The Charlotte News
Saturday, November 3, 1951
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via William Jorden, that U.N. negotiators, in a surprise concession, suggested that Kaesong, sought by both the allies and the Communists, be placed in the neutral zone to resolve the conflict over the parameters of the buffer zone in the western half of the zone, the eastern half having been tentatively settled earlier in the week, contingent upon settlement of the remainder of the zone and the additional issues to be settled by the talks, such as administering the ceasefire and prisoner exchange. Communist negotiators appeared cool to the idea in person but did not categorically turn it down.
In the ground war, eight separate Communist attacks on the western and central fronts failed to gain any ground, three of which, all repulsed, occurred just west of Yonchon on the western front. In three other attacks, U.N. forces were initially forced to withdraw, but then regained the ground unopposed at dawn.
In air action, enemy ground fire shot down an F-51 Mustang and Russian-made MIGs shot down an F-84 Thunderjet, while three enemy jets were damaged, when 20 MIGs jumped 24 Thunderjets pulling out of a rail strike near Sinanju in northwest Korea. In all, three jet battles took place, but the other two did not result in damage to either side. A Fifth Air Force spokesman said that the enemy was not as aggressive as on Friday.
General Eisenhower, arriving in Washington for talks with the President on Monday and Tuesday regarding developments in NATO's military preparedness, told reporters that from his point of view, the conversation would regard "strictly military" matters and would not touch on political issues. Supporters of the General for the Republican nomination for the presidency the following year were quick to point out that he did not exclude private meetings with supporters to discuss politics. Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania, leader of the movement to place the General's name before the Republican convention, said that he intended to meet with the General on Monday or Tuesday.
Former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, addressing in Memphis the Atlantic Union Committee, of which he was president, criticized the U.N. as having been "oversold" to the American people and predicted that NATO would not work and that General Eisenhower was aware of the fact. He said that the U.N. had failed to stop a war from occurring in Korea and would not be able to stop, except by use of force, a war in Iran over the oil nationalization dispute. He proposed the Atlantic Union concept of a federation of the democracies as the plausible alternative and urged the American people to support it.
In Frankfurt, West Germany, American and German authorities had opened a big drive against black marketeering and vice among U.S. troops in West Germany. Both military and German police were patrolling the hotspots where soldiers congregated, in search of the "shady dealers and loose women" who always followed the troops. Orders were given to pick up any soldiers caught dealing with black marketeers are living in "illegal billets" with German girlfriends. A recent raid had netted large quantities of coffee and cigarettes bought from Army post exchanges and sold into the German black market for many times their original cost. The same raid had resulted in the arrests of 25 known prostitutes and found six soldiers in the "illegal billets".
In Buenos Aires, a bomb damaged a printing plant which published a book by Eva Peron, wife of El Presidente Juan, titled The Reason for My Life. El Presidente was campaigning for a new six-year term. Other violence had also accompanied the campaign. The Communist candidate for the presidency had been shot in a town 200 miles from Buenos Aires, and a Peron follower was killed. El Presidente had retired temporarily from the presidency to show that he was not trying to influence the outcome of the election.
House investigators indicated that they were not through questioning Assistant Attorney General, Lamar Caudle, head of the tax division, and wished to examine his income tax returns. What they had so far learned or expected to learn was not disclosed from the series of executive sessions already conducted before the Ways & Means subcommittee. Mr. Caudle, from North Carolina, told reporters that he had answered all the subcommittee's questions and had no comment. Attorney General J. Howard McGrath said that he had been aware in advance of Mr. Caudle's trip to Italy the prior summer as a guest of two wine merchants who were checking on their back account, and believed he had done nothing wrong, but said he would probably have advised against it had he known more about it at the time.
A piece appears on the front page by Joseph Alsop, addressing the empire of Pan American Airways and its fierce lobbying efforts in Washington, responsible for the elimination of two members of the Civil Aeronautics Board, including its chairman, after they opposed Pan Am's "chosen instrument" bill of 1947, under which Pan Am would have achieved a virtual monopoly over European routes, and for opposition to the airline's purchase of American Overseas Airways. Another member of CAB was not expected to obtain reappointment in 1948 and, fearing that he could obtain no other job at his stage of life, was eventually reappointed after the intervention of future Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, counsel for Pan Am at the time, and the member then had voted ever since in favor of Pan Am's desired course.
In Shelby, N.C., a prominent Cleveland County farmer killed one of three men who were attempting to break into his son's house the previous night. He captured one of the other men at the house and the third was picked up at home, both of whom being tenant farmers in the area. No charges had been filed against the farmer.
In San Rafael, California, an 80-year old man was asking for $15,000 in damages from Pacific Greyhound Lines for loss of a cigar on October 25, after a female bus driver seized the unlighted cigar and smashed it against the bus steering wheel, telling the man, in an "insolent, insulting and loud voice", that the cigar would be returned when the bus reached San Francisco. The story is titled: "What This Nation Needs: $15,000 Cigar". Well, $5,000 was being sought for his "humiliation and embarrassment".
What he should have done was to take
out another cigar, light it, and then put it out on the seat cushion
next to him. Or, when he got off the bus, opened the gas tank lid,
and deposited the lighted cigar into it. Or...
In El Paso, Texas, Sheppard King III, scion to an oil fortune, after obtaining a quick divorce in Mexico, made plans to wed his beloved Egyptian belly dancer. Mr. King had embraced Islam after meeting her, adopting the name Abdullah.
In Philadelphia, singer Frank Sinatra and actress Ava Gardner had just applied for a marriage license.
Wintry
On the editorial page, "A Way to Minimize Tax Fraud" supports the effort to place IRB collectors under the Civil Service system, as recently suggested to Congress by the President and endorsed by Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder and IRB commissioner John B. Dunlap. While it would not preclude all tax evasion and fraud through bribing tax collectors, it would at least reduce its likelihood and help restore public confidence in the tax collection system.
"Mecklenburg Can Hold Up Its Head" congratulates the residents of the county for having met the goal of the Community Chest drive.
"It's a Nice Theory, Anyway" remarks that it was possible that the President, in meeting this week with General Eisenhower, would encourage him to accept the Democratic nomination for the presidency, as the President was too smart to want to run against the General the following year. By urging the General to run as a Democrat, the President would be assured of his foreign policy being carried forth into the future, permitting the President to bow out with honor from public life, in accordance with the desires of First Lady Bess Truman.
Most people, it ventures, believed that the General could beat anyone on either ticket and if he became the Republican nominee, the President would be faced with a race he did not want and could not win.
"What War?" tells of Roscoe Drummond of the Christian Science Monitor having concluded recently that "the cold war is being won by the West", whereas U.S. News & World Report had recently headlined an article by Governor Dewey: "Why U.S. Is Losing the 'Cold War'". And in the same issue, the editors proclaimed that World War III was already afoot, and the U.S. losing.
It concludes that it was difficult to know what to believe.
"For Better Schools" praises the work of the PTA, which, according to the North Carolina Public School Bulletin, had tripled in its membership since 1939-40 and now had 899 local units, compared to 701 at that earlier time. It had encouraged sympathy and understanding in the home between parents and teachers in raising children and was contributing substantially to improvement of the schools, and so it pays its devoirs.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "View from the Bench", tells of Superior Court Judge Susie Sharp, later to become a member of the North Carolina Supreme Court and then its Chief, having stated in an address to the State Bar in Raleigh recently that the public would be shocked at how little preparation lawyers undertook in cases being tried before the courts and at the procrastination with which cases were prosecuted, relating that one case over which she had presided had been delayed from term to term for eleven years.
It says that it did not know how true the indictment was but praises the effort by Judge Sharp to encourage efficiency in the courts, and suggests that it might help if the courts held sessions during the full week rather than taking weekends off.
Drew Pearson tells of a secret deal whereby the British had provided fifty jet engines to Russia in 1947-48, and that those engines had been copied and were being used in the Russian MIG-15s, able to outperform all American planes in Korea except the F-86 Sabre jets. So many such Russian jets had been sent to Korea that it was no longer possible for the allied bombing runs to come anywhere close to the Yalu River except at night. He notes that, to deflect any criticism, the British could retort that in 1933-34, then-Secretary of State Cordell Hull had permitted American fighter plane engines to be sold to Germany despite the treaty banning munitions to Germany. Those engines had later powered the Fokkers which devastated British troops during the early part of the war.
Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had been upset when he learned that the President had nominated General Mark Clark to become Ambassador to the Vatican, saying that it was as bad in Texas as having nominated Alger Hiss, as many Texans blamed General Clark for the heavy casualties suffered by the 36th Texas Division at the Rapido River in Italy during the war. The Senator said that at one point, the General could have been lynched had he set foot in Texas.
He next imparts of a pair of slot machine operators out of Portland, Oregon, having obtained delays in their prosecution for tax fraud through the help of a law firm in New York, one of whose partners was former counsel to the President when he had been a Senator and chairman of the Truman Investigating Committee, and the other, having been counsel for the Kefauver Crime Investigating Committee the previous year. They, in turn, had hired a lawyer on the West Coast who had once served as an attorney in the tax division of the Justice Department, and the result was that the $800,000 tax fraud cases brought against the slot machine operators had been delayed for a long time before they had recently been indicted.
Marquis Childs, in McAllen, Tex., tells of the town being the heart of the Republican Party in Texas, in part because of the migration of Republicans from the Midwest to retire and in another part because the late R. B. Creager, who had lived in neighboring Brownsville, had been a GOP national committeeman and patronage dispenser before the Democrats had come to power, and almost literally owned the Republican Party organization in Texas at that time. The new national committeeman was Carlos Watson, also from Brownsville, and Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania, the prime moving force behind the movement to draft General Eisenhower for the Republican nomination, had come to McAllen to solicit support for the General's candidacy.
Texas polls had shown that if General Eisenhower were running as a Republican against the President, the majority would vote Republican. Long-time political observers, however, were skeptical of such polls and believed that the tradition of voting Democratic in the state would prevail in 1952. The only time the state in recent history had voted Republican was when Herbert Hoover had run in 1928 against New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic, and religion had been injected into that campaign to produce the Democrats' turn away from the Democratic nominee. The President had created an issue with respect to Catholicism by appointing General Clark to be Ambassador to the Vatican by the fact of the implicit recognition of the Vatican therefore as a sovereign state. Texas Baptists, meeting at their annual convention in Houston the previous week, had denounced the President in harsh language, charging "moral degeneracy".
Senator Connally, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, would therefore be hard-pressed, as he was up for re-election the following year and faced a challenge in the Democratic primary for the first time in 18 years, not to stop the appointment of General Clark in January by pigeonholing it in committee. While the issue might be forgotten by 1952, it was quite fresh at present.
Robert C. Ruark hopes that the airlines, TWA and Pan American, would work out their competition for trips overseas to Europe, as he believed that everyone ought be able to visit Europe on the cheap. Pan Am had set a low no-frills, round-trip fare of $405, to go into effect the following April, compared to the current going rate of $711. TWA was willing to cut its fare but not to that level. He asserts that it was time to take long-distance flying out of the luxury category and place it within reach of the ordinary person, as the trans-Atlantic passenger-ship firms had been doing for years.
He states that the Bible told of the old camel caravans having a walking fare for those who could not afford to ride the camels, but that there was never any lack of candidates for a seat on the camel.
A letter writer from Whiteville, N.C., thanks the newspaper for printing the "Evening Prayer" on the front page, says that she enjoys it.
A letter writer from St. Paul, Minn., urges readers of the newspaper to work for the election of General Eisenhower as President, to avoid the possibility of election of Senator Taft or re-election of the President, who had retained people around him who had received mink coats and deep freezers to encourage influence peddling. He finds the General to be a "trusted man".
Wait until you get a load of the
person he will select as his vice-presidential running mate
A letter writer complains of the Chamber of Commerce bulletin not being accurate about the history of Presbyterian College, now Queens College, urges more care being taken in preparation of the bulletin.
A letter writer comments on the letter supporting the appointment of General Clark to become Ambassador to the Vatican, finds that the President could not have been playing politics when he made the appointment as it was known that there would be opposition by Protestants. She wishes to correct a local Baptist minister who had preached a sermon against the appointment, and, as a Catholic, assures him that Catholics had not sought an ambassador to be appointed. She also finds inapposite the minister's analogy that Catholics would oppose sending a Government representative to Baptist headquarters in Nashville, as the Vatican was a separate sovereignty with representatives from about 30 countries residing there, including England, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Germany.
Framed Edition
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