AT 1:00 A.M. ON THE morning of April 11, 1951, a tense band of Washington reporters filed into the White House newsroom for an emergency press conference. Hastily summoned by the White House switchboard, they had no idea of what was to come. The Truman administration, detested by millions, had grown hesitant, timid, and unpredictable. The Korean War, so boldly begun ten months before, had degenerated into a “limited war” with no discernible limit, a bloody stalemate. Some reporters, guessing, thought they were going to hear about a declaration of war, that the administration was ready to carry the fighting into China and bring it to a swift and victorious end. That was what Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of U.S. and United Nations forces in the Far East, had passionately been urging for months, ever since Chinese communist troops had sent his armies reeling in retreat from the YaIu River.
President Truman did not appear in the newsroom. His press secretary merely handed out copies of three terse presidential statements. At 1:03 A.M. the great wire-service networks were carrying the news to the ends of the earth. The President had not adopted the victory plans of America's greatest living general. Instead he had relieved him of all his commands, “effective at once. ” The President had acted because “General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States and the United Nations.”
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