Two Voices

Harry Truman did what not even Franklin Roosevelt had had the temerity to do. He ordered Douglas MacArthur to shut up. The President's summary order arrived in Tokyo shortly after midnight Monday morning. There, in his headquarters in the Dai Ichi building, General MacArthur made the only decision he could make. He silently saluted his commander in chief across 6,769 miles of land and ocean, and shut up.

But for what Harry Truman intended to accomplish, the order had been given too late. A statement by MacArthur, drawn with the obvious intention of making military sense out of the Administration's strange, vacillating policy on Formosa, had already been sent to press in the U.S. That practical fact had made the statement public property, and within a few hours it had been published across the land.

"The Threadbare Argument." Mac-Arthur's statement was drawn after the Veterans of Foreign Wars had asked the general, "should it be your desire," to send a message which could be read at the V.F.W. convention in Chicago this week. It was very much his desire. He sat down and wrote an eloquent statement on the situation which, next to Korea, was most on his mind--the situation of Formosa.

Better than most he knew the history of the Administration's bewildering policy there: its brushoff of Formosa last January as strategically not worth the risk; its apparently forthright decision on June 27 to defend it; Dean Acheson's spurning, after that, of any alliance with Chiang

Kaishek; the President's affront to Chiang through his order "neutralizing" Formosa; MacArthur's own flying visit to Formosa, and the Administration's alarm that this would be construed as U.S. acceptance of Chiang.

MacArthur had a single, paramount conviction; no matter what, Formosa had to be denied to the enemy--an end which the Administration was also trying to achieve. His statement was a complete military justification of that policy, packed with compelling military logic. In the hands of a hostile power, he wrote, "Formosa would be an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender, ideally located" to checkmate the U.S. "Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument of those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia. Those who speak thus do not understand the Orient."

The statement went to the V.F.W. over the Army Signal Corps network.

What Statement? On Thursday last week the Chicago Sun-Times directed its Washington correspondent to ask the State Department if it would change the hour of the Monday release date on.Mac-Arthur's statement. State was taken aback. It did not know that MacArthur had made any statement on Formosa or anything else. Acheson telephoned the White House, which knew nothing about 'it either. Neither, as it turned out, did the Department of Defense. Washington officialdom went into a flap, trying to get hold of the text. But it was not until Saturday morning, by which time the Associated Press had calmly put the statement--marked "hold for release"--on its wires, that State officials caught up with a copy.

It was put under Harry Truman's nose. That morning, Acheson, Louis Johnson and an assortment of advisers and high brass gathered in the President's office with their mixed emotions. Mr. Truman reacted with growing choler. The meeting grimly discussed the matter, and the President and Secretary Acheson discussed it again in the afternoon.

"I ... Withdraw." Acheson argued: a statement on U.S. policy in the Pacific was beyond MacArthur's authority, and furthermore MacArthur was full of hot air. The U.S. had not held Formosa during World War II, Acheson argued,* and the U.S. had not been forced then to fall back on the Golden Gate. But primarily, Acheson deplored the timing. At that very moment, he reminded the group, the State Department was trying to get the United Nations, despite Malik, to adopt the neutralizing of Formosa as U.N.'s own formal policy. Warren Austin appeared to be making some progress along that line. MacArthur's statement would upset Acheson's policy.

The President agreed with his Secretary. If he hesitated it was because he foresaw the certain political repercussions. But some 24 hours after he first read the statement, Mr. Truman told the Defense Department to send Tokyo an order in his name that the statement be withdrawn.

A few hours later, the V.F.W. got a cable from MacArthur: "... I have been directed to withdraw my message to the Veterans of Foreign Wars."

"Constitutional Importance." But the whirlwind was already sown and the State Department never overtook it. U.S. News & World Report, which, relying on the release date, had gone to press with it last week, appeared on the stands with the full text even as Washington reporters hurried to the White House to inquire, in effect, what in hell was going on.

White House Aide Charles Ross tried to explain. "In the field of foreign relations there can be only one voice stating the position of the United States," he said. "This is regarded as being of fundamental constitutional importance."

Nevertheless, another voice was being heard, and very clearly. All the world could hear it, in the officially withdrawn words of Douglas MacArthur (see box).

* A point that Pacific war veterans could elaborate upon. The Japanese bombers that destroyed the Navy and Air Forces in Manila, and the ground troops that held the Philippines until MacArthur's troops fought their way back, came from Formosa.

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