April 19, 1951 – General Douglas MacArthur’s Farewell Address to Congress

Douglas MacArthur (1880 – 1964) was an American five-star general and field marshal of the Philippine Army, for which he received the Medal of Honor. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. He was one of only five men ever to rise to the rank of General of the Army in the US Army.

MacArthur in Manila, Philippines c. 1945, smoking his signature corncob pipe

It was MacArthur who, aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay, officially accepted Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945. He then oversaw the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951. He led the United Nations Command in the Korean War until he was removed from command by President Harry S. Truman on April 11, 1951.

In a 1973 article in “Time Magazine,” Truman was quoted as saying in the early 1960s:

I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

MacArthur’s firing led to a storm of public controversy; polls showed that the majority of the public disapproved of the decision to relieve MacArthur. Beginning on May 3, 1951, a Joint Senate Committee—chaired by Democrat Richard Russell, Jr.—investigated MacArthur’s removal. It found that “the removal of General MacArthur was within the constitutional powers of the President but the circumstances were a shock to national pride.”

MacArthur in 1951

On this day in history, MacArthur made his last official appearance in a farewell address to the U.S. Congress, defending his side of his disagreement with Truman over the conduct of the Korean War. During his speech, he was interrupted by fifty ovations. In his speech regularly ranked as one of the top 100 American Speeches of the Twentieth Century, MacArthur concluded with:

I am closing my 52 years of military service. When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all of my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but 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.’

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.

Good Bye.”

You can read the full text of his farewell address here.