MacArthur v. Truman

In the chapter of Harry Truman's memoirs that deals with the firing of General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean war, one word instantly caught Douglas MacArthur's eye: "insubordination." MacArthur boiled up in anger. "Now, for the first time," he wrote in an answer to Truman in last week's LIFE, "[Mr. Truman] bases his action on what he terms insubordination, one of the most serious of all military offenses and one which throughout our military annals has never been made without the officer concerned being given a hearing and the opportunity to defend himself . . .

"This belated claim of insubordination is made by [Truman] not as a public official but as a private citizen . . . Had Mr. Truman made such a charge against me at the time of my relief, or even later during his tenure of office, I would have had the right and privilege to ask that a Court of Inquiry sit in judicial judgment upon his allegations. But he made no such charge, confining himself instead to administrative reasons for my replacement by an officer of his selection--a decision which . . . left me with no remedy, either in law or tradition."

Rejected Charge. The real cause of his dismissal, MacArthur wrote, may have been "my recommendation made in January that a treason trial be instituted to break up a spy ring responsible for the purloining of my top-secret reports to Washington." This recommendation, he suggested pointedly, probably seemed to Truman a politically inspired "red herring" designed to embarrass the Administration. But in fact, MacArthur theorized, Red China would never have risked troops in Korea without advance information that its Manchurian bases would be immune from U.S. attack. Likely "links in the chain to our enemy in Korea": British Spies Guy Burgess, then a member of Britain's diplomatic staff in Washington, and Donald Maclean, head of the American Department in Britain's Foreign Office (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Harry Truman's account reported that the decision to fire MacArthur was unanimously endorsed by Secretary of Defense General George Marshall, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Presidential Adviser Averell Harriman, and by General Omar Bradley and his entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. MacArthur replied by accusing each of these principals of personal prejudices against him: Marshall's "enmity was an old one"; Harriman resented a heated conference in Tokyo; Acheson "had frequently exhibited petulance" because of MacArthur's interference with the State Department's "socialistic concepts" for Japan. As for Bradley, his enmity "undoubtedly had its origin in my refusal to accept him as my senior ground commander for the invasion of Japan . . . because of his decisions and actions connected with the Battle of the Bulge, where he was the ground commander and which resulted in approximately as many American casualties as were sustained in the entire Southwest Pacific Area campaigns."*

Accepted Colossus. On the most essential point at issue between Truman and himself, MacArthur had a stronger case--and some sharp observations about the results of Truman's policy in Asia. He notes bitterly that he was the first American commander in history ever denied the right to fight to win. Because the U.S. failed to drive the Communists out of Korea, "Red China promptly was accepted as the military colossus of the East. Korea was left ravished and divided. Indo-China was partitioned by the sword. Tibet was taken almost on demand. Other Asian nations began to tremble toward neutralism . . .

"All this and more has followed from Mr. Truman's fatal decision not to see it through in Korea. It plunged us from an invincible position of moral strength into the confusion of uncertain bewilderment, the practice of doubtful expediency and the eventual misery of timid appeasement."

* The Army Historical Division places MacArthur's Southwest Pacific casualties at 136,426 and Bradley's Bulge casualties at 81,447-

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