THE PEOPLE: The Great Debate

The unfamiliar and doomlike atmosphere of the Korean crisis stirred up a familiar U.S. reaction: many a citizen, great & small, thought that he knew just what ought to be done about it:

¶ Two members of Montana’s Roosevelt County (pop. 9,550) draft board announced that they were unwilling to draft men until the U.S. guaranteed to use the atomic bomb. Selective Service Director Lewis B. Hershey promptly suspended them.

¶ National commanders of four veterans’ groups (American Legion, V.F.W., Disabled American Veterans and Amvets) wrote President Truman a joint letter urging him to give General Douglas MacArthur full authority to bomb Manchurian bases.

¶ Brash Russell Birdwell, pressagent, bought a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter to clobber Britain’s Socialist Prime Minister Clement Attlee in plain view of impressionable movie moguls. “He conies—this socialist of a beggar government . . . with an umbrella borrowed from Chamberlain to warn the President that we must withdraw from Korea—to hell with our brave kids . . . and to invite butchers of our wounded boys to seats at the U.N. . . . America will go it alone!” The British consul-general in Los Angeles wrote a letter in reply to suggest politely that Birdwell keep cool and to ask, “Can he cite a single instance in which Britain pulled out and left her allies to bear the brunt of battle?”

¶ Stooped, fierce-eyed old Cordell Hull said that he felt exactly the same about the “situation today” as he did when he dressed down Japanese peace emissaries after the attack at Pearl Harbor.

¶ G.O.P. Presidential Aspirant Harold Stassen urged the U.N. to demand that the Chinese Communists cease fire in Korea, and to A-bomb targets in China if they refused.

¶ Evangelist Billy Graham suggested that “Mr. Truman and Mr. Attlee . . . hold a little prayer meeting, telling God ‘We don’t know where to turn.’ ”

¶ Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Alexander Wiley asked the State Department to find out what could be done about arresting Russia’s Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky.

¶ Twenty-two Chicago ministers organized an “eleventh hour, prayer-for-peace vigil,” managed to draw only a few dozen people into the chapel where it was held. But after Disc Jockey Martin Block put a rabbi, a priest and a Protestant minister on his program for 15 minutes of prayer for peace, he was able to announce that the switchboard at Manhattan’s station WNEW “lit up like a Christmas tree.”