The Charlotte News
Friday, August 17, 1951
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert B. Tuckman, that the subcommittee of two persons from each side tackled the issue of the disputed location of the buffer zone, in an unusual air of informality for the Korean ceasefire talks. While there were official indications that the Communists were ready to compromise, the members of the subcommittee declined to comment on what had happened in the session. The subcommittee would meet again on Saturday. At the end of the session, there appeared an unusual gesture of friendship among the four subcommittee members, with Maj. General Henry Hodes, one of the U.N. representatives, placing his arm around North Korean Maj. General Lee Sang Cho. The other two subcommittee members, U.S. Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke and Chinese Maj. General Hsieh Fang, also appeared in good spirits. Outbursts of laughter had been overheard from behind the closed doors during the session, in complete contrast to the cold military formality which had hung over the earlier meetings of the full five-person delegations, who had reached a three-week deadlock on the issue of the ceasefire zone.
Peiping radio quoted the chief Communist negotiator, presumably referring to Lt. General Nam Il, as saying that it was possible to adjust the demand for a ceasefire line along the 38th parallel "on the basis of terrain and mutual defense", an apparent reference to the U.N. demand that present battle lines be the basis for the ceasefire zone.
The House passed, overriding the President's veto by a vote of 318 to 45, a bill providing $120 in monthly pension payments to veterans of the two world wars and Korea, who had suffered non-service related disabilities.
Republican Senators won the right to file a sharply critical report on the RFC, following the investigation by the Senate Banking Committee. The text of both the majority and minority reports were to be kept secret until noon Monday. Chairman of the Committee, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, had demanded that the Committee withhold all sanction for the minority report, as it contained, he said, "vicious" language.
The House approved three Government appropriations bills totaling four billion dollars and prepared another for action the following week, which appropriated 1.6 billion. The long-delayed bills called for a ten percent cut in the budgets of most affected agencies.
The joint Senate committees which had investigated the firing of General MacArthur voted twenty to three against rendering any final report on its two months of hearings. Chairman Richard Russell of Georgia told reporters that the majority feeling was that any report would only "revive bitter controversy at a critical period in the Korean peace talks". It was decided, however, that individual members of the committees could file statements of their personal views, to be included in the hearing record. Senators Harry Cain of Washington, Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and William Knowland of California were the three dissenting votes.
Averill Harriman challenged an assertion by Patrick Hurley that the late President Roosevelt had told General Hurley to "soften" the terms of the Yalta agreement in early 1945 and obtain the assent of Premier Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the changes. Mr. Harriman, then Ambassador to Moscow, said that Mr. Hurley, then Ambassador to China, had told him of no such mission during a visit with him in Moscow in April, 1945, and that he made no statement suggesting that FDR was disturbed about the agreement. Mr. Harriman had said that the postwar problems had not resulted from the agreement at Yalta but rather from the fact that Stalin had failed to carry out the agreement. He had added that while FDR was not in good health at the time, he had given long thought to definite objectives and carried on the negotiations with lucidity. The statement of Mr. Harriman, made to the joint committees during the investigation of Far East policy and the firing of General MacArthur, was made public by Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut.
In Tehran, knife-wielding Moslem terrorists wounded six Iranian policemen who were part of a force attempting to break up an anti-British demonstration regarding the ongoing oil nationalization talks. The demonstrators were 200 members of the fanatical nationalist Fedayan Islam sect. The assistant chief of Tehran's police was wounded in the ten-minute melee, having been slashed on one hand. A member of the Fedayan sect had assassinated Premier Ali Razmara the prior March.
The Iranian Government negotiators had turned down the latest British proposal to try to resolve the nationalization dispute and were expected to present a counter-proposal the next day. Chief British delegate Richard Stokes said that the Anglo-Iranian oil company would buy its oil elsewhere should Iran reject the latest British proposal, which reportedly had the backing of U.S. mediator, Mr. Harriman. Mr. Stokes said that the offer, which would provide the Iranians an equal share with the British in the profits from the oil, was the best he was authorized to make.
The Defense Department charged that two former servicemen during World War II had played key roles in the killing of Major William Holohan, head of an OSS mission which parachuted behind German lines in late 1944 to provide aid to the partisans. The Department said that the two men had killed him, with the aid of two Italians. The two Americans said they would fight any attempt to return them to Italy for trial, and the Italian Government had made no move to extradite them. One of the men said that the Defense Department had never confronted him with the charges and that it amounted to a trial in the press and on radio, violating basic concepts of justice and due process. Both men proclaimed their innocence.
The Government launched a nationwide drive to enforce cattle price ceilings, to head off a black market in beef. At the same time, plans were announced to change the price ceilings.
On the editorial page, "Council Fiddles While Drivers Burn" tells of the City Council, prior to undertaking a major grade crossing elimination project, having hired a Greensboro engineer to make a complete survey of the cost and anticipated results of the project. It had employed a Chicago engineer to study the volume and characteristics of industrial waste before it tackled stream pollution. And an intensive survey of traffic origin and destination had been made before the Council and the State Highway Commission joined in the determination of the routing of Independence Boulevard. It had also undertaken a thorough study of possible sites and similar structures elsewhere before authorizing the three million dollar auditorium-coliseum bond election.
But the Council had not voted funds for an adequate survey of city needs for offstreet parking facilities. It urges the people to ask their elected representatives whether they had an open mind on the subject of offstreet parking, and, if so, whether they were not placing the interests of private parking operators above the public interest in refusing to allocate money for an adequate survey, and if not, why they had launched a costly program of opening up bottlenecks in the business district without also providing parking space for the increased flow of vehicles thus enabled to enter the city.
Well, we would damn well like to know and tomorrow, not today—that is today, not tomorrow—even if that was yesterday and yesterday's gone.
"Two Proposals: One Good, One Bad" compliments a City Councilman for urging restoration of the unanimous consent agreement preventing consideration of any item of business before the Council not on the advance agenda unless provided special approval by all Councilmen present.
The same Councilman, it opines, was in error, however, in recommending a return to regular private sessions preceding the public Council meetings.
"Queasy Consciences?" finds that most Americans would accept, even if reluctantly, a military alliance with Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain, provided it would materially strengthen world defenses against Communism without compromising the battle for freedom everywhere. But it also finds that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should not have stricken from its subcommittee's report regarding aid to Spain a section which had questioned "whether the acquisition of such an ally is worth the price that would be exacted by way of compromising the moral and spiritual values shared by the free nations of the Atlantic area", and other such language regarding questions anent strengthening of Generalissimo Franco and thereby reducing the likelihood that the people of Spain would regain their freedoms. Another section linking Spain and Yugoslavia together by saying that both countries were governed by dictators had also been stricken from the report.
It wonders what was wrong with the Committee, whether their consciences were queasy regarding aid to Spain, whether they were seeking to evade a basic and important issue by suppressing it. It thinks the sections should have remained in the report so that NATO nations would understand that the alliance being proposed with Spain was of the mind and not the heart, so that the American people would understand that the country was lining up with dictators with its eyes open, and so that the dictators in Latin America could appreciate the new statement of American aims.
It concludes that the first objective in world affairs was self-preservation, that the second was to bring freedom to all oppressed people, and that the country should not let its preoccupation with the former weaken its resolve to accomplish the latter.
"Second the Motion" tells of Senator Joseph McCarthy having said that the President had engaged in a "smear attack" on him when the President had denounced "slander-mongers" and "smear attacks" in his speech before the American Legion recently. Senator McCarthy had demanded that the radio networks provide him equal time to give an answer.
The President had mentioned no one by name, but, comments the piece, if Senator McCarthy wanted to volunteer as the object of the remarks, it would take his word for it. And, it further offers, he ought to know a smear attack when he saw it. It seconds the motion for giving him equal time, provided the Senator would give those he had labeled, from within his privileged sanctuary on the Senate floor, Communists or Communist sympathizers equal time to respond and within equal facilities.
Drew Pearson, located near the Czech border, again tells of the experiment to penetrate the Iron Curtain utilizing balloons bearing messages of friendship and freedom, in an effort to purvey positive psychological propaganda to combat the negative propaganda being disseminated by the Soviets toward the West. Congress had seriously hamstrung the efforts of the State Department in this regard, as the members as a whole had little faith in psychological warfare. Accordingly, the National Security Council had ruled out any strong appeals to the people of the satellite countries urging revolt, sabotage or disruption of the Cominform governments.
The average citizens of Czechoslovakia were not interested in hearing foreign radio broadcasts which merely said that the Soviet system was evil, something they already understood. They wanted to hear from the Voice of America ways by which they could overthrow the yoke of oppression. Yet, under official NSC policy, no such advice could be given, while Soviet psychological warfare offered excitement, intrigue, revolt against colonial oppressors, and nose-thumbing of bourgeois masters. Thus, private individuals had attempted the experiment with the balloons.
He believes, based on contact with people the previous winter and from the study of the Iron Curtain, that the Soviets' greatest fear lay in civil unrest and thus any contact between the West and the people of Russia or the satellite nations. He urges that in order to win these nations over to the side of freedom, they had to be inspired, encouraged and, above all, kept informed.
He praises the American Crusade for Freedom Organization, the Inter-American Federation of Free Trade Unions, veterans or prisoners of war chiefly from Belgium, France, Holland and Italy, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the AFL Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, the CIO Canadian Congress of Labor, and the International Federation of Free Journalists for launching the balloon program. Chief dynamo in the operation had been Abbott Washburn of General Mills.
It was especially significant that the balloons were being launched at a time when Associated Press correspondent William Oatis had been imprisoned falsely for alleged espionage against the Czechoslovakian Government.
He adds that the more one paid out in concessions to the Soviets, the more Moscow demanded in ransom money and the more it was inclined to mistreat American citizens and increase demands for blackmail. The crackdown by the U.S. on Czech trade was an indication of a new, tougher policy by the U.S. and the balloon operation supplemented that effort.
"Pitchmen of the Press", in the tenth in the series of articles originally published in the Providence (R.I.) Journal, for the fourth day in a row regards the radio program of conservative commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr.,—not yet Westbrook Pegler, for which misleading statement the prior day, the editors duly apologize.
Mr. Lewis, it says, had been responsible, according to reports, for killing the Office of Price Administration at the end of the war, for paving the way for former Atomic Energy Commission chairman David Lilienthal to retire from Government service, and for casting a cloud of treason over former Vice-President Henry Wallace.
Now, he was undertaking to destroy the U.N. On the prior February 8, for instance, he had remarked that a known Communist was a member of a subcommittee of the organization, with protection and good offices provided by the U.N. In all of his subsequent attacks on the organization, he treated it as strictly an American institution, essentially an arbitration service to which no one who disagreed could be admitted.
On March 13, he objected to the U.S. paying dues for U.N. membership. On April 14, while discussing the downed Navy plane over the Baltic, he said that the matter would go before the U.N. but that nothing would come of it, except further polite discussion and deliberation, typical for the body, with nothing ever being accomplished, and that even in the rare case where something was accomplished, there was no way to effectuate it. He accused the U.N. of offering a "protective blanket for the Soviet Union to do whatever it wishes to do in its ruthless and reckless campaign of world piracy". He found it to be "a completely impotent implement", to which the member nations had to resort. As long as Russia was aware of that fact, he continued, it had no fear of retaliation for its actions.
But the facts were that the U.N. had accomplished a number of useful functions since the war, that Russia did have fear of its retaliation, and that the member nations did not lack the power to settle their own problems, as demonstrated by the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine of aid to Greece and Turkey, NATO, the military aid program, etc.
On April 25, Mr. Lewis had stated,
on the sixth anniversary of the start of the San Francisco U.N.
Charter conference, that it had all looked very glamorous and
promising at that earlier time when the U.S. had been "palsy-walsy"—only cerebrally
In the next broadcast, after the speech, in which former President Hoover proposed to unseat Russia and the other Iron Curtain satellites from the U.N., Mr. Lewis said that the proposal did not go over well with the "appeasement group" and that it stood as a test of whether people such as Eleanor Roosevelt were appeasers to Russia. But others who issued statements disagreeing with the former President included Republican State Department adviser John Foster Dulles, former Republican Senator Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, and Assistant Secretary of State, John D. Hickerson, each of whom was staunchly anti-Communist.
Since Mr. Lewis's anti-U.N. effort had been started, several political figures had begun a campaign to disband the U.N., some of them repeating terms and phrases used by Mr. Lewis in his April attacks.
A letter writer from Troy, N.C., says that on August 12, Montgomery County had been the scene of "mass murder" in a two-car automobile collision which occurred on one of the main state highways near the Pee Dee River bridge which joined Montgomery and Stanly Counties, resulting in the deaths of seven persons—an editorial on which had appeared earlier in the week. He says that he stood in the room of an Albemarle funeral home where the remains of five of the victims, all women, had been placed on couches. He wants the reader to enter that room with him, finding that the room shrunk and that it was hard to breathe with a "sweet sickening odor" pervading the air, "the perfume of the dead". The eyes of the five victims had the "fixed, stark stare of the dead". Their twisted limbs and broken arms seemed to be an appeal of the dead. The "battered lips torn by smashed teeth" were twisted in the "ghastly smile of death".
He says that after that experience, he vowed henceforth to observe the 55 mph state speed law which he and thousands of others in the state violated each day. Death, he concludes, had been his witness to the vow.
A letter writer finds that 75 percent of the stories regarding accidents in the home were phony. Most such injuries, he suggests, were the result of a wife throwing a pressure-cooker at her husband, a son-in-law engaging in a fight with his father-in-law, a mother-in-law bashing in the head of a daughter-in-law, etc. "Sorry to have disillusioned you, again."
A letter from State Senator from Lancaster County, W. Bruce Williams, of Heath Springs, S. C., says that he had read with interest an article in the News about the fine condition of Marlboro County in South Carolina, that it had sold some bonds for the record low interest rate of 3.03, reflective of a good financial rating. But Lancaster County, the previous March, had sold $300,000 worth of school bonds at a price of 1.93, considerably less than that for which the Marlboro bonds were sold. He says that he was delighted to hear of the wonderful financial condition in Marlboro, but wanted everyone to know that they were enjoying good health in Lancaster also.
A letter writer says that Congress had loaded the United States with debt and devalued the currency, thus making high prices inevitable and living expenses of those on fixed incomes almost unbearable, while giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to foreigners for the purpose of obtaining their goodwill. And now they were talking about adjusting the pensions of Spanish-American War widows to the value of the dollar the Congress had depreciated. He suggests that it was yet to be seen whether the Congress was as generous toward the widows as toward the people of foreign lands, some of whom were Communists and enemies of "American civilization". He suggests that the Congress would have to face the people in the 1952 elections on the basis of what they would do with these pensions.
A letter writer from McBee, S.C., urges that despite being too short, too fat, freckled, unshapely, too lean, bearing a hooked nose, or too tall, one should not worry but be happy with what one had and make the most of it. He advises that there was no such thing as a "super-race". Any average looking woman could make any average man happy. Perfection was sheer nonsense. No human being was perfect. Hollywood was built upon the "beauty of deception", "makeup, swanky clothes fitted to the falsie-shape and dimestore jewelry backed by a setting that is moved from place to place." He believes that Mae West and Hedy Lamarr both had "phony figures", says that he had never seen a beautiful woman and never intended to meet any. "Pretty is as pretty does with the makeup, clothes, perfume, etc." Only angels were perfect and none wanted to meet any yet.
Well
Framed Edition
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