, although many believed that the Conservatives would have a better opportunity than had Labor to negotiate successfully with the Iranians regarding the oil nationalization dispute, as they could blame the situation on the Labor Government and then liquidate the former British holdings in Iran without great political consequence. The Conservative Government was more likely to be viewed with approval by the U.S. Congress, as being less likely than Labor to spend American aid dollars to finance domestic experiments in socialism.
In Washington, Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh met again, for the fourth day, with U.S. officials who were urging resumption of negotiations in the Anglo-Iranian oil dispute. The President had said the previous date to reporters that some progress had been made in the talks and stated he was hopeful that Iran would resume the negotiations. But shortly thereafter, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister said that the Premier's discussions with the President, Secretary of State Acheson and others had been only exploratory and had not developed anything tangible thus far. He said it was up to Britain to reopen the negotiations on the basis laid down by Iran, that being to deal only with arrangements for selling oil and the compensation to be paid for the nationalization of British property. He said that he had flown to Washington to take part in negotiations regarding offers by foreign business interests to purchase the oil from Iran and not to negotiate with Britain.
In Cairo, the Egyptian Foreign Minister stated at a news conference that Egypt would not consider a Western proposal that Egypt join a Middle Eastern defense pact as long as the British remained in Egypt and the Sudan. He also said that Egypt regarded France as having practically the same imperialistic ambitions as Britain, and that the U.S. was not mediating the Anglo-Egyptian disputes regarding the Suez Canal and the Sudan, despite rumors to the contrary. He stated that America seemed to regard the dispute from one aspect, "military preparations for a future war", and therefore disregarded "the principles of right and justice".
A scheduled atomic bomb test in the Nevada desert had been called off because of prevailing storm conditions, after planes had been sent aloft, presumably to drop a nuclear weapon.
In Shandon, California, Gene Rambo, three times the champion cowboy at the Grand National Rodeo in San Francisco, would not be riding in the 1951 competition which started this night, as he had fallen from his horse on his ranch the previous night and broken his thigh bone.
On the editorial page, "Education on Smoking" again reiterates the newspaper's stance that it was difficult to tell a child that smoking was wrong when he saw parents and friends smoking and billboards, magazines and radio advertised smoking in a pleasing vein. The moral approach would also likely be rejected by young people, producing only "bored yawns" from most. Yet, all schoolchildren wanted to be healthy and many aspired to be athletes. So it suggests that an appeal made on the basis of salubrity might be more conducive to avoidance of the habit.
Take the direct
"The Primary Road Problem" tells of an engineer reporting to the Charlotte Engineers Club that modernization of the State's primary road system would cost at least 305 million dollars, a finding which had been published in a pamphlet earlier in the year by the engineer and distributed widely by the State Highway & Public Works Commission. The newspaper had opposed the 1949 200 million dollar bond issue for a secondary road program, based on its belief that the primary roads needed as much improvement as did the secondary roads and that any capital investment program should cover both.
To improve the primary roads now might require another bond issue, but whatever would take place, it should be preceded, it opines, by more study and analysis than was provided the secondary road program prior to its adoption.
"Brer Vaughan's Deep Freeze" tells of Maj. General Harry Vaughan, military aide to the President, having recently provided his views on ethics in government to the editors of U.S. News & World Report, and the editors had wished to know about his receipt of the deep freezers, a controversy which had arisen in 1949. He explained that the President, while a county commissioner in Missouri, was provided fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, and chickens by the local farmers and because iceboxes were unavailable at that time, all of it had been spoiling but could not be thrown away, lest the farmers would have their feelings hurt, whereupon one of the General's old friends had said he could probably solve the dilemma by providing a freezer. That was where, he explained, the 1946 gifts of the freezers began, which included one to the General, Bess Truman, then-Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson and others.
The piece wonders why the General had never thought of giving the farm produce to the soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington or to some other worthy recipient. Instead, one gift necessitated another, just as with Brer Rabbit, when he first got his front paws stuck to the Tarbaby, then his rear paws. It finds it a wonder that Lustron, the bankrupt Government-funded postwar prefabricated-home builder, had not built a house for the freezer full of chicken and fruit and vegetables.
A piece from the Baltimore Evening Sun, titled "Steam Bows to the Diesel", tells of the diesel locomotive now serving 53.1 percent of the total gross-ton miles of freight hauls across the nation and 63.7 percent of the total passenger-train car-miles, quickly leaving behind the old steam locomotives. Only the Norfolk & Western, among the major carriers, was still standing firmly behind steam, as most of its revenues came from the coal industry.
An editorial from the Richmond News Leader examines the record of the first session of the 82nd Congress which had adjourned the previous Saturday, having enacted only 180 public laws, while filling up 14,000 pages of the Congressional Record and another 7,000 pages of the Appendix.
After recapitulating the record, it concludes that it was "a disheartening struggle, a frantic, despairing nightmare sort of struggle, in which Senators spend hours solemnly firing a few chauffeurs and cutting the budget for State Department luncheons, while $57 billion for arms are voted with scarcely a cogent look. There aren't enough hours in a watchdog's day…" It finds that the government was what the citizenry had made it.
Drew Pearson finds that Republicans believed that the President's appointment of General Mark Clark to become Ambassador to the Vatican, recently withdrawn, would do the Democrats more harm than good. The big-city Catholic vote had begun to shift away from the Democrats to the Republicans because of Senator Joseph McCarthy's semi-successful claims of Communists in the State Department. But the Republicans believed that the gains from the appointment could be erased because the President had waited until the very end of the session of Congress to make the appointment, meaning that General Clark could not be confirmed and, moreover, to preserve his military status, needed Congressional approval to serve as a diplomat while continuing to serve in the Army. The Republicans figured that the President had thus alienated large segments of Protestant voters while gaining no new friends among Catholics. They would seek to brand the effort as merely playing politics.
As part of the investigation into the 1950 Ohio Senate campaign between Senator Taft and Joe Ferguson, a Catholic, there had surfaced some campaign literature which urged voting against Mr. Ferguson on the basis of his Catholicism. The literature had urged that Catholics wanted to have an official representative to the Vatican and obtain public aid for parochial schools. Senator Taft had urged the investigation into the campaign based on heavy spending, but now might regret the effort. Hesitant Senator Guy Gillette, chairman of the Senate Election subcommittee charged with investigating the matter, however, had been slow to undertake the investigation over the course of a full year since the election. Senator Gillette had finally set November 19 as the date for the start of hearings.
Marquis Childs tells of Secretary of State Acheson, after having gained popularity in the wake of the successful Japanese peace treaty conference in early September, having lost most of this gain in the recent flap over the confirmation of Ambassador Philip Jessup to become a member of the U.N. delegation. The situation was one of damned if he did and damned if he didn't, because he would have been accused of cowardice in the face of controversy had he not submitted Mr. Jessup's name for confirmation, but having done so, he also had stirred up quite a lot of controversy on Capitol Hill.
Senator Tom Connally, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had, in front of several foreign dignitaries, become quite irate at Secretary Acheson as soon as he became aware of the nomination, saying that Mr. Jessup had no chance of confirmation. Mr. Acheson, because Mr. Jessup had been previously confirmed on four occasions, believed erroneously that he would be confirmed again.
Mr. Childs regards the recess appointment as being of questionable wisdom, only likely to stir the controversy further.
In hindsight, some believed that Mr. Jessup would have done better before the committee had it not been for the State Department trying to suggest that recognition of Communist China had never been considered. Two documents showed the contrary. One was a memorandum prepared for John Foster Dulles, arguing against the view held in early 1950 by some policy-makers that the fact of Communist domination in China made recognition more or less inevitable, along with an adjustment of the status of Formosa. The second document was a memorandum prepared by General MacArthur for then-Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson when he and Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley visited Tokyo in mid-1950, just before the outbreak of the Korean War. The document was a denunciation of those in Washington who General MacArthur suspected of wanting to recognize the Communists and jettison protection of Formosa.
General MacArthur, in his speech before the American Legion convention the previous week, had claimed, without proof, that he had foiled a plot to hand over Formosa in March 1951 to the Communists, a claim no one believed could be documented.
Meanwhile, a profound disservice had been done to Mr. Jessup, a loyal public servant, and the people were left in great confusion with respect to a major issue of foreign policy regarding Communist China.
Robert C. Ruark discusses the recent
Congressional investigation of gambling
Framed Edition
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