A summary dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur comes as a crowning stupidity to the mess that President Truman and his State Department have of our Asiatic policy.

By a squiggle of the pen, a Pendergast politician has removed from command in the Far East the very bedrock of respect for American authority! Beyond that, he has gone far toward nullifying all the sacrifice in blood and sweat that has been invested in Korea to date!

[Thomas J. Pendergast was a Kansas City political boss, friend and supporter of Truman, imprisoned for corruption]

Perhaps it was in the Truman tradition that General MacArthur should be removed—for having had the honesty, the guts and the foresight to differ from the stultifying policies of Washington! Men who have dishonored public trust, who have been parties to the abuse of positions of authority for private gain, have gone without reprimand, or have received additional accolade.

But General MacArthur, who charted a brilliant victory in the Pacific, who consolidated our victory in Japan on a scale not even remotely approached in Europe—regardless of what may be said for the winsomeness of General Eisenhower—he is fired for having dared suggest, in a private letter to a Republican member of Congress, that we avail ourselves of the help of a logical ally in the Nationalist Chinese!

WE ARE NOT CONCERNED, God knows, with the political repercussions of this development, because President Truman already had destroyed himself politically. But we are immensely concerned with the possible reaction upon the world now engaged in a war—hot or cold—with the forces of Communism.

Who has been fighting Communism in Asia the longer, General MacArthur or President Truman and his State Department, who were swindled on the pretext that the forces taking charge of China were not Communists, but merely “agrarian reformers?”

Only one man in comparable authority in Asia has recognized the danger from the outset; has known and recommended the proper course we should follow. That man is General MacArthur!

Mr. Truman, who inherited the Presidency by death and who was elected mainly by dint of pure popular sympathy for the underdog, may have felt his vanity abused when he flew to Wake Island to “confer” with General MacArthur prior to the last congressional elections. MacArthur is a good soldier—so the actual truth of that conference never has escaped his lips.

Once again, President Truman may have suffered a blow to his personal political vanity when General MacArthur replied directly to a letter from the House Republican Leader, Joseph Martin, regarding a matter of foreign diplomacy and national strategy.

Why didn’t the President himself invite and use the advice of the man best qualified to say what we should do in the Far East?

WHOM DID Mr. Truman consult? The officials of the State Department or the Defense Department, who manifestly were fooled from the very start? Or the advocates of an Asiatic Munich?

Obviously he did NOT consult—in good faith—the one man who was the chief architect of all our peacetime accomplishments in Asia, and who more than any other man engineered our speedy triumph in that theater!

Otherwise—it stands to reason—Douglas MacArthur hardly would have been driven to the necessity of making his views public in a letter to a member of Congress.

Perhaps, in the strictest bureaucratic concept of Army protocol, General MacArthur should have kept his lips sealed oven while he saw his nation’s interest sold to a slaughterhouse, and even while he saw American men being deployed to their death without the aid of logical assistance. General MacArthur has been a soldier most all of his life. But he has been an American even longer!

IN THE FACE of his record for achievement in Asia—in splendid contrast to the sorry record of Defense Secretary Gen. George Marshall and the others who had a part in the abdication of China to the Communists and who now are presuming to take his place—the most that General MacArthur deserved for his supposed “insubordination” was some form of military directive.

MacArthur’s removal must make Moscow very, very happy.

And most of America, we venture to say, would have been happier had Mr. Truman himself given up his job, for which HE is obviously unfit!