Douglas MacArthur: Farewell Address to Congress

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The first half of Douglas MacArthur’s farewell address to Congress is taken up with reviewing the geopolitical situation. MacArthur asserts that “the Communist threat is a global one” and argues that “you cannot appease or otherwise surrender to Communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.” He notes that the colonial era in Asia is now over, and the Asian peoples want to forge their own destinies. He also reviews the strategic situation in the Pacific Ocean, noting that the Pacific has become a vast “moat” protecting America and that it has assumed “the friendly aspect of a peaceful lake.” He goes on, however, to highlight the Pacific’s strategic importance: “The holding of this defense line in the western Pacific is entirely dependent upon holding all segments thereof, for any major breach of that line by an unfriendly power would render vulnerable to determined attack every other major segment.” That attack, in his view, would come—and indeed was coming as he spoke—from Communist China, “which, for its own purposes, is allied with Soviet Russia but which in its own concepts and methods has become aggressively imperialistic, with a lust for expansions and increased power normal to this type of imperialism.”

In the second half of the speech, MacArthur turns specifically to the Korean War. MacArthur’s reading of the situation in Korean led him to the belief that firm steps were needed to lessen the threat from Communist China. He then notes the controversy that ensued: “For entertaining these views, all professionally designed to support our forces in Korea and to bring hostilities to an end with the least possible delay and at a saving of countless American and Allied lives, I have been severely criticized.” He specifies some of the steps he wanted to take, such as clearing out enemy strongholds north of the Yalu River, which forms the border between China and North Korea. He makes clear, though, that politics, not military conditions on the ground, were dictating the course of the war, in his view making victory impossible. But, he says, “war’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there can be no substitute for victory.” He believed that efforts to appease Red (that is, Communist) China on the part of some American politicians who wanted to avoid all-out war and intervention by the Soviet Union would only lead to future, bloodier wars. MacArthur concludes his speech on a sentimental note, delivering one of his most widely known lines, a quote from an old barracks song: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”