A Critic Predicts

In Miami's gaunt convention hall last week, flags and bunting brightened every bare steel girder. It was the annual gathering of the American Legion. To hear Old Soldier Douglas MacArthur, 14,000 legionnaires thronged the hall, and brimmed over onto bleachers set up outside. During MacArthur's 45-minute address, he was halted by applause 49 times.

Most of the news in the speech was in a single paragraph. Said the general: "There is little doubt that the yielding of Formosa and the seating of China in the U.N. was fully planned when I called upon the enemy commanders in Korea on March 24 to meet me in the field to arrange armistice terms .. . The opposition I expressed . . . with the overwhelming support it received from the American people, unquestionably wrecked the secret plan to yield on these issues as the price for peace in Korea."

Next day at his press conference, the President of the U.S. lashed back, calling MacArthur, in effect, a liar. Snapped Harry Truman: It's not based on fact. Then he added, with all the deliberateness which the jutted Truman jaw connotes, that the general knew it. It was the first time that Truman took direct issue with MacArthur, by name, since the famous firing.

MacArthur's counterpunch had plenty of steam behind it. Truman, he said, "would relieve many millions of patriotic minds ... if, instead of indulging in innuendo and trying to alibi the past, he would announce the firm determination that under no conditions . . . would the U.S. permit Formosa to fall in Red hands or Communist China to be seated in the U.N. This simple and understandable assurance he has never given. I predict he never will."

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