Truman was furious. It was then that the President decided to fire his general. “I’ve come to the conclusion that our Big General in the Far East must be recalled,” he wrote in this diary. A few days later, MacArthur, who surely must have known what he was doing, drove the last nail into his own coffin. He wrote a letter to Joe Martin, the Republican House minority leader, supporting Martin’s view that Chiang’s troops should be called into this war. MacArthur knew the letter would be released by Martin: It was filled with grand statements about the real battleground being Asia. But the final
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