FOREIGN RELATIONS: The Last Word

What did Douglas MacArthur say to Chiang Kaishek?

Harry Truman certainly wished he knew, and so did the State Department and the Pentagon. They did not even know about the general's flying trip to the Chinese Nationalist capital on Formosa (TIME, Aug. 7) until he made it. And while they were belatedly and reluctantly beginning to warm up—by degrees—to the Nationalists, they looked in their newspapers and read of diplomatic gallantries between MacArthur and Mme. Chiang and fervid comrades-in-arms exchanges between MacArthur and the Generalissimo.

MacArthur's own version of what went on, when...