A little later, as the meeting was breaking up, Ridgway grabbed General Hoyt Vandenberg and asked him why the Joint Chiefs didn’t send orders to MacArthur telling him what to do. Vandenberg just shook his head. “What good would that do? He wouldn’t obey the orders. What can we do?” “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” Ridgway asked. Vandenberg gave him a long look, both puzzled and amazed. “This was,” Acheson later noted, “the first time that someone had expressed what everybody thought—that the Emperor had no clothes on.” Now a collision course was set.
