Impatient Audience

The dramatic thunder & lightning of the big MacArthur hearing had settled into a steady drizzle of repetitious questions and patient, repetitive answers. Testimony scudded close to the million-word mark, and there were still any number of witnesses and weeks of hearings to come. Crowds had thinned. The big Senate caucus room was no longer needed--the Senators moved the show into a smaller committee room.

It was Republican Charles Tobey of New Hampshire who found the drizzle most monotonous. "I am impressed," cried he in soap-opera tremolo, "with the futility of much that is going on here . . . I wish we could ring the curtain down, for the good of the country . . ."

Nothing Doing. On the sixth day of Omar Bradley's testimony, Iowa's Bourke Hickenlooper broke in to make a proposal. Why not skip the three Joint Chiefs, who were next in line to be heard, and move on to Dean Acheson? In doing so, Hickenlooper conceded that "the Joint Chiefs will probably be in general agreement" with Bradley and George Marshall, thus conceding that the Republicans had just about abandoned their hope that the hearings would find the Joint Chiefs siding with MacArthur against the President. Democratic Chairman Richard Russell put it up to the committee and the committee, by a null vote, decided nothing doing: it would keep going down its list of witnesses in turn.

J.C.S. to Mac. Only once in the week did Omar Bradley make big news. He, like Marshall, had been arguing steadily that MacArthur had been sacked not because he disagreed with Washington, but because MacArthur had taken his disagreement over U.S. policy to the public instead of arguing it out through proper channels. Last week, under persistent questioning from the Democrats, Bradley also admitted that the Joint Chiefs had accumulated some serious, purely military doubts about MacArthur's conduct of the war. Interest perked up.

Arkansas' William Fulbright pressed Bradley about J.C.S. messages sent to MacArthur after the first Chinese attack, expressing concern about the way his X Corps on the eastern flank was getting separated from the Eighth Army.

Look Out. "Now," said Fulbright, "I would interpret that as a warning to him that 'you had better look out. It looks to us at least as if your flanks are exposed.' Is that a correct interpretation?"

Said Bradley: "That was the purpose of this ... to call his attention to the fact that from here it looked like they were exposed." MacArthur had replied that he could not do otherwise; besides, the terrain was such that the enemy could not take advantage of the X Corps' position.*

FULBRIGHT: "Well, that was proved to be a complete misjudgment because they did take advantage of that situation, did they not?" Said Bradley: "Yes, they did." FULBRIGHT : "... As a result... we suffered our heaviest casualties of this war?" BRADLEY: "Well, Senator, it is hard to sit back here and say how many of those lost were due to the fact that the right flank was exposed or how many of them were due to the fact that the Chinese hit him harder than he expected. I think it is a little bit unfair for me to sit here now and try to say . . . But I think . . . that, knowing what I knew at the time, I would have done it somewhat differently."

*Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins testified that the J.C.S. had approved MacArthur's split of his forces "in the initial phases" because Eighth Army Commander Walton H. Walker could not be expected to run his own Army and also boss the amphibious landing the X Corps was then staging at Wonsan. Later, Collins added, the J.C.S. twice told MacArthur that they were worried about the "growing separation" between the two forces.

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