(See Cover) A hush fell over the assembled Congress of the United States and the crowded galleries. In the silence, the Doorkeeper's voice came clear: "Mr. Speaker, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur." In a great wave, the applause and cheers burst upon the erect figure who strode down the aisle. Democrats, Republicans, and the crowds in the galleries rose as one, clapped and shouted on & on. Across 8,700 miles, through cheering crowds, clouds of black headlines and storms of angry argument, Douglas Mac-Arthur had come to this podium to make his stand before the nation and to state his case to the world. He stood in a trim Eisenhower jacket without ribbons or medals, back rigid, his face stony — a dis missed commander conscious that history plucked at his sleeve, peered down at him from the lenses of the television cameras. He waited, impassively. As silence fell, he began to speak slowly, in a deep, reso nant voice. "I address you," he said, "with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country." Applause welled up again, interrupting him as it was to do again & again — in all, some 30 times.
Douglas MacArthur spoke with a native eloquence that the nation had not heard in years, without bombast or gesture. The resonant voice sometimes rasped, some times sank almost to a whisper, but never rose from a low, confident pitch.
Global. In his first ten minutes, he disarmed critics who accused him of ignoring Europe, or of wanting to reimpose a discredited past upon Asia. "The issues are global," he said, "and so interlocked that to consider the problems of one sector oblivious to those of another is to court disaster for the whole. While Asia is com- monly referred to as the gateway to Eu rope, it is no less true that Europe is the gateway to Asia . . . There are those who claim our strength is inadequate to protect on both fronts ... I can think of no greater expression of defeatism."
MacArthur swung a majestic glance backward at Asia's past. "The peoples of Asia found their opportunity in the war just past to throw off the shackles of colo- nialism and now see the dawn of new opportunity . . . This is the direction of Asian progress and it may not be stopped."
In China, MacArthur found "a new and dominant power in Asia, which, for its own purposes, is allied with Soviet Russia, but which in its own concepts and methods has become aggressively imperialistic." In Japan, "the Japanese people since the war have undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history . . ." In the Philippines, "we must be patient and understanding and never fail them, as in our hour of need they did not fail us." On Formosa, "the government of the Republic of China has had the opportunity to refute by action much of the malicious gossip which so undermined the strength of its leadership."