Army & Navy – COMMAND: Smearing MacArthur

In the Senate last week Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg protested the fact that the Army’s War College Library had just recommended for soldier readers a magazine article bitterly hostile to General Douglas MacArthur and his Presidential boom. In the American Mercury a freelancing writer named John McCarten* had belittled General MacArthur’s talents and charged that “the worst elements on the political right, including its most blatant lunatic fringe, are whooping it up for MacArthur.”

What most astonished many a soldier reader of the Library bulletin was the language of the Library’s recommendation of the article: “a comprehensive and objective appraisal of the General as Presidential timber, with special reference to the character of his backers and an analysis of his military reputation before Pearl Harbor and afterwards.”

Said Senator Vandenberg: “I am one of the sinister ‘backers.’ . . . A smear article if ever I read one in my life.”

Next day War Secretary Henry L. Stimson summarily ordered the War College Library’s “recommendations” discontinued.

Said the Secretary to the Senator: “I . . . assure you of my complete agreement with your statement that ‘the War Department must be scrupulously careful to avoid the official distribution of partisan or prejudicial material to the Army either at this time or any other.”

* Featured by the Mercury as a onetime TIME writer, John McCarten left TIME two years ago.