The Charlotte News

Friday, September 14, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. troops had taken a high peak against substantial resistance from the enemy north of Yanggu on the eastern front, while at the other end of the peninsula, six Russian-type T-34 tanks and two self-propelled guns were spotted west of Yonchon, immediately attacked by U.N. artillery, planes and tanks.

Allied planes flew support missions for the infantry and continued to attack enemy supply lines. One Marine Corsair fighter was shot down by Communist ground fire, and headquarters indicated there was no chance that the pilot had survived. For the first time in six days, there was no report of any jet battle.

The Big Three foreign ministers, meeting in Washington, said at the close of the five-day conference that they intended to proceed as rapidly as possible with negotiations to bring West Germany into NATO. They implicitly indicated that they believed that, eventually, Germany would be unified and have an overall peace settlement with all of its prior enemies. They indicated that West Germany would receive a "peace contract" in lieu of the existing occupation status, which would enable the Germans to contribute to Western defenses. It indicated that the allied high commissioners would proceed to negotiations with the West German government as rapidly as possible. It also indicated that there was no reason for further delay in establishing a treaty for Austria and stated sympathy for Italy's request to terminate the peace treaty limitation on Italian armed forces.

The witness who had begun his testimony the previous day to the Senate subcommittee investigating William Boyle, DNC chairman, for his alleged influence in enabling a St. Louis printing firm, of which the witness had been employed, to obtain a large RFC loan in 1949, continued his testimony by saying further that Mr. Boyle had influenced RFC loans. Two RFC directors had testified that they had never been influenced by Mr. Boyle in any way.

Eugene Dooman, a former State Department official, testified before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee that after Dean Acheson had become Undersecretary of the Department, it adopted a policy aimed at the destruction of Japanese capitalists, which, in his judgment, coincided with Communist objectives. He said that he did not know whether General MacArthur had agreed with those policies. Mr. Dooman and had retired from the Department at the end of August, 1945.

Attorney General J. Howard McGrath asked Congress for an overhaul of election laws, indicating that they were riddled with loopholes and obsolete provisions. He urged legislation to make it illegal for anyone, including a political committee, to receive a contribution for a candidate or make an expenditure for a candidate unless authorized in writing by the candidate, a requirement, he suggested, which would curb use of defamatory literature in campaigns. He also suggested giving more publicity to required financial reports.

Congressman Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, Republican national chairman for the 1948 presidential campaign, had just returned from a trip to Europe where he had met with General Eisenhower, and was convinced that he and others within the movement to nominate the General for the presidency had the General's approval. He said that he was sure General Eisenhower was a Republican and that talk of his running as a Democrat was silly. The General had made it clear, however, that if he was to be the Republican candidate, it had to be by a draft and not something contrived.

In Boston, Denis Delaney, fired by the President as Massachusetts Collector of Internal Revenue, was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on charges of accepting $12,500 from individuals to influence his official decisions. The charges regarded tax claims totaling at least $170,000 for three individuals and one corporation.

In New York, an attorney for two policemen, accused in the police graft scandal in Brooklyn, said that they would demand a psychiatric examination for gambler Harry Gross, the prosecution's chief witness, who had absconded from custody for one day to go to Atlantic City for what he called a "walk in the sun". The attorney suggested that his behavior pattern indicated mental instability. He was slated to testify that he had bribed the eighteen police officers on trial to hide his 20-million dollar per year gambling syndicate.

In New Kensington, Pa., for the second time in a month, a prominent banker was charged with embezzling more than a half-million dollars. The latest arrest was of a 60-year old assistant cashier of the First National Bank, charged by the FBI with embezzling $550,000 over the previous 22 years, about $25,000 per year on a steady basis. He had gone undetected because he had full charge of the bank's ledgers, maintaining two sets of books. But bank examiners had just found one apparent error and then discovered a huge shortage. The man was described as a good church member, without an enemy in the world. He had been working at the bank since 1917, starting as a teller. He told the FBI that he had used some of the money to invest in the stock market. A month earlier, the president of the Parnassus National Bank in the same town had been charged with embezzling $800,000.

Vic Reinemer of The News, in the fifth of his six-part series of articles on the Hoover Commission report of 1947 regarding efficiency in the Government and recommended changes to eliminate waste and duplication of services, looks at the Department of Agriculture.

News sports editor Bob Quincy, touring the football camps of the major colleges across the Carolinas, examines Furman this date on page 6-B—should you have an abiding interest.

On the editorial page, "Truck Regulation Needed" urges that it was time for the City Council to analyze the dispute regarding the ban of curb parking on Graham Street and to re-examine its bearing on the all-important truck regulation proposal, as put forward by City Traffic Engineer Herman Hoose.

By all means practical, let us get that done, so that we do not have to read about it anymore.

"The German Settlement" discusses the Big Three foreign ministers conference in Washington, seeking to reach a German settlement, with implications for NATO, to be discussed further at the NATO Council meeting opening the next day in Ottawa. There would be no general conference or treaty, such as there had been with Japan, for it would be complicated too much by East Germany and the prospect of Soviet resistance. Even the most nationalistic Germans had resigned themselves to a divided Germany for the foreseeable future.

One of the principal bargaining points was the issue of German participation in Western defense, with the majority of Germans opposed to rearmament. With that in mind, the German militarists had demanded military equality with the Western powers as their price for participation, leading to a compromise whereby occupation would cease by the three Western powers and the 1.25 billion dollar expense of it, which had been borne by the Germans, would be applied to the building of German defenses within the European army. That prospect would speed the establishment of that army, following the adoption of the Schuman plan for pooling European coal and steel.

There remained the problem of having 12 bosses, one from each of the NATO nations, complicating General Eisenhower's job as supreme commander of NATO, holding up action because of the complex decision-making machinery within the NATO Council. General Eisenhower had advocated that the key was a federal union within Europe to replace the problematic Council.

It urges that the NATO Council should accompany its discussion in Ottawa regarding the German settlement with consideration of this larger problem.

"Umstead Joins the Scrap" tells of William B. Umstead having announced his intent to run in the gubernatorial contest in 1952, finds that he would make an able governor, having been a good Congressman, with a sound liberal voting record, though being more conservative after being appointed by Governor Gregg Cherry, whose 1944 campaign he had managed, to the Senate following the death of Josiah W. Bailey in late 1946.

It thinks it would be therefore risky to try to put a label on him until he announced his platform, but it was likely he would be among the conservatives who dominated the 1951 General Assembly, though it notes that the Assembly had finished by spending more money than Governor Kerr Scott had sought.

"Hoffman as a Candidate" tells of pollster George Gallup having published the results of a poll in the current issue of Look, which showed that if General Eisenhower were not the Republican presidential candidate in 1952, the next choice of independent voters would be Paul Hoffman, former Marshall Plan administrator, now head of the Ford Foundation.

While it finds that he would be an able president, it thinks the likelihood of him becoming a candidate remote, given his comfortable position at the Ford Foundation, as indicated the previous day in the column of Marquis Childs, concludes that it was likely the parties would provide only two mediocre choices for the voters in 1952—referring, based on earlier editorials, to Senator Taft and the President.

Drew Pearson tells of three scientists, Dr. Dean Burk, Martin Schwartz, and Jerome Cornfield, at the National Institute of Health having discovered the secret of sunlight, the basis for Dr. James Conant, president of Harvard, having recently indicated in a statement that solar energy would surpass atomic energy in the near future. The research had been based on earlier research by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Emil Warburg of Germany, and promised to unlock several possibilities, including production of plant life in "food factories" which would be cheaper and more efficient than current farming methods, providing hydrogen gas in unlimited quantities by taking it from water via sunlight, and converting sunlight into electric power.

Sounds like a bunch of poppycock, sunlight to electric power. Whoever heard of such a thing? Next thing you know, they'll tell us we can't drive our car anywhere we wish 'cause they're too wasteful.

Recent statements by the President and Senator Milton Young of North Dakota regarding sensational new war weapons stood in sharp contrast to earlier statements by General John Church during his orientation conference at Fort Benning, Georgia. He had said that basic warfare had not changed in 2,000 years and he did not contemplate any change in the future resultant of the new weaponry being developed. When asked about the 16-inch guns on naval vessels which had never fired a shot in the previous war, he had no immediate reply, but said that strategic bombing was no different than that which Light Horse Harry Lee had undertaken behind the lines during the Civil War. When a visitor remarked that the group had been impressed with the Air Force, he had stated in reply that they had killed four or five people on a raid while the Army still performed the "real job in war".

He recounts some of the statements of Czech Prime Minister Antonin Zapotocky regarding the "Winds of Freedom" balloon launch over Czechoslovakia, which Mr. Pearson had been instrumental in organizing, to bring information about America via leaflets attached to the balloons to people living behind the Iron Curtain. The Prime Minister had said, among many other things, that the balloons were filled with "press manure", designed to "infect" Czechoslovakia with "rabble and filth", that everything brought by the Western winds was "filth and dirt". He said that the Czechs were detecting spies and assassins, and then sentencing them to the punishment they deserved, apparently in reference to Associated Press correspondent William Oatis, imprisoned on trumped-up espionage charges. He also said that "no American beetles" would destroy their harvest, a reference to the unfounded Czech claim the previous year that American planes had dropped beetles to destroy their crops.

Mr. Pearson says that 14 million leaflets were launched from Bavaria, ten miles from the Czech border, and that reports indicated that so many of them had rained down over the large cities of Prague and Pilsen that some of the streets were literally white. The leaflets reminded the Czech people that they had not been forgotten in the West.

Marquis Childs discusses the background of the new Secretary of Defense, Robert Lovett, finding him well qualified for the position. He had served as Assistant Secretary of War for Air under President Roosevelt and performed an exceptional job in building the country's airplane production to a level which the pessimists had found impossible at the outset. President Truman made him Undersecretary of State in 1947, serving under Secretary of State Marshall until the latter's resignation in early 1949. He then returned to his private banking firm, Brown Brothers, Harriman & Company, until he was called again to serve as Undersecretary of Defense, again under Secretary Marshall, a year earlier. His role in the latter position was to provide the details for defense spending as it approached 50 billion dollars per year, while Secretary Marshall provided the policy.

He had a firm grasp of international relations and shared General Marshall's penchant for efficiency and order in administration.

Robert C. Ruark tells of Baby Shor, the wife of Toots Shor, having written an essay for Collier's, titled "My Life with Toots", and, thinks Mr. Ruark, having established a bad precedent thereby in the process. He foresees the time when all wives of prominent citizens would hire press agents and hold them over their husbands as blackmail to deter unwanted behavior, lest they follow suit and publish a memoir of the husband's exploits in his private life. He warns publishers who were married that should they continue to publish such accounts, they, themselves, would eventually fall victim to the malady.

A letter writer, president of Abbott Realty Company, says that a statement about the Rose Garden in the newspaper had been entirely wrong and misleading, that his company had no claim against the City, that the Garden property had been taken by the State Highway Commission as a part of the new Independence Boulevard right-of-way, and that he had agreed to accept $5,000 in settlement, despite the land value being much greater. The money had been appropriated but not yet delivered to his company, still held by some "political influence somewhere down the line". He hopes to live long enough "to see the color" of that money. But, he clarifies, the City had nothing to do with it.

So there. Nothing more needs to be said further about anything, ever.

A letter writer comments on the quote from the President on the front page of September 11, that it was "just a pack of lies that waste and extravagance" were running wild in the Government, juxtaposed on the page to the installment regarding the Hoover Commission report of 1947, which had discussed "wasteful expenditure of funds".

He concludes: "Viva les presidentes!" And then adds a "P.S.": "And Hoover quotes facts."

Someone, perhaps, ought instruct him that four years had passed in between those statements, and that the Hoover Commission was a bipartisan group, of which former President Hoover was only chairman, a Commission appointed by President Truman, the recommendations from which the President had been dutiful in trying to obtain passage for in Congress.

A letter writer seeks to instruct reporter Dick Young that the Plaza started at Westmoreland Avenue and ended at the city limits with the Norfolk Southern Railroad. He says that the residents would appreciate it if the newspaper reporters would stop trying to rename the street "Plaza Road", which actually only began outside the city limits.

The editors respond that he was technically correct, but add that most people referred to the street as Plaza Road, including members of the City Council.

So there, you gadfly.

A letter writer from Rockingham says, in response to the letter writer who discussed "murder" on the highways of the state, that he was so impressed by his restraint that he decided to add that what was needed over and above the refusal to issue driver's licenses to those who were deaf, the reinstitution of mechanical inspections, and proper marking of intersections, was a 45 mph speed limit, rigidly enforced.

A letter writer from Monroe agrees with another letter writer who had praised the column of Dr. Herbert Spaugh as the best part of the newspaper, finds his column to be worth the price of the paper.

We appreciate the sentiment, but that doesn't say very much for Dr. Spaugh, as the newspaper only cost a dime a day.

A letter writer from Kings Mountain says that he would like to know what had become of the people who had promoted Dr. Warren for Governor. He voices his support.

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