Soldier's Return

A husky C-54 transport nosed through the morning haze over Washington National Airport one day last week and coasted to a landing. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson helped crewmen push a big aluminum ramp up to the plane while the rest of the Pentagon's top brass gathered round. A smartly uniformed honor guard snapped to salute, four 105-mm. guns boomed a 17-gun salute. General Lucius D. Clay hopped out and looked about him with the fixed smile and nervous glance of a man who was surprised by all the fuss. After four controversial years in Germany--two of them as U.S. Military Governor--Lucius Clay had come home to a hero's welcome.

A Four-Star Ovation. Washington unrolled its plushiest red carpet for the wan, wiry veteran of the cold war. At the airport Louis Johnson bundled him into a long, black Cadillac and whisked him off to the White House. There, in the sunlight of the presidential rose garden; President Truman pinned a second Oak Leaf Cluster on the riband of General Clay's Distinguished Service Medal and read a praise-packed citation he had written himself. "General Clay," intoned the President, ". . . proved himself not only a soldier in the finest tradition . . . not only an administrator of rare skill, but a statesman of the highest order . . ."

On Capitol Hill, where the Senate later approved 52-year-old Soldier Clay's retirement as a four-star general (at $6,600 a year), there were more salutes. Clay addressed both Houses of Congress, stood somberly and half-smiling as Representatives and Senators gave him standing ovations (his father, Alexander Stephen Clay was a U.S. Senator from 1897 to 1910). A few minutes later General Clay sat in a Pentagon press conference, firing answers at newsmen as fast as they could write them down. (Would Germany ally herself with Russia? ". . . Only if the Western powers [were] unwilling to accept Germany back into the community of nations." The future of East-West relations? "I don't think we should ever forget that this is a real struggle between democracy and communism--and that it is going to continue for many years.")

A Final Flourish. The next day General Clay climbed nervously into an open convertible, sat himself on the top of the back seat and rolled slowly up Broadway to receive Manhattan's traditional hero's welcome--the cheers of 250,000, a bath of ticker tape and confetti and a key to the city from Mayor William O'Dwyer.

Clay's home town of Marietta, Ga. would add the flourishes this week with a big barbecue and public reception. Then Lucius Clay, retired after 32 years of service, would be able to do what he's wanted to do for a long time--"just . . . get in an automobile and go somewhere."

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