Celebrity's Path

General William Dean still saw nothing heroic about being a returned prisoner of war, but by last week he was resigned to the fact that the U.S.. intended to treat him as a hero.

With easy grace he perched himself atop the back seat of an official car to accept a noisy, ticker-tape welcome from downtown Manhattan. To the crowd of half a million who cheered him, he responded with a wry grin and a wave. When the parade passed into Wall Street, he glanced abound ostentatiously. Said he, in memory of ceaseless Communist propaganda about imperialist Wall Street: "I wanted to see what my 'masters' looked like." At City Hall ceremonies, he turned the talk away from himself by extolling other returned prisoners on the platform with him.

Later in the week, the general followed the celebrity's path to the speaker's rostrum of the National Press Club in Washington. There he reminisced in jocular, earthy language about his captivity. His roughest time, he said, came when the Communists questioned him for grueling periods--once for 68 hours, then 44 hours and then ten hours--trying to get him to reveal the defense plans for Japan. After one session, as he lay sleepless and freezing on the mud floor of his hut, he resolved to kill himself.

"I decided I'd better kill myself be cause I might squeal when they started driving those long needles or splinters up under my fingernails and setting them on fire.'' he said. "I knew they did things like that, and they told me they were going to, and I believed them, and I thought, 'Dean, I don't know whether you can take it or not.' " That night he grabbed a submachine gun from a dozing guard, intending first to kill his Chinese tormentors, then put the gun in his mouth and fire. But the triggers jammed, and the guards jumped him. Next day, oddly enough, the Communists quit the interrogation and began giving him better treatment.

After the Press Club speech, Dean went before the television cameras with

CBS's Ed Murrow. During the interview, that old feeling came out again. Asked Murrow: "You didn't expect to return home as a hero with the Medal of Honor?" Replied Dean, gravely: "No, anything but that. I expected when I returned that I might even be tried for not having done better--for not having fulfilled my obligations to my country."

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