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Tell the People. The G.O.P.'s best speechmakers fanned out across the nation. Bob Taft talked of the new "appeasement." Said he: "It would be hard to deliberately invent a more disastrous series of policy moves than this Administration has adopted during the past 18 months." Dirksen saw MacArthur's firing as a victory for Great Britain, and the State Department as "a branch of Downing Street." Far out in right field, Joe McCarthy announced in Milwaukee that the recall was "a Communist victory won with the aid of bourbon and Benedictine." Of Harry Truman he said in a press conference: "The son of a bitch should be impeached." Nebraska's Ken Wherry took to the air to ask: "Who got us into this war? This is Truman's war and General MacArthur, under orders of the Commander in Chief, has done his level best to end the war ... I have not seen any statement by [MacArthur] that he wants to send American foot soldiers into Manchuria. Certainly he has not suggested an all-out war with China . . . Let us hear from him."
Hearing from MacArthur was plainly what few Democrats relished. While they hemmed & hawed about inviting the general to address Congress, Joe Martin hurled an ultimatum. If they didn't make up their minds by that very afternoon, Douglas MacArthur would proceed to New York and address the nation from there."* Suddenly, opposition evaporated. With a concurring nod from Harry Truman, the Democrats announced that they would be glad to join in honoring such a great general with a "joint meeting" (slightly less formal than a joint session) this week. Word went out from the White House: don't attack MacArthur personally; he's dynamite.
The Long & Short. At week's end Harry Truman himself showed his party how he proposed to play politics in his fashion. He chose Washington's top ceremonial rite for faithful, fat-cat Democrats, the $100-a-plate Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, to beg "every Democrat to put patriotism above politics." Not once did he mention MacArthur by name, but he got a fine laugh by ad-libbing a reference to MacArthur's report to him at Wake Island: "It has been categorically stated that Russia will not come in if we bomb Manchuria. That statement was made to me about the Chinese not coming into Korea. And it was made on good authority, too, and I believed it."
Otherwise, Harry Truman concentrated on some of MacArthur's Republican supporters in Congress, also unnamed:
"They say they want other free nations to resist aggression, said he, "but they don't want us to send any troops to help. They want us to get out of Korea—but they urge us to wage an aggressive war against China. They say it will provoke Russia to attack if we send troops to Europe—but they are sure Russia won't be provoked if we carry the war to China.They say they want to crush Communism —and yet they want us to go back into our shell, and let the rest of the world be overrun by the Reds. They say they are worried because the Russians outnumber us—but they are not interested in keeping allies who can help us.