Now at Blair House, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman all agreed that MacArthur should be relieved, and only after each had spoken, Truman, for the first time, said he was of the same opinion. He had made his decision. He told Bradley to prepare the necessary papers.
“Rarely had a matter been shrouded in such secrecy at the White House,” reported the Washington Post the morning of Tuesday, April 10. “The answer to every question about MacArthur was met with a ‘no comment’ reply.”
On Capitol Hill, an unidentified “congressional official” told the Post that the President had decided against removing the Far East Commander. Representative Martin said he favored bringing MacArthur home to report to Congress. In Tokyo, according to a United Press dispatch, a member of MacArthur’s staff said meetings between the general and Secretary of the Army Pace were “going forward with an air of cordiality”—thus seeming to refute rumors that Pace had been sent to dismiss MacArthur. A photograph on page 1 of the Post showed a smiling MacArthur welcoming an even more smiling Pace on his arrival at the Tokyo airport.
A Post editorial, meantime, expressed concern that MacArthur’s repeated efforts “to run away with the diplomatic ball” had “excited little more than a ripple among the American people,” and blamed the administration for its “muting” of the issue. Civil supremacy was at stake. The President ought to take a firm hand. “Any reassertion of the President’s authority as Commander in Chief and initiator of the country’s foreign policy would win him, we feel sure, the support of the American people. That’s what they are crying out for—leadership….”
The morning cartoon by Herb Block showed “Captain Harry Truman” asleep on his World War I army cot, trembling in fear, too terrified to challenge the five-star general.
At the end of a routine morning staff meeting, the President quietly announced—“So you won’t have to read about it in the papers”—that he had decided to fire General MacArthur. He was sure, Truman added, that MacArthur had wanted to be fired.
He was sure also that he himself faced a political storm, “a great furor,” unlike any in his political career. From beyond the office windows, the noise of construction going on in the White House was so great that several of the staff had to strain to hear what he was saying.
At 3:15 that afternoon, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman reported to the Oval Office, bringing the drafted orders. Truman looked them over, borrowed a fountain pen from Bill Hassett, and signed his name.
They were to be sent by State Department channels to Ambassador Muccio in Korea, who was to turn them over to Secretary Pace, who by now was also in Korea, with Ridgway at Eighth Army headquarters. Pace was to return at once to Tokyo and personally hand the orders to MacArthur—this whole relay system having been devised to save the general from the embarrassment of direct transmission through regular Army communications. All aspects of the issue thus far had been kept secret with marked success, but it was essential there be no leaks in the last critical hours, as Truman made clear to his new press secretary, Joe Short, the White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun whom Truman had picked to replace Charlie Ross. Announcement of the sensational MacArthur news was not to be made until the following morning.
The next several hours passed without incident, until early evening, after Truman had returned to Blair House. Harriman, Bradley, Rusk, and six or seven of Truman’s staff were working in the Cabinet Room, preparing material for release, when Joe Short received word that a Pentagon reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Lloyd Norman, was making inquiries about a supposed “major resignation” to take place in Tokyo—the implication being that somehow MacArthur had already learned of Truman’s decision and was about to resign before Truman could fire him.
Bradley telephoned Truman at about nine o’clock to report there had been a leak. Truman, saying he wanted time to think, told Bradley to find Marshall and Acheson. Marshall, it was learned, had gone to a movie with his wife, but Acheson came to the White House immediately, and like Rusk and George Elsey, he thought it would be a mistake to do anything rash because of one reporter’s inquiry. As he had from the start, Acheson again stressed the importance of the manner in which the general was dismissed. It was only fair and proper that he be informed before the story broke.
Harriman, Charlie Murphy, Matt Connelly, Joe Short, and Roger Tubby argued that MacArthur must not be allowed to “get the jump” on the President. The story must come from the White House, not Tokyo. The announcement should be made that night.
Such a decision, thought Elsey, would look like panic on the part of the White House. It would be undignified, unbefitting the President. But as Elsey later recalled, “There was a degree of panic.”
There was concern that MacArthur might get wind of this and might make some grandstand gesture of his own. There were rumors flying around that he was going on a world-wide broadcast network…. And in effect, the White House was, I’m afraid, I’m sorry to say it, panicked by the fear that MacArthur might get the jump.
Meantime, something apparently had gone wrong with the transmission of the President’s orders. Nothing had been heard from Muccio about their receipt.
Had George Marshall been present that night—or Charlie Ross—possibly things would have been handled differently.
Truman would remember Bradley “rushing over” to Blair House at a late hour. Actually, the time was just after ten and Bradley came accompanied by Harriman, Rusk, Joe Short, and Matt Connelly. By 10:30, Truman had decided.
Short telephoned Roger Tubby at the White House to have all the orders—those relieving MacArthur, as well as those naming Matthew Ridgway his successor—mimeographed as quickly as possible.
“He’s not going to be allowed to quit on me,” Truman is reported to have said. “He’s going to be fired!” In his diary, Truman recorded dryly, “Discussed the situation and I ordered messages sent at once and directly to MacArthur.”
From a small first-floor study in his Georgetown home, Dean Acheson began placing calls to Tom Connally, Les Biffle, and John Foster Dulles, to tell them what was about to happen. At the State Department, Rusk spent a long night telephoning the ambassadors of all the countries with troops in Korea. “Well, the little man finally did it, didn’t he,” responded the ambassador from New Zealand.
At the White House, switchboard operators began calling reporters at their homes to say there would be an extraordinary press conference at 1:00 A.M. And at 1:00 A.M. in the White House press room, Wednesday, April 11, Press Secretary Short handed out the mimeographed sheets.
Truman, in his second-floor bedroom at Blair House, was by then fast asleep.
General MacArthur learned of his recall while at lunch in Tokyo, when his wife handed him a brown Signal Corps envelope.
If Truman had only let him know how he felt, MacArthur would say privately a few hours later, he would have retired “without difficulty.” Where the Tribune reporter got his tip was never learned. MacArthur would later testify that he had never given any thought to resigning.
According to what MacArthur had been told by an unnamed but “eminent” medical authority, Truman’s “mental instability” was the result of malignant hypertension, “characterized by bewilderment and confusion of thought.” Truman, MacArthur predicted, would be dead in six months.
Truman Fires Macarthur
The headline across the early edition of the Washington Post, April 11, 1951, was the headline everywhere in the country and throughout much of the world, with only minor variations. The reaction was stupendous, the outcry from the American people shattering. Truman had known he would have to face a storm, but however dark his premonitions, he could not possibly have measured what was coming. No one did, no one could have. One southern senator in the course of the day described the people in his part of the country as “almost hysterical.” The senator himself was almost hysterical. So were scores of others on Capitol Hill and millions of Americans.
The day on Capitol
Hill was described as “one of the bitterest…in modern times.” Prominent Republicans, including Senator Taft, spoke angrily of impeaching the President. The full Republican leadership held an angry emergency meeting in Joe Martin’s office at 9:30 in the morning, after which Martin talked to reporters of “impeachments,” the accent on the plural. “We might want the impeachments of 1 or 50.” A full-dress congressional investigation of the President’s war policy was in order. General MacArthur, announced Martin, would be invited to air his views before a joint session of Congress.
Senator Nixon demanded MacArthur’s immediate reinstatement. Senator Jenner declared the country was “in the hands of a secret coterie” directed by Russian spies. When, on the floor of the Senate, Jenner shouted, “Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction,” the gallery broke into applause.
A freshman Democrat from Oklahoma, Senator Robert Kerr, rose to defend the President. If the Republicans believed the nation’s security depended on following the policy of General MacArthur, Kerr said, then they should call for a declaration of war against Red China. Otherwise, Republican support of MacArthur was a mockery. Tom Connally reminded his colleagues that Americans had always insisted on civilian control over the military, and three Senate Republicans, Duff of Pennsylvania, Saltonstall and Lodge of Massachusetts, spoke in agreement.
But such voices were lost in a tempest of Republican outrage. The general’s dismissal was “another Pearl Harbor,” a “great day for the Russian Communists.” MacArthur had been fired “because he told the truth.” “God help the United States,” said Senator James P. Kem, Republican of Missouri.
In New York two thousand longshoremen walked off their jobs in protest over the firing of MacArthur. A Baltimore women’s group announced plans for a march on Washington in support of the general. Elsewhere enraged patriots flew flags at half-staff, or upside down. People signed petitions, fired off furious letters and telegrams to Washington. In Worcester, Massachusetts, and San Gabriel, California, Truman was burned in effigy. In Houston, a Protestant minister became so angry dictating a telegram to the White House that he died of a heart attack.
The legislatures of four states—Florida, Michigan, Illinois, and California—voted resolutions condemning the President’s action, while the Los Angeles City Council adjourned for a day of “sorrowful contemplation of the political assassination of General MacArthur.” In Chicago, in a front editorial, the Tribune called for immediate impeachment proceedings:
President Truman must be impeached and convicted. His hasty and vindictive removal of Gen. MacArthur is the culmination of a series of acts which have shown that he is unfit, morally and mentally, for his high office…. The American nation has never been in a greater danger. It is led by a fool who is surrounded by knaves….
“IMPEACH THE IMBECILE”…“IMPEACH THE LITTLE WARD POLITICIAN STUPIDITY FROM KANSAS CITY”…“SUGGEST YOU LOOK FOR ANOTHER HISS IN BLAIR HOUSE,” read telegrams typical of those pouring into Washington. In the hallways of the Senate and House office buildings, Western Union messengers made their deliveries with bushel baskets. According to one tally, of the 44,358 telegrams received by Republicans in Congress during the first 48 hours following Truman’s announcement, all but 334 condemned him or took the side of MacArthur, and the majority called for Truman’s immediate removal from office.
Republicans were overjoyed. “This is the biggest windfall that has ever come to the Republican Party,” exclaimed Senator Styles Bridges.
A number of prominent liberals—Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Justice William O. Douglas—publicly supported Truman. Douglas, who had told Truman as early as October that MacArthur should be fired, wrote, “In the days ahead you may need the strength of all your friends. This note is to let you know that I am and will be in your corner…I know you are right.”
While by far the greatest clamor came from those in the country outraged over what Truman had done, there was no lack of conviction, even passion, among people who felt he was in the right, that a fundamental principle was at stake. And to many of these same people, how one felt about Harry Truman personally was immaterial.
“It makes not the slightest difference if Mr. Harry Truman is an ignorant person who never graduated from college, who once worked in a haberdashery shop, who was a protégé of one of our worst city bosses and came into the presidency through accident,” the Reverend Dr. Duncan E. Littlefair said in a sermon at the Fountain Street Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Neither does it make any difference if General MacArthur is a man of astounding personality, tremendous achievement, graduated first in his class in the great College of the Army and has had a distinguished career and has proven a wonderful administrator of the Japanese people or that we like him better than we do Harry S. Truman. Principle, principle, must always be above personality and it must be above expediency. The principle here we recognize…[is] that control of this country must come through the president and the departments that are organized under him and through Congress, and that any decision that comes from that person through those means is not to be dismissed because we don’t like the personality who expressed it, nor is it to be overridden because we have a conquering hero….
Another letter of support addressed to the President came from the Washington Post music critic, Paul Hume.
Throughout Europe, MacArthur’s dismissal was greeted as welcome news. “MAC IS SACKED,” declared the London Evening Standard. The French, reported Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, were “solidly for Truman.” Not a single paper in Paris had failed to support his decision.
But most impressive was the weight of editorial opinion at home, despite vehement assaults in the McCormick, Hearst, and Scripps-Howard newspapers, or the renewed glorification of MacArthur in Henry Luce’s Time and Life.
The Washington post, The New York Times, the New York Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, the Miami Daily News, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Denver Post, the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor, all these and more endorsed Truman’s decision. Importantly the list also included such staunch Republican papers as the Des Moines Register and Tribune and the New York Herald-Tribune, which went out of its way to praise Truman as well for his strength of character:
The most obvious fact about the dismissal of General MacArthur is that he virtually forced his own removal. In high policy as in war there is no room for a divided command…. General MacArthur is a soldier of the highest abilities…to lose his service and his talents is in a very true sense a tragedy for the nation, yet he is the architect of a situation which really left the President with no other course. With one of those strokes of boldness and decision which are characteristic of Mr. Truman in emergencies, a very difficult and dangerous problem has been met in the only way it could have been met….
In his “Today and Tomorrow” column, Walter Lippmann commended Truman and Marshall both for having “done their duty.” And the working press, according to the Saturday Review, privately sided with Truman by a margin of six to one, though most reporters thought the dismissal had been poorly handled.
The clamor in the country, the outrage, the noisy hostility to Truman, the adulation of MacArthur continued, however, and would grow greater still when MacArthur made his triumphal return. Nothing had so stirred the political passions of the country since the Civil War.
At the heart of the tumult was anger and frustration over the war in Korea. Nobody liked it. Senator Wherry had begun calling it “Truman’s War,” and the name caught on. People were sick of Truman’s War, frustrated and a bit baffled by talk of a “limited war.” America didn’t fight to achieve a stalemate, and the cost in blood had become appalling. If it was a United Nations effort, then the United States seemed to be bearing the heavy side of the burden. According to the lat
est figures, there were more than ten thousand Americans dead, another fifty thousand wounded or missing in action. The country wanted it over. MacArthur at least offered victory.
To a great part of the country MacArthur was a glorious figure, a real-life, proven American hero, the brilliant, handsome general who had led American forces to stunning triumph in the greatest of all wars wherein there had never been any objective but complete and total victory. “Douglas MacArthur was the personification of the big man…Harry Truman was almost a professional little man,” wrote Time in a considerably less than unbiased attempt to appraise the national mood, but one that nonetheless applied to a large part of the populace. For someone of Truman’s modest attainments, a man of his “stature,” to have fired Douglas MacArthur seemed to many Americans an act smacking of insolence and vindictiveness, not to say dreadful judgment. Nor did the way it happened seem right. Reportedly, the firing had been carefully timed so as to make the morning papers “and catch the Republicans in bed.” Rumors also attributed the announcement to another of Truman’s dead-of-the-night temper tantrums, or heavy drinking. In a speech in Milwaukee, having called Truman a “son-of-a-bitch,” Joe McCarthy charged that the decision had been influenced by “bourbon and Benedictine.” Even to more fair-minded Republicans than McCarthy and others of the party’s vociferous right wing—as to a great many Democrats—it seemed to have been a graceless, needlessly unkind way to terminate a great career. Who did “little Harry Truman” think he was?
Old admirers of Franklin Roosevelt speculated on how differently “the master politician” might have handled things—made MacArthur ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, perhaps.
But in a larger way, for many, the firing of MacArthur was yet another of those traumatic turns of events of recent years—like the fall of China to Communist control, like the advent of the Russian bomb—that seemed to signal a world out of joint, a world increasingly hard to understand and threatening.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 524