Transcript: Chapter 30

NARRATOR: By early 1951, the Communists had retaken Seoul and Inchon, and driven MacArthur's forces below the 38th parallel. Again the general urged the president to widen the war. Again the president refused.

NARRATOR: Then, on January 25, the longest retreat in American military history ended. MacArthur's bleak assessments had been wrong. His field commander General Matthew Ridgway took United Nations forces on the offensive.

Assaulting the Communists with tanks and artillery, Ridgway began driving them back. By the end of March, forces under Ridgway's command had reached the 38th parallel once again. There, the war stalemated.

More than 50,000 American soldiers had been killed or wounded; South Korean casualties numbered over 160,000. Truman cautiously began exploring the possibility of negotiations with the Chinese to stop the fighting and restore a divided Korea.

ROBERT DONOVAN: What Truman wanted and what the American policy-makers wanted was to get out of there as decently as we could.

NARRATOR: At just that moment, MacArthur stepped in and undermined the president's plan. The general issued his own proclamation, demanding that the Chinese commander surrender to him. The president was in a rage. MacArthur had wrecked his hope for negotiations.

"I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea," Truman said later. "I was never so put out in my life."

GENERAL VERNON WALTERS: I guess in the back of his mind, MacArthur figured, this is a captain of artillery. What does he know about this war?

And in Truman's mind, I'm the president, I decide American foreign and military policy.

GEORGE ELSEY: With General MacArthur making more and more statements that were calling into question national policy, some of Truman's advisors began to urge that he relieve the general. Well, that's something you just don't casually do. You don't relieve a commander in the field in the midst of major hostilities.

NARRATOR: But when MacArthur sent a letter to the House Minority leader criticizing the president's conduct of the war, Truman had had enough.

"This looks like the last straw," he wrote in his diary. "Rank insubordination."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Truman knew the firestorm he would face. He knew he would be attacked in the press. But he also knew that eventually the people, and history, would see that he had done the right thing.

NARRATOR: On April 11, MacArthur was having lunch in Tokyo when his wife handed him a brown Signal Corps envelope:

"I deeply regret," the message read, "that it becomes my duty as president and Commander in Chief of the United States military forces to replace you as Supreme Commander."

Truman had fired one of the most popular generals in American history.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: And he did it very abruptly. And he did it knowing full well what would happen.

NARRATOR: MacArthur came home to a hero's welcome. On Capitol Hill, Republicans attacked Truman. Senator Joseph McCarthy told a press conference: "The son of a bitch ought to be impeached." The president was deluged with wild telegrams, denouncing him as a pig, a little man, a Judas.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Who was he, this little, pipsqueak captain from World War I, to fire the great, beloved, awesome, General MacArthur?

GENERAL EDWIN SIMMONS: MacArthur was received in a tumultuous fashion in every city, ticker-tape parades, Joint session of Congress. He addressed the Congress. He made that famous speech.

MACARTHUR ADDRESSES JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS: "I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that 'Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.'

GENERAL EDWIN SIMMONS: "Old soldiers never die, they simply fade away." I've never been quite sure what that meant, but it sounds great.

MACARTHUR (SOF) "And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and..."

NARRATOR: Truman wasn't listening. As MacArthur spoke, the president met with his secretary of state, then took a nap. Later he read what the general had said, and privately remarked: It's "a bunch of damn bullshit."

GEORGE ELSEY: Truman took it all in stride. He said, "This'll blow over. Bring the general home. Let him have his ticker-tape parades. That's okay. All this will be gone in a few months," and it was.

NARRATOR: The stalemate in Korea continued. On July 10, 1951, peace talks began, but they would bog down and drag on for the rest of Truman's days in office. The war in Korea would go on, in the end, taking more than 54,000 American lives. Truman's only comfort was in knowing that he had kept the struggle from spreading -- that he had prevented the horror of a full-scale nuclear war.

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