The Charlotte News
Monday, March 26, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that U.N. troops had solidified their lines on the Western front in Korea this date and driven rapidly north toward the 38th parallel, moving east from Munsan and linking up with an American division north of Uijongbu, ten miles south of the parallel. With the link-up, enemy resistance, which had been stubbornly persisting in delaying actions, was reported to have vanished.
On the central front, an American division was reported to be two miles from the parallel.
On the east coast, South Korean patrols penetrated the parallel, crossing and recrossing it at will. South Korean troops were reported to have conducted a commando raid 50 miles north of the parallel on Saturday, landing on the Wolsa peninsula and killing a hundred enemy while capturing 69, then withdrawing.
Correspondent John Hightower reports of the dispute between the Administration and General MacArthur on how to win the Korean war having reached a fever pitch. The Administration might soon ask the General to clear with Washington anything he said about foreign policy. The State Department and the President had been surprised by General MacArthur's statement via the press the prior Friday that the Communists were licked in Korea and that he would be glad to discuss peace terms with them. The President had issued an order in December that all Government personnel commenting on foreign policy would first need clearance from the State Department. A statement had issued from the President and Secretary of State Acheson on Saturday saying that the General had authority over military operations in Korea but was not authorized to negotiate political issues, being dealt with at the U.N. and by the governments whose troops were fighting in Korea.
General MacArthur would be relieved of command and called home two weeks hence. This latest breach of protocol was the culmination of a long series of problems between the President and General MacArthur regarding the General's reluctance to understand the President's role as commander-in-chief during the Korean war, as well as the authority of the U.N., which the President had sought to convey and resolve in their Wake Island meeting the prior October.
The Defense Department was still assessing how much more it would need to add to the current defense budget of 41.7 billion dollars. The third supplement had been estimated at ten billion. The original defense budget before the Korean war had been 13.2 billion. The first supplement in September was 11.7 billion and the second, in January, was 16.8 billion.
A U.S. Navy escort carrier delivered a shipment of planes and spare parts as well as other armament to French forces fighting in Indo-China against the Communist Vietminh.
As the first session of the Inter-American Foreign Ministers Conference was getting underway this date in Washington, it was reported that the Administration was considering an unprecedented 80 million dollar military aid program for Latin America. President Truman would address the conference. Secretary Acheson wanted to form an agreement with South and Central American countries to build up their military strength so that they could carry a greater share of the hemispheric defense responsibilities now borne chiefly by the U.S.
A Chinese Nationalist press report from Taipei, Formosa, said that the Soviets had given 60 small submarines to the Communist Chinese. Other unconfirmed reports said that the Communists had executed 50,000 persons in Kwangtung Province during the prior two weeks.
Ships and planes continued to search for the Air Force transport plane missing over the Atlantic off Ireland since Friday with 53 persons aboard, including a general. A reporter for the London Daily Express wrote that the plane probably was sabotaged.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover urged the Kefauver organized crime investigating committee to continue to expose organized crime and asked local communities to take the lead in eliminating it along with their allies, "the political renegade", through annual grand jury investigations.
Attorney General J. Howard McGrath urged the Congress to pass tighter laws against perjury and to grant him authority to provide immunity to a witness who declined to testify under the Fifth Amendment. He also recommended legislation which would restrict use of communications facilities to transmit gambling information, without harming freedom of the press.
A New York grand jury indicted James Moran, resigned New York City Water Commissioner, for perjury, along with Louis Weber, a Brooklyn numbers bookmaker, both accused of lying about their associations with each other in testimony before the grand jury.
Ambassador William O'Dwyer, former Mayor of New York, charged in a telegram to the Senate crime committee that the story of fireman John Crane, imparted in testimony the prior week, that he paid to Mr. O'Dwyer a $10,000 gift to gain support for the New York Firemen, was a lie made up to save the skin of Mr. Crane.
The President signed a bill which would induce owners of Series E war bonds to hold onto them rather than cash them in at their ten-year maturity date, to begin maturing on May 1. The new law allowed deferral of taxes on interest on the bonds until they were actually cashed. It also allowed exchange of the bonds for Series G bond which paid interest every six months.
Public Health Service officials told a House appropriations subcommittee that several hundred veterans were being forced to give up their beds in hospitals because of the increased abuse of marijuana among teenagers since the war. They said that at two hospitals in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Ky., for instance, there had been only 26 patients under the age of 21 admitted in 1946, while the number had jumped to 700 in the latter four months of 1950. The Fort Worth hospital had plans to take 300 beds from veterans as a result. They said that the larger number of teenagers being treated were coming from Chicago and New York. Heroin had become easy to obtain near schools and in certain neighborhoods of large cities, and many teenagers had switched from marijuana to heroin.
The Government exempted the florist industry from price control.
Thieves the previous night had
robbed two radio stations about thirty miles apart, one in Gaffney,
S.C., WFGN, and the other at Gastonia, N.C., WLTC. The former had to
leave the air because the thieves stole their microphones, two
turntables and an electric clock
From the equipment, the thieves eventually formed Fox News, and the rest is history.
In Denver, N.C., a boy ran into the side of a car and the motorist asked him if he was alright, to which he responded, "Mind your own damn business," and ran away.
On the editorial page, "Needless Confusion in the Senate" discusses the two resolutions being debated in the Congress regarding whether to allow the President to send troops to NATO without Congressional approval. The resolution expressed the sense of the Congress that Congressional approval would be required to send the troops but that the Congress approved the present plans of the President and Joint Chiefs to send four additional divisions to Western Europe to complement the two already present.
This resolution had been put forth by Senator Alexander Smith of New Jersey in an effort to compromise between the stance taken by Senator Kenneth Wherry, who favored sending no more troops to Europe, and that of Senator Tom Connally, who wanted no restrictions on the President's authority.
The problem lay in the wording of the NATO treaty which had not specified that the U.S. would send troops and, when ratified by Congress, the fact that the Administration had assured that the U.S. did not intend to send troops.
The piece favors the Congress stating its support of full implementation of NATO and of General Eisenhower welding together the air, naval and ground forces of Western Europe. Once that approval was made, it posits, it should be left to the Joint Chiefs as to the number and type of units which should be sent in support of the NATO forces.
"Rank Political Opportunism" tells of a dispute arising out of Wilkes County over the proper constituency of the school board, which the Legislature would have to resolve. The system was unfair, says the piece, because counties elected school board members only on an advisory basis, leaving it to the Legislature to appoint whom it wanted, often resulting in the Democratically controlled Legislature appointing Democrats to boards in Republican counties.
"Concerned with Cows" tells of the progress through time of the dairy industry in North Carolina, having started before the Civil War but being depleted thereby and by Reconstruction which followed. There was also a Texas tick infestation and lack of any laws to control breeding of cows. When the latter two problems were remedied, the state got its first boost in the dairy industry. Now, every town with a population of more than 10,000 had a well-equipped pasteurizing plant and since 1900, the average production per cow had doubled, now producing 5,200 pounds per cow. The average per capita consumption of milk had also doubled. Thus, while dairy farmers were doing well, so, too, were the state's children who were consuming more milk for building strong bodies.
Got milk
A piece from the Chapel Hill Weekly, titled "Spelling Bee for the Home Front", tells of the New York Herald Tribune having recently printed the name of former Senator Frank P. Graham as Charles P. Graham and having once printed the name of former Governor Gregg Cherry as Governor Gregg. It finds, by the same token, that it never had problems with getting the spelling of foreign names right, whether difficult Far Eastern names or European names with a string of consonants in them. Yet, it managed to mangle the simple North Carolina names. It proposes that the UNC School of Journalism include a spelling bee for proper names on the home front.
Drew Pearson, in London, finds that the questions he had come to Europe to answer, whether there would be war in 1951 and whether Western Europe could be rearmed in time to meet Soviet aggression, were still difficult to answer. There were many reasons why it appeared Russia would not attack anytime soon. For one thing, there was an apparent tug-of-war ongoing within the Kremlin between Soviet leaders V. M. Molotov on one side and Marshal Beria and Malenkov on the the other as to who would succeed Stalin. The Beria side, with control of the secret police, was likely to win. With such dissension, it would be difficult to achieve agreement on making war.
There was also unrest within the satellite countries, in the Ukraine, in Poland, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, which would make it hard for Russia to control them in the event of war.
Another pressing question was whether Europe, if challenged by Russia, would fight. He believes that the areas which would fight readily and well were Turkey, Yugoslavia and Berlin. The Greek army was in good shape but the Greek people, he finds, would not fight long if attacked. The remainder of Europe was torn by neutralism as between the U.S. and Russia. Italy would not fight. Germany, outside Berlin, would not fight. The worst mistake being made by the military and isolationists in the Senate, he ventures, was to talk of arming the Germans who did not want to rearm.
France and England would fight if they were given hope and confidence, with sufficient forces to do the job. General Eisenhower was trying to instill that hope and confidence.
Mr. Pearson says that he personally opposed sending a large land army to Europe but believes that a limited number of U.S. troops would give the needed boost to European morale.
Stewart Alsop discusses the plight of Vlado Clementis, the former Czech Foreign Minister who was now either dead or as good as dead. He had become persona non grata to the Soviet Communist Party because of his having made broadcasts while in exile in London during the war against Hitler while the Russians were allied to Germany, prior to June, 1941.
He became aware of his precarious status while in New York at the U.N., but was assured by his old friend, President Klement Gottwald, that he could return safely to Czechoslovakia. When he reached home, however, President Gottwald had lost power and the arrest of Mr. Clementis appeared imminent. He sought escape through Bratislava, with plans to go to West Germany and from there to Belgrade, but his plans were interrupted when his brother, who was aiding his escape, was arrested. He then sought the aid of an old Communist ally, who was then also arrested. Eventually, he was also arrested by the secret police and his whereabouts now were unknown.
As a lifelong Communist, his case demonstrated that no one was safe inside the Communist world once they were labeled a problem and recalcitrant to the party will. It was a central weakness of the Communist system.
Robert C. Ruark, in New Orleans, tells of the Kefauver crime investigation having caused many cities, including even New Orleans, to take steps to clean up their gambling operations. Gambling had been outlawed in Jefferson Parish, causing Frank Costello's Beverly Club to have to close. But the gambling operations had just moved their establishments over to neighboring St. Bernard Parish where gambling remained legal.
He finds that while the Kefauver committee had been salutary in its revelations of graft and corruption protecting gambling operations around the country, if the operations closed down in one locale and merely opened in another nearby, little concrete progress in eradicating the problem had been accomplished.
A letter from the chairman of the Lincoln County Republicans in Lincolnton wonders what a previous writer was mad about regarding the speech of Senator Taft only at a private dinner arranged by Young Republicans and not before the general public. This writer informs that the money raised from the dinner would help Republicans in the state. Also, he saw many Republicans and no millionaires, Democrats or "sycophantic patronage seekers" at the dinner, as the previous writer had described. He finds the attendees of the dinner to be better Republicans than the prior writer.
That's the way to promote party unity in the state.
A letter writer responds to a letter from Alexis on March 21 which had complained of "damphool" drivers and speed demons in downtown Charlotte when he came to visit for a doctor's appointment. He agrees with the basic sentiment but finds that the writer placed too much blame on speeders, proceeds to list a host of other violators who were just as responsible for accidents and deaths.
A letter writer from Ronda comments on the refusal of the young draftee from Mecklenburg to join the Army based on his belief that there was no reason to harbor ill feeling toward others and that it was wrong to kill. This writer, a minister, had known the young man and his family and praises them as good, law-abiding people.
Many readers had taken issue with them because, he says, they did not belong to a church. But he explains that the reason for that status was that another preacher had excluded them from their church in Reidsville. That preacher, however, was subsequently sent to jail for "many disgraceful things". He finds it to be no issue therefore that they did not belong to a particular denomination. He concludes that if the Congress did not know what the war was about, then it was no surprise that a young man did not understand it.
Framed Edition
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