The Charlotte News
Saturday, February 17, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via correspondent Olen Clements, that American infantrymen, supported by artillery, gained as much as two miles in a counter-attack against the vanguards of three North Korean divisions in the hills north of Chechon, where the enemy had penetrated allied lines by ten miles. The battle still continued by 5:00 p.m. A U.S. Tenth Corps officer said that the enemy's attempt to flank the allies in the east to gain access to the roads south had so far failed.
In the Seoul area, there was only scattered, light fighting around Wonju and Chipyong, where the enemy had suffered 22,128 casualties in four days of fighting. While the Chinese had pulled back the remnants of four divisions committed to the attack, there were signs that 150,000 troops might still try to break through the allied central front lines and threaten the 100,000 U.N. troops around Seoul.
In New Delhi, the Hindustan Times reported, via British correspondent Arthur Moore, who had visited Peiping, that China's Korean adventure had stripped North China of gasoline and strained its hospital facilities, as casualties were much greater than anticipated. He said that though the reservoir of manpower seemed limitless, Chinese leaders were not indifferent to the loss of life.
Prime Minister Josef Stalin had called the U.N. a tool of "American aggression" and the resolution condemning China as an aggressor in Korea "shameful". Russian newspapers had presented the statement on the front pages while radio stations also promoted the propaganda, considered to be his most important pronouncement in the previous two years. He also said, in response to a question, that he did not consider a new world war inevitable. Some diplomatic observers at the U.N. seized on the Soviet leader's statement that "if" Britain and the U.S. rejected finally the peace proposal made by China, the war could only end in defeat for the "interventionists", regarding the contingency as a sign that he was at least open to continued negotiations for peace in Korea. The U.N. three-person good offices committee, however, expressed doubt that the statement signified anything which they could use to effect a peace. Diplomats in Western Europe viewed the speech as indicating that a Big Four conference to discuss world peace issues was more necessary than ever.
Administration experts on Russian policy and members of the Senate, as Republican Senators Bourke Hickenlooper and Karl Mundt, reacted to the statement as being merely propaganda. Observers did find it interesting that Stalin, himself, had now given final public sanction to the line voiced by Soviet figures for the previous year. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, in a radio speech the previous night, had estimated that Russia had at least 235 divisions under arms.
Senate Republican leaders appeared to split three ways on whether to approve the sending of troops to Western Europe in support of NATO. One faction favored no limitation on the number, while another, led by Senator Taft, wanted limited quotas in ratio to European troops and the ability for Congress to approve the commitment, while the third faction, led by Senator Kenneth Wherry, wanted to ban sending of any troops until Congress could act on the matter. The combined Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, holding hearings on the pending resolution of Senator Wherry, had issued invitations to former President Hoover and to Governor Thomas Dewey to testify before them.
The National Production Authority banned whitewall tires from further production to induce manufacturers not to put so many different types of the same rubber products on the market, saving ten percent of the amount of natural rubber being consumed. Whereas blackwall tires used synthetic rubber, whitewalls required natural rubber.
Them whitewalls look better though. Look like a grandpa riding around with them blackwalls down 'ere.
In Boston, an investigation was ongoing by the chief postal inspector to determine why 28 workers whose time cards were punched were not present on the premises of the post office annex when a surprise raid was conducted on reported transgressions by some 200 workers. One clerk was reported to be vacationing in Florida while his time card said that he was working. Fellow workers collected a fee for punching the time cards for the missing workers. During the raid, one worker had the time cards for ten other workers in his pocket. At least one worker had collected about $10,000 over the previous year through the practice. The racket was estimated to have cost the Government four million dollars since the end of the war when it was said to have started. Some workers only reported to work on paydays. The pool allowed members to work no more than two days per week.
In Canea, Crete, a five-man court convicted a man for carrying arms without a permit and sentenced him to two years in prison, after he was accused of forming an armed band to capture his beloved, the 19-year old daughter of a Liberal member of the Parliament. The defendant's brother was a Populist member of Parliament. The young woman was pregnant. She denied testimony that the defendant had seduced her in the presence of his men, five days after the kidnaping. In a scene out of Shakespearean tragedy, the two families had been feuding for years, and the father had wanted to put the young Romeo in jail. She promised to be with him in Crete if he had to serve his term there.
Maybe six days after.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of an eight-year old girl from Gaffney, S.C., calmly reading comic books after having an open safety pin removed from her lung at the Eye, Ear & Throat hospital in Charlotte. The child had swallowed the safety pin some six months earlier while playing in the yard. She had a habit since early childhood of swallowing items, had once swallowed a ring when she was two. Then, she had eaten potatoes and bananas to enable the ring to be expelled. So, she ate bananas also on this occasion, appeared unconcerned about the pin apparently in her stomach. Later, however, she developed a chronic cough and eventually, three weeks earlier, the doctor determined through fluoroscopy that the pin, lodged in her lung, open in such a way that it was sticking upward toward her throat, was the cause of the cough.
Turn her upside down and spank her good. She may not cough it up but she sure as hell will stop swallowing things.
Did she also stand in the shower of rain while watching the lightning strikes, and commiserate with the geese?
On the editorial page, "The Enemy's Weak Spot" supports Secretary of State Acheson's recent attempts to fan the flames of nationalism in Communist satellite countries, in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, as well as in such countries which had split with the Cominform and the Kremlin, as Yugoslavia, to exploit the weakness of Russia in holding together its far flung empire.
While it finds the Secretary's warning that aggression against Yugoslavia could lead to war, such warnings had to be backed up with adequate military power to make good on the threat. If the country was ready to fight for Yugoslavia, then the warning was appropriate but if not, the piece ventures, it was wise not to issue too many challenges.
"A Military Matter" finds that the Congressional debate over whether to send American troops as part of the defense of NATO to be missing the point, that the decision was properly one of the military rather than of policy. The policy was to resist Communist aggression in Europe by building up the common defense, and committing American troops in that defense effort would bolster the policy and help assure its success. It was also not prudent to try to limit the number of troops, as favored by Senator Taft, as that also was a military decision.
It concludes that if Congress wanted to reverse the Administration's entire foreign policy, it could. But as long as the policy stood, it should not second guess the decisions of the military experts, supplanting them with its own wisdom.
"A Question for Senator Smith" comments on the speech recently by Senator Willis Smith to the Farm Bureau of North Carolina, excerpts of which are quoted in the following piece from the Asheville Citizen. He had not condemned the Truman Administration for responding to the call of the U.N. Security Council to send troops into Korea but he had questioned the wisdom of the decision and said nothing positive about the venture.
The piece finds that while he had played it safe by consigning to the verdict of history whether the decision was wise or not, his own election the prior summer in the primary against Senator Frank Graham was in the same category. It thinks it appropriate to ask the Senator what he would have done had he been in the Senate the previous summer. When interviewed during a stop in Charlotte the day after the invasion, two days after the runoff primary with Senator Graham, he had commented that he had been so busy that he had not had the time to concentrate on the invasion.
No one liked to see the country involved in a shooting war anywhere in the world. But faced with the situation on June 25, 1950, the country could only have left the invaders to conquer South Korea or take the course the President took. The piece finds that the Government had no real alternative and that if Mr. Smith now had one, he should offer it rather than sowing the seeds of doubt, as he had in the Asheville speech.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Willis Smith on the Korean War", quotes extensively from the speech in Asheville by Senator Smith, in which he had stressed that the country was in a war and not merely conducting a police action in Korea, said that it resulted from U.N. commitments rather than the usual course of Congressional declaration of war under the Constitution, that it was not from attack on the U.S. but rather in pursuit of a "moral idea that may have been extended a little too far." The result had been the deaths and maiming of American boys shipped 7,000 miles from home.
He had concluded that having committed to the war, however, American prestige was on the line and had to be preserved, but that some believed the country should have never gone into the war and millions believed that the country ought withdraw from the commitment.
He sounds like a Commie. You get rid of one Pinko and now got 'nother un in 'ere. Remember that Jesse feller back 'ere in June, around about the first primary, investigatin' the prisons director for paintin' his house? He may ha' done steered us wrong with them radio promotions of this feller. That Jesse may be a Commie, too.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator Owen Brewster of Maine telling the Harvard Alumni Luncheon Club that he advocated replacing Dean Acheson as Secretary of State with Chief Justice Fred Vinson and that the Republican Party as a whole would support such a change. Such a move would dovetail with the desire of some Democrats to elevate Mr. Acheson to the Supreme Court and replace him with the Chief Justice. Senator Brewster had added that if Mr. Vinson were then to end the war, he would not mind should it boost him into the role of successor to President Truman, despite being a Democrat, as he would deserve the Presidency at that point.
Chief Justice Vinson would remain on the Supreme Court, of course, and die in that position at age 63 in September, 1953, making way for the appointment by President Eisenhower of Governor Earl Warren as Chief.
Parenthetically, no one in 1953, as did some nutbag Republicans and their radio shills regarding counterparts in February, 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died at age 79, suggested for a moment that President Eisenhower and other influential Republicans had conspired to knock off Chief Justice Vinson to open the seat for a Republican appointee.
Tony Accardo, probably the biggest hoodlum in Chicago since the demise of Al Capone, together with his partner Jack Guzik, ruled the most lucrative underworld in the country. Mr. Accardo belonged to the Mafia, though he referred to himself as a "betting commissioner". He had learned his craft from Mr. Capone, was suspected of helping to promote the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929. Mr. Accardo disclosed a large amount of income on his tax return, albeit without designating its source beyond generalities. Mr. Pearson again provides examples of the returns, identifying income as coming from "various sources" or "miscellaneous income re betting, baseball, football, hockey, etc."
He left out basketball. What goes, heya?
The IRB then took the attitude that it was impracticable to check, pursued the matter no further. Such was a general trend with gangsters' income, the IRB agents being so busy and understaffed that they had little choice but to avoid an investigation. Mr. Pearson suggests appointment by Treasury of a special tax task force for the underworld.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop tell of an elaborate pantomime taking place in Washington to convince the Kremlin that it could not direct an attack against Yugoslavia without grave consequences. Air Force Secretary Thomas Finletter, along with other high officials, was visiting Yugoslavia and Turkey in furtherance of that effort. The question of the potential for attack of Yugoslavia had been raised in the British Parliament. Governor Thomas Dewey, in his Lincoln Day speech, had raised the prospect and recommended that any such attack be met with a declaration of war, a position probably influenced by his former adviser on foreign affairs, John Foster Dulles, now adviser to the State Department on the Far East and currently in Japan negotiating the final war treaty.
Secretary of State Acheson had also recently quoted from the President's statement the prior summer, that any attack on Yugoslavia would "strain the fabric of peace".
In addition to war preparations in Russian satellites Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria, the Russians, themselves, had amassed 13 divisions in the Carpathians and Carpatho-Ukraine, from which they could easily strike Belgrade.
Yugoslavia was facing internal pressures as well, mounting from the shattered economy out of the drought of the previous summer.
Yet, in fear of Congress, the State Department had limited its request the prior fall for aid to Yugoslavia to 80 million dollars and was now asking the Yugoslav government to join the Marshall Plan to obtain an additional 100 million. But joining the Marshall Plan, though this additional amount was necessary for the government to continue, would complicate the more its internal pressures from among the dedicated Bolsheviks. In addition, the efforts in Congress of Senators Taft and McCarthy were delaying such aid, needed at once.
The Alsops conclude that the real aim of these moves was to make a serious impression on Moscow, while avoiding making the impression on the Congress and the country at large, that war would result from an attack on Yugoslavia. But there was no sense in conveying that threat to the Kremlin if the Congress and the country would not back it up. And there was no reason for the State Department to fear a Congressional minority, as the Congress and the country would respond if the matter were explained simply and honestly.
Robert C. Ruark tells of the friends
of jazz musician Pee Wee Russell
Mr. Ruark is impressed by their willingness to take up such a cause for someone so undeserving of charity for his profligate lifestyle, the reason he devoted space to the venture. "Deserving" candidates, he finds, rarely needed the application of charitable works. Few of Mr. Russell's friends, however, were without like sins.
Mr. Russell had asked that no sob stories be conveyed in the papers about him. None of the musicians stood to gain from publicity surrounding the event.
As Mr. Condon had explained, since Pee Wee had given a lot of people pleasure, they wanted to give him back to the people in "good shape". Mr. Ruark finds that not a bad definition of charity in its purest form.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of Willis Smith's secretary, John Slear, having seen some gate-crashers at the State Society's party honoring Presidential counsel Charles Murphy, had, through some third parties, checked their credentials, to find that they were Secret Service agents who preceded the arrival of the President and First Lady. He notes that it was the first State function attended by the President, and both North Carolina Senators were out of town.
Columnist Peter Edson had reported that Senator Walter George of Georgia had a recent exchange with North Carolina Congressman Robert Doughton, chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, regarding the pending tax bill, in which Senator George said that the Senate would leave it to the House to work it out. Mr. Doughton had suggested that they work out half and let the House work out the other half, to which Senator George said the Senators would not wish to deprive the House of all the pleasure, as they would want to close all of the loopholes.
Congressman Hamilton Jones had recently toured the new plant of the Washington Post with News editor Pete McKnight, and the two began discussing with Herblock the general subject of North Carolina newspapers. Herblock, a Midwesterner, said that he was impressed with the liberal tone of the state's editorial pages, many of which carried his syndicated cartoons, that such was somewhat unique given the conservative territory surrounding the state. Congressman Jones then interjected the familiar quotation, that North Carolina was a "valley of humility between two great mountains of conceit".
Not too many people were surprised that Congressman Monroe Redden, a former protege to deceased Governor and Senator J. Melville Broughton, was retiring from office after his present third term, as the death of Senator Broughton in March, 1949 had hit him hard and diminished his hopes for political ambitions in Washington.
Senator Smith was reading Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, described on its jacket as the "counterweight to Marx's Das Kapital".
Senator Clyde Hoey, in renewing his subcommittee's investigation of five percenters, said that he had no quarrel with legitimate agents who sought for their clients Government contracts based on the merits, though they may also seek a percentage fee, but wanted to discourage those who sought such contracts through influence peddling.
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