The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 9, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Don Huth, that the Communists would send a new message to the allies this date, hoped to contain acceptance of the new terms for resumption of the ceasefire negotiations, that is acceptance of Panmunjom as the site of the conference to replace Kaesong, deemed too problematic by General Matthew Ridgway for its control by the Communists and thus not truly in no-man's-land. It was reported that Vice-Admiral C. Turner Joy, head of the U.N. ceasefire negotiation team, had left allied headquarters in Tokyo to return to his advance headquarters in Korea, in readiness for resumption of the talks.

Since the talks had ceased on August 23, the Communists had suffered an estimated 80,000 casualties and lost nearly 250 square miles of territory.

In ground fighting, the Chinese Communists fought fierce hand-to-hand battles against attacking U.S. troops on the western and eastern fronts. U.S. First Division cavalrymen made gains of more than a mile near Yonchon on the western front. Chinese soldiers replaced North Koreans on the eastern front, entering that sector for the first time in several months. U.S. Army intelligence officers described the soldiers, however, as "reluctant draftees" rather than professionals.

In the air war, U.N. pilots reported that they had killed or wounded more than 400 enemy soldiers on Monday, the heaviest single-day toll in several months.

The Navy announced that enemy mines and shore guns had damaged two American warships, resulting in 27 Americans killed or wounded.

Britain warned Egypt this date that it intended to retain its full rights under a 20-year defense pact formed in 1936 between the two countries, after Egypt the previous day had made moves to void the treaty. Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison said that Britain would not recognize the legality of the unilateral action by Egypt in abrogating the treaty. Crowds in Cairo were showing their hostility to the British and support for the Egyptian Government's decision. Premier Mustafa El Nahas Pasha had introduced to the Egyptian Parliament the previous day bills calling for the ouster of the British from the Suez Canal and providing Egypt with control of the Sudan, jointly ruled by Egypt and Britain per the 1936 treaty.

The joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee declared that Russia could launch an atomic attack on 20 to 30 American cities, but Congressman Henry Jackson of Washington said that the U.S. was now capable of producing tactical atomic weapons for use on the battlefield which could halt an enemy army in its tracks. Mr. Jackson pleaded for greater production of these atomic weapons, so that they could be produced in dozens of varieties and in thousands and tens of thousands of volume in years to come. He asked for greater appropriations for their production. His plea came in the wake of the announcement of a second Russian atomic test blast.

The Senate Internal Security subcommittee heard in executive session former Vice-President Henry Wallace regarding his spring, 1944 mission to China. He was scheduled to testify in an open session later. He was accompanied by George Ball, a Washington lawyer—later to become Undersecretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. in 1968. The subcommittee was investigating the claims of former Communist Louis Budenz that the Vice-President, receiving advice from John Carter Vincent, John Service, and Owen Lattimore, traveling with him at the time, which had been pro-Communist, whereas the Vice-President had reported to President Truman that the advice he received, which included substituting General Joseph Stilwell with General Albert Wedemeyer, was in fact anti-Communist China.

A Senate Rules subcommittee voted unanimously to investigate charges brought by Senator William Benton of Connecticut against Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, seeking the ouster from the Senate of the latter. Senator Benton had accused Senator McCarthy of committing perjury and fraud, as well as "calculated deceit" of the American people, in his charges of Communists within the Government.

A former Federal tax collector in St. Louis testified before a House Ways & Means subcommittee, looking into sideline profits and payments received by IRB agents, that when he had taken the job in 1944, he had been assured it would be appropriate to continue his law practice on the side. He had resigned his position as collector the previous April and was under scrutiny by a St. Louis grand jury after Federal intelligence agents testified that he and his family had received over $6,000 from a St. Louis insurance firm specializing in selling insurance to firms and individuals in trouble with the IRB collector's office. The former collector said that the money was for legal fees.

RFC administrator Stuart Symington stated at a press conference that RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson had engaged in normal conduct when he sought modification of his company's RFC loan payments, a request which the RFC had denied when he testified that the money for the payment could be raised from private sources.

In Wethersfield, Conn., a lawyer told the State Pardons Board why his client, previously convicted of killing a police officer, was called "The Angel" by his fellow inmates, as he had worked 72 consecutive hours helping victims of a flu epidemic within the prison. He had also served as a human guinea pig in wartime medical experiments and wanted to donate skin to victims of the 1944 Hartford circus fire. He had donated 14 pints of blood to the Red Cross, as well as having assisted the prison's Catholic chaplain and being an attendant in the prison hospital. After studying the record, the Board granted the inmate a conditional pardon following his serving 13 years on his life sentence. He would receive a new job at a New Haven hospital upon his release.

Former President Herbert Hoover commended The News and reporter Vic Reinemer for the recent series of articles on the 1947 Hoover Commission Reports, making recommendations for streamlining the Government to eliminate waste and promote efficiency. The former President wrote a letter to publisher Thomas L. Robinson, which is reprinted verbatim. The Citizens Committee for the Hoover Report was reprinting the six-part series of articles in booklet form and distributing it on a national basis.

In the World Series in New York, the Yankees led the New York Giants 5 to 1 in the third inning, following a grandslam homerun by Gil McDougald in the top of the third. The Yankees would go on to win 13 to 1, taking a 3 to 2 game advantage in the Series.

On the editorial page, "Whither Now, Mr. Byrnes?" tells of South Carolina Governor James Byrnes having stated at the recent Gatlinburg conference of governors that he would oppose the President seeking renomination in 1952 and would support either Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia or Senator Richard Russell of Georgia as the nominee of the party.

The editorial suggests that what Governor Byrnes was really doing was trying to persuade the party to seek another candidate, not necessarily a Southerner, but one, such as Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, who combined theoretical liberalism with sound fiscal policy. The implicit threat otherwise was that the Southerners might bolt the party and support the Republican nominee. The Governor also might found a new, more influential States' Rights movement than that of 1948, led by then-South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, which Mr. Byrnes had not joined.

The piece, however, finds the ultimatum mystifying, for as long as the Democrats remained in power in Congress, where Southerners enjoyed a disproportionate number of committee chairmanships, the South could continue to shape, as it had done, the domestic policy put forward by the President. Furthermore, the Southerners agreed with the Administration's foreign policy. It concludes, therefore, that it hoped Mr. Byrnes would inform how he hoped to improve the South's fortunes by opposing the President for renomination.

"Time Has Run Out for the Reds" finds that with the ceasefire talks apparently about to resume in the new location of Panmunjom, per the accepted terms by General Ridgway, the Communists, in dropping their previous insistence that to begin the resumption of the talks would require dealing with the claims of violations of the neutral zone at Kaesong, had reached the point of realization that the American public would not put up indefinitely with loss of American lives in Korea and that the potential for use of America's new secret weapons, including the possibility of use of strategic atomic weapons, which would not indiscriminately affect the civilian populations as with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs of 1945, had induced the Communists to return to the truce table. It believes that a truce would soon follow.

"Half a Loaf…" finds the proposed law by Senator Pat McCarran, to make it illegal for any official of a national political party to accept fees or other benefits for negotiating with Federal agencies, to be salutary as a means of taking the profit out of political influence, but, nevertheless, insufficient. It favors making it illegal also for persons or entities to offer such fees or gifts for the purpose of exerting influence.

"Welcome to a Lady" welcomes to North America Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the first visit to North America by the Princess. It finds that the American people were quite fond of the Royal Family, having welcomed King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, to the U.S. in 1939, upstaging FDR at the time, a hard thing to accomplish.

It states, "Every inch a lady, genteel and genuine, Elizabeth has more friends and admirers this side the Atlantic than she knows about."

Well, if you are going to welcome her properly, you ought use proper English syntax in the process, and not end a sentence in a preposition. For, as Winston Churchill once said, doing so starts the whole damned thing over again. And, surely, we would not wish to do that.

So, let's try that again: "Every inch a lady, genteel and genuine, Elizabeth has more better friends and admirers this side of the Atlantic than about whom she knows."

There, much more better.

A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "'Into the File Case Yonder'", tells of a recently let contract by the Air Force, going through a series of complicated bureaucratic hurdles before being processed as a 20-clause, 4-page document. The object of the contract was delivery of one 50-cent copy of the booklet, "Economic Policies for National Defense".

Julia Woodson, a first grade teacher, writing in North Carolina Education, tells of having been approached by her school's science supervisor, lamenting the fact that third-graders had not been taught about the stars in the first grade. She had argued at the time that it was hard enough to get the students to read properly, let alone study star diagrams and pick out various constellations.

But to fulfill the wishes of the supervisor, she prepared two star charts for her pupils, one emphasizing the North Star, and the other, the constellation Orion. She showed the charts to the children and figured that her duty was adequately performed. Then a few days later, one of her students reported of having been walking home from church with her mother and spotting Orion in the sky. Another child had spotted a formation which appeared as the Little Dipper but was not in fact.

Having had it demonstrated by her pupils that her initial observation was wrong, she determined to buy a book for the class which would explain the stars. Their interest in the universe had, in turn, sparked interest in many other related fields, such as food, plants, clothes, animals, weather, and air. Soon, her classroom was filled with various instruments by which to conduct scientific experiments.

She concludes that she now understood that teaching of the stars had not been a waste of time, but had laid the foundation for further understanding of science, creating an interest in reading, writing, language, and numbers.

Drew Pearson tells of former White House "court jester" George Allen now being very close to General Eisenhower, acting as liaison between the President and the General to make sure the latter did not enter the 1948 Democratic race for the presidential nomination. Mr. Allen now said that it was a cinch that the General would run as a Republican in 1952, and that he would hop on a plane and fly directly from Paris from his job as supreme commander of NATO to the convention in Chicago to accept the draft of the Republicans for the nomination. He said that there was nothing that the President could do to stop it.

The President's close advisers had counseled against his recent press conference to try to clarify his executive order allowing agency heads to classify information under their control. The Defense Department, the CIA, and others in charge of military secrets, however, had urged the President to issue the order and to back it up, in part to prevent the military from setting U.S. policy, leaving it to the heads of civilian agencies to classify information passing to them from the military.

Repeatedly, generals and admirals had intruded on civilian policy or disclosed secrets which caused serious damage, the prime example of which was the publication of the Smythe Report in 1945, regarding atomic energy, at the behest of General Leslie Groves, military head of the wartime Manhattan Project. At the time, scientists had protested to the Army that the Report contained vital secrets by which an astute scientist could piece together the necessary knowledge to produce an atomic bomb. General Groves then demanded that the Report be recalled, but by then, it was too late, as the press and public already had it.

Another release of secret information occurred when General Orvil Anderson, commander of the Air War College, stated that the U.S. wanted a preventative war, necessitating that he be relieved by the Air Force to demonstrate to foreign powers that such advice was not official U.S. policy.

Mr. Pearson notes that during the summer, the President had proudly demonstrated to many visitors the accuracy against enemy planes of the new guided missile.

Senator Richard Nixon of California had a lot to do behind the scenes with the cleanup of the income tax mess in San Francisco. Some time earlier he had received letters from those close to the Federal grand jury which was seeking to investigate the IRB scandal but which had suddenly been called off by Federal District Court Judge Lewis Goodman. At the time, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles O'Gara was trying to present evidence of income tax collection irregularities to the grand jury. To remedy the situation, Senator Nixon had introduced a bill which would permit grand juries to hire counsel of their own and investigate situations of their choosing, regardless of whether the U.S. Attorney or a judge provided approval. When Senator Nixon phoned the Justice Department to inquire about Mr. O'Gara, the response was that he was a "psychopath". In the end, Mr. O'Gara was called as a witness before the committee investigating the IRB and many of the tax collectors he was seeking to investigate had now been removed.

Former Secretary of War Robert Patterson, a former Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, had notified the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had withdrawn his endorsement of Frieda Hennock to be a Federal judge, after he became aware of facts brought forth by the New York Bar Association.

Joseph Alsop finds that Congress, in investigating influence-peddling at the RFC and DNC chairman William Boyle, had been dealing in small potatoes. He looks instead at the long fight to take over the Federal Power Commission by Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma and thereby deregulate the natural gas industry, which he had failed to do through a bill vetoed by President Truman.

Senator Kerr was able to get two of his cronies appointed to the FPC, but the President had recalled one of the nominations before it could be confirmed after protests by FPC chairman, Leland Olds. But then when the appointment of Mr. Olds came up for renewal, Senator Kerr organized an effort to paint him as a sinister Socialist, offering as evidence some writings Mr. Olds had authored when very young. The Senate then rejected his confirmation.

Meanwhile, Senator Kerr offered his bill to protect natural gas producers against FPC rate-making. Senator Paul Douglas stirred controversy in the Senate on behalf of consumers, indicating that gas prices were about to be inflated, leading the President to register his veto.

But then the President nominated his friend, former Governor Mon Wallgren of Washington, to be the new FPC chairman. The Senate confirmed him speedily. Senator Douglas reportedly remarked that it was like hiring a nurse to murder the baby.

At that point, Mr. Wallgren satisfied Senator Kerr by enacting the bill to deregulate the gas industry through a simple administrative ruling, circumventing the President's veto. The result was hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for the natural gas property owners, eventuating in higher prices paid by consumers of natural gas.

He promises another report to show the nearly incalculable stakes in this FPC struggle for power.

Robert C. Ruark finds that the October 4 murder of Willie Moretti, underworld figure who was friend to gambling kingpins Frank Costello and Joe Adonis, was likely the result of Mr. Moretti having opened up to the Kefauver Committee the prior December, such that, as a prophylactic measure, his mob connections decided to shut him up permanently. Mr. Ruark states that he deserved what he got, as he, just as with others of his ilk, had made his way up through the ranks by guns and brass knuckles.

He thinks that the murder should not signal fear of a general gang war, as a gang war would be ameliorative.

"Weep not for Willie nor for any who collect the big one. They've had it coming, all of them, ever since they broke into big business with the butt of a gun."

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