Senate opens MacArthur hearings, May 3, 1951

On this day in 1951, the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, meeting jointly in closed session, began hearings into President Harry S. Truman’s dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. 

Truman’s firing of MacArthur as commander of U.S. forces in the Korean War had ignited a political firestorm.
Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio) said Truman “must be impeached and convicted. His hasty and vindictive removal of Gen. MacArthur is the culmination of a series of acts which have shown that he is unfit, morally and mentally, for his high office.” 

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As the featured witness at the opening session, MacArthur spoke for more than six hours. He assailed Truman’s Cold War foreign policy, arguing that if the president’s “inhibitions” about extending the war into Communist China had been removed, the conflict could have been “wound up” without a “very great additional complement of ground troops.” 

MacArthur went on to suggest that only through a strategy of complete military destruction of the communist empire could the United States hope to win the struggle against its ideological foes. 

The hearings ended on June 25 without any hard conclusions about MacArthur’s dismissal, but the general’s harsh stance and intemperate statements on the need for an expanded conflict against communism served to erode his popularity with the American public. 

MacArthur tried to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. But he lost out to another famed military leader with a more moderate political outlook: Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

MacArthur died at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington on April 5, 1964, at age 84. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized a state funeral and ordered that he be buried “with all the honor a grateful nation can bestow on a departed hero.” 

Source: “American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964,” by William Manchester (1983)