Truman, MacArthur, And McCauley
By Gene Aronowitz
When I was growing up, my parents would rent rooms in our house. The tenants, we called them roomers, were like members of the family. My favorite was an army officer, Colonel McCauley, who lived with us when I was in the eighth grade.
The Korean War was being waged at the time and President Truman, who I liked even then, had just fired General Macarthur. I was at the dining room table working on an essay for school, in which I was defending Truman. Colonel McCauley offered to help me and ended up writing the entire essay himself. No big deal. Lots of kids get that kind of assistance on their homework. It doesn’t help them but it gets the job done.
I took my essay to school and, along with others in the class, I read it aloud. I don’t remember the reactions of my classmates, but my teacher loved it. She really loved it.
She arranged for me to read it to another class and the other teacher loved it too.
They marched the entire school down to the auditorium to listen to my plagiarized piece of writing. The place was packed and I was relishing this very much undeserved admiration. I read the defense of Truman for the third time that day. The kids probably didn’t like anything about this. Here I was getting all this attention and not for anything they valued. Besides, the essay was undoubtedly over their heads as it was over mine. Perhaps a few of them might have appreciated the fact that I put one over on the teachers but they didn't know what was happening.
I understand now and probably understood then that if I had been found out I would have been in deep trouble. .It would not have been pleasant if this ruse was discovered. But it wasn’t.
I remember the whole episode as thrilling and do not recall any sense of guilt. But while I still get a charge out of the whole thing, there’s not a single doubt in my mind that Harry Truman would not have approved.
