Old Soldiers Never Die

By the spring of 1951 the Korean War had become a stalemate, and General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of United Nations forces, wanted to widen it. He pressed to bomb bases in China, blockade the Chinese coast, and bring Nationalist troops from Taiwan into the fight. President Harry Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to keep the war limited and avoid a larger conflict with China and the Soviet Union. MacArthur took his case public, and in a letter read on the House floor declared that there was no substitute for victory.

On April 11, 1951, Truman relieved him of command. The decision was among the least popular of his presidency. MacArthur returned to the United States for the first time in fourteen years to an enormous welcome, and on April 19 he addressed a joint meeting of Congress for thirty-seven minutes, interrupted again and again by ovations.

He defended his strategy and argued that appeasement only begot new and bloodier war. He closed with a line from a barracks ballad of his cadet days at West Point. "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty."

Millions turned out for a ticker-tape parade in New York the next day. But Senate hearings that spring heard the Joint Chiefs back the president, and General Omar Bradley warned that a war with China would be the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy. The episode settled, in a way that has held since, that a general in the field answers to the civilian commander in chief.