The Charlotte News

Saturday, September 22, 1951

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Matthew Ridgway, allied supreme commander, had worked for long hours this date on his reply to the Communist offer to resume the ceasefire talks at Kaesong in Korea. It was not known when he would transmit his answer or what, if any, conditions he would impose.

Nearly 120 American and Communist jets, 34 F-86 Sabre jets and 85 MIGs, fought for 25 minutes over "MIG Alley" in northwest Korea in what may have been the history's largest jet battle to that point. American pilots reported that they had damaged three Communist MIG-15's. The largest previous battle had occurred September 10.

A late bulletin indicates that three enemy aircraft had raided Seoul early in the day and that one had been shot down by allied night fighters.

In ground fighting on the east-central front, allied infantrymen repulsed another attack at the highest peak of "Heartbreak Ridge". Little action was reported from the central front, site of action around the "iron triangle" on Friday, in which it was estimated by U.N. officers that the enemy had lost nearly 1,000 men, killed or wounded. There was also little action on the western front.

Speculation that there was a Communist offensive in the making had died down at Eighth Army Headquarters, with the waning of the full moon.

Senators were seeking to block a plan by the Army and Air Force to hire big-name stars for a radio recruiting drive during the fall. The two branches announced that they would pay $688,000 to CBS and NBC to promote recruiting, the programs to include Frankie Laine and sports broadcaster Bill Stern. Senators Joe O'Mahoney and Homer Ferguson, both members of the Appropriations Committee, denounced the plan as excessive and unwarranted.

Three Republican Senators, John Williams, Homer Ferguson and Richard Nixon, said that if RNC chairman Guy Gabrielson could not properly explain his purported connection with obtaining an RFC loan for a company in Texas, of which he was president and general counsel, he should resign from his unpaid position as national committee chairman. Mr. Gabrielson had sent a letter to the Senate Investigating Committee, looking into charges of influence exerted by DNC chairman William Boyle to obtain an RFC loan for a St. Louis printing firm, saying that there had been a misunderstanding and that he wished to appear before the subcommittee, chaired by Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina.

If Mr. Gabrielson is possessed of a crystal ball with which to peer into the future by a year, he will seek sympathy in the matter through use of the gift of a little black and white cocker spaniel, which, he will then demonstratively state, he would not return. He might also mention his wife's cloth coat and their 1950 Oldsmobile.

The Senate called an unusual Saturday session this date to try to get some action on the debate-stalled 5.5 billion dollar tax increase measure. A controversial amendment had arisen on the bill, proposing to tax mutual savings banks and savings and loan associations for the first time. Senator Ralph Flanders and five other Senators were seeking to eliminate this amendment, written into the bill by the Finance Committee.

The head of the postal union called upon the President to fire Postmaster General Jesse Donaldson for being "the most tyrannical administrator ever to hold office" in the postal service. Mr. Donaldson had been in the position for two years, during which time he had cut down mail deliveries from twice to once per day and imposed widespread economic measures.

In London, King George IV, 55, walked about inside Buckingham Palace and chatted with his family while awaiting serious surgery, to be conducted within the Palace, for a mysterious lung ailment. Crowds gathered outside the Palace and tension mounted throughout the nation and Commonwealth, as it was not yet known when the operation would take place. King George would die the following February.

In Miami, an unknown person had set off two dynamite blasts which tore holes in an apartment house, in an area which had already experienced discord regarding plans to permit blacks to live in formerly all-white areas.

In Rochester, N.Y., a large explosion had torn apart a family home while the husband and father of five was on the golf course. His wife drove up and honked the horn, telling him that the house had been blown to bits right before her eyes. There was no indication of the cause of the explosion—presumably related to the otherwise uncaptioned photograph next to the piece, regarding "gas explosions".

In Morganton, N.C., three members of a family, a mother and two young boys, ages 14 and 12, along with a 19-year old male, were being held for investigation in the slaying of a 65-year old recluse. The Sheriff said that the woman indicated that the 19-year old had shot the man with a shotgun after the four of them went to his home to rob him. The family, including all six children, lived on the farm of the victim in a small one-room log shack. The crime had been discovered when the two boys entered a store and produced $158 in large bills, prompting inquiry by the storekeeper as to where they had obtained the money, to which they responded that they had found a gold mine.

On the editorial page, "Slot Machines for Sale" tells of a decision to enforce the slot machine ordinance in the city, coming on the heels of news stories listing the slot machine licenses purchased by Charlotte clubs, finding it to be perhaps more than just coincidence. It makes room for the possibility that it had been under consideration previously, and does not suggest any defense for the presence of slot machines, even in private clubs. But it finds that their presence in private clubs was not as much of a menace as in a public gambling place. The machines were designed to produce revenue to defray the expenses of a club's operations. The club operators, fearful of Federal enforcement, purchased their Federal licenses, yet ignored State law, for lack of enforcement. Charlotte possessed 30 percent of all the slot machines licensed in the state, and it concludes that ridding the city of them would at least place respect for State law on the same level as obedience to Federal law.

"Congressional Sherlocks" tells of the 82nd Congress, according to the Congressional Quarterly, having investigated more than 130 different matters at a cost of more than two million dollars and thousands of man-hours, without resulting in a single new law. It suggests that the coming election year might account for some of the upsurge in investigative activity in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans, as both were playing for headlines.

It posits that Congress ought limit itself to investigation of matters which were genuinely in need of new legislation, as otherwise it had passed only 140 laws since the beginning of the session in January, less than half the product of the previous Congress by the same date. Even those 140 laws, it appeared, had not received the proper scrutiny they deserved.

Whereas in an earlier time Congress had been a place where great minds sought to build a national reputation by writing and sponsoring worthwhile legislation, many members now appeared to be seeking the glamour of television and newspaper headlines. With a weak Administration and a "watered-down Judiciary", the trend did not bode well for the preservation of a responsible Congress.

"Charlotte's Working Girls" tells of it being National Business Women's Week, beginning the following day, and thus a proper time to note some of the accomplishments of women in Charlotte's business and professional circles. The Business & Professional Women's Club, including about 150 members from over 20 occupations, had been active in slum clearance and city beautification projects, as well as sending dozens of less privileged girls to two camps, and actively supporting the public library, the USO, the Salvation Army, and other projects and drives. Recently, members had participated in a series of radio broadcasts on international affairs and careers for women.

"Sound Advice from Washington" quotes from the Reverend Frederick Brown Harris, the Senate chaplain, who had prayed during the previous week, in part:

"We lift this day our prayer for personal integrity. We crave an unintimidated conscience, firm and resolute even before the small temptations of public office.

"Save us from the shirked responsibility, the easy lie, the unfair retort. We would be honest with ourselves. May we esteem faithfulness before the bar of our own judgment about the praise of others..."

And it goes on.

A piece from the Christian Science Monitor, titled "The Defense Bond Drive", tells of the First Defense Bond Drive being underway, and provides some of the reasons for buying bonds. The purchase contributed to the national security, was a check on inflation by keeping money out of the marketplace, and constituted a personal investment. It urges the purchase of defense bonds.

Drew Pearson tells of a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers having accidentally stated to a House Committee that the Engineers were opposed to the Missouri Valley Authority. They sided therefore with the utilities on this issue and wanted flood-control dams to be for flood control and navigation only, not for generation of electricity at cheap prices as with TVA. Thousands of farmers objected to giving up their land for dams and reservoirs unless they were to be devoted to generating electricity. He provides the colloquy in Congress between the representative of the Engineers and Congressman Clare Magee of Missouri, who was quite perturbed at the opposition to MVA by the Corps.

Senator Homer Capehart, the Wurlitzer king, was cross-examining witnesses who were testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in opposition to his cost-plus amendment for boosting price ceilings, opposed by the President and Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson, when a young lobbyist for the Americans for Democratic Action appeared, prompting Senator Capehart to ask a series of questions anent whether he was a registered lobbyist, whether his wife was a registered lobbyist, and other such inquiries, each question fired in rapid succession before the witness could answer. Finally, the witness interrupted and stated that he was surprised by the Senator, then read a letter which he had pulled from his personnel file at ADA, providing a character reference and excellent recommendation for the witness, signed by Senator Capehart.

The Navy and Air Force were forbidden from taking more than six percent of their recruits from the highest intelligence brackets and so now were planning to recruit women of high intelligence. The Air Force wanted to recruit 40,000, the Navy, 20,000, and the Army, 30,000.

Soon, one of every four Air Force bases would be stationed abroad.

Joseph Alsop discusses the new "wonder weapons", which included the "Matador" guided missile and the hydrogen bomb. Despite Air Force publicity and that of the President and Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, chairman of the joint Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee, the reports on such weapons, he indicates, were "generally phony" in terms of their purported miraculous capabilities.

The Matador was known to have a top speed which was only subsonic and its guidance system was far from refined. An expert had stated that it represented a great increase in expense but little improvement in performance over the German V-1 of World War II.

The hydrogen bomb also had to be approached with some degree of skepticism. There were two main types of potential hydrogen bombs, the first being based on plutonium fission which would act as a trigger for a nuclear explosion of tritium, very rare and very expensive to produce. That type of bomb had been proved to work in the tests conducted at Eniwetok by a plutonium bomb which could act as the trigger for the tritium bomb. But it was the second principal type of hydrogen bomb which would be practically useful in warfare. That bomb used plutonium as a trigger for tritium, and then the tritium to trigger a chain reaction of deuterium, the amount of which would determine the power of the bomb. Were it not for this second type of bomb, the hydrogen bomb project would be useless.

A single tritium bomb capable of destroying an area of 120 square miles would cost the same as 80 conventional atom bombs of the type which had been dropped on Nagasaki, capable in the aggregate of destroying an area of nearly 7,000 square miles. Deuterium could be manufactured relatively cheaply and in great quantities, but a chain reaction of deuterium took time to develop, and the bomb had to be held together during that process, about 30 times longer than the Hiroshima bomb, that is to say many millionths of a second longer, following the plutonium and tritium triggers having been activated. The problems in developing that bomb remained substantial.

Robert C. Ruark tells of the Defense Department having taken over from the Red Cross the public relations job in stimulating the public to give blood to comprise the reserve of plasma in case of military setbacks in Korea or disaster at home. Mr. Ruark proposes a draft of blood donors, those who were called up for the draft but were not classified 1-A, and possessed of suitable blood. Such men would then be required to provide a pint on given intervals, in consultation with their doctor. He thinks that it would not be a tremendous strain on civil liberty, any more than the draft was an imposition. He sees the only drawback being that 1952 was an election year.

Tom Schlesinger of The News, in his weekly Capital Roundup, tells of Senator Willis Smith of North Carolina, shortly after entering the Senate the previous January, having been sought out by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada for some intimate conversation regarding Senator Smith becoming a member of the Judiciary Committee, to which Senator Smith readily assented. He was the only freshman Senator to get his first choice of a committee assignment, something which was fairly unique. It was not clear what Senator McCarran's motives were, beyond his acquaintance with Senator Smith. But many speculated that he was rewarding the Senator for defeating Senator Frank Graham in the Democratic primary, as the latter, who had been a member of the Judiciary Committee, had quietly torpedoed more than one of chairman McCarran's stratagems. Senator Smith openly praised Senator McCarran for honesty and meticulousness.

Because of the friendship, Senator Smith could qualify as an expert on the subject of subversive forces which had influenced or sought to influence the country's Far Eastern policy, as Senator McCarran had also picked him to be a member of the Internal Security subcommittee, now beginning its public phase of investigation. During the secret phase, Senator Smith had conducted a number of hearings in executive session in and outside Washington. He had recently stated that the investigation had to be very careful because of the fact that Russia had been the country's ally during the time many of the events about which the investigation centered had taken place. He said that even he might have said something about Russia at one time which was favorable.

Despite the precaution, the subcommittee had drawn criticism because of the incidental mention of individuals and the reiteration by some witnesses of hearsay charges which they had previously asserted before other investigative bodies. Some claimed it was extending the work of the wholesale denunciations started by Senator McCarthy on the Senate floor, a charge which Senator Smith denied, claiming that the subcommittee had maintained a high standard of evidence and avoided sensational claims. He said that Senator McCarran was among the firmest in his belief that television and radio coverage should be barred from the hearings. He even was willing to allow witnesses to determine whether they should be photographed.

Senator Karl Mundt had formed the "Committee to Explore Political Realignment", which sought a formal coalition between Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats, a move being avoided by the members of the North Carolina Congressional delegation. They treated it the same way they treated Senator Mundt's suggestion that a Republican run for president with a Southern Democrat as his vice-presidential running mate.

Senator Clyde Hoey had joined Senator Smith in going on record with 54 other members of Congress, in a letter sent to the President, in opposition to recognition of Communist China by either the U.S. or Japan, and against a Japanese treaty with Communist China.

A large facsimile of the Declaration of Independence had recently appeared on the walls of Senator Smith's outer office, next to the Confederate Stars and Bars.

Perhaps, in combination, the two formed a Hammer and Sickle...

It was certain that the Congress would not adjourn by October 1.

Senator Hoey considered the tax bill reported out by the Finance Committee to be "pretty good on the whole".

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