The long-distance call from Connecticut roused Joe Martin out of a sound sleep in Washington's Hay-Adams House at 1:30 a.m. Said a woman's voice: "I think it's terrible." "What's terrible?" asked the House Republican leader wearily. Then Joe Martin was shocked awake by the news that Douglas MacArthur had been fired.
The shock was only momentary. By midmorning, on Martin's signal, the Republican leadership moved smoothly into battle position. Martin, longtime admirer of Douglas MacArthur, quickly assumed the role of leader in getting him back to the U.S. to make his position clear before the nation. He put in a call to Tokyo and got the general's promise to address a joint session of Congress. Just before noon, Martin wound up a conference with Senate and House G.O.P. brass in time to catch the hungry lunchtime headlines with terse talk of "the possibility of impeachments." The plural "impeachments" obviously meant both Harry Truman and Dean Acheson.
One Man Battle. Before such a coordinated offensive, and the wave after wave of angry telegrams (125,000 of them, almost all pro-MacArthur), the Democrats fell back in confusion. Compelled to stand by their party, but unwilling to attack MacArthur in the face of public opinion, they mumbled about the President's right to fire an insubordinate general. They were only saved from complete rout by a freshman Senator, Oklahoma's Robert Kerr. Like a Democratic Horatius, Kerr fought a desperate battle all afternoon in the Senate. "The Republicans are making a lot of noise on this floor today," said he, "but they are dodging the real issue. If they . . . believe that the future security of this nation depends on following the MacArthur policy, let them put up or shut up. Let them submit a resolution, expressing it as the sense of the Senate, that we should either declare war against Red China, or do that which would amount to open warfare against her . . . If they do not, their support of MacArthur is a mockery." Minnesota's brash Hubert Humphrey picked up the cue. "The Republican Party," he said, "has become the war party."
The accusation was enough to make Joe Martin & Co. give pause. Already three Republican Senators—Pennsylvania's Jim Duff and Massachusetts' Henry Cabot Lodge and Leverett Saltonstall—had broken ranks to defend Truman's right to act. If the MacArthur issue was to be broad enough to include the eastern internationalists in the G.O.P (generally more interested in Europe than Asia), such forthright Republicans as California's Bill Knowland (who favors the decisive course in both Asia and Europe) and such high & dry isolationists as Indiana's Homer Capehart and Illinois' Everett Dirksen (who frequently criticize U.S. involvement in either Korea or Europe), some changes had to be made fast. Out from Martin's office went the new word: forget impeachment talk for the time being, stop talking about the Formosa question, and concentrate on a demand that MacArthur come back and report his views to Congress—in a joint session, nothing less.