THE PRESIDENCY: The General Rose at Dawn

The President seemed to be in a carefree and folksy mood when he began his long pilgrimage to shake the hand of General Douglas MacArthur. But once the presidential DC-6, Independence, left St. Louis, his jocularity vanished. At California’s Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base he barely nodded to photographers. In Hawaii the next morning, Admiral Arthur W. Radford’s pretty wife welcomed him according to island custom; when she put a lei around his neck and kissed his cheek, he reddened, took off the floral offering as if it were poison ivy.

When he lunched at the Pearl Harbor Officers’ Club—after a cruise in a picket boat past the rusting hulks of the battleship Arizona* and the target ship Utah—he spoke with great seriousness of his hope for world peace. At the Army’s Tripler General Hospital, where he made a surprise visit to men wounded in the Korean war, his usual geniality returned. He joked with a soldier who had lost an eye: Well, the President said, you can be a banker and use your glass eye to show sympathy to people who want loans.

Neutral Field. But that night, as he prepared for the last, 2,300-mile leg of his journey to Wake Island, an odd atmosphere of expectancy and something very like tension settled over the expedition. Truman and MacArthur—who had never set eyes on each other, and who had clashed publicly over U.S. policy in Formosa (TIME, Sept. 4)—seemed, at the moment, like the sovereign rulers of separate states, approaching a neutral field with panoplied retainers to make talk and watch each other’s eyes.

The illusion was heightened by the hour of meeting—dawn had just begun to silhouette a great black thundercloud east of Wake Island as the Independence circled for a landing. Even in the dim light, the President could see dozens of Japanese tanks rusting away along the barren beaches. The President’s plane landed, taxied past the aircraft that had brought MacArthur (he had arrived twelve hours earlier), Truman’s advisers, and 35 stateside reporters and cameramen.

A battered 1948 Chevrolet sedan rolled up. Douglas MacArthur stepped forth and advanced, hands in his pockets, his greasy, battered, gold-encrusted cap well down on his head. As the President stepped down, MacArthur held out his hand.

“I’ve been a long time meeting you, General,” said Truman, grinning.

“I hope,” the general answered genially, “it won’t be so long next time.”*

As 200 Guamanian, Filipino and Marshallese laborers applauded lustily, the two men got carefully into the dusty automotive ruin—climbing over the front seat because the rear doors were stuck—and rattled off to a Quonset hut which a Pan American foreman had surrendered for the occasion. The general sat down on a rattan settee, the President on a wicker chair. The door closed. It stayed closed for one hour. Nobody heard what was said.

Pipe Session. At 7:45 the two men emerged into the tropic sunshine and made another rattling journey, this time to Wake’s new coral-pink administration building. Their advisers—General Omar Bradley, Frank Pace, Admiral Radford, Philip Jessup and Averell Harriman for the President, Korean Ambassador John Muccio and Brigadier General Courtney Whitney for MacArthur—were waiting. The President suggested that it was no weather for coats. Said MacArthur, pulling out a pipe: “Do you mind if I smoke, Mr. President?”

“No,” said non-smoking Harry Truman, “I suppose I have had more smoke blown at me than any other man alive.” The President pulled out an agenda penciled on a scratch pad and the conference began. Judging by the formal statement issued later and comments of the conferees, Truman confined the talk to subjects on which he and MacArthur already agreed—Korea, the Philippines, stabilizing the Far East. Particularly, the President wanted to hear the general’s opinions on rebuilding Korea. According to one man in the room, the President referred to Formosa only by saying—as if in passing—that “we are in agreement.”

There was no mention at this round-table meeting of Chiang Kai-shek or Indo-China. MacArthur did most of the talking, and did so, said Presidential Press Secretary Charlie Ross, “magnificently.” The meeting took exactly two hours.

When it was over, the President went off to get a little rest. The general, however, remained in the administration building, toying restlessly with his watch, as if anxious to get back to the war. When reporters asked him to comment on the conference, he replied sharply: “All the comments will have to come from the President’s publicity man.”

When he decided to leave the building, there was no waiting car. His pilot, Lieut. Colonel Anthony Story, asked a civilian behind the wheel of a battered jeep: Would he give General MacArthur a ride? Said the driver, glumly: “Well, if it’s an order …” Finally, the colonel flagged a CAA pickup truck; MacArthur and the pilot bumped off in it.

If the general’s manner seemed reserved and abstracted, the President reflected nothing but enthusiasm. He acted—in the words of New York Times Correspondent Tony Leviero—”like an insurance salesman who has at last signed up an important prospect . . . while the latter appeared dubious over the extent of coverage.” Truman characterized the general as “one of America’s greatest soldier-statesmen.” Faced with such hallelujahs, MacArthur authorized Press Secretary Ross to state: “No field commander in the history of warfare has had more complete and admirable support than I have during the Korean operation.”

When the two men got together to say goodbye at the airstrip, MacArthur was graciousness itself once more. He stood at attention while the President pinned a fourth oakleaf cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal on MacArthur’s open-necked shirt. MacArthur shook hands firmly, smiled and said, “Goodbye, sir. Happy landings. It’s been a real honor to talk to you.” The Independence took off for Hawaii at 11 a.m. The general was on his way to Tokyo five minutes later.

Face to Face. What had been accomplished? The conference had been so short, the explanations of it so unrewarding, that, as Wake Island faded astern, many a correspondent felt he had witnessed nothing but a political grandstand play. There was no doubt that the President—and the Democratic Party—would benefit from the Wake Island meeting.

But the cynics overlooked a fact which Admiral Radford was quick to point out: two men can sometimes learn more of each other’s mind in two hours, face to face, than in years of correct correspondence. Harry Truman put it more simply: I don’t care what they say, he said. I wanted to see General MacArthur, so I went to see him.

*In whose hull still lie the bodies of 1,092 Pearl Harbor dead.

*Douglas MacArthur has not been to the U.S. since 1937. Franklin Roosevelt lured him as far as Hawaii for a conference in 1944—also just before an election.