The Charlotte News

Thursday, March 15, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. troops had returned in force to Seoul without firing a shot, searching the ruined streets for hidden Communist soldiers. The remaining stragglers among the civilians had cheered the return of the allies after the Communists had held the city since January 4, their second occupation period of the war. Pyongyang radio had falsely reported that allied troops were killed, two tanks destroyed, and six aircraft shot down in taking Seoul.

Enemy anti-aircraft fire over Korea had knocked out three U.S. planes, with one pilot killed.

All along the 70-mile front, the allies surged northward against retreating enemy forces. American assault troops entered Hongchon against light enemy fire, finding it in ruins with only five civilians present. Later, it was hit by enemy mortar fire.

The offensive was now headed toward Chunchon, eight miles south of the 38th parallel.

The U.S. Seventh Division won a seven-hour battle after ambushing the enemy in their own trap set up to wipe out the American infantrymen. The Second Division made gains against the stiffest resistance since the withdrawal of the enemy had begun the previous week.

Correspondent John Hightower reports that the Chinese Communists had not yet taken sufficient punishment to show any interest in making an acceptable political settlement and that some bitter battles might lay ahead for the U.N. forces despite recent successes. It was generally believed that a little north or south of the 38th parallel would be as far as the current drive would go, though the military commanders had discretion to go further north. A State Department spokesman said that rumors that the war was about to end, which had triggered a sell-off in the stock market, were without basis and that the other side had not abandoned its determination to drive the allies from the peninsula. Officials of the U.S. Government said that the minimum terms of settlement acceptable to the U.S. would be complete liberation of South Korea.

The House Armed Services Committee, by a vote of 18 to 15, eliminated from the House version of the universal military training bill the four-million man limitation. The Senate version had included the ceiling.

Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston reportedly told Government leaders in a top-level meeting of the Defense Mobilization Board the previous day that the anti-inflation program was in distress and could founder unless given stronger support. One problem, he had said, was the opposition by the cotton state Senators to the recently imposed ceiling on raw cotton, as well as signing of contracts for higher wages between unions and employers to avoid implied or expressed threats of strikes.

An agent for the Bureau of Narcotics told the Senate Kefauver organized crime committee, meeting in New York, that narcotics smuggling into the U.S. had increased after Charles "Lucky" Luciano had been deported to Italy. The committee had named Mr. Luciano as the czar between the Chicago crime syndicate and a New York-New Orleans crime axis ruled by gambling kingpin Frank Costello. He said that a mob, headed by Thomas Luchese, with supply sources in California and Mexico, controlled distribution in New York. Mass arrests in New York and Arizona in 1941 had partially cracked this mob but Mr. Luchese had escaped punishment.

Frank Costello was scheduled to be recalled by the committee to answer inconsistencies between his testimony in which he denied paying anyone to check for wiretaps on his phone and that of another witness who said he was paid a fee by Mr. Costello for the purpose. Committee chairman Estes Kefauver said that based on the conflict, someone had committed perjury.

The IRB told the House Appropriations Committee that it was investigating racketeers' tax returns through a special task force.

The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reported that Thomas McCabe had resigned as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, planning to resume his prior private sector position as president of Scott Paper Co. He had succeeded Marriner Eccles as chairman in April, 1948. Mr. Eccles remained on the Board.

In New York, William Perl, jet propulsion scientist of Columbia University, was indicted for four counts of perjury for testifying before a grand jury that he did not know the defendants in the espionage case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell. He was believed to have gone to college with Mr. Rosenberg and Mr. Sobell, and to have been a roommate of Mr. Sobell in Washington a decade earlier.

In Miami Beach, Elliott Roosevelt, son of the late President, married Minewa Bell Ross, a California heiress, in a simple ceremony this date. Both had been previously married and divorced, Mr. Roosevelt three times and his new wife twice.

John Daly of The News reports that plans had been set for the Textile Workers Union of America to go on strike starting the following day at 50 cotton mills across the two Carolinas.

In Raleigh, a committee of the State Senate approved legislation to permit a vote in Greensboro and Winston-Salem regarding establishment of State ABC-controlled sales of liquor.

On the editorial page, "Theory vs. Practice" tells of two points in contention in the debate over whether Congress should be required to approve sending of troops to NATO, the one being the right of Congress to provide or deny that approval, and the other being the wisdom in exercising any such right should it exist in law and under the Constitution.

It debates not the question of legality but whether it was appropriate for Congress to try to usurp military decision-making. The number of troops to be committed and their disposition, it posits, should be an exclusively military determination.

Former Secretary of War Robert Patterson, it finds, had the right approach, that it was a military decision. The military leaders believed that Western Europe was defensible and it was Congress's prerogative to determine whether it ought be defended and if so, then it should refrain from placing unreasonable restrictions on the military in defending it.

"Operating Plan for the Garden" tells of the City Council having established an independent five-man authority to administer the three-million dollar auditorium-coliseum project to be built on Independence Boulevard—dubbed for the time "Charlotte Gardens", though the gardens would fall by the wayside in favor of parking lots by construction in 1955. It abandoned the proposal to make the project a regular department of City Government. The success, it finds, of the five-person authority would depend on the personnel appointed to it, and it was to be hoped that competence would be the criterion in making the appointments rather than personal friendship or politics.

"The End of a Long Campaign" reviews the highway bill which provided for increased State funding of local streets after its passage by the Legislature and expresses gratitude to the body for doing so after the newspaper had promoted the cause for the previous two years.

A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "He Promoted Amateur Athletics", tells of the ousting of Harvard's athletic director, William J. Bingham, suggests that it may or may not have had something to do with the need of Harvard to keep up with the pack in winning football games. His departure could mark the end of an era, when athletics was considered by him as a general process of individual development, an amateur rather than professional process. If Harvard proved the cynics wrong and resisted the temptation to succumb to alumni pressure to use the change of athletic directors to alter the tradition, instead retaining its academic prowess, then it would live up, says the piece, to its own standards.

Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution discusses, as had a News editorial the prior Monday, the United Press poll of Democratic state and local leaders which placed Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois at the top of the list of contenders for the 1952 presidential nomination should President Truman choose not to run again. Senator Douglas was considered a man of integrity who did not necessarily follow the liberal party line, and a great orator of the caliber of Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Henry Clay, a man of stature as President Lincoln. Even the supporters of Senator Taft admitted that he came in second to Senator Douglas in a debate. His recent Senate floor speech on foreign policy had been one of the finest arguments delivered in contemporary times.

As a former University of Chicago professor and World War II Marine veteran at age 50, wounded on Okinawa, Senator Douglas took no back seat to anyone in his background qualifications. Though he differed with Southerners on civil rights, they respected him for his integrity.

Mr. McGill concludes that the Senator reminded of the days when there were great men in the Senate. "He is cut in the whole cloth and pattern of Americanism."

Drew Pearson discusses the invitation of the President to his supposed political enemy, Representative Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, seeking his support on the draft revision bill. There were no commitments but the two departed with a friendly handshake.

He next provides some more letters from men in the armed forces complaining about various things. An Army private stationed in Colorado complained because the men had been punished for some unknown person firing several shots behind the barracks. The Army said that it was a military incident of no concern to the public. Mr. Pearson finds it a dangerous attitude, that civilians had the right to know of such incidents.

A woman in Oregon wanted to know when her husband would be home from Korea, where he had been for six months. He answers that the Marines were sending some men home on a rotational basis. The Air Force was adopting a more formal rotation, while some Navy personnel had returned to Japan and the West Coast but under no formally adopted rotation. The Army claimed to be still too short on replacements to start such a rotation, as General MacArthur was still continually seeking more men.

An Army corporal in Korea had written that his wife had been writing every day but that he only received one letter per week. He responds that the mail could not always get through to the front under battle conditions but that the soldier would likely find a backlog of mail when the Army mail service caught up with his unit.

Two of the biggest defense contracts, one for a tank engine and the other for an aluminum plant, had been awarded to the Louisiana district of Congressman Edward Hebert, despite his feud with the President, which had led many observers to predict that it would adversely impact his ability to attract defense projects.

Marquis Childs tells of gloomy foreboding at Eisenhower headquarters surrounding the prospects for NATO unity, a concern passed to the Pentagon by General Eisenhower, the result of delay in Congress of a final decision on whether it would agree to authorize the President, without Congressional approval, to send troops to Western Europe as part of NATO.

Republicans, such as Senators Alexander Smith of New Jersey and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts wanted the NATO mission to succeed, but also wished to avoid offending the Taft-Wherry wing of the party who wanted to place limits on the number of troops which the President could send. Senator Lodge had been responsible for much of the confusion in the wording of the Senate version of the bill, which had caused delay in the House debate on the bill, as well as in the Senate.

A share of the responsibility also lay with the President, he suggests, for having dared Congress, and specifically the Southern Democrats, to limit his authority to send troops, insisting that it was within his right as commander in chief of the armed forces. Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had added fuel to the fire in his manner of proceeding on the matter, which had irritated at times former President Herbert Hoover, an advocate of withdrawing the nation's defenses to the two oceans.

He cites one overlooked source for the Wherry-Taft-Hoover wing of the party, foreign policy adviser Brig. General Bonner Fellers, who had advocated air and naval power as a means to resist Communist aggression while pulling back ground troops, that Western Europe could not be defended with ground troops. He had also advised abandonment of both the Marshall Plan and the Point Four program.

Only Senator Wherry was pleased with the Senate resolution on sending troops to NATO, and that suggested the ambiguities of its language.

Robert C. Ruark tells of now having television to keep him warm instead of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, as when he was a child. He tells of a "horrid mischance" having taken him and his family to Philadelphia in recent months to witness the pilot of a program starring strong man Dan Lurie, the "Sealtest Big Top". Mr. Lurie insisted on actually lifting a 200-lb. weight at the beginning of the show, not just a prop, as it meant "artistic integrity" to hoist the real thing. Mr. Lurie had replaced a man named Stan Elkin who decided to resist the draft by the show and its advertising agency.

He did not blame Mr. Elkin as he had seen some things on tv which would curl a person's hair, as a sister act which employed spitting in each other's faces for laughs and an actor who used the word "damn" in a recent presentation. The stuff did not go over well in the medium of television.

He had never read the credits of movies but now paid close attention to the tv credits, which seemed to list everyone who had anything at all to do with a show as menial as one about charades in a barn.

He suspects that there was much less than met the eye about the medium, and bet that it would become "lesser and lesser". But he got up early every Saturday to watch Mr. Lurie advertise Sealtest ice cream and present the circus show, as, he predicts, one day the 200-lb. weight would get the better of its lifter.

A pome from the Atlanta Journal appears, "Expressing Reaction To Certain Verbiage Used By Persons Who Mouth Radio Commercials:

"Any item labeled 'Yummy'
I will not put inside my tummy."

Does that even include
Chewing bubblegummy in the nude?

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