The General's Case

The general arrived on time. In dark slacks and a battlejacket without trappings, except for the two circlets of five silver stars, he strode with an easy half-wave, half-salute through a jam of curious stenos and secretaries, past milling clusters of newsmen and photographers, into Room 318 of the Senate Office Building. Bedlam followed him in. Cameramen clambered on to chairs to capture the firm jaw, the still-dark hair and serious mien, for the afternoon editions. The 25 Senators of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees dribbled in, shook hands with Douglas MacArthur one by one, and found their places at a long table. Other Senators, admitted by a last-minute vote which opened the hearings to all members of the upper house, lined the sides of the room. In the center, at a table facing the committeemen, Douglas MacArthur took his seat. A gavel pounded furiously for order, vainly at first, finally with success; police cleared the room. The great wooden doors of Room 318 swung shut. In the crowded hearing room, the curtain went up on the most dramatic hearing in congressional history.

For three amazing days, Douglas MacArthur sat in the center of the stage to make his case against the foreign policy of his Commander in Chief. The issues were as grave as any in the nation's history, and as politically combustible, but witness and questioners responded with fairness and decorum. What might have been dangerous to the nation was not; in fact, the U.S. was given a chance, in a deadly earnest game of Questions & Answers, to appraise, with more facts than it ever had before, the difficult decisions to be taken.

"Uninformed Desire." Until the last moment, there had even been a chance that the hearings would be open. Senate Democrats headed off a Republican drive to throw the hearings open to press and public, and to the great continental retina of the TV camera. Democrats were anxious to keep General MacArthur's thundering rhetoric out of earshot of the microphones, and his dramatic profile off the screens of the 12 million television sets.

But there was also a more valid argument; it was put to the Senate by Richard Russell, Georgia's bachelor Senator, who presided over the hearings with an even-handedness that won the praise of Republicans and of MacArthur himself. "I have been disturbed in recent days," he told the Senate on the eve of the hearings, "because of the way we are running the Government, by taking action here in response to a quick expression of uninformed desire . . ." It was not a question of hiding facts from scrutiny; there would be facts spoken and documents discussed that could not be bared to the Communists: "There is something here that is more important than continued tenure in the Senate, or even the election of the President of the United States in 1952."

Lunch at Work. From the opening of the hearing, Douglas MacArthur, with his rhetorical sweep, his commanding past, his monumental self-confidence, made perhaps the most resonant witness ever to appear on Capitol Hill. While Senators far younger than the 71-year-old witness wilted at the pace, MacArthur sat serenely in his place, left the room but once on each long day. He persuaded the Senators on the last two days to lunch on sandwiches and coffee in the hearing room. At the end of each session, he flew back to New York; up early, he flew back to Washington and stepped briskly back into Room 318 for more.

Hour after hour he slouched comfortably in a straight-backed chair, puffed at an old briar pipe. He fielded questions confidently, headed off some, ran with others. A question about his land program in Japan took him back 21 centuries: "I don't think that since the Gracchi effort at land reform in the days of the Roman Empire has there been anything quite as successful of that nature." He mentioned, in one sweeping dissertation, the Caesars, the Magna Carta, the French Revolution and the average daily calory consumption of the present-day Japanese.

"One of the Gravest Mistakes." Republicans, led by California's William Knowland, Washington's Harry Cain, Wisconsin's Alexander Wiley, fed questions designed to bring out MacArthur's criticism of Administration policy. Example from Knowland: "Would you be willing to express your judgment as to whether [Nationalist] China . . . was jeopardized by the . . . Yalta agreement . . .?" MacArthur: ". . . One of the gravest mistakes ever made was to permit the Soviet to come down into China at Port Arthur, Dairen and other places of that sort." But he did not bite at all of the spoon-fed questions ("That is a question and an argument rolled into one, isn't it?"), pointedly passed up an opportunity to blame Secretary of State Dean Acheson for his recall, held strictly to the old West Point code by refusing to criticize the Joint Chiefs of Staff ("I hold them ... in the greatest esteem"), or, for that matter, any military officer.

The Democrats, too, treated the general with deference. They threw some tough questions, but sometimes apologetically and always warily. The witness admitted of no criticism. He confessed to only one mistake--that of concurring in Washington's decision in 1947 to withdraw U.S. occupation forces from Korea. His other past actions he defended confidently: his failure to anticipate the Chinese intervention (it was Washington's responsibility to scout it and tell him); his readiness for trouble ("The disposition of those troops, in my opinion, could not have been improved upon had I known the Chinese were going to attack"); the skill of his armies' retreat ("Those forces withdrew in magnificent order and shape").

Horror Alive. As MacArthur the battle commander, the general was most eloquent. He was horrified at the mounting bloodshed in Korea; and he made the horror come graphically alive. "It isn't just dust that is settling in Korea. It is American blood." He was convinced he had the program for ending the war quickly and decisively, and asserted that on Jan. 12, at least, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had approved most of it.

But when General MacArthur replaced the hat of a theater commander with the hat of a global strategist, he seemed less sure of his ground. To the surprise of the committee on the first two days, he steadfastly refused to concede, for example, that the heart of the Communist menace was the Kremlin. On the third day MacArthur agreed that most of the military power held by Communism is located "unquestionably in Soviet Russia."

Often he insisted that he was just a theater commander and not responsible for figuring out the global ramifications of the policy he proposed. He based his recommendations for a more decisive policy in Asia on the "belief" that Russia would not come in, and the hope that China would quickly be defeated; but he admitted that his intelligence on Russia was "very limited," and argued that the consequences of a wrong guess were for higher authority to worry about.

Yet he insisted that he had also considered the risks, and set them against what he considered the greater risks of the Administration's half-war. "I believe that if you do not settle successfully what you have started, and are committed to, in Korea, you will tend to incite [the Russian] to increase not only the tempo of his blow but the time of his blow. I believe that the program I have suggested will tend to not precipitate a world war, but to prevent it." There Douglas MacArthur rested his case.

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