The Little Man Who Dared

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A White House aide, leafing through a routine sheaf of wire copy from the news ticker, started with surprise. He had come across the report of Joe Martin's speech, made that afternoon in the House, containing General Douglas MacArthur's letter endorsing the employment of Chiang Kai-shek's troops to open a second front in China. The aide rushed in to the President's office. As he read, Harry Truman flushed with anger. As the White House leaked the story later, he made his decision then & there--Thursday, April 5--that Douglas MacArthur must go.

After the Cabinet meeting next day, Truman motioned to Defense Secretary George Marshall and J.C.S. Chairman Omar Bradley (who briefs the Cabinet on the Korean fighting) to stay behind. Truman told them his decision and explained his reasons. Marshall agreed that MacArthur must go, and Bradley added that the Joint Chiefs emphatically felt the same way.

For five days, Truman hugged his secret. The Joint Chiefs held emergency meetings to discuss MacArthur's successor. They decided on Lieut. General Matthew Ridgway, then picked Lieut. General James Van Fleet to replace Ridgway as Eighth Army Commander in Korea. The secret was so closely guarded that* Van Fleet himself, unaware of it, was vacationing on his brother's Florida farm when his appointment to Korea was announced. Monday, Truman saw his congressional leaders and met with the Cabinet, asked opinions of both groups, but told neither what he planned later. Secretary of State Dean Acheson undoubtedly already knew about it, but through the historic week, Acheson, architect of the Asia policy that MacArthur attacked, kept assiduously out of the press and out of sight.

The Order. Just before lunch Tuesday, Harry Truman again saw Marshall, decided with him that the time had come to act. He went to Blair House for lunch, took his usual nap, returned to the White House at 3 o'clock. He summoned Marshall, Bradley, Acheson and Averell Harriman to a final meeting, then told his staff to draw up MacArthur's firing orders --just as the afternoon papers bloomed with headlines from Tokyo: MACARTHUR DEMANDS FREER HAND IN WAR.

The problem was to get Douglas MacArthur fired at a time when Truman's case against the general would hit the public hardest and with the least immediate counterreaction. Classified documents were dug out of files, declassified and checked. One was a Dec. 6 memorandum directing that "officials overseas, including military commanders," were to "clear all but routine statements with their departments and to refrain from direct communications on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines, or other publicity media." Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk hurried over from the State Department, and General Omar Bradley arrived from the Pentagon. By 9:30, the documents and statements were ready and taken over to Blair House. Harry Truman looked them over and signed.

The Announcement. By midnight, stencils had been cut, and Press Secretary Joe Short gave the switchboard orders to summon the regular White House reporters (see PRESS) at 1 a.m. The press got the mimeographed sheets: "With deep regret, I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States Government and of the United Nations in matters pertaining to his official duties ... It is fundamental . . . that military commanders must be governed by the policies and directives issued to them in the manner provided by our laws and the Constitution."

Why the 1 a.m. summons? The White House's hollow explanation was that the timing was for the convenience of the general, since it was then midafternoon in Tokyo. But that wasn't the real reason at all: the news had been timed to make the morning newspapers, and catch the Republicans in bed.

As the reporters scrambled for their phones to flash the news to an unsuspecting world, Blair House was dark. Harry Truman had gone to bed.

In Tokyo, just a little after 3 o'clock in the afternoon, General Douglas MacArthur was eating a chicken leg at a late lunch when an aide handed him a note. It was a radio news flash. Holding the drumstick in one hand and the note in the other, MacArthur read the news. His mouth opened in astonishment. Abruptly, the luncheon ended. It was 20 minutes later that he got the official dispatch informing him of the President's decision.*

After Six Years. Seldom had a more unpopular man fired a more popular one. Douglas MacArthur was the personification of the big man, with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership, with the few critics who distrust and fear a big man's dominating ways. Harry Truman was almost a professional little man, with the admirers who like the little man's courage, with the many critics who despise a little man's inadequacies. Harry Truman, completing his sixth year as President, last week had written a record of courage in crises--in enunciating the Truman Doctrine against the Communist threat in Greece, in his firmness over the Berlin blockade, in the way he rallied his party and won the 1948 election, in his quick decision to counter the Korean aggression. But the six years had provided increasing evidence of shabby politicking and corruption in his day-to-day administration, of doubts about his State Department, and cumulative distaste for his careless government-by-crony.

Last week as he faced his difficult decision, Harry Truman knew that he and his Administration were threatened by long-smoldering rancor just waiting to burst into angry flames.

Congressional probers were still unearthing new evidence of skulduggery in the RFC. His leadership in Congress was more scorned than effective. The public had an impression of a petulant, irascible President who stubbornly protected shoddy friends, a man who had grown too touchy to make judicious decisions, who failed to give the nation any clear leadership in these challenging times, whose Asia policy seemed to combine a kind of apologetic resistance with something between a hope and a prayer.

The Clash. The man he fired was a military hero, idolized by many. MacArthur had done a superb job as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the occupation and reconstruction of Japan. He was the strongest bulwark against the Far East's Communists, who had long cried for his head. If Douglas MacArthur had an admirer in the White House set, it was Truman himself, an ex-artilleryman with an innate respect for soldiering.

But strong-minded General Douglas MacArthur had set himself firmly against the policy of Truman, of his Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and of the U.N. itself. Despite repeated efforts to silence him, he had spoken up defiantly and deliberately. As a soldier, Douglas MacArthur well knew that he was risking his military career. His bold pronouncements had alarmed U.S. allies, especially Britain. In Truman's view, this threatened the solidarity of the North Atlantic countries, and embarrassed Secretary Acheson in his own plans. Douglas MacArthur could not (and would not) compromise his views of what was right and necessary, refused to accept the acquiescence of silence. The clash was slow in building, but the end was inevitable. Taking his political future in his hands, Truman made his decision.

Letters & Meetings. On the record, there was little doubt that Douglas MacArthur had ignored the wishes, intent, and specific orders of his Commander in Chief on policy pronouncements, though he carried out his directives in the military field. But his forceful pronouncements had moved into a vacuum left by the Administration's own uncertainties.

Within a month after the President's announcement neutralizing Formosa, he had flown there to call on Chiang Kai-shek and had been pictured kissing the hand of Madame Chiang Kaishek; he made numerous statements to visitors of the course he deemed necessary in Asia, and he fired off his famed letter to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, declaring Formosa essential to U.S. defense.

Unable to suppress the letter or to silence MacArthur by teletype, Harry Truman staged the dramatic Wake Island meeting, from which emerged public White House statements of agreement (and MacArthur's private assurance to Truman that the Chinese Communists would not come into Korea). Harry Truman returned triumphantly to proclaim that he and his general had settled their differences--only to have a Tokyo "informed source" announce that Supreme Commander MacArthur "holds unalterably to the view that Formosa should not be allowed to fall into the hands of a potential enemy."

Last Warning. Then the Chinese surged across the Yalu. They forced a bruising defeat on MacArthur's ill-deployed forces, shaking the J.C.S.'s confidence in his military judgment. MacArthur was for bold and forceful retaliation. But the State Department laid down the line: U.S. policy would be to fight China only in Korea. MacArthur, unable to accept the logic of fighting a war he could not win, launched a fresh barrage of dissent. He loosed a flood of announcements, interviews, and answers to magazine queries, complaining of the enemy's "privileged sanctuary," calling such limitations "an enormous handicap without precedent in military history," declaring that "never before has the patience of man been more sorely tried."

On March 20, the J.C.S. forwarded a memo informing MacArthur that the President was planning an announcement that, with South Korea cleared of aggressors, the U.N. was willing to talk of negotiations. Before anyone in Washington knew what was up, MacArthur had flown to Korea and offered to meet the enemy commander to arrange a cease-fire in the field. MacArthur added an implied threat: "The enemy therefore must by now be painfully aware that a decision of the United Nations to depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the area of Korea through expansion of our military operations to his coastal areas and interior bases would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse."

Harry Truman dispatched a sharp reminder again demanding silence, and smoldered when he was told later in the week of a British correspondent's report of a conversation with MacArthur: "He said that it was not the soldier who had encroached on the realm of the politician, it was the politician who had encroached on that of the soldier." Then came the Martin letter, addressed to a member of the political opposition, with its observation: "It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here ... we fight Europe's war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words."

The Explanation. A few days later, over the morning coffee, the nation read of Harry Truman's reply and fumed. That night, Truman took to the air with an explanation. "I believe that we must try to limit the war to Korea ... A number of events have made it evident that General MacArthur did not agree with that policy. I have therefore considered it essential to relieve General MacArthur so that there would be no doubt or confusion as to the real purpose and aim of our policy . . .

"You may ask: Why don't we bomb Manchuria and China itself? Why don't we assist the Chinese Nationalist troops to land on the mainland of China? . . . What would suit the ambitions of the Kremlin better than for our military forces to be committed to a full-scale war with Red China? . . .

"The Communist side must now choose its course of action . . . They may take further action which will spread the conflict. They have that choice, and with it the awful responsibility for what may follow . . . We do not want to see the conflict in Korea extended. We are trying to prevent a world war--not to start one."

Douglas MacArthur believed that "here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest," and that the battle might be lost before Harry Truman decided it had begun. Harry Truman, as the first of 18,000 telegrams and 50,000 letters poured in, knew that he faced the biggest political storm of his stormy political career.

* Truman's order stripped MacArthur of four commands--Commander in Chief, United Nations Forces in Korea; Supreme Commander for Allied Powers, Japan; Commander in Chief, Far East; and Commanding General, U.S. Army, Far East. But as a five-star general, MacArthur keeps his rank, active duty status and pay ($18,761) for life.

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