President Truman's relief of General Douglas MacArthur purposes is [just temporarily] allied with Soviet Russia." If MacArthur's thesis was accepted, then it followed that expanding the war with China would not provoke a conflict with the Soviet Union. The Joint Chiefs emphatically disagreed, although this contradicted their position that it was Europe and not Asia that was the prime concern of the Soviet Union. Even among Republicans, there was little support for MacArthur's position. On 5 April, Martin read the text of a letter he had received from MacArthur, dated 20 March, criticizing the Truman administration's priorities on the floor of the House. In it, MacArthur had
President Truman's relief of General Douglas MacArthur who had arrived the day before. MacArthur shook hands with the President rather than salute, and declined an offer to stay for lunch with the President which Bradley considered "insulting". This did not bother Truman; what did annoy the President, a former haberdasher, was MacArthur's "greasy ham and eggs cap that evidently had been in use for twenty years." The meeting, which had no agenda and no structure, took the form of a free-wheeling discussion between the President and his advisors on one hand, and MacArthur and the CINCPAC, Admiral Arthur Radford, on the other. Topics discussed included Formosa, the