Action on M-Day

The long-distance call from Connecticut roused Joe Martin out of a sound sleep in Washington's Hay-Adams House at 1:30 a.m. Said a woman's voice: "I think it's terrible." "What's terrible?" asked the House Republican leader wearily. Then Joe Martin was shocked awake by the news that Douglas MacArthur had been fired.

The shock was only momentary. By midmorning, on Martin's signal, the Republican leadership moved smoothly into battle position. Martin, longtime admirer of Douglas MacArthur, quickly assumed the role of leader in getting him back to the U.S. to make his position clear before the nation. He put in a call to Tokyo and got the general's promise to address a joint session of Congress. Just before noon, Martin wound up a conference with Senate and House G.O.P. brass in time to catch the hungry lunchtime headlines with terse talk of "the possibility of impeachments." The plural "impeachments" obviously meant both Harry Truman and Dean Acheson.

One Man Battle. Before such a coordinated offensive, and the wave after wave of angry telegrams (125,000 of them, almost all pro-MacArthur), the Democrats fell back in confusion. Compelled to stand by their party, but unwilling to attack MacArthur in the face of public opinion, they mumbled about the President's right to fire an insubordinate general. They were only saved from complete rout by a freshman Senator, Oklahoma's Robert Kerr. Like a Democratic Horatius, Kerr fought a desperate battle all afternoon in the Senate. "The Republicans are making a lot of noise on this floor today," said he, "but they are dodging the real issue. If they . . . believe that the future security of this nation depends on following the MacArthur policy, let them put up or shut up. Let them submit a resolution, expressing it as the sense of the Senate, that we should either declare war against Red China, or do that which would amount to open warfare against her . . . If they do not, their support of MacArthur is a mockery." Minnesota's brash Hubert Humphrey picked up the cue. "The Republican Party," he said, "has become the war party."

The accusation was enough to make Joe Martin & Co. give pause. Already three Republican Senators--Pennsylvania's Jim Duff and Massachusetts' Henry Cabot Lodge and Leverett Saltonstall--had broken ranks to defend Truman's right to act. If the MacArthur issue was to be broad enough to include the eastern internationalists in the G.O.P (generally more interested in Europe than Asia), such forthright Republicans as California's Bill Knowland (who favors the decisive course in both Asia and Europe) and such high & dry isolationists as Indiana's Homer Capehart and Illinois' Everett Dirksen (who frequently criticize U.S. involvement in either Korea or Europe), some changes had to be made fast. Out from Martin's office went the new word: forget impeachment talk for the time being, stop talking about the Formosa question, and concentrate on a demand that MacArthur come back and report his views to Congress--in a joint session, nothing less.

Tell the People. The G.O.P.'s best speechmakers fanned out across the nation. Bob Taft talked of the new "appeasement." Said he: "It would be hard to deliberately invent a more disastrous series of policy moves than this Administration has adopted during the past 18 months." Dirksen saw MacArthur's firing as a victory for Great Britain, and the State Department as "a branch of Downing Street." Far out in right field, Joe McCarthy announced in Milwaukee that the recall was "a Communist victory won with the aid of bourbon and Benedictine." Of Harry Truman he said in a press conference: "The son of a bitch should be impeached." Nebraska's Ken Wherry took to the air to ask: "Who got us into this war? This is Truman's war and General MacArthur, under orders of the Commander in Chief, has done his level best to end the war ... I have not seen any statement by [MacArthur] that he wants to send American foot soldiers into Manchuria. Certainly he has not suggested an all-out war with China . . . Let us hear from him."

Hearing from MacArthur was plainly what few Democrats relished. While they hemmed & hawed about inviting the general to address Congress, Joe Martin hurled an ultimatum. If they didn't make up their minds by that very afternoon, Douglas MacArthur would proceed to New York and address the nation from there."* Suddenly, opposition evaporated. With a concurring nod from Harry Truman, the Democrats announced that they would be glad to join in honoring such a great general with a "joint meeting" (slightly less formal than a joint session) this week. Word went out from the White House: don't attack MacArthur personally; he's dynamite.

The Long & Short. At week's end Harry Truman himself showed his party how he proposed to play politics in his fashion. He chose Washington's top ceremonial rite for faithful, fat-cat Democrats, the $100-a-plate Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, to beg "every Democrat to put patriotism above politics." Not once did he mention MacArthur by name, but he got a fine laugh by ad-libbing a reference to MacArthur's report to him at Wake Island: "It has been categorically stated that Russia will not come in if we bomb Manchuria. That statement was made to me about the Chinese not coming into Korea. And it was made on good authority, too, and I believed it."

Otherwise, Harry Truman concentrated on some of MacArthur's Republican supporters in Congress, also unnamed:

"They say they want other free nations to resist aggression, said he, "but they don't want us to send any troops to help. They want us to get out of Korea--but they urge us to wage an aggressive war against China. They say it will provoke Russia to attack if we send troops to Europe--but they are sure Russia won't be provoked if we carry the war to China.They say they want to crush Communism --and yet they want us to go back into our shell, and let the rest of the world be overrun by the Reds. They say they are worried because the Russians outnumber us--but they are not interested in keeping allies who can help us.

"The long and short of it is they want defenses without spending the money; they want us to wage war without an army; they want us to have victory without out taking any risks, and they want us to try to run the whole world and run it without any friends."

The assembled Democrats got a great kick out of that. But millions of other Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, had their ears tuned for the roar of a Constellation bringing Douglas MacArthur home.

*Martin telephoned MacArthur headquarters only once, on the first day, but had good knowledge of what MacArthur was thinking all week long. Presumably his go-between with Tokyo was Patrick J. Hurley, Secretary of War when MacArthur was Chief of Staff, wartime ambassador to China and, since then, unbending foe of Dean Acheson and the Asia policies of the State Department.

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