The Charlotte News
Saturday, June 7, 1952
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. truce negotiators in Korea had walked out of this date's session after declaring a three-day recess in the deadlocked negotiations without awaiting the consent of the Communists. Lead negotiator, Major General William Harrison, had told the Communists that if they wanted to come to Panmunjom the following day they could, but that the U.N. representatives would not be back until the morning of June 11. Subsequently, General Harrison indicated that the negotiators would meet again on that date or later, if the Communists desired. He said that despite the fact that the Communists, as usual, wanted to meet every day, the U.N. negotiators were tired of listening to "all that drivel" daily, involving continual propaganda. The sudden departure by the U.N. delegation had left the Communists "surprised and baffled", according to a U.N. spokesman. During the morning session, lead Communist negotiator, North Korean General Nam Il, had accused the allies of "tearing the Geneva Convention to pieces" by their refusal to repatriate all Communist prisoners of war whom they held.
The sticking point in negotiations remained voluntary repatriation of prisoners and the Communists' contention that inadequate numbers of prisoners, 70,000, were to be returned by the allies, notwithstanding that figure having been based on the allied screening process of the prisoners, a process which the Communists had approved in advance.
In the ground war, U.N. forces had knocked Chinese troops from an advance Communist hill position on the western front near Chorwon, after the enemy troops had been softened by night-flying bombers and heavy artillery.
In the air war, according to the weekly Air Force announcement, allied jet fighters had shot down nine enemy jets and damaged four others during the previous week, without losing any planes in aerial combat. It was the second successive week in which there had been no loss of allied jets in air battles with the MIGs. Enemy anti-aircraft fire, however, had shot down two Air Force planes, and a B-26 night-bomber had failed to return from a mission.
The Defense Department told of an additional 106 American battle casualties in Korea, including 22 killed, 78 wounded and six injured.
The House would hear the following Tuesday the Army's report on the Communist prisoner of war uprising on Koje Island, after the Armed Services Committee had received the report the previous day and was obliged to send it to the floor pursuant to a resolution adopted the previous week. Committee chairman, Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, had indicated that he would await the Army's own investigation before acting on the demands of some members that the Committee investigate the problems at the prison camp.
In Berlin, the Communists made another territorial grab on the fringes of the city, occupying a large farm, 60 percent of the acreage of which lay in the French zone, while all of its buildings were in the Soviet zone. The Communist People's Police had ordered five families, including 15 persons, to vacate immediately and confiscated all of the livestock. The Soviets had agreed in 1945 that the area should belong to the French zone to aid the food supply in Berlin. In January, 1951, a detachment of Russian soldiers and People's Police had also descended on the same farm to make a border survey, but retreated when the French and West Berlin police had shown up. In addition, the Russians continued to bar allied motor patrols from the international highway linking Berlin to West Germany, but allowed normal civilian East-West traffic to pass.
Negotiations entered a third day at the White House between steel industry and union officials, trying to negotiate an end to the steel strike. There was no comment by the confreres to the press. There had been some indication of slight optimism, as the two sides reportedly were engaged in serious negotiations regarding the underlying dispute to form a new contract, which had expired at the beginning of the year. The site of the talks had shifted to the Cabinet Room at the White House from the Executive Office Building across the way.
In Springfield, Mo., the President, in an address before the 35th Division, with which he had served as a captain in World War I, declared this date that the Air Force in Korea could bomb the enemy at will, almost anywhere in its territory. He made the statement in reply to Senator Taft's criticism of Administration air policy, indicating that "short-sighted politicians" were "playing with fire" by slashing defense appropriations as Russia might be plotting "new Koreas in other parts of the globe". He said that the talk that the U.S. Air Force in Korea was at the mercy of Russian-made enemy planes was simply not true. Senator Taft had indicated several days earlier that allied planes were outnumbered four to one and the ground forces, two to one, and that the Administration's neglect had left the country with about 6,000 planes while Russia had 20,000 in organized combat groups, and was building them faster than the U.S. The President indicated that the U.S. had 15,000 planes in active use, and blamed Congressional foes who had forced a great reduction of the proposed defense budget from 51 billion dollars to 46 billion dollars and had cut the foreign military and economic aid package from 7.9 billion dollars to 6.5 billion dollars, for any lack of production. He said that the country could not tell what the Kremlin was planning, that there could be other Koreas being planned or greater attacks than had occurred up to that point, and that there was thus no justification for slashing appropriations for defense and foreign aid.
General Eisenhower's supporters claimed that there had been a theft in Indiana of the 32-vote delegation for Senator Taft. Meanwhile, in New York, the General faced reporters in his second press conference since becoming an official candidate for the nomination. The General had commented, regarding the Senator's offer of a compromise on disputed Southern delegations, "Gee, that sounds good." (But his voice intonation is not evident, indicating whether he was being sarcastic or genuinely suggesting, "Gee, that sounds good.") Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., campaign manager for the General, had quickly rejected the proposal, stating that it was never correct to compromise with dishonesty, that the Eisenhower forces were correct on the facts and the law and would enter no deals which would disenfranchise the Republicans of Texas, that the convention itself would decide the matter and that he had no doubts as to the outcome. (For Senator Lodge, it sounds like the statement was, "Geeeee, that sounds good.")
At his press conference, General
Eisenhower indicated that he would be willing to arrange a meeting
with Premier Stalin in the interest of peace, but also stated that he
believed the differences between the East and the West were not
negotiable at the present time. He said that it was not clear that
arranging a meeting with the Russian Premier was the correct approach
to the problem, but that if he determined that a meeting was
desirable, there was nothing he would not do to promote peace and
security. In response to a reporter's question as to how he would
have handled the steel crisis, he indicated that the Supreme Court
had ruled and that he would not quarrel with that decision, answering
another question by stating that the Congress had the power to
declare war and a national emergency and also the right to confer on
the President the power to act in emergencies. He indicated, however,
that in those situations, the President could not be expected to "sit
supinely back and wait for Congress". At one point, the General
flushed in the face at a question regarding why he would join an
organization, the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, headed
by Alger Hiss, former State Department official presently in prison
for perjury before a grand jury regarding his testimony in 1948
before HUAC, claiming that he had no contact with Whittaker
Chambers during the time frame the latter had claimed that Mr.
Hiss had passed to him State Department documents intended to be
turned over to the Soviets. The questioner identified himself as Dr.
Emanuel Josephson, the author and publisher of a book, titled
Rockefeller "Internationalist". (He had also authored other gems, such as The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which he contends that the deliverer of this September, 1944 speech
Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, the leading candidate at present for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, would visit Charlotte the following Thursday for a conference with his supporters in the area. He would also visit Asheville, Raleigh and Greensboro during a one-day trip to the state. He would confer with district chairmen and party leaders in Asheville, Charlotte and Raleigh and would deliver an address at a rally in Greensboro that evening.
In Raleigh, State assistant budget director, D. S. Coltrane, had been fired by Governor Kerr Scott the previous day, after having supported William B. Umstead in the gubernatorial primary a week earlier against Hubert Olive, supported by the Governor. Mr. Coltrane, however, indicated that he expected to stay on the job, stating that he would issue a statement within a few days indicating his intentions. He said that he had received numerous telephone calls since hearing the news of his firing, the third such firing after the primary, urging him to remain on the job. Mr. Coltrane had been an old college friend of the Governor, and the Governor was said by observers of the situation to have felt improperly advised by him when the General Assembly's appropriations committee had taken steps to cut the Governor's control of large State funds. F. L. Gobble, a senior State Representative from Forsyth County, had wired Mr. Coltrane this date, urging him not to resign, saying that he spoke with the full confidence that he was speaking on behalf of the majority who would serve in the ensuing General Assembly at the beginning of 1953.
But won't all of the turkeys in the straw be consumed by then at Thanksgiving and Christmas?
On the editorial page, "Byrd Proposal Was Ill-Timed" finds that the Senate had done the right thing in delaying action on Senator Harry F. Byrd's proposal to request that the President use the Taft-Hartley 80-day injunction provision to end temporarily the steel strike. The piece suggests that such an action would be hasty and ill-advised while industry and union negotiators continued to meet at the White House in an effort to reach a resolution of the dispute and end the ongoing strike, which had begun the previous Monday, immediately following the Supreme Court's ruling in the steel seizure case. It was not clear whether there would be a settlement of the strike and contract dispute during the weekend, but it suggests that the negotiators ought be given time to reach a compromise. The proposal by Senator Byrd would have no legal effect in any event, as the Congress had no authority to compel the President to invoke Taft-Hartley by the terms of the law. It suggests that the President would be on questionable ground if he did so at the current time.
It would be better for there to be some "real leadership in the executive branch" to effect more amicable relations between labor and management. Industry did not want to strike and the union also did not want to strike, and their differences regarding the union's demanded increase in wages commensurate with that recommended by the Wage Stabilization Board versus the demand by industry that the price per ton of steel would have to increase as much as $12 to accommodate the wage increase, appeared to be soluble. It recommends therefore that Congress keep its hands off the matter until national security required further legal action.
"The Fog around NATO" tells of NATO officials the previous winter, following the Lisbon Conference, having announced that there would be approximately 50 divisions in appropriate condition of combat readiness for the defense of Western Europe by the end of the year, including twelve French divisions. But now it had developed that the French had actually promised only ten divisions. The loss of those two divisions had pointed up the problems of maintaining closed-door diplomatic sessions.
Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune had written that the twelve-division figure had been a compromise between the ten which the French said they could provide and the fourteen urged by the U.S., a compromise which the French had accepted on condition that no commitment was involved as to the battle-worthiness of the other two divisions, that they would be "paper" divisions.
The truth about the negotiation had come forth when it became necessary for the French National Assembly to appropriate the money for the additional divisions, with the French Defense Minister, Rene Plevin, telling the Assembly that without additional aid, France could not have twelve full divisions ready by the end of the year. It appeared to the press to be a renunciation of the French commitment. Realizing the problem, American officials issued a statement that the French request did not affect the agreement reached in Lisbon. That statement had confused things even further, prompting journalists to dig into the story and ferret out the compromise.
It suggests that it might be wondered how many other such secret negotiations had been made under compromise arrangements of the type. This story would undermine the public confidence in NATO and members of Congress could use it to criticize the entire NATO program.
A proposal was before the Congress, introduced by Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa, that there would be formed a North Atlantic Assembly, to act as an advisory body, composed of citizens from the fourteen NATO nations, having no legislative power but being able to discuss issues and the common problems of the members in a public forum. It suggests that such an organization would dispel much of the "foggy gobbledygook" presently surrounding NATO and increase public understanding of the organization's task.
"Empty Cookie Jar" finds that many Southern Republicans were living for the day when the Republican Party would return to power in Washington and be able to pass out political jobs for patronage. They had kept their organizations deliberately small so that they could be the beneficiaries at that time. Yet, patronage was not what it had once been. There were presently 2.6 million Federal jobs, of which about 2.2 million were under Civil Service protection, with most of the remaining 315,000, including the FBI, Atomic Energy Commission, and the State Department Foreign Service, being positions not subject to political appointment. One estimate had it that there were 12,250 political jobs remaining in the Federal Government, with most of those in non-Southern population centers. Thus would be left few jobs at the state and local level in the South. Pending legislation might reduce the number of those jobs even further.
It concludes therefore that if the GOP were to win, many of the hungry Republicans in the South would likely find the cupboard bare.
"Fiscal Sense from the Senate" tells of the Congress possibly getting ready to do what it should have done long ago, and set up a joint Congressional budget bureau, a bill for which had already passed the Senate and was now before the House Rules Committee.
Congress had not equipped itself to do the job of annual appropriations, with such measures sometimes gathering dust in the Senate because Senator Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee was physically unable to hold hearings before the Appropriations Committee which he chaired.
Sometimes, busy executives testified before that Committee and then had to repeat their testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee. A brief experiment with omnibus bills had been dropped, with Congress again appropriating money on a piecemeal basis, not knowing until the end of the session how its appropriations would stack up against expected revenue.
Congress had assembled no group of experts or statisticians competent to evaluate the mass of statistics and recommendations brought before it each year by the Budget Bureau in the executive branch, government agencies and private groups. That information was sifted by overworked committee staff, and Congressmen then had to make across-the-board cuts or random cuts to achieve any reductions in the recommended budget. The proposed joint bureau would abolish the need for dual hearings and give Congress the ability to make intelligent budget cuts.
A piece of from the Asheville Citizen, titled "Take It out of Politics", tells of Governor Kerr Scott's letter dismissing Dr. T. C. Johnson as commissioner of paroles having been issued the day before the gubernatorial primary, removing any hint that it was vengeance for the loss by Governor Scott's candidate for the gubernatorial nomination, Hubert Olive, and the support by Dr. Johnson of the victorious candidate, William B. Umstead. But, it adds, that fact would not remove the "political odor" from the dismissal.
It suggests taking politics completely from this sensitive office, as the commissioner of paroles ought be a person trained in sociological casework and penology, and a practicing professional in those fields, not a political appointee, subject to gubernatorial pressure. It suggests that the State had managed to make a mess of parole practices and prison administration, and that the efforts of some able men, including some presently in office, had not spared the State a poor reputation in those fields. The position ought be a career one with tenure determined by the General Assembly. That was the only way practically to eliminate politics from it. It concludes that paroles unwisely granted or granted without scientific application of the parole theory could only mock the processes of justice.
Drew Pearson tells of the Army having hushed it up, but that the two key generals in the Koje Island prison camp fiasco had gotten off the hook with a light reprimand, and that it was only by direct order of new U.N. supreme commander, General Mark Clark, that the reprimand was withdrawn and Brig. Generals Francis Dodd and Charles Colson, successive commanders at the camp when General Dodd had been taken hostage by the prisoners, had been demoted to colonels. General Colson had agreed to concessions objectionable to the Pentagon in gaining the release of General Dodd, but the Army had been prepared to whitewash the matter until the intervention of General Clark.
Mr. Pearson comments that the Army was always quick to discipline enlisted men, slower to discipline junior officers but practically never undertook drastic action against the high brass, thus the reprimand.
Evita Peron, the wife of the Argentine dictator, was dying of cancer. A former cabaret performer, she had risen to capture the love of the Argentine lower classes and the hate of the upper classes. She had been warned by doctors that she could not last through the summer. The diplomats in Latin America were coolly calculating what the effect would be of her death on revolution and war. Few Argentines were aware of her condition, and when they became aware of it with her eventual death, part of the power of dictator Juan would disappear. It was being speculated that he might at that point depart the country and live abroad or that the military, which had long hated Evita and her labor following, might seize the opportunity to revolt. Seldom had the fate of a country been so wrapped up in a woman.
The oil lobbyists were desperately seeking to defeat the President's recent veto of the tidelands oil bill, giving back the tidelands to the states. There had been promises of large campaign contributions in the Senate cloakrooms. Things were so tight on the pending override vote that Senator Joseph O'Mahoney, seeking to uphold the President's veto, had cabled his Democratic colleague, Senator James Murray of Montana, to rush back from Europe to help hold the line against override. The showdown vote was expected the following Tuesday. The original bill had passed the Senate by a 50 to 35 vote, not enough for the two-thirds override. But the pressure being exerted by the oil lobby against Senators either to reverse their votes or leave town when the vote was taken was significant.
Raymond Moley, in the sixth in his
series of 12 articles abstracted from his 1952 book, How To Keep
Our Liberty: A Program for Political Action, tells of this and
the previous piece being a distillation of the longest and hardest to
write chapter of his book, designed to answer the New Deal and Fair
Deal question to their critics as to what they would do different. He
submits his answer as the platform for a national conservative party,
based on the 18 principles of economic liberty
Second, he suggests "more cooperative rather than government health care". That's fine, of course, as long as the cooperative cooperates in keeping health care costs reasonable. But, inevitably, greed sets in as the big drug companies enter the picture.
He also advocates returning the taxation sources to the states, "stolen" through the years by the Federal Government, sharing of control and conservation of natural resources between the states and the Federal Government, taking a "constructive approach" to civil rights through regional meetings of governors rather than Federal action, that Federal anti-lynching legislation was obsolete as lynching as a practice had practically disappeared—thanks, he might note, first, to the intervention of the war when men were cast alongside men of different races to fight against a common enemy, and afterward, when some chafed at the new economic competition from the black population, both in the big cities of the North and in the rural South, to vigorous action by the Truman Justice Department, entering the picture where state and local officials cast either a blind or at least indifferent eye to the need for vigorous enforcement and prosecutions, especially where the good ol' boy police chief and his officers, sheriff and his deputies, were involved in the transgressions—, and, finally, that the principle toward which agricultural policy ought aim should be a "free market", removing Government supports and benefits—so as to repeat the debacle of the Depression years, and, with those socialistic Henry Wallace Federal regulations supplanted by relaxed state regulations on conservation, a revisit, in time probably, to the Dust Bowl era of the latter Thirties, leading to the Okie migration westward, ho, becoming such a scourge to the California economy and state welfare system that economic means testing had to be implemented at the state border. It'll be wonderful. Call it the Grapes Society.
Bet you can't wait for Monday, when
you can read five more of his enumerated suggestions for achieving
free enterprise, in response to the New Deal and Fair Deal. All of it
had worked so well in the 1920's and early Thirties. It has that
return to the old lazy, hazy, crazy days
But never mind. You can read it.
Barry Goldwater, incidentally, would
defeat Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland in the November race
for the Senate in Arizona. Wethinks he must have been reading
Here's a suggestion, solving two problems at once, prison overcrowding and the defense budget. Either employ the license-plate shop workers at the rocket science laboratories, or accuse all of the top nuclear physicists and rocket-builders of treasonable espionage with some other country, and then give them a choice of making license plates or working for free, on home-furlough, at their old jobs for the next twenty to thirty years, depending on good behavior and work credits. Problem of high taxes and inflation instantly solved. Keep up with the Rooskies with very little overhead beyond materials costs.
Marquis Childs, in Abilene, Kans.,
contrasts the town in which General Eisenhower had come of age before
departing at age 17 for West Point, with the château outside
Paris which had been his headquarters until recently, while supreme
commander of NATO for a year and a half. The General understood the
difficulty in erecting a bridge
Mr. Childs perceives the General as being a little tentative at this point, greeting people with surprise when they greeted him with outstretched hands and broad smiles, a departure from his military life where everything was regulated and labeled and members of a reception committee for a military man stepping from a plane had been identified and arranged by rank, each knowing his precise place in the ceremony. Now, the greeters came forward in a mass. He finds the General an adaptable man, as shown in the various phases of his career.
His speech on Wednesday evening to a nationwide television audience had been cautious and even a bit timid regarding his new political side, coming close to its intended non-political nature. If his principles expressed sounded like platitudes, then, he thinks, the General would undoubtedly say that the country had become too cynical and too far removed from the meaning of those principles. He said that he was against inflation, overcentralization of government, and taxes which were so high as to be nearly confiscatory. Yet, at several points in the speech, he delivered a broad outline of the positions which would separate him from the others running for the Republican nomination, as well from the Truman Administration.
General MacArthur, and to a lesser extent, Senator Taft, belittled the external threat of Communist aggression, instead stressing the internal threat of both inflation and Communist infiltration. But General Eisenhower had indicated that the citizens needed to be alert to both forms of danger. He protested secret diplomacy, as that which had surrounded Yalta in February, 1945. The political emphasis of his speech was strongest regarding the dangers from incompetence and corruption when a party was too long in power.
This speech had been a trial, and
large areas of his policy stands remained to be defined with greater
clarity and force. Pressure was building for him to do so, with
almost everyone with access to him recommending a speech to the South
in the South
He concludes that the atmosphere in Abilene had been friendly and warm, with little or no hint of the fierce antagonism which had characterized the remarkably close Republican race for the nomination. The crowds had been in a holiday mood in spite of the rain and thunder. "This was their boy; their hero. The next step onto political terrain is likely to be rougher and tougher."
The ultimate question may be how you're going to get his golf-cleat marks out of the floor of the White House when he vacates in 1961.
Framed Edition
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