The Charlotte News
Monday, June 25, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that on the first anniversary of the start of the Korean war, the world talked of peace, but the war continued. Chinese and North Korean troops were more aggressive all along the 100-mile front. There was still no sign of the enemy's anticipated first anniversary offensive.
On Sunday, the enemy drove allied troops off two important ridges south of Pyonggang, the apex of the "iron triangle". One hill changed hands six times.
Thirty enemy jets made another hit-and-run attack out of Manchuria. One was shot down and the ten-minute battle was quickly ended. During the previous nine days, the enemy had lost 13 planes and had 29 damaged while the allies had lost 11 planes.
Allied warships continued to fire on east coast ports in North Korea.
Correspondent Stan Carter provides a first-anniversary report on the 38th parallel, where barbed wire was still in evidence with sandbagged machine gun emplacements. Allied trucks moved along the road which served the invaders a year earlier. "In a way," he reports, "this is a pretty place." The First Cavalry Division had posted a sign saying that the war had begun at this point on June 25, 1950. He describes the rubble of war left behind.
In a radio broadcast Saturday night, Russia's Jakob Malik had issued a proposal for a ceasefire, which included evacuation of troops from the area around the 38th parallel.
The President, in Tullahoma, Tenn., for the dedication of the Arnold Air Force Engineering Development Center, said, without mentioning the Malik proposal, that the U.S. was ready to join in a "real settlement" of the war, one which would fully end the aggression and restore peace and security. He also attacked Republicans for their attacks on Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of Defense Marshall and Joint Chiefs chairman General Omar Bradley, and for "spreading fear and slander and lies".
Iranian Ambassador Nasrollah Entezam, president of the U.N. General Assembly, said that a ceasefire would not be difficult to arrange, provided Russia was sincere in desiring one. The position of Russia, he said, was not far from that of the U.N. the previous December. He said that he would meet with Mr. Malik prior to the next day's General Assembly meeting regarding the ceasefire proposal. He regarded as extremely important an unconfirmed report of a Peiping radio broadcast that China supported the ceasefire proposal.
Stock prices on the New York Stock Exchange fell somewhat in the wake of the ceasefire proposal.
Maj. General Rosie O'Donnell testified this date before the joint Senate Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees that he wanted to burn five North Korean cities and destroy eighteen major strategic targets by air attack at the start of the Korean war but that a political or diplomatic decision had apparently overruled him, as Lt. General George Stratemeyer said no. General O'Donnell had wanted to bomb Rashin, seventeen miles from the Russian Siberian border, but the State Department vigorously protested the one bombing raid on it as being too near the Russian border, possibly triggering Russian intervention in the case of accidentally hitting Siberia. General O'Donnell said that his airmen did not make that kind of error over a distance of seventeen miles.
In Budapest, twenty-three prosecution witnesses, all under arrest, perfectly cooperated in the espionage conspiracy trial of Archbishop Joseph Groesz. All twenty-three admitted their subversive activities, claiming to be a a part of the conspiracy to overthrow the Communist Government with American and Yugoslav help, to restore the kingdom of the Hapsburgs.
A nationwide strike was called against Western Union, starting the following Monday. The union was demanding a 25-cent per hour wage increase.
South Carolina Governor James Byrnes praised the findings of the three-judge panel in Briggs v. Elliott, holding that while the Clarendon County schools were not equal and had to be brought into equality "promptly", segregation was not per se violative of Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, as the plaintiffs had sought to show, with District Court Judge J. Waites Waring dissenting—eventually, in 1954, the opinion which would sway the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, of which Briggs was part, to hold unanimously that segregation of public schools was violative of Equal Protection. Governor Byrnes, former Secretary of State and Supreme Court Justice, said that the two-judge opinion of Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John J. Parker and District Court Judge George Bell Zimmerman, in his estimate, was "unanswerable".
Tom Fesperman of The News recalls the heat wave in the state during the week of the start of the Korean war, prompting rumors at the time that Wilmington had been evacuated and the Reserve called up. Some believed that there was no war at all and that it was all just another Orson Welles radio stunt as at Halloween, 1938. It was the day after the runoff primary in which Willis Smith had defeated incumbent Senator Frank Graham for the Democratic nomination. By Sunday evening, the new war dominated the news. Most people thought that something ought be done but that sending troops to Korea was going too far, so soon after the end of World War II. The odor problem pervading the Sugaw Creek area receded in the minds of Charlotte residents.
On the editorial page, "Russia's Peace Maneuver" finds little of interest in the peace bid offered via radio by Russia's Jakob Malik, despite it being greeted with worldwide excitement. A ceasefire could have taken place at the beginning of the conflict but for Communist China's intransigence and Russia's insistence that such questions as the control of Formosa and the admission of Communist China to the U.N. be included in the discussions.
Mr. Malik had advocated the start of discussions between the belligerents re a ceasefire and armistice, providing for the mutual withdrawal of forces from the 38th parallel. The piece wonders who Mr. Malik had in mind as the "belligerents", in light of the fact that Russia had sought to perpetuate the myth that Communist Chinese fought only as "volunteers" in the war. It thus wonders whether he included the Chinese Communists within the ambit of that term and whether the Soviets insisted on being party to the negotiations, as in the past. It also wonders what conditions would attend a ceasefire, whether it would include admission of Communist China to the U.N. and the abandonment of Formosa. There was no assurance that ceasefire would not merely be an excuse for the enemy to regroup and re-equip its forces.
Until these questions could be answered, it urges restraint by the U.N. members on becoming hopeful of a viable settlement. It favors exploration of the proposal, however, as every avenue toward peace needed to be traveled, and not dismissing it as mere propaganda, though it might turn out so. But it could be the first break in the diplomatic-military impasse which was threatening the survival of the civilized world.
"Korean War Anniversary" tells of five U.N. military campaigns during the first year of the Korean war having established the U.N. forces' ability to meet the enemy in the field and push it back, inflicting terrible punishment in the process.
But in the diplomatic and political field, the U.N. had not been so successful. The debate ensuing the dismissal of General MacArthur had made it difficult to discuss settlement short of complete military victory.
It quotes from chief American U.N. delegate Warren Austin, from a commencement address recently at Georgetown University, in which he had said that in Korea the nations were testing a theory that aggression by a great power could be met by U.N. action locally without expanding into general war. The theory had grown out of the bitter lessons of the 1930's, preceding World War II. He stressed that it was important to continue to blame aggressors for acts which would turn a limited war into a general war.
"Self-Combustion" finds it necessary, in the heat of summer, to warn of spontaneous combustion, a worry it had since reading one summer Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, wherein a devout father of a family suddenly caught fire and was "oxidized"—perhaps meaning "vaporized", unless the father suddenly rusted in the heat—though the story provides only that his skin was scorched and bruised and his clothing reduced to ashes. Mr. Brown had not explained the phenomenon but insisted it had happened. Many believed in it. It concludes the moral to be that those who got hot under the collar might set off a chain reaction.
Better watch your drinking of inebrious spirits while in the hot sun, also.
A piece from the Asheville Citizen, titled "MacArthur and Appeasement", tells of being puzzled by General MacArthur and other isolationist orators dwelling on the term "appeasement". It wonders what they meant. Since Munich in September, 1938, the word had been associated with Neville Chamberlain's "peace for our time" pact with Hitler in exchange for ceding to Germany the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. But now, it suggests, General MacArthur would have to be deemed an appeaser when he said that the decision to intervene in Korea was "an act done suddenly and without the slightest preparation or seeming consideration". Apparently, General MacArthur would have refused response to the challenge of the North Korean invasion of the South.
The General appeared to prefer big wars to little ones. He wanted an aggressive war but did not inform how the Chinese war would be ended. In his view, to negotiate was to appease. It was hard to believe that the American people would accept such an argument, implicit in which was surrender to Communism.
It wonders whether the U.S. had engaged in appeasement in 1947 when it worked within the U.N. to eject Russia from northern Iran in 1947, with the Truman Doctrine in Greece and Turkey, with the Marshall Plan in France and Italy where Communism had once thrived, with NATO, and in Asia by aiding the Chinese Nationalists with arms and training until they collapsed of their own weight in the face of the Communists.
It finds that General MacArthur had become the exponent of extreme isolationism and its handmaiden, preventive war, seeking to sell these doctrines to the American people.
Drew Pearson addresses an open letter to the G.I. in Korea seeking to answer the recurring question they posed as to why the country fought there. Since the beginning a year earlier, when it was clearer that the country fought to stop Communist aggression in its tracks and to deter further aggression, he had developed reservations and wondered whether it had been wise to enter the war.
The reasons for fighting, he finds, were that the country had always been successful in fighting on foreign soil; to keep enemy encroachment over there rather than over here; that if the country was to avoid the cost of a permanent military establishment it needed advance notice to prepare for war and Korea afforded that preparation; and so that the war could be isolated to avoid world war.
He suggests that if resolute world machinery, as the U.N., had existed in 1914 at the outset of World War I, it might have been avoided or contained in Bosnia and Serbia, just as Korea.
He believes that the country had a slim chance of avoiding world war with the Soviet bloc and if it were to occur, the sacrifices being made by the allied troops in Korea would go down in history as helping to prevent that dire scenario.
The last reason was that it was necessary to strengthen the peace machinery of the world and Korea was the greatest test of that machinery. Previously, the nations had never had the guts to construct a police force to stop war. This time, in Korea, the nations had met the challenge and the effort might prevent the occurrence of world war three.
Marquis Childs tells of the increasing inclination toward bureaucratic decree, suggesting the decline of democracy in the country. One manifestation of it was the new indictment of the second-tier Communist leaders, following the upheld convictions of the top eleven Communists in the country.
Many were asking whether this latest prosecution was going too far and would eventually reach down to all 10,000 to 15,000 card-carrying Communists who might be said to teach or advocate the overthrow of the Government by force or violence, as prohibited by the Smith Act of 1940. Many wondered whether it would also next include those who taught socialism or unpopular reform.
Communists had been jailed in the previous two years for refusing to testify to Congress regarding whether they had ever been members of the party. But when the same thing happened to a propagandist for a right-wing organization, his friends and backers rose up in protest that his Constitutional rights were being violated. The same people, however, were not so concerned about the rights of Communists.
It appeared to Mr. Childs to suggest the potential danger of government by bureaucratic decree. If the law was to be stretched to include one within its prohibitions, then it would be so ultimately for all. The courts became "merely ratifying agencies for the bureaucrat to give a gloss of respectability to his decrees."
The necessity for preserving America's freedom was far greater in the present in light of that forced upon prosecutors and courts by Communism.
Justice Hugo Black in his dissent in Dennis v. U.S., upholding the constitutionality of the Smith Act, expressed the hope that the "pressures, passions and fears" of the time would subside and that a later Court would restore the First Amendment liberties to the preferred place where they belonged in a free society. Mr. Childs suggests that all but a few bigots would join in that hope.
Robert C. Ruark tells of departing with his wife for a safari in Africa. He had seen a movie one time which starred Gregory Peck. In it, he had played the role of the white hunter with whom the adventurer's wife fell in love, winding up shooting her husband. He wonders whether it was fair to start a safari when the hunter was already typecast as the villain. His chief hunter looked like Gregory Peck, not the aged and ugly sort of fellow typifying the breed, and so it brought the movie to mind.
He had plenty of weaponry for the
hunt, including a .357 magnum, which "elephants
A letter writer finds it unfortunate that the House had approved an appropriation for a V.A. hospital at Charlotte and Salisbury, previously nixed by the President as unnecessary but revivified by Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi. The writer thinks that economy was well-suited to eliminating what the V.A., itself, had said was unnecessary.
A letter writer finds disappointing the action of the Senate Banking Committee in voting to ban further price rollbacks and providing for more liberal credit terms for the purchase of cars. He believes such measures would only encourage inflation. As a veteran of World War II, he believes that the war needed to be put on a pay-as-you-go basis and that economy had to be practiced in such areas as the V.A. hospitals and other pork-barrel projects to achieve that end.
A letter writer from Rock Hill, S.C., praises the newspaper for its story on Rock Hill appearing the prior Thursday, regarding the dispute in York County over the question of political and financial control, which he proceeds to explain.
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