FOREIGN RELATIONS: Two Voices

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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.