For five days after his New York reception, General Douglas MacArthur stayed secluded in his ten-room, $130-a-day Waldorf-Astoria suite, but all the while his name—and the debate he set off—went on blooming steadily in black headlines.
During MacArthur's five days of retreat in Manhattan, coveys of cops, MPs and hotel dicks turned both press and public aside. Special switchboard arrangements diverted almost all of his 3,000-odd daily telephone calls. His zealous military secretary, Major General Courtney Whitney, onetime Manila lawyer, carried his word to Manhattan's clamoring reporters.
Doubting Thomases. "MacArthur," Whitney said, still did not have the "faintest idea" of the President's reason for firing him, added that the abruptness of the dismissal had "deprived" MacArthur of the opportunity of making farewell addresses to his troops and Japanese people.
When he was asked how MacArthur might react to a presidential draft, Whitney replied: "The general told me that if any such question was raised he would advise the questioner to go home and read the Bible. Especially the chapter on St. Thomas . . . the part pertaining to doubting Thomas."
Whitney, long MacArthur's spokesman in Tokyo, was not an unqualified success in New York. The New York Herald Tribune, Post and the tabloid Daily News cried editorially, as one, that his pronouncements were a liability to the general. The News, while applauding MacArthur, did not conceal its restiveness at his Olympian remoteness, and noted in irascible tones that the cops who were holding back its reporters had let a burglar enter the exclusive Waldorf and get away with a fur coat.
"What Is Our Policy?" But these sounds of criticism were drowned by cheering when the general and his family took to the road again. Chicago, like San Francisco, Washington and New York, gave him the biggest welcome in memory. Downtown business closed up, stores barricaded their windows, and crowds applauded wildly as he was driven along a 23-mile route from the airport to his hotel in a geranium-red Lincoln with 100 motorcycle cops leading the way. That night at Soldier Field, 50,000 (not a capacity crowd) cheered him to the echo when he rose—after being driven around the great bowl in the dramatic glare of a single searchlight beam—to make the second formal speech since his return.
"What," he asked, "is our policy in Korea? ... Our losses there in ratio to the men committed have already reached staggering proportions ... I have strongly urged the need for a positive policy . . . designed to stop, through strength, this slaughter of America's sons. [We have] a policy vacuum heretofore unknown to war."
When he said: "Although my public life is now closed . . ." he was interrupted by cries of "No!" "It is closed," he went on, but "I feel my responsibility of national citizenship no less deeply ... I shall continue to fight against that greatest scourge of mankind, Communism, as long as God gives me the power to fight."