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.
