The Last Word

What did Douglas MacArthur say to Chiang Kaishek?

Harry Truman certainly wished he knew, and so did the State Department and the Pentagon. They did not even know about the general's flying trip to the Chinese Nationalist capital on Formosa (TIME, Aug. 7) until he made it. And while they were belatedly and reluctantly beginning to warm up--by degrees--to the Nationalists, they looked in their newspapers and read of diplomatic gallantries between MacArthur and Mme. Chiang and fervid comrades-in-arms exchanges between MacArthur and the Generalissimo.

MacArthur's own version of what went on, when it came, told less than the papers. "It was so sketchy that you can't dignify it by calling it a report," snorted a White House intimate. "The President knows that MacArthur flew down to Formosa, and that MacArthur and Chiang discussed the defense of Formosa and Chiang's re-offer of three Chinese Nationalist divisions--and that's all he knows."

And since Douglas MacArthur is not the kind of man that Washington lightly orders around, or remonstrates with, there were anxious meetings at the White House. The President profoundly admires MacArthur as a general, said the White House man, but believes that political and diplomatic decisions affecting the U.S. should be made in Washington, not Tokyo. Finally, on short notice, quiet, slender Averell Harriman, the President's new foreign affairs troubleshooter, was hustled off by plane to Tokyo. He was to tell the general to keep the President better informed, and on non-military matters to make recommendations, not decisions.

While Harriman was still air-bound, U.S. newspapers blossomed with Tokyo stories quoting a "reliable source" on what MacArthur would have to tell him. It was a cogent last word: 1) the Korean war would be useless if the U.S. did not fight Communism wherever it arose in Asia; 2) this meant backing Chiang's Nationalists, the British in Hong Kong, and the anti-Communists of Indo-China, Siam and Burma; 3) anything less than this firm, determined action would invite Communism to sweep over all of Asia.

After the first day's conferences, the same "reliable source" added that Harriman and the general were "pretty much in agreement." Then Averell Harriman pushed on to Korea, where the general's men took him up to the front.

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