SEPTEMBER 12, 1951
I listened to Murrow’s panel show on the radio last night. He had two retired generals on to talk about Stillwell’s testimony this week in Congress about the troop surge in China. Of course, he had Patton on for the pro-surge party, but I’d never heard of the other guy, a fellow named Eisenhower or Eisenstein … I’m not sure I caught the name right. Patton did his usual entertaining job of grandstanding that was full of poetic fireworks and very apt references to history. Old Eddie Murrow had a real cold fish on his hands with the other guy, though – getting him to talk was like pulling teeth. I don’t know where CBS found him.
Anyway, Murrow started with a very good summary of how things got to this point. He reviewed how Churchill had gotten elected prime minister in 1936 on a platform of warning about German rearmament and treaty violations, his famous speech to the League of Nations about the threat of Nazi poison gas attacks from airplanes, FDR’s support for the “Coalition of the Willing” that had invaded Germany just as Hitler’s army entered Austria in 1938, how the “real” war had been over so quickly; the failure to find the poison gas that Churchill had warned about … Churchill’s unfortunate “mission accomplished” speech to Parliament … FDR’s defeat in 1940 because of the on-going unrest in Germany … how Stalin had taken advantage of all that to support communist takeovers throughout Eastern Europe … Churchill’s election defeat in ’41 … the communist election victory in Germany in ‘44… the Tojo-Stalin Pact … the whole sad story. Even though I’m a real news hound, sometimes I get really tired of how the radio folks just love to go over the whole “quagmire” thing over and over. I’m just glad Roosevelt’s not alive to hear it.
The real highpoint, though, was Patton. Near the end he really tore into Murrow and the other guy. He said that with Soviet and Japanese support for Mao, it was only a matter of time before Russia and Japan divided up all of Asia if we didn’t keep supporting Chiang. He said that “Chiang may be an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.” in that gravelly voice of his. Eisenhower or Eisenhauer (or whatever the guy’s name was) said Patton was just a shill for MacArthur, who everybody knew was going to run for president in ’52.
Boy, Patton made him sorry he’d said that: He said he didn’t care who was running for president, that his friends in the Pentagon told him that Joe Stalin had been working on some kind of new super-bomb, and that he had a bunch of German scientists working on new kinds of airplanes in Siberia that ought to be making people’s blood run cold. You know how much I love that kind of thing. I’ve read about a fellow named Goddard who died a few years ago who said the kinds of thing Patton was talking about really were possible.
Murrow ended up having to take the other side (which he didn’t seem to mind, reliable friend of Uncle Joe that he is), since the Eisenglass fellow seemed to be tongue-tied after that. He said that the intelligence failures that led to the war in Germany ought to make Patton suspicious of his “friends in the Pentagon,” that rumors about Russian super-weapons were just anti-communist paranoia, that Chiang was a corrupt fixer, that the Flying Tigers were a bunch of mercenaries, Patton ought to be ashamed of being a friend to people like Mussolini and that thug DeGaul … the usual litany.
I don’t know. Sometimes I think these people on the radio want Stalin to take over the world. They ignore all the evidence of the prison camps in Russia … what are they called? Gulash, Gulag?
Anyway … it’s late and I need to get to bed. The work of a lawyer is never done. I’ve got a personal injury case going on that’s taking up a lot of my time. The lawyer on the other side, a guy named Dick Nixon, is a real slime bag – classic ambulance chaser. He ran for Congress a few years ago and got beat pretty bad. He’s got a real chip on his shoulder over it. Everything’s a dirty trick with him. Talk about paranoid! Anyway, it’s off to bed with me.
