Work Done

Chairman Richard Russell called it "a rich treasure house for the historian." The MacArthur hearing was more than that: it was a classroom for the citizen of the U.S. and the rest of the free world. Never before had the world had so detailed a record of the intimate thinking and the very methods by which the leader among nations proposed to wage peace and prosecute war.

The glamour, excitement and anger of the first weeks of General MacArthur's return had subsided; the public, or at least a large part of it, admitted that things were more complicated than they had seemed. It sat back to hear the discussion out. Meanwhile, the impact of Douglas MacArthur had already made firm some decisions which had been tentative, made emphatic some intentions which had been halfhearted, made urgent some programs which had been dawdling.

If the Administration had ever toyed with the idea of appeasement, it had been forced to a public renunciation. Red China would not be allowed "to shoot its way into the United Nations," said Secretary of Defense Marshall. The Administration would "never yield" Formosa to Communist hands.

U.S. allies had been put on notice that the U.S. was fed up with their dealing with a killing enemy. The Senate brusquely voted a ban on all economic aid to countries which sold war materials to the Communist nations. Reading the signs, the British government belatedly toughened up in its dealings with the Communist Chinese (see FOREIGN NEWS), agreed (as did France) to support an economic blockade of mainland China in the U.N., and announced that it would not insist that Formosa be turned over to Red China--at least not until the Korean fighting ended.

U.S. enemies were put on firm notice that the U.S. patience was exhausted, that it would tolerate no more "incidents," that it was ready to fight if provoked. "We might easily be forced into action and are prepared to take that action," said George Marshall.

Unlike the debate of aid to Europe, this debate was not an argument over whether the U.S. was doing too much, but whether it was doing enough--for its safety and the safety of the free world. With the hearings barely started, the nation could already count it a long step forward.

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