MACARTHUR HEARING: Curtain

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The script had become repetitious, the audience was getting that glazed look: it was time to end. This week the curtain came down on the MacArthur hearing.

The 26 Senators who had sat for eight weeks in a Capitol hearing room and asked questions were far from unified in their conclusions about why General Douglas MacArthur was dismissed, what should be done next in Korea, or how much the U.S. had been to blame for Communism's advances in Asia. The official transcript totaled 2,045,000 words—more than twice the wordage of the Bible.

"In Direct Disagreement." To wind up the show, the Senators offered their star performer an opportunity to reappear and comment on what had been said. But General MacArthur was willing to let things stand as they were. "I think it should be understood, however," he wrote, "that certain of the testimony given by some of the subsequent witnesses did not coincide with my own recollection and record of the events, and with many of their opinions and judgments I am in direct disagreement." MacArthur also had a last dart for the man who fired him: "Insofar as the investigation dealt with my relief from the Far East command, I feel that the full facts have not been elucidated due to orders of the President silencing the pertinent witnesses."

So the committee turned to its last four witnesses, minor performers by contrast to those who had gone before them, but each with some sharp bits to contribute.

MAJOR GENERAL PATRICK J. HURLEY, onetime Secretary of War (under Hoover) and wartime ambassadorial troubleshooter (under Roosevelt), is a man with a lot of unwritten history in his system. He came into the hearing room in a mood that bristled like his dashing white mustache, promptly lit into the State Department. "A weak and confused foreign policy after Yalta," he added, ". . . is the primary cause for every international problem confronting our nation, and for every casualty we have suffered in Korea." Democrat Brien McMahon of Connecticut was lying in wait for him with quotes from Hurley's days as Roosevelt's Ambassador to China, when he was sure that the Chinese Communists were mere agrarian reformers, not tied to Moscow. (Example: "The only difference between Chinese Communists and Oklahoma Republicans is that the Oklahoma Republicans aren't armed.") Hurley replied hotly that he had done and said some things "of which I am not proud," but "I served President Roosevelt during the war . . . just as a man who goes over the top or hits the beach ... I have never claimed that I was really perfect in my conclusions."

Oklahoman Hurley furnished a new, intimate glimpse of President Roosevelt in his last days. In March 1945, Hurley testified, he visited Roosevelt to complain of the still-secret concessions made to Russia at Yalta: "... I went to the White House . . . with my ears back and my teeth skinned, to have a fight about what had been done. When the President reached up that fine, firm, strong hand of his to shake hands with me, what I found in my hands was a very loose bag of bones.