Prospect & Retrospect

It takes a fast dollyman on the camera to keep Douglas MacArthur in focus.

After the Minnesota primary dealt a heavy blow to Robert Taft's chances, General MacArthur last week suddenly appeared at the front of the stage. He was discussed more seriously as a presidential possibility than at any time since last summer. MacArthur responded by saying that he was not a candidate, but he also pointed to an earlier statement that he would not "shrink . . . from accepting any public duty to which I might be called by the American people."

A few days later, in uniform, he appeared at Jackson, Miss., and in a distinctly political speech, charged the Truman Administration with waste, graft, high taxes, political greed and socialism. Said MacArthur: "Whether it be by accident or design, such policy, formulated with reckless indifference to the preservation of constitutional liberty and our free enterprise economy, coupled with the rapid centralization of power in the hands of a few, is leading us toward a Communist state with as dreadful certainty as though the leaders of the Kremlin themselves were charting the course."

He turned to the stalemated Korean truce talks. Though negotiations have been under way for eight months, "the only noticeable result is that the enemy has gained time to bring up artillery, air and mechanical transport and to perfect his antiaircraft defenses and communications, all to gain strength where once his weakness was most pronounced . . .

"Our failure . . . in Korea will probably mean the ultimate loss of all of continental Asia to international Communism."

Such talk, both sensible and bold, inspires a lot of Americans to think of Douglas MacArthur as the man the country needs in the White House. Yet no sooner had MacArthur freshened his image as a contemporary statesman, than he began fading back again into the shadows. This week he visited Little Rock, Ark., where he was born 72 years ago while his father, Arthur MacArthur, was in command of the old Army arsenal. Obviously caught in the sentiment of the occasion, Douglas MacArthur, in fine, old-fashioned prose, deliberately stressed his heaviest political liability: his age. "For me," he said, in what proved to be a thoroughly nonpolitical speech, "the shadows are deepening. I left Little Rock long, long years ago when life was simpler and gentler. The world has turned over many times since then, and those years of old have vanished, tone and tint; they have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were."

Bygone days, he said, recalled "a land of used-to-be, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday . . . filled with ghosts from far off fields in khaki, and olive drab, in navy blue and air corps grey.

"I can almost hear the faint, far whisper of their forgotten songs. Youth, strength, aspirations, struggles, triumphs, despairs, wide winds sweeping, beacons flashing across uncharted depths, faint bugles sounding reveille, far drums beating the long roll, the wail of sirens, the crash of guns, the thud of bombs, the rattle of musketry--the still white crosses."

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