Bunker Calls MacArthur Firing Disastrous Blow to U.S. Prestige

"The dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur by the Truman administration was a disastrous blow to the prestige of American foreign policy and to the fate of the Far East," Colonel Lawrence Bunker '26, MacArthur's chief aide in the Korean conflict, said last night.

In a speech sponsored by the Young Republican Club, Bunker said that when Truman dismissed MacArthur he was playing right into the Communists' hands. "The number one task of the Chinese Reds," the former aide said, "was to deface MacArthur at all costs. Truman simply did it for them."

Bunker added that the firing of MacArthur was done for unscrupulous political reasons. "For just such reasons," he said, "MacArthur was not allowed to win the war in Korea when he could have. I would further say that everyone who was killed in the Korean conflict from January, 1951 on, was outrightly murdered by the State Department," he added.

If MacArthur had not been fired and if he had been allowed to pursue the Korean war as he had wished to, Bunker felt that we would have driven the Reds completely out of Korea, the Communists would then not have been able to win in Indo-China, Mao Tse Sung's government would have fallen, and the Chinese Nationalists would have been able to return to their homeland.

Bunker also accused Truman of lying at the Wake Island Conference. "I was there," he said, "and I heard him tell everyone that he and General MacArthur agreed on the defense of Formosa. Two days later he told a news conference that he totally disagreed with MacArthur on the question of that island. What else is this but a lie?"