President Harry Truman spoke softly—so much so that some staff had to strain to hear him above the sound of White House renovation. "So the staff won't have to read it in the papers, I'm going to tell you that I fired MacArthur yesterday," Truman said.
It was an otherwise routine April 1951 White House staff meeting. But the statement—that a president with mid-20s approval ratings was relieving an American hero general of command in the midst of an unpopular war—was anything but normal. Frank Pace, the secretary of the Army, was in Asia, Truman added, and would tell MacArthur. "I'd kind of like to announce it myself," he added.
The decision was a long time coming. MacArthur, a former Army chief of staff, Medal of Honor winner, had commanded the Southwest Pacific Theatre in World War II, accepted Japan's surrender, and oversaw that country's occupation in the postwar years. When the Korean War broke out, MacArthur was put in command of United Nations forces against the North. MacArthur had mixed sometimes brilliant military strategy with public pronouncements that often bordered on (or flat out were) insubordination, issuing his own foreign policy dictates and trying to push the United States into a broader war with Red China.
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