The Charlotte News
Tuesday, June 23, 1953
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports, via Robert B. Tuckman, that South Korean President Syngman Rhee, following two days of meetings with U.N. supreme commander General Mark Clark, seeking to obtain his cooperation in the truce, demanded, in the course of a CBS interview, additional truce terms this date, which a U.S. Embassy source in Seoul said were "totally unacceptable to the U.N. Command". The new terms included a mutual security pact with the U.S., simultaneous withdrawal of both U.N. and Chinese forces from Korea, and resumption of the war if post-armistice conference talks got nowhere within the allotted 90 days following the truce, presumably including implicitly the unification of Korea. He again stated that the terms had to be met or Korea would depart the U.N. Command and go it alone. He said that the U.N. Command ought thank him for releasing the 27,000 anti-Communist North Korean prisoners of war, rather than condemning him as a violator of the original U.N. agreement when committing to the war in early July, 1950, following the North Korean attack on South Korea. He complained that no one had questioned the violation of international law by the Communists toward the allied prisoners of war, but that everyone was "brave to condemn" him as a violator, and that he could not understand the inconsistency.
The U.N. P.O.W. command announced this night that U.S. troops had replaced all South Korean guards at mainland prison camps holding anti-Communist Korean prisoners of war, with the last remaining South Korean guards having been replaced the previous day. South Korean guards were still being utilized in one camp where anti-Communist Chinese prisoners were being held, as well as guarding Communist Chinese and Communist North Korean prisoners who had not indicated a desire against repatriation to their Communist homelands.
Senator McCarthy said this date that he planned additional public hearings to determine whether some authors, whose books were still in the overseas libraries of the State Department's Information Service, had Communist affiliations. He said that he did not feel that he had fully developed a cross-section of the Communist authors whose books would be quoted in a forthcoming subcommittee report, and therefore had ordered the suspended hearings resumed. He said that his chief counsel for the subcommittee, Roy Cohn, was in New York arranging to have authors subpoenaed. He was also seeking to have recalled a State Department propaganda specialist bound for Japan, seeking to subpoena him before the subcommittee, wishing him to explain why he had ordered the Voice of America propaganda programs beamed to Korea, quoting editorials critical of President Rhee's conduct in the 1952 Korean election campaign, prompting President Rhee to ban U.S. propaganda from Korean radio.
The New York Times, following a survey of such Information Service libraries in 20 foreign capitals, reported the previous day that several hundred books by more than 40 authors had been removed from the shelves, after six confidential directives had been issued by the State Department since February 19, with interpretation of those orders having varied from capital to capital. The newspaper account had listed Lillian Hellman, Clarence Streit, Langston Hughes, Walter Duranty, Dashiell Hammett, Howard Fast and Edgar Snow as being among the better-known authors whose works had been removed from the libraries. It had found only one such library, in Tokyo, where it was admitted that many of the books and periodicals had actually been burned or scrapped for pulp. Only 16 authors had been listed specifically by the State Department in its orders.
In West Berlin, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, under black banners of mourning for the dead in East Germany's riots of the prior week, said that the period of totalitarian rule over Germans had passed, and hailed the "martyrs of freedom" who had arisen against Communism in the Eastern Zone, where hunger was reported adding to its misery. Chancellor Adenauer had lionized the protesters by saying, "With weapons, an unarmed, defenseless people can be beaten to the ground, but their will, their determination, will never bow." Police estimated that more than 50,000 persons had shown up before the entrance to City Hall to hear the memorial service.
Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters that Republican Senators, in a closed-door meeting this date, determined to give the President a free hand in spending foreign aid money. The 5.3 billion dollar foreign aid authorization bill reported to the full Senate by the Committee contained a provision that the President could transfer up to 10 percent of the funds allocated to a specific area or for a specific program. Senator Wiley said that he would support an amendment to the bill which would expand that authority to an unlimited amount. The full Senate was scheduled to begin debate on the measure the following week. The House had authorized just under five billion dollars for the purpose. The Administration had sought 5.47 billion dollars for the foreign aid budget.
The Senate rejected by a vote of 47 to 42 the Administration's economic controls bill this date, with 43 Democrats joining three Republicans and an independent, Senator Wayne Morse, in a move to return the bill to a reconciliation conference with the House.
General Hoyt Vandenberg, retiring chief of staff of the Air Force, said this date before the annual convention of Kiwanis International in New York, that the Air Force was handicapped by a shortage of personnel, "more serious than any shortage of money or of planes". He said that the Air Force and other branches of service had been required to cut manpower while at the same time increasing strength in units. The following year, while increasing the Air Force by about ten wings, they were expected to reduce manpower by 20,000, requiring that the Air Force turn away about 9,000 volunteers per month as it accepted 3,000, causing it to lose over the course of the ensuing two years trained men almost as fast as it was able to recruit untrained men, possibly amounting to a third of its entire strength. No one could predict, he said, what would happen to the Air Force if such restrictions were not lifted.
The House Judiciary Committee this date determined in an executive session not to subpoena Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark for questioning by a subcommittee, regarding his time as Attorney General between 1945 and 1949, to have been in relation particularly to the Kansas City vote-fraud case and other matters.
A House Judiciary subcommittee this date set hearings for the following Tuesday on a resolution introduced by Representative William Wheeler of Georgia to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas for "high crimes and misdemeanors", a resolution which had been introduced shortly after Justice Douglas, the prior Wednesday, had issued a stay of the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a stay which was overturned two days later by a 6 to 3 vote of the Court, regarding the issue of whether the 1946 Atomic Energy Act penalty provisions had superseded the 1917 Espionage Act penalty provisions, under which the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death after having been convicted under the latter Act for providing the Soviets with critical atomic bomb secrets, the Rosenbergs having been executed the prior Friday night following the noon Court ruling. The Court had ruled that the question raised was not significant, as the 1946 Act expressed no Congressional intent to supersede the earlier Act, and that, in any event, the acts for which the Rosenbergs were principally prosecuted had occurred in 1944-45, prior to passage of the 1946 Act. Mr. Wheeler needed his head examined.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this date that the cost of living index rose between mid-April and mid-May by three-tenths of a percent, to 114 percent of the 1947-49 average, the third straight month it had risen. The report indicated that all major living cost items showed slight increases, except transportation, which had not changed. The rise was nine-tenths of a percent higher than in May of the previous year and 12 percent above June, 1950, at the beginning of the Korean War. The largest increases occurred in food prices, rising a half of a percent, and medical care, rising by four-tenths of a percent.
In London, John Christie, the clerk accused of murdering several women, including his wife, and burying some of them in his backyard and others in a secret space behind his kitchen, testified before a jury in the Old Bailey court this date that he might have killed more than the seven women admitted by his defense counsel in opening statement. He said that he was not certain. He had entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, with his attorney declaring this date that he was as "mad as a March hare". The lone murder charge against him at the current trial pertained to his wife, but his confession of strangling or gassing of six other younger women in the course of mad sex orgies beginning in 1943 when he had been a wartime special policeman, had been read to the jury this date. One of the victims had been the wife of the man whom Mr. Christie's testimony had helped to send to the gallows four years earlier. The 19-year old man had been sentenced to death for the killing of his baby daughter, who had died during the course of an abortion—for which, it turned out, Mr. Christie had been hired by the young husband to perform, killing the wife in the process. Two of the victims had been London playgirls killed in 1943, their skeletons having been found in Mr. Christie's garden. The defendant appeared to be in a daze as he testified, saying, in reply to many questions, that he could not recall the events.
In Oklahoma City, a broken water pipe at the home of a judge had flooded his lawn, ordinarily not a major problem, but for the fact that Oklahoma City was in the middle of a drought and the water supply was disappearing, causing lawn watering to be banned for the summer by local ordinance. Thus, the advice communicated from his awakened wife had caused the judge to leap from the bed and into his car in the early morning and race to obtain a plumber, who gave the judge the proper tool to cut off his water supply. As he was attempting to do so, however, he remembered another city ordinance specifying that only a plumber or water department employee could cut off the city water supply, thus put the wrench aside and called the water department, as neighbors began to notice his shimmering lawn full of water as they drove past on their way to work. Eventually, a person from the water department shut off the water. The judge was a little more lenient than normal with those defendants appearing before him during the afternoon session of court, as he said he had discovered first-hand what it meant to be caught in a web of circumstantial evidence.
He should have resorted to the old balancing test between the public good and strict adherence to city ordinances, and shut off the water, just as when a fire department has to resort to blowing up residential structures to prevent the spread of a fire, as during the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. No one would have raised any eyebrows if explained properly. Which would you rather have, strict adherence to an ordinance, apparently written too strictly without regard to emergencies, or waste of precious city water during a drought? It is always well to resort to native common sense in such situations, rather than being too strictly adherent to ordinances written for ordinary situations.
In Buffalo, N.Y., a 25-year old printing salesman had appeared in court the previous day, explaining that a construction barrier at a busy intersection had resulted in heavy traffic which blocked a continuous view of the traffic light, forcing him, to get around the barrier, to merge into a single line of traffic, such that the last time he had seen the light, it was green and so he proceeded. A motorcycle officer gave him a ticket, however, for running a red light. The defendant had returned to the scene with his camera and taken a color motion picture showing other motorists doing what he had done, and the judge dismissed the case. The film for the camera had cost him $10, the same as the fine for running the red light.
Common sense…
As pictured, former President Truman
returned to Washington
On the editorial page, "Contradictory Signs in Korea" indicates that most Americans admired a fighter such as South Korean President Syngman Rhee and that many would agree with his action in freeing the North Korean prisoners who did not wish to be repatriated. But at the same time, it was obvious that the President had harmed the imminent truce by his actions, making it impossible for the U.N. Command to carry out the agreements made during many months of negotiations at the truce talks, supplying the Communists with a pretext for calling off the truce, while raising doubts as to the permanence of any armistice which might finally be signed.
It suggests that President Rhee was not a rational man, for if he had been, he would have understood that his actions placed him in a dilemma, potentially causing the free world to wash its hands of him and leave South Korea in waste and ruin, to exist without outside military help, food, medicine and funds for rehabilitation. While that would not occur without more provocation, the patience of the free world was not unlimited.
There was, however, reason to believe that Communist China and perhaps Russia wanted a respite from the Korean War so badly that they would arrange an armistice regardless of this latest issue.
It says that it points out the contradictory signs by way of emphasis that it was time for cooler heads among the American people and that difficult foreign problems did not vanish merely by a change of Administrations, that Secretary of State Dulles might find it as hard to effect a solution as had Secretary of State Acheson, and that the only wise course for the American people was to prepare themselves to give President Eisenhower more support than they had ever given to President Truman regarding a solution to the Korean impasse.
"Diplomas, Yes—But Few Jobs" indicates that enrollment in black colleges was up 2,500 percent over 1930, according to a recent issue of Time, a statistic in which all Americans could take pride. College enrollment by black students 23 years earlier had been very small, and so the enrollment of only a few thousand could dramatically increase the statistical formulation. Nevertheless, the increased enrollment was remarkable. But because of the difficulties for black graduates in obtaining jobs in their chosen fields of professional training, there was an increasing amount of underemployment.
Of every 100 college-trained black men and women who remained in the South, nearly 60 percent took civil service examinations, entering Federal Government service, as it was easier to obtain those jobs than in private industry or in state or local governments. Many of those Federal jobs did not require the skills possessed by the applicant. Of 107 blacks who had graduated from a North Carolina college in 1949, 44 had left the state, most having gone north, and of those who had remained, 10 were working in semi-skilled jobs as waiters, Pullman-car porters and the like. Most of the remainder worked for the Federal Government, or in teaching or the ministry. Over 80 percent of back policemen, postmen and post office clerks in the state were college graduates. Of white workers in the same categories, only 40 percent had completed high school.
It suggests that there was more need for a solution to this uneconomic use of skills trained by the state than there was for applause regarding increased black college enrollment.
"A Liberal Is a Liberal Is a Liberal" finds that political definitions in the country were being abused, such as in the recent attempt to redefine "reactionaries" by the Chamber of Commerce weekly, Washington Report. Historically, a reactionary in the United States was a person of the extreme right, but the Report had contended that the definition was one who sought "to undo political progress". It considered giving away ownership of offshore oil to the states and releasing atomic power to private enterprise to be political progress, and thus the opponents of those proposals became "reactionaries".
A similar effort had been made to redefine "liberal", generally applied in recent years to Northern Democrats and enlightened Republicans, angering some of the right-wingers who wanted to be called liberal as well. Thus, they had begun to refer to that latter group as "liberals", in quotation marks. As a further complicating factor, someone had created the term "McLiberal", to denote, among old-fashioned reactionaries who deplored anything which had occurred since the days of William McKinley, anyone who favored the New Deal, collectivism, etc. By adding quotation marks or the prefix "Mc", besides being confusing and silly, two interpretations were drawn of the liberal, neither of which fit the historical concept.
It finds that the old terms were
good enough, that reactionaries remained "right wing rascals, as
opposed to the radicals of the left wing", and that in between
were the liberals and conservatives, who maintained order
A piece from the Salisbury Post,
titled "Gadget for Nervous", indicates a new invention of a
reclining chair which vibrated at the push of a button, finding that
any mechanically-minded man within Salisbury could attach a motor to
a rocking
It cautions, however, that a girl
should not sit in such a chair during the course of a proposal, as
her shaking head might discourage her swain, "and proposals are
hard to wangle in these shaky
Drew Pearson indicates that as one wandered through the relics of ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt, one had to wonder why those empires had passed from the scene and whether America's leadership would also pass. The U.S. had won the war and kept the Western world free after the peace, as leaders of the free world. But, he asks, whether it could continue against a shrewd, ruthless nation controlling the greatest land mass in the world. Historians suggested that the great empires of the past had been overthrown because they had vacillated, using unreasonable police power which turned public opinion against them, and because they had put local interest ahead of the wider international interest. He proceeds to examine U.S. leadership of the free world.
For years, the U.S. had talked about free elections in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the other Soviet satellites, that the people would ultimately rise up against the Soviet masters. Now they were beginning to do so, as evidenced by the riots in East Berlin by the workers the prior week, meeting Russian tanks with no more than sticks, stones and their bare hands. Now, Czech workers were rioting in the streets of Pilsen. But the U.S., meanwhile, sat by doing nothing, letting Russia take the initiative with its phony peace movement, when U.S. leadership could step forward with a demand for free elections in those satellite countries. The Yalta agreement had required that such free elections take place, and the U.N. could act as the supervisory power to ensure that they were fair. Such a vote would result in casting off Communism, and the U.S. could reassert its leadership by demanding repeatedly such free elections until results were achieved.
Second, the U.S. ought demand that a United States of Europe be created. He suggests that one of the great mistakes of the Truman Administration was not making the Marshall Plan dependent on the economic integration of the European governments and the eventual creation of such a federation within Europe. Europe's economic ills bred war and the small countries of Europe could not exist independently, any more than could Detroit if it sold automobiles only within the state of Michigan. There was no point in building new factories in France and Italy merely to handle their domestic markets. Such markets needed to be integrated, and when the East European satellite states were to cast off the yoke of Communism, they would need to be provided a chance to fit their agricultural economies into an industrial economy of Western Europe, to form a natural partnership. The late Count Sforza, Foreign Minister of Italy, had emphasized that point to Mr. Pearson in 1947, indicating that unless the U.S. knocked the heads together of the European countries by use of the Marshall Plan as leverage, a United States of Europe, essential to the salvation of the Continent, would not be achieved. Such could still be accomplished by way of the Mutual Security Aid program, and many Europeans had come to the same conclusion, only in need of vigorous support and leadership by the U.S.
Third, there needed to be a demand for lifting the Iron Curtain, to allow residents of the free world to visit. Recently, Ambassador to Moscow Charles Bohlen had cabled the State Department that Russia was about to take the initiative by proposing an exchange of students, scholars and scientists, as a slight lifting of the Iron Curtain. That should provide the cue for the U.S. to seize that initiative and propose such an exchange. Mr. Pearson suggests that the key to peace was a lifting of the Iron Curtain, and that the reasons it had not occurred was because the Kremlin feared contact with the outside world, that if the people living behind the Iron Curtain became familiar with the friendship, progress and living standards of the West, there would be revolt from within. He urges, therefore, making that demand and to continue making it.
Joseph & Stewart Alsop discuss the prefix "mega" as in "megadeath", "megaton" and "megabuck", describing the new age as a function of millions of various things. They assert that if a truce were to come in Korea, it would likely be remembered as "the last serious war on something resembling a human scale". They indicate that on a quiet day on the Korean front, "settling nothing, leading nowhere", the use of ammunition was perhaps ten times that of Napoleon's artillery at Austerlitz. Yet, the Korean War remained on a scale which was "wholly human".
They state that one of the two of them had gone from the "inhuman, gigantic intricacies of world politics to the dusty, doubtful front in Korea", finding the latter nearly refreshing. For one could cheer the men as they met a great challenge and not as mere "automata who had somehow escaped the blind brutality of destiny." Those who died could be remembered as men, no different from those who had fallen in other wars in past centuries.
But in the peace, mere men and soldiers would hardly count, as the heroes of the war, from the Medal of Honor winner down to the mechanics at the airfields, would be merged, lost and forgotten in the "great mass of people who did not know about megatons and megabucks and megadeaths". The fact, they indicate, that such words had become part of the jargon of a few hundred men who understood them, spoke volumes of the time and condition. Such "inhuman inflation" had begun long before the first detonation of the atomic bomb in July, 1945, with both Europe and America having been rocked with indignation in the early 1890's, when George Kennan, great uncle of the George Kennan of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations who had developed the policy of containment vis-à-vis the Communists, had reported on the plight of the Russian political exiles in Siberia, of whom there were less than 400 before the turn of the century. By the early Thirties, his great-nephew could report from Moscow that political exiles numbered in the millions. He could have reported that there were presently "at least ten megaslaves" under the observation of the Soviet political police. With such gargantuan numbers, it was hard to feel the same indignation aroused by the great-uncle's stories.
They posit that it was not only the loss of the power to feel which was a danger, but also the loss of power to understand, threatening the foundations of free societies. As Dr. Robert Oppenheimer had recently remarked, "I do not think a country like ours can survive for very long if we are afraid of the people." He had been, in effect, pleading with his fellow nuclear physicists to impart their knowledge to the people, to conquer that increasing failure to understand. But the Alsops indicate that it was too much for which to hope and that the large body of the people would go on not knowing, while those who did know would carry on their private conversations about the destiny of the rest of the people.
"For such as these, a megadeath has lost all human meaning, being reduced to a mere statistic and papers so top-secret that they are carried from office to office in locked briefcases by men of the rank of Major or over, who are worried by their receding hairlines and the doubts about their promotions caused by their dull assignment."
James Marlow addresses the rioting in East Germany the prior week, indicating that it had caused the Russian Communist masters major damage, if only in terms of propaganda, while also complicating matters for the Western Allies. After the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, the Russians had talked of peace and suggested a relaxation of their grip in some of the satellite nations. They had even indicated a new direction in East Germany by shifting their control from military to civilian hands. There had been for long discontent among the East Germans with Communist rule, to which testimony was provided daily by the flow of refugees to West Germany.
The workers' rebellion of the previous week in East Berlin had been the result of demands for lower work schedules, lower consumer prices, freedom for political prisoners, free elections, and reunification of Germany. There was fierce hatred of the Russians within East Germany, and the demonstrations were the largest against Russian control of the satellites since World War II had ended and the Russian occupation had begun. (Mr. Marlow does not mention it, as the times made it quite impolitic to to do so, but it must be borne in mind that there had also been reported at the time some resurgence in Germany of intense nationalism in the ugly form of its predecessor, Nazism, and there is no reason not to believe that some of the rioting and rebellion against the Soviet rulers was not being fueled by the old Nazis who hoped for revivification of the Nazi Party, not intended to suggest thereby that the Communist rule in the Eastern Zone was at all acceptable by people truly desirous of freedom, though the controls instituted by the Communists had begun with their punitive and deterrent aspects to put down and keep down such a resurgence of Nazism, which had resulted, after all, in the loss of innumerable numbers of Russians, placed in the several millions, during the Nazi invasion of Russia and afterward to the end of the war in Europe.)
Mr. Marlow continues that after the Western Allies had set up the West German Republic, the Russians had created a puppet East German government, while millions of Germans longed for a reunited country. But for a free, independent, united Germany to be linked with the West would be the greatest economic and military barrier to any Russian moves against Western Europe, and so it was no wonder that the Communists had delayed agreements to allow Germans free elections to set up a single, united government.
Query whether, just as John Foster Dulles in 1939 had gone about the United States proclaiming Nazi Germany as the great bulwark against the aggression by Communists of the Soviet Union, was it not now the case, in 1953, that Soviet control of East Germany, which included the old Prussian Junkers, the military class which had formed the heart of the Nazi military might, was, in an odd way, the great bulwark against any resurgence of Nazism or a similar type of Fascism in East Germany, while serving as such a contrast to the West Germans to cause them, along with the refugees who sought the West from East Germany, to prize freedom and democracy over totalitarian rule, thus setting up a kind of double bulwark against the spread of totalitarianism to Western Europe? It is complicated, and cannot be divided by black and white, East and West, or by a wall—not unlike present times in Amurica, where, of late, there have been too many tourists of various stripes out in the streets of America's cities, especially in Portland. Go home and think.
A letter writer finds that the letters which had opposed teaching of the Bible in the public schools had been inconsistent, asking whether those persons would favor removal of the slogan "In God We Trust" from currency, that one of the weaker arguments they had set forth was that teaching of the Bible would cause those not taking the course to have an inferiority complex for not going along with the majority. He suggests that it would be the same for students not participating in sports.
You do not catch the ball very well.
It is not an "inferiority complex" of which those who were
knowledgeable on the subject complained, but rather peer pressure
causing those not participating to participate in religious
instruction, which might very well conflict with their own
traditional training at home and in church, causing confusion, when
religious training was plentifully available in the community within
every sort of church for those who wanted it. And, as a matter of
fact, if that phrase on U.S. currency indicates symbolically that the
"God" to which it refers is the "Almighty Dollar",
the "God of Mammon", then, yes, we do favor removing it
A letter writer suggests that the talk of separation of church and state had been misinterpreted and misunderstood, that since God created each person, as well as the world and everything in it, it was not possible to separate the people from the Commandments and the Scriptures. She finds that nowhere in the Constitution were the people denied the right to choose any faith or no faith, and that there were many children who would never hear of God and the Scriptures unless they were taught it in the public schools.
That's just some more of that hogwash, and you very well know it in a town like Charlotte, with plentiful churches. And, you conveniently leave out the Establishment Clause in your Constitutional analysis. You do not play ball very well either.
A letter writer also believes that the Bible study program was salutary and should continue to be taught in the public schools, that the 26 Baptist ministers who had signed a resolution to urge the public schools of the City and County to cease the program were busybodies, and would ultimately come to find the error of their ways and busy themselves just as actively in undoing their proposal.
A letter writer from Mooresville finds that the Establishment Clause had been included in the Constitution to prevent the establishment of a state church which would have to be supported by tax money paid by members of other churches, and that while teaching of the Bible in the public schools was against the letter of the document, it was in accord with its spirit, as the country was founded on faith in God, as the motto on the coinage suggested. This anonymous "Bible Student" points out that quite a few courses were taught at UNC in religion, and it seemed that teaching religion in a high school ought be just as constitutional.
Before you speak, you ought to experience, and actually audit, with the permission of a professor, a course or two in religion at UNC, and understand that they were not teaching religion, but about religion, in terms of its cultural and historical impact, not seeking to indoctrinate students in the texts of the Bible or recommending a particular religion to practice, but rather recounting the threads of philosophy and mythology running through all religions. If religion were taught, as a general matter, in that context within the high schools, then there would be no objection. But the Bible course in question was teaching Protestant Christian religion, not comparative religion, or of the Christian religion in its historical and cultural context. Moreover, there was not offered any courses on other religions along with it as equally available electives. You also do not play ball very well. Go sit on the sidelines awhile and watch others who can play better.
A letter from a couple comments on the vote of June 12 by the Park Road Baptist Church membership to end the Bible study program in the public schools, indicating that, as members of the church, they did not have a chance to vote, state that they would never vote not to teach the Bible in any place, including the schools.
A letter from a black minister, who had written the newspaper several times earlier regarding segregation, finds that the Rosenbergs had been "cruelly sacrificed on the altar of vengeance" after being "convicted in an atmosphere of hysteria created by panic patriots". He believes that there was a reasonable doubt as to their guilt. He opposes the death penalty under any circumstances, and finds the case the "most monstrous travesty of justice" within his memory. "Society has committed a crime worse than murder." He expresses shame at the "collective guilt" for the execution.
A letter from Bob Cherry, Jr.—who appears, by the subject matter and surname, to be related in some manner to the former UNC student, J. R. Cherry, Jr., who, four years earlier, had stirred up a hornet's nest with respect to the German Communist graduate student, studying under a Government-funded Atomic Energy Commission scholarship at UNC—, responds to a letter from Monroe by a writer who had found it sad that "frustrated America" dared to speculate on Communist motives, saying that he was not so sad as he was convinced that the writer was "commissar of Union County double talkers and pseudo-champion of the proletariat". He takes issue with a number of the statements made by the writer, indicating, "As for the Communist part of the world, let its leaders unequivocally prove that they will no longer operate as a gang of insidious, indecent, contemptible thugs or a first class, self-made bunch of what Independence Harry called Drew Pearson!" He concludes that he would fight such people "with the combined strength and violence of a thousand bourgeois!"
As to what "Independence Harry" called Drew Pearson, he refers to the statement of President Truman that Mr. Pearson was an "S.O.B." for having protested outside the Argentinian Embassy in Washington against the pinning by dictator Juan Peron of a medal on the President's military aide, General Harry Vaughan, and General Vaughan's willing acceptance of same. But, Mr. Cherry, don't place too much significance
Incidentally, Mr. Pearson erred in his recollection, in the above-linked "Merry-Go-Round" television interview with the former President from the following September, regarding the date of the Lincoln Day February speech in Wheeling, W. Va., wherein Senator McCarthy began his attacks on various numbers of supposed Communists in the State Department, remembering it as having occurred in 1951. It was actually in 1950, as it was the midterm election year politics which caused the RNC to assign to Senator McCarthy the task of drumming up publicity for the Truman Administration's supposed softness on Communism and failure to weed Communists out of the Government, a random assignment on the Lincoln Day dinner circuit which led to a theretofore little-known Senator becoming forever linked to scurrilous, false attacks on decent, upright public servants and citizens for the sake of political expediency and cultivating notoriety, becoming in the process a new "ism". It was, however, a fairly short ride to the graveyard, rather than to the White House, for the relatively young Senator. Those seeking to cheat their way to the top, stepping on the backs of others in the process, should never forget the historical lesson. Unfortunately, Mr. Nixon did not take enough note of it.
A letter writer advises readers not to be fooled into fascism by the Communist smear, suggesting that there was plenty of fascism within the government, schools and churches, about which Senator McCarthy had said nothing. He quotes from the Bible that one should beware of false prophets in sheep's clothing, while being "ravening wolves", that Senator McCarthy was using the same tactics of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain, that the Senator had sought to smear President Truman and the State Department heads, but that the effort had not succeeded, had also sought to smear Dr. James B. Conant during his confirmation process as the new U.S. High Commissioner of West Germany. He thanks God that there were enough true Republicans and Democrats to protect the character of Dr. Conant and urges Christians to pray for the President and his Cabinet, "that God will protect them and grant them grace and wisdom to do the right thing."
Framed Edition
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