After managing to cross the Yalu River without detection, the Red Chinese on October 25 launched an overwhelming assault on United Nations forces, driving them back toward the 38th parallel. They were assisted by Soviet air cover, the first time U.S. pilots had tangled with Russian-made MIG fighter planes.
The Communist attacks continued to drive the UN forces southward utilizing their superior troop strength to encircle UN positions. A combined U.S. Army–Marines force of 20,000 was nearly wiped out at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, but escaped with nearly 15,000 casualties. On December 16, 1950, Truman declared a national emergency and young men began receiving draft notices under the Conscription Act. MacArthur considered using nuclear weapons against the Communist onslaught, insisting that it should be his prerogative, not the president’s, which naturally infuriated Truman. He also considered a scheme to dump a belt of atomic waste in the Yalu River to prevent the Chinese from resupplying themselves.
After the commanding general of Eighth Army was killed, General Matthew Ridgway was put in command. He managed to restore confidence, stabilizing the army and abandoning the retreat. The Red Chinese continued to attack but their tactics were extremely costly. The action, bloody and ferocious, settled around the 38th parallel.
TRUMAN DEVELOPED A SORT of inferiority complex after he was suddenly pitchforked into the presidency; he felt inadequate replacing such a man as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and was touchy about people not giving him proper respect. Truman had not liked MacArthur even while he was vice president, complaining privately about MacArthur’s imperial demeanor, especially vis-à-vis the president of the United States. Roosevelt knew how to handle MacArthur, but Truman was sensitive and picked fights; MacArthur gave him ample cause.
Truman became particularly incensed when a photograph appeared in newspapers showing MacArthur in Formosa kissing the hand of Madame Chiang after it had become official State Department policy to distance the United States from the Nationalist Chinese. (This was to keep from losing face should they be overrun by the Chinese Communists.) MacArthur told a State Department official he didn’t care if Chiang “had horns and a tail so long as he fought against the Communists.” Next, MacArthur issued a statement to the American Legion assailing American foreign policy in the Far East, which made Truman’s blood boil.
At the Wake Island conference, Truman had confided his private feelings to his diary: “Gen. MacArthur was at the airport with his shirt unbuttoned, wearing a greasy ham and eggs cap that evidently had been in use for twenty years.” Not long after that meeting Truman became almost apoplectic when MacArthur gave an interview to U.S. News & World Report in which he criticized the military restrictions placed upon him by those in Washington. In response, Truman issued a gag order that forbade high military or civilian officials from making a public statement without first clearing it with their department.25
With the war seemingly stalemated, Ridgway’s Eighth Army scored a convincing victory over the Red Chinese. Truman was contemplating calling for a truce and holding peace talks when MacArthur, seemingly out of the blue, issued a public statement to the Chinese threatening to invade their port cities and take other destructive action against them unless they capitulated immediately. To Truman that was sheer insubordination and he used the occasion to relieve MacArthur of his command on April 11, 1951.
When Bradley got wind of the firing he awakened Truman to tell him that if word reached MacArthur before Truman’s order did MacArthur would likely resign. “The son of a bitch isn’t going to resign on me. I want him fired,” the president said. A 1 a.m. press conference was held that night at the White House to announce MacArthur’s relief. In Tokyo, one of MacArthur’s staff heard the news on the radio and hurried to tell Jean. She informed the general, who calmly told her, “Jeannie, we’re going home at last.”26
WHEN MACARTHUR LEFT TOKYO the following day, a quarter million Japanese lined his route to the airport. He was incensed over Truman’s dismissing him without first letting him know, but he never addressed the issue publicly; he was soldier enough to know that the president has a right to fire anybody.
He was immediately invited to address a joint session of Congress, and he wrote his speech in flight. When he reached San Francisco late at night, half a million people were waiting for his plane chanting, “MacArthur for president!” In Washington, George Marshall, Omar Bradley, and a dozen three- and four-star generals were there to welcome him.
His address to Congress has been called “an epic moment” in the early years of television. It “left a grainy, if indelible, impression among millions of Americans of what a living legend and walking myth looked like in the flesh.”27
In almost direct contravention to the foreign policies of Truman and his State Department, MacArthur spoke for more than an hour, frequently interrupted by wild ovations. He spoke about Asia, about the impoverishment and suffering of its people, and also about the dangers inherent in the rise of Red China. He criticized the lack of reinforcements for the army fighting in Korea and the restrictions placed upon him that he claimed kept him from winning a complete victory.
“It has been said that I am a warmonger,” he said, his words ringing throughout the congressional chamber. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I know war as few men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition … But once war is forced on us there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory—not prolonged indecision,” he said. “In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory.”
He ended his speech with perhaps the most stirring closing remarks ever spoken in the halls of Congress. “When I joined the Army even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over several 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—Goodbye.”
It not only brought down the house, it nearly caused a riot. There were cries of “No! No!” Men wept and stamped their feet and beat upon their thighs with their fists; many jumped up and waved their arms wildly in the air, shouting MacArthur’s name. The Speaker of the House had never seen such an outburst during his fifty years in politics. He told a friend, “There wasn’t a dry eye on the Democratic side of the House … nor a dry seat among the Republicans!”28
Truman denounced the speech as “One hundred percent bullshit.”29
The next day, MacArthur went to New York City for a spectacular ticker-tape parade that an estimated seven million people attended. His speech was followed by lengthy congressional hearings on the conduct of the war, in which MacArthur charged that his recommendations on how to proceed were accepted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff but torpedoed by the Truman administration. To contradict this allegation, the Democrats put George C. Marshall under oath, creating the sorry spectacle of two senior statesmen of the army accusing each other of lying. This episode was what prompted Senator Joe McCarthy’s three-hour “treason” screed in Congress against Marshall.
In the summer of 1951 the MacArthurs took a large apartment on the thirty-seventh floor in the Waldorf Astoria Towers on New York’s East Side. The spacious rooms were filled with an opulence of Oriental art and mementos, and MacArthur resumed his eternal pacing, stopping only to sleep, watch sports on TV—especially football—or attend Broadway plays.
A friend of the author’s recalled an occasion when legendary football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who had recently won the first of his many national championships at the University of Alabama, was a guest at the Waldorf during the Heisman Trophy awards ceremony
. Bryant had assembled a number of his fellow coaches—including such luminaries as Darrell Royal, Woody Hayes, Ara Parseghian, and Duffy Daughtery—for a cocktail party in his suite. He had instructed a former player who served as an assistant coach not to let anyone from the press disturb the party.
At some point there was a knock at the door and the assistant answered it to find an elderly gentleman inquiring whether this were Coach Bryant’s suite. The assistant acknowledged it was, and the man asked if he could see the coach. “Coach Bryant is busy at the moment,” the assistant answered and asked for the man’s name.
“Douglas MacArthur,” came the reply.
The assistant was so flabbergasted he simply stared, dumbstruck, but Bryant had noticed the incident and intervened, inviting MacArthur in. He had stayed only a short while when there was another knock and Mrs. MacArthur appeared in the doorway. “It is time for the general to go to bed,” she said.
In 1960, at the age of eighty, MacArthur agreed to write his memoirs for Time Inc.’s Henry Luce for $900,000—the equivalent of more than $7 million today.
Two years later, with his health deteriorating, he accepted West Point’s prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award and journeyed up the Hudson to give his final speech at the United States Military Academy. After reviewing the corps at parade on the Plain, MacArthur had lunch in the dining hall with the cadets, then gave perhaps his most inspiring oration ever.
Its theme was the West Point motto: “Duty, Honor, Country,” and in spine-tingling prose MacArthur reached back across the years for meaningful examples.
“From your ranks come the great captains who hold the nation’s destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds. The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: duty, honor, country …
“The soldier, above all other people,” he said, “prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato … ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ ”
In conclusion, MacArthur said in a now quavering but still strong, gravelly, baritone voice: “The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here … I listen, then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll.
“In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: duty, honor, country.
“Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the corps, and the corps, and the corps.
“I bid you farewell.”30
There was an instantaneous outburst of cheering and a long standing ovation, during which it was said that “grown men fumbled with their handkerchiefs and blew their noses in a vain attempt to hide their tears.”
Two years later, almost to the day, MacArthur died in Walter Reed Hospital of complications from surgery. He was eighty-four years old. He wanted to be buried not at West Point nor at Arlington but in Norfolk, Virginia, his mother’s hometown. There they had promised him an entire city square, including the remodeled old courthouse, in which to house the MacArthur Memorial, including the MacArthur archives, a theater, and nine museum galleries containing his mementos.
The day after he died, MacArthur’s body was taken to the U.S. Capitol where it lay in state by order of President Lyndon Johnson. The military caisson and flag-draped coffin were accompanied there by Black Jack, the horse that had accompanied the body of slain President John F. Kennedy to Arlington not five months previous. Some 150,000 people visited MacArthur’s casket before it was taken by train to Norfolk.
In the large domed rotunda of the MacArthur Memorial his black tombstone lies in the center of a circular sarcophagus, and Jean lies next to him, having died in the year 2000. Around the top and inside of the rotunda are carved in marble the names of all the battles MacArthur fought, from the Philippine Insurrection Campaign, to World Wars I and II, and finally Korea. It is an impressive sight, of which MacArthur would be justly proud.
THESE THREE MEN COULD HARDLY have been more different. Patton and MacArthur were the killers—but while one abhorred war, the other was an inveterate war lover. Marshall spent much of his career keeping the two of them, with their outsize egos, from self-imploding. In the end he had to preside over the demise of both their careers, which—in the greatest irony of all—seemed not to tarnish their reputations but to vastly enhance them.
MacArthur and Patton were seriously intellectual and each had a grasp of history that equaled or exceeded that of a university professor, while Marshall was a brilliant thinker who spurned the intuition-based choices of the other two and engineered a total victory in World War II.
They had been born into the age of horses and buggies and lived to the age of nuclear weapons and—in MacArthur’s case—the spectacle of men in outer space. At times they were revered by their peers and by the multitudes as gods, but they weren’t, of course. They were exceptionally good soldiers, and great captains, brave as lions, bold as bulls, audacious, and inventive, marshaling huge victorious armies. With all their quirks and foibles and mistakes they were still fine men who served their country with distinction, and when they died their memory enriched the national trust.
* A widely circulated American proposal formulated by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau would have turned Germany into a virtual sheep pasture, with no industrial capability whatsoever.
† Nearly $1.5 trillion in today’s dollars.
‡ More than $1 trillion in today’s dollars.
§ For what it’s worth, the author’s parents were married there, in 1942.
ǁ Whether he did or did not, Ike reminded Patton of it in a letter dated September 11.
a In 1948 the grave would be moved to a more open space to accommodate the thousands of people who came to visit the site.
b George Patton IV graduated from West Point and became a great leader and hero in his father’s footsteps during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, winning two Distinguished Service Crosses and retiring as a major general. He died in 2004.
NOTES
Chapter One: First Captain, VMI
1 George C. Marshall. Interviews and Reminiscences (Lexington, Va.: George C. Marshall Research Foundation, 1996). To avoid endless ibid. in these notes, this recollection and all of those that follow unless otherwise noted are taken from this collection of transcripts taped by Marshall in 1956–57 in response to written questions sent him by his official historian Forrest C. Pogue. In nearly 650 pages of interviews Marshall vividly recounts his life story from his earliest recollections until roughly two years before his death in 1959.
2 Forrest C. Pogue. George C. Marshall: Education of a General 1880–1939 (New York: Viking, 1963).
3 Ibid.
4 Marshall, Interviews and Reminiscences.
5 William Frye. Marshall: Citizen Soldier (Indianapolis, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947).
6 Ibid.
7 Pogue, Education of a General.
8 Frye, Citizen Soldier.
9 Ibid.
10 Pogue, Education of a General.
11 Frye, Citizen Soldier.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
Chapter Two: Master of the Sword
1 Carlo D’Este. Patton: A Genius for War (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
2 Ruth Ellen Patton Totten. The Button Box: A Daughter’s Loving Memoir of Mrs. George S. Patton (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
3 Martin Blumenson. The Patton Papers: 1885–1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
4 D’Este, Patton.
5 Ladislas Farago. Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1964).
6 Ibid.
&n
bsp; 7 Robert H. Patton. The Pattons: A Personal History of an American Family (New York: Crown, 1994).
8 D’Este, Patton.
9 Ruth Ellen Patton Totten, The Button Box.
10 Ibid.
11 D’Este, Patton.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Robert H. Patton, The Pattons.
15 Fred Ayer, Jr. Before the Colors Fade: Portrait of a Soldier: George S. Patton, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964).
16 D’Este, Patton.
17 Robert H. Patton, The Pattons.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Blumenson, Patton Papers: 1885–1940.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Robert H. Patton, The Pattons.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Blumenson, Patton Papers: 1885–1940.
28 Ayer, Before the Colors Fade.
29 D’Este, Patton.
30 Blumenson, Patton Papers: 1885–1940.
31 Ruth Ellen Patton Totten, The Button Box.
32 Blumenson, Patton Papers: 1885–1940.
33 Robert H. Patton, The Pattons.
34 D’Este, Patton.
35 Ruth Ellen Patton Totten, The Button Box.
36 Ibid.
37 Blumenson, Patton Papers: 1885–1940.
38 Ruth Ellen Patton Totten, The Button Box.
Chapter Three: The Champion of Vera Cruz
1 Douglas MacArthur. Reminiscences: General of the Army (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
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