The Charlotte News
Saturday, May 5, 1951
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that U.N. tank-infantry columns moved into no-man's land again for the fourth consecutive day, hunting for withdrawing enemy forces. Except for one British battalion, badly mauled, no allied units had suffered severely in the first phase of the Communist spring offensive which began April 22, had been stalled north of Seoul a week later and had since fizzled. Enemy casualties in the offensive had been estimated at 70,000.
Correspondent John Randolph on the western front tells of fifteen U.S. soldiers captured by the enemy a week earlier having returned to allied lines the previous night and telling of being interviewed by a Chinese general. They said that they had been well treated and were twice set free, apparently on instructions of the general, the second time after accidentally being recaptured. One of them said that the "Chinks" treated them pretty well behind the lines but were kind of rough at first at the front.
General MacArthur testified this date for the third day before the joint Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. He said that he did not believe that the present preparedness program would have to be increased to carry out his proposals for beating Communist China but rather that the power the country already had should be released. He disagreed with Senator Brien McMahon that the Soviets might enter the conflict if the war were broadened to hitting Chinese bases. He said that unless the country finished what it had started, it would tend to precipitate war rather than prevent it. He favored delaying universal military training until the present emergency was over. He confirmed that in October, 1950 at the Wake Island conference with the President, he had said that the war was going so well that his Second Division could be moved in January, 1951 to Western Europe. He said that the U.S. would not need to maintain the kind of force now present in Korea were his plan put into effect. He had made plans to evacuate the mass of U.S. troops to Japan if withdrawal had been required. He did not want to discuss how many troops should be sent in support of NATO.
In response to questioning by Senator Lyndon Johnson, the General said that there was not enough time for preparation as in the past, for the first blow in the next war might prove decisive and there was no longer any way to avoid surprise attack by an enemy, who could strike without warning. He said that the country's defense and production preparedness goal was expected to be reached in about two years.
Senators Irving Ives and Blair Moody said that when discussing the pattern of the Korean war from the time the country became divided at the 38th parallel to the loss of Maj. General William Dean in July, 1950, General MacArthur nearly broke down in emotion. Though thought dead, General Dean was actually a prisoner of war and would survive the war and be released.
The White House reacted with no comment to a report that the General at one point had described as "tommyrot" the claim that he had refused for a time to permit free operation of the CIA at Tokyo headquarters.
Following the second day of testimony, the General said to the press when asked of his impression, "Very interesting." After the first day, he had said only, "Interesting."
The first 1,500 Army returnees from Korea were given a large reception in Seattle.
Syrian forces launched a new attack this date against a commanding Israeli position on the northern shore of the sea of Galilee, the height of Tel Al Muteila in the demilitarized zone inside Israeli territory. Following an 80-minute battle, the Israelis repulsed the attack, inflicting heavy casualties. The attack was in disregard of the ceasefire agreement negotiated by the U.N. the previous day. Each side claimed that the other had first violated the ceasefire agreement, recognized for only a short time. A dispute had arisen over the demilitarized zone between the two countries, set up in 1948 at the end of the Palestinian war.
A West Berlin newspaper reported the execution of 40 Soviet army deserters by the Russian secret police in East Germany. They had been among a group of 73 soldiers who fled the barracks at Bernburg. The other 33 deserters had not yet been captured.
The House said that it had cut 24 of 25 million dollars requested from the President's emergency fund, evidence of its sincerity in cutting the budget. The 6.1 billion dollars for 27 agencies had been cut by 693 million. The House also cut to 5,000 the number of new public housing units which could be started in fiscal year 1952, whereas the law allowed up to 135,000 new units annually.
Emery Wister of The News reports of John Bolick of Charlotte, a veteran of the Korean war who was now back in civilian life after being discovered to be only 15 when he enlisted September 7, 1948. He said that he was disappointed at the discharge at first but now that he had gotten used to it, would just as soon stay out of the service for awhile. He said that it was cold at Fort Lewis, Washington, where he was assigned after basic training, but that it was nothing compared to the cold he experienced in Korea. He said that the men from the South never could get warm enough.
In Durham, Senator Richard Nixon
spoke to the Duke Bar Association at its spring luncheon
On the editorial page, "The Charge of Appeasement" tells of the New York Times sardonically editorializing that things had reached the pass where if the the country was unwilling to bomb Chinese bases and blockade their ports or provide air cover for an invasion by Chinese Nationalist troops, it was described as "appeasement".
The piece likewise takes issue with application of "appeasement" to the Administration which inaugurated the Truman Doctrine of military aid to Turkey and Greece, which stood up to Russia in the Berlin blockade of 1948-49, which used the Marshall Plan to save Italy and France from Communist election victory and restored Western Europe's productive capacity to resist Soviet aggression, which initiated NATO and appointed General Eisenhower as supreme commander of it, which had negotiated for long-term bases in Greenland, which met the challenge of North Korea invading South Korea, which pushed the U.N. to enable itself to act by majority vote of the General Assembly when the Security Council was blocked by veto, which kept Formosa out of Communist hands, which sent aid and military advisers to Indo-China, which mobilized the nation with a preparedness program and which had sought to send grain to India to prevent starvation.
It concludes that while the Truman Administration had made its share of mistakes, it was not guilty of appeasement.
"Time to Meet the Parking Problem" tells of Charlotte needing to meet the off-street parking problem as 450 U.S. cities owned and operated parking lots and five operated public parking garages. The traditional excuse for delay in Charlotte was the lack of enabling legislation, but that had been passed in the 1951 Legislature. It hopes for a change.
Build 'em with the Merc-o-matics
"The Journal and Its Readers" tells of the Wall Street Journal getting in trouble with its readers regarding its editorial stance in favor of the President discharging General MacArthur. One reader had even accused the Journal of being "red".
The piece thinks it ought be proud that its readers placed so much store in its editorial column. Any person who was so close-minded as to be unable to admit of a view contrary to their own was someone over whom it was not worth shedding tears. Any newspaper worth its salt sooner or later would make someone mad. An editor whose readers registered no reaction should reexamine the editorial positions it had taken, as either not saying anything or not being read.
"Our Children" quotes from the "Washington Wire" column of The New Republic which reported on witnessing an atom bomb drill among kindergarten children. It had recommended the spectacle to parents as a way dimly to comprehend total war.
The piece asks what it could add
A piece from the Greensboro Daily News, titled "The Toll-Takers", discusses the traffic accident near Statesville which had taken five lives the prior Saturday night when a speeder, traveling between 80 and 85 mph, being chased by the Highway Patrol, failed to make a curve and crashed head-on into another vehicle. The piece urges that such chronic speeders be taken from the highways.
A letter writer had noted the incident also but criticized high-speed chases by the Highway Patrol for relatively minor traffic violations.
Drew Pearson tells of Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine having bided her time and gotten even with Senator Taft for being the force behind Senator Joseph McCarthy in getting her ousted the prior fall from the Senate investigating committee after she had advocated a fair hearing for those smeared by Senator McCarthy. Senator Smith had continued working on the committee assigned to investigate the Senate election in Maryland between Senator John Butler and defeated Democratic incumbent Senator Millard Tydings the prior fall. Senator Taft had continually tried to draw focus from the inquiry by urging that the Ohio Senate election had more skulduggery than that in Maryland and so should be investigated. So, Senator Smith accommodated Senator Taft and got the Democratic members of the committee to go along with an investigation of the Ohio Senate election. But that did not please Senator Taft as such an investigation would uncover the dirty tactics of some of his supporters, such as anti-Catholic literature being distributed and the expenditure of far more money than opponent Joe Ferguson.
England, France, Italy, and the U.S. were now facing in the ensuing year and a half elections, being a temptation to the Soviets to strike while transitions in government were imminent. The British Labor Government could not fully support U.S. foreign policy and its requisite rearmament without getting flak from voters. The French Government also could not spend too much on rearmament without loss at the polls. The MacArthur debate with the President had already started a row which was closely linked with the 1952 presidential race. Pending elections also made it difficult for governments to act quickly in response to Soviet moves. He regards therefore 1951 as a crucial year when it came to the question of peace or war.
The Ford-o-matic and the Merc-o-matic done come out, too—took away your need for your clutch free frows, until March, 1957, anyway.
That 'as pretty underhanded
Joseph Alsop, in Athens, tells of a potential fighting force of at least seventy divisions already existing in Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia, while the U.S. spent billions to establish anew a fighting force in Western Europe of about 40 divisions to resist potential Russian aggression. The fighting spirit of the population of the Eastern Mediterranean countries was strong as well. The only thing needed to transform the force into a powerful menace was some intelligent diplomacy and a sensible arms program. Even within a year, important results could be achieved.
Unless the divisions in the three countries were tied together militarily and politically, however, they would be of little more than local value. The refusal of a U.S. guarantee of security to Turkey had already caused the country to begin to revert to neutrality.
In Greece, great progress had been made toward modernization and efficiency of the Army. The Greek Government was more willing to wait on Washington to reach an accommodation than was Turkey. But the Greeks had no present means by which to cooperate with either Turkey or Yugoslavia. Soviet plans were based on this fact. Bulgaria had two armies poised to drive across southern Yugoslavia as far as the Albanian frontier, to separate the Greek and Yugoslav forces.
He suggests that the price of arms to Yugoslavia ought be an agreement to form an alliance with Greece and Turkey. While such an alliance would not be cheap to effect or reduce the need for the Western European alliance, the Western allies were neglecting the opportunity to form the Eastern Mediterranean alliance.
Robert C. Ruark tells of it becoming clear from General MacArthur's statements since returning home that the country was entangled in a "joke war" in Korea, made doubly tragic by the sacrifice of young lives in it. For the aim of any war was victory and that appeared not to be the aim of this war. Instead, it resembled a "grisly game of squad tag". The loss of life had been in pursuit of what appeared an illusory goal.
If the original goal, as stated, was to protect South Korea from North Korea and deter aggression around the world, he regards the action as a failure. South Korea had been protected by using its home turf to engage in a bloody tug of war, as "firemen, wrecking the joint in order to salvage nothing." The Americans who had died, sometimes murdered by the enemy after becoming prisoners, had done so without knowing the reason for their dying. It was difficult to fight in a war where there was no logical finish, akin to the myth of Sisyphus.
General MacArthur had accused Washington of having no policy on Korea and the public would weary of the repeated stories of loss of men and movements forward and then back, defending Seoul and losing it several times in the process.
He regards the country as having two courses, to win the war or lose it. But continuing to fiddle with it was to fiddle with the lives of men. To win meant hitting it with everything the country had. To lose meant withdrawal and going home. Otherwise, he finds, it was simply military double-talk.
Mr. Ruark, as with General MacArthur, appears not to have adjusted well to the nuclear age, when to broaden the war in such a way as to provoke the Soviets or Communist Chinese into a world conflict would be potentially cataclysmic. To fight a limited war of attrition in the hope of pushing the enemy to a recognition of their own useless loss of life, far greater than the allied loss of life, over ground of little value to them militarily or economically, while, from the allied point of view, seemingly without an established goal, without a clear spot on which to plant a flag, as on Mount Suribachi, and declare inspirational "victory", yet was the only way to avoid such potentially catastrophic results.
War had ceased to be of the glorious type with the advent of the atomic bomb. There would be no more victors; the tickertape parades for generals coming home had just breathed its last, long sigh of farewell.
Perhaps, the paper weight which was tossed from a window in New York along with the tickertape to greet General MacArthur, winding up killing a man along the parade route, was symbolic of that last tragic gasping for breath from the dying war of the past. For, in the modern age, with newsreels and television cameras rolling for everyone around the world to see, to celebrate "victory" is to breed hatred in the vanquished enemy, to breed a need for vengeance somewhere down the line in the young too callow to understand what war really is, and finally to breed in the victors the drunken need for more victory and thus more war to achieve it.
That seemingly innate drive to war, born of the aggressive hunter-gatherer, fight-or-flight instinct, as President Truman and the Joint Chiefs readily understood, had to be suppressed in mankind in this modern age, lest mankind, as it nearly did in World War II, ultimately might perish from the earth in a final puff of smoke and ash.
There was no more room for the General MacArthurs or the General Pattons, the great individualist soldiers fighting with all they had to muster, to win the final battle of the final war—and rightfully so. War, as war was fought in the two World Wars, was done. Mr. Ruark, the hard-drinking, game-hunting chronicler of the manly manner out of the day of Rudyard Kipling, a would-be Ernest Hemingway, but without A Farewell to Arms in his store of type, had, along with the individualist generals, become the grand anachronism.
As General Eisenhower as President and President Kennedy would come to realize, those old, primordial urges to war would need to be channeled now into a more productive internationally competitive program, commensurate with the spirit of the U.N., something more than mere sport as in the Olympics—which had failed in its modern incarnation since the turn of the century to settle each quadrennial enough of the internecine tendencies. That became the space race, a scientifically oriented, civilian form of the arms race.
Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of former Senator Frank Graham, six weeks after being appointed Defense Manpower administrator, now being tapped as U.N. mediator between India and Pakistan regarding Kashmir. Most State Department officials believed the mission hopeless as two previous efforts to resolve the problem had failed. He was proposed for the position by both the U.S. and Britain, after his successful mission in Indonesia a few years earlier. There were no objections to the appointment but the Soviet representative wondered why the appointee had to be American.
Representative Hamilton Jones of
Charlotte had found that even a Congressman could not obtain tickets
to see "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"
The Paul Green outdoor drama, "Faith of Our Fathers", on the life of George Washington, scheduled for its second summer season run in Washington, had been revised and was nearly a new presentation.
Former Senator Graham provided a tribute to former Governor Charles B. Aycock, read into the record at a joint session of the Legislature.
A public opinion poll said that most of the public would like to see Congressional sessions on television, and a resolution proposing such broadcast had been introduced, stimulated by the success of the televised Kefauver hearings into organized crime. Senator Clyde Hoey opposed the idea for being a hindrance to carrying on public business and potentially causing delay, as certain members would seek to hog the cameras. He believed it turned the proceedings into a show rather than a judicial proceeding to ascertain facts.
That's a novel idea. Wonder when that will come.
In any event, when Senator Hoey would die in 1954, as we have pointed out many times, Governor William B. Umstead would appoint to the seat Sam J. Ervin of the North Carolina Supreme Court. His televised hearings during the memorable summer of 1973 would break all previous records for popular interest in Congressional hearings.
Senator Willis Smith had joined four
other freshman Senators to prevent a resolution to provide home rule
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