Editorial Note
President Truman and General of the Army MacArthur, together with their advisers, met on Wake Island on October 15 to discuss various Far Eastern topics, particularly the situation in Korea. Prior to the general conference, President Truman and General MacArthur held a private conversation. According to the very brief account of this conversation in Courtney Whitney, MacArthur: His Rendezvous with History (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), page 387, Truman and MacArthur devoted the bulk of their conversation to the fiscal and economic problems in the Philippines. According to the record kept by General of the Army Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there was a brief discussion of the Philippines during the general conference session of the Wake meeting. The possibility of Joseph Dodge serving as the head of an economic mission to the Philippines was discussed (see telegram 643, October 17, to Manila, infra), and President Truman mentioned, but did not accept, a suggestion by General MacArthur that President Quirino be invited to the conference. For General Bradley’s record of the Wake Island Conference of October 15, see volume VII, page 948.
Telegram 887, October 11, from Manila, not printed, reported that President Quirino, who learned from press accounts of an imminent meeting somewhere in the Pacific area between President Truman and General MacArthur, had wired an invitation to President Truman to hold his conference in the Philippines or to visit the Philippines while in the Pacific (711.11–TR/10–1150). Telegram 607, October 11, to Manila, not printed, reported that President Truman had telegraphed his appreciation of President Quirino’s invitation and expressed his regret that the short time available for the Pacific conference and pressure of other commitments in the United States made it impossible for him to visit the Philippines (711.11–TR/10–1150).