The Charlotte News

Saturday, June 16, 1951

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Olen Clements, that rearguard enemy troops clashed with probing allied patrols in scattered battles across the ridges of east and central Korea this date, with the enemy trying to preserve its escape routes to the north as allied armor moved closer to Kumsong, the new enemy defense fortress.

The harshest fighting was north of Inje on the eastern front, where two enemy counter-attacks were launched and repulsed, and in the wooded hills defending the road to Kumsong.

Allied patrols searched in the "iron triangle" areas for enemy stragglers but found none.

Ground commander, Lt. General James Van Fleet, said that they expected a third offensive from the enemy soon as they had sufficient reserve units which had not been heard from in some time.

The U.S.S. Thompson was hit by enemy shore batteries near Songjin on the northeast coast Thursday, resulting in three men killed, following in the wake on Tuesday of the Walke incident, in which the ship struck a leftover Japanese mine from the war, killing 26 men.

Labor disputes tied up shipping in every major port area in the nation this date, as radio operators of the National Maritime Union struck on the West Coast, preventing any ship from sailing, as under maritime law none could sail without a radio operator. East Coast and Gulf Coast operators, represented by different unions, were not yet striking but shippers wondered whether any ship would sail as they were expected to join the strike when their contracts expired at midnight. The President declined to intervene. The unions had promised that ships would continue to be manned if carrying vital defense cargoes or materials and equipment bound for Korea.

The President lifted a foreign aid ban to countries trading with nations behind the iron curtain. The lifting of the ban was for only 90 days. The President said the ban did more harm to the country and its allies than good. It had been imposed at the behest of Senator James Kem of Missouri, as an amendment he sponsored to an appropriation bill nevertheless signed by the President, because, he said, the funding was needed. Senator Kenneth Wherry objected to the President's action as a direct nullification of an act of Congress. Senator Harry Cain likewise objected, calling the action a betrayal of the American dead and wounded in Korea and part of a ten-year period of "appeasement and cowardly surrender".

Well, you can just go to hell you little sons-of-bitches.

The President signed an extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act for two years.

Republican Senators John W. Bricker and Homer Capehart, along with other Republican Senators, vowed to carry a fight to the Senate floor to raise rent ceilings by 37 percent after losing the fight in the Senate Banking Committee, which prolonged and widened the President's authority in imposing rent controls, limiting increases to 20 percent above base-period levels.

In Tehran, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh gave the British an additional two days to reply to Iranian demands that all British oil profits in the country be turned over to Iran. Originally, the British had been provided only until Sunday morning to reply, but U.S. Ambassador Henry Grady had interceded to obtain the extension. He warned that a breakdown in the settlement negotiations over the nationalization and anticipated seizure of the British oil interests could result in chaos.

The Czech Government confirmed that it held two missing U.S. Air Force pilots, one of whom was Norwegian, after they had landed in Czech territory on June 7. There was no statement as to why they had landed or precisely where. A search for the missing pilots had been abandoned on June 11, as it was assumed they had crashed behind the iron curtain.

General MacArthur would wind up his four-day tour of Texas this date with a speech in Fort Worth, after stating in Dallas the previous night that the people would demand an end to what he believed were appeasement policies of the Administration. He had drawn a boisterously supportive crowd in Dallas, where a group broke through a barricade to surround his open convertible, followed by more enthusiasm shown by those gathered in front of the Adolphus Hotel. Some 27,500 had turned out to hear him speak in the 76,000-seat Cotton Bowl the previous night, interrupting him 18 times with applause. Amid rebel yells from the crowd, he said some would seek peace promptly with a decisive victory while others would engage in appeasement and compromise, with less regard for human life.

DNC chairman William Boyle had stated the previous day in a newsletter to Democrats that Alfred Kohl, leading figure in the China lobby, had made sizable campaign contributions to Senators Styles Bridges and John Butler, prompting Senator Bridges to deny that either Mr. Kohl or the lobby had influenced his support of the Chinese Nationalists.

In Montreal, the death toll in the fire at a Catholic orphanage and home for the elderly rose to 32, including two nuns, and firemen feared it might reach as high as 50 after they sifted through all of the debris, as eighteen remained missing. The Mother Superior of the home was one of the two nuns who perished after she rushed into the blazing building with a fire extinguisher to try to save residents.

In Raleigh, a black man had undergone surgery to remove several items from his stomach, including seven spark plugs, a wheel balancer weight, an unfired .32-caliber cartridge and a knife blade, all of which he said he was forced to swallow by a band of masked men in Jefferson, Georgia, two weeks earlier. He had managed to escape the men and flee to Raleigh. Infection had set in, according to doctors, and the man's condition was serious.

On the editorial page, "Where Will the GOP Go from Here?" finds the Republicans in some degree of quandary after the MacArthur hearings had tended to cool the ardor of those in the country who had fervently waved the flag for the General upon his initial return after being fired by the President. With the nation at war, the policies of Secretary of State Acheson being questioned, the Fulbright Banking subcommittee investigating influence at the RFC, and the Kefauver crime investigating committee exposing graft and corruption in Democratic enclaves in large cities, the Republicans had been licking their chops over 1952 election prospects when the firing of General MacArthur appeared to put the icing on the wedding cake for a GOP reunion with the White House after twenty years outside looking in.

But all of that joy had been premature and now, with the rebuttal to General MacArthur by the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of Defense Marshall and Secretary Acheson, public opinion had shifted back to the Administration policy in the Far East and away from General MacArthur.

Even Henry Luce's Time Magazine, for long an enemy of Secretary Acheson, had editorialized that he had acquitted himself so well before the inquiry that even his enemies were forced to recognize his skill and intelligence. It provides a lengthy quote from that publication.

Now, Senator Joseph McCarthy had taken to the attack again, this time engaging in a diatribe against Secretary Marshall, essentially accusing him of being a traitor in Far Eastern policy, favoring the Chinese Communists over the Nationalists. Only three Senators had seen fit to listen to his vituperative speech in the Senate.

Senator Taft would not follow such a dishonorable course but it was not clear what course he and the bulk of the party would follow. He might continue to attack foreign policy, but the piece hopes not, that it would be more salutary to continue the attack on the domestic deficiencies of the Administration. Otherwise, it predicts, the Republicans would set the stage for the re-election of President Truman in 1952, for which the party would have to answer to millions of independent voters for years to come.

Oh, don't worry. You will at long last get your Republican President—and his Vice-President. Just who, as a result, would be answering to whom among independent voters for years to come, however, is another issue.

"Tax Evasion Pays Off" finds the self-employed able easily to avoid full payment of taxes while the wage-earner and white collar worker had to pay directly from their paychecks. It does not object to the 12.5 percent rise in individual tax rates but wants the IRB to crack down on willful tax evaders.

"The Boy's First Night Out" tells of an eight-year old boy camping out in the backyard in his tent with a friend for the first time and making it through the night without incident, as the father—presumably the author of the editorial—, first reading the newspaper, then keeping one ear open by the bedroom window, awoke at dawn to find, to his relief, all copacetic.

Still recovering from vacation the previous week, it appears...

Drew Pearson tells of the Senate investigating committee having investigated Aramco oil in 1948 and found that it had overcharged the Navy for oil by demanding $1.05 per barrel when FDR had arranged with the Saudi Arabian Government in April, 1941 to charge only 40 cents per barrel during the national emergency. American companies, Texaco, Standard of California, Standard of New Jersey and Sunoco, had a 40 percent interest later in Aramco. The Senate committee also found that Aramco claimed it had doubled the royalties to the Arabian Government, explaining the difference in price, but that in fact there had been no doubling of royalties and the U.S. Government had clearly been defrauded. Yet, the Justice Department had shelved the matter since the Senate investigation three years earlier and the statute of limitations was about to expire within a few days.

Industry spokesmen had been discussing Government economic controls with officials of the NPA, wherein several business leaders argued that all-out allocation of materials should not be implemented as the country was not in an all-out war. A pen manufacturer from Petersburg, Va., R. S. Gilliam, begged to differ, however, saying that he could not believe the country was not in an all-out war as his son had been killed in Korea.

Joseph Alsop tells of a major mystery being why the Soviets had not apparently tested a second atomic bomb since their first blast in August, 1949, announced by the President in September, 1949. It was possible that the Soviets had hidden the blast in a lead-lined underground vault, to avoid being detected by distant seismographic instruments and atmospheric tests, the usual way of detecting a blast. But that would limit the capability to test the destructive power of such a bomb and so negate the purpose of the test.

Another explanation was that the Soviets had not been able to make enough bombs to afford to test one. But that, too, defied logic as new Soviet sources of uranium had been tapped in Turkestan, discovered in the 1920's. To make one bomb required a large installation and so it was not the case that the Soviets, having built one and tested it, lacked the facilities to build another.

The best theory was that the Soviet scientists had assured the Kremlin that the 1949 bomb had worked well enough such that there was no reason to test another, consistent with the Soviet pattern with regard to other military equipment. If the theory was correct, the lack of a second test suggested the Soviets believed that their stockpile was adequate for their purposes. Indeed, the 1949 test was far greater in strength than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 and therefore such a bomb could do substantial damage to any targeted city.

He concludes that it would be interesting to see when and where a second bomb would be tested, as, consistent with its psychological warfare, the Soviets might choose the Polish marshes, which would enable the bright glow from the bomb to be seen through much of Western Europe, perhaps affecting the will of Western Europeans to resist Communist attempts to effect control from within.

Robert C. Ruark finds that doctors were apt to use the "bend over" technique of providing an injection to treat most any disease in 1951, from chickenpox to halitosis to athlete's foot. He thinks it stupid, however, to hunt rabbits with an elephant gun and prefers to maintain the more potent remedies for the more potent diseases and leave the body to heal more or less naturally from the common cold and lesser ailments.

"If I have a point it's that I still want my guy to command me to say 'Ahhh' and take a sounding with a stethoscope. That 'Bend over, Buster,' technique is all right, but you can overwork anything to the detriment of all concerned."

Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly "Capital Roundup", tells of Senator Willis Smith disappearing for a week on an investigative mission in New York as part of his duties heading a task force for the Judiciary Committee, investigating Communism in the country, and remaining mum with the press as to what he was precisely investigating, causing consternation among North Carolina reporters accustomed to more openness from Senators Clyde Hoey and Frank Graham. He had only said that press reports speculating on his mission were not entirely correct. The New York Herald Tribune had said that he was looking at Communist influence in radio, television, telephone and telegraph communications. Senator Smith said that he heard fewer than 20 witnesses and many of them opposed leftist influences in these media.

Both Senators Smith and Hoey were among 58 Senators who voted to cut 2,500 jobs from the Labor Department and the Federal Security Agency, threatening cuts of 200,000 others. The initial cut would set a policy of ten percent cutting of agency and department employment which probably would carry over to other agencies and departments as well.

Twenty-five Senators had been tied up since May 3 in the MacArthur hearings.

Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma had requested that two News editorials on the MacArthur hearings be reprinted in the Congressional Record. He also inserted the additional editorial, "Dewey's Challenge to His Party".

Congressman Thurmond Chatham had placed in the Congressional Record the News editorial complimenting Congressman Hamilton Jones on his voting record.

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