To those who said American military strength was inadequate to face the enemy on more than one front, MacArthur said he could imagine no greater expression of defeatism. “You cannot appease or otherwise surrender to Communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.” To confine the war to Chinese aggression in Korea only was to follow a path of “prolonged indecision.”
“Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” He paused, then, softly, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “I could not answer.”
A record 30 million people were watching on television and the performance was masterful. The use of the rich voice, the timing, surpassed that of most actors. The oratorical style was of a kind not heard in Congress in a very long time. It recalled, as one television critic wrote, “a yesteryear of the theater,” and it held the greater part of the huge audience wholly enraptured. Work had stopped in offices and plants across the country, so people could watch. Saloons and bars were jammed. Schoolchildren saw the “historic hour” in classrooms or were herded into assemblies or dining halls to listen by radio. Whether they had any idea what the excitement was about, they knew it was “important.”
“When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams,” MacArthur said, his voice dropping as he began the famous last lines, the stirring, sentimental, ambiguous peroration that the speech would be remembered for.
The hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” And like the old soldier of the 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.
A “hurricane of emotion” swept the room. Hands reached out to him. Many in the audience were weeping. “We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!” exclaimed Republican Representative Dewey Short of Missouri, a former preacher. To Joe Martin, it was “the climaxing” of the most emotional moment he had known in thirty-five years in Congress. Theatrics were a part of the congressional way of life, Martin knew, but nothing had ever equaled this.
It was MacArthur’s finest hour, and the crescendo of public adulation that followed, beginning with a triumphal parade through Washington that afternoon, and climaxing the next day in New York with a thunderous ticker-tape parade, was unprecedented in American history. Reportedly 7,500,000 people turned out in New York, more than had welcomed Eisenhower in 1945, more even than at the almost legendary welcome for Lindbergh in 1927. It was “awesome,” wrote Time. “Everybody cheered…a man of chin-out affirmation, who seemed a welcome contrast to men of indecision and negation.”
But, in fact, not everybody cheered. There were places along the parade route in New York where, as MacArthur’s open car passed, people stood silently, just watching and looking, anything but pleased. In Washington, one senator had confided to a reporter that he had never feared more for his country than during MacArthur’s speech. “I honestly felt that if the speech had gone on much longer there might have been a march on the White House.” Even Time noted that while Republicans in Congress might consider MacArthur a godsend, few were ready to endorse his proposals.
Truman had not listened to MacArthur’s speech, or watched on television. He had spent the time at his desk in the Oval Office, meeting with Dean Acheson as usual at that hour on Thursdays, after which he went back to Blair House for lunch and a nap. At some point, however, he did read what MacArthur had said. Speaking privately, he remarked that he thought it “a bunch of damn bullshit.”
As Truman had anticipated, the tumult began to subside. For seven weeks in the late spring of 1951, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees held joint hearings to investigate MacArthur’s dismissal. Chaired by Democratic Senator Richard B. Russell, the inquiry opened on May 3 in the same marble Caucus Room, 318 of the Senate Office Building, where the Truman Committee had conducted its sessions. Though the hearings were closed, authorized transcripts of each day’s sessions, edited for military security reasons, were released hourly to the press.
MacArthur, the first witness, testified for three days, arguing that his way in Korea was the way to victory and an end to the slaughter. He had seen as much blood and disaster as any man alive, he told the senators, but never such devastation as during his last time in Korea. “After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited. Now are you going to let that go on…?” The politicians in Washington had introduced a “new concept into military operations—the concept of appeasement,” its purpose only “to go on indefinitely…indecisively, fighting with no mission….”
But he also began to sound self-absorbed and oddly disinterested in global issues. He would admit to no mistakes, no errors of judgment. Failure to anticipate the size of the Chinese invasion, for example, had been the fault of the CIA. Any operation he commanded was crucial, other considerations were always of less importance. Certain that his strategy of war on China would not bring in the Soviets, he belittled the danger of a larger conflict. But what if he happened to be wrong, he was asked. What if another world war resulted? That, said MacArthur, was not his responsibility. “My responsibilities were in the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various agencies of the Government are working night and day for an over-all solution to the global problem. Now I am not familiar with their studies. I haven’t gone into it….” To many, it seemed he had made the President’s case.
The great turning point came with the testimony of Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs, who refuted absolutely MacArthur’s claim that they agreed with his strategy. Truman, from the start of the crisis, had known he needed the full support of his military advisers before declaring his decision on MacArthur. Now it was that full support, through nineteen days of testimony, that not only gave weight and validity to the decision, but discredited MacArthur in a way nothing else could have.
Speaking solemnly, Marshall began by saying it was “a very distressing necessity, a very distressing occasion that compels me to appear here this morning and in effect in almost direct opposition to a great many views and actions of General MacArthur. He is a brother Army officer, a man for whom I have tremendous respect….”
The administration was not turning its back on an easy victory in Korea, Marshall said, because there could be no easy or decisive victory in Korea short of another world war. The present policy might indeed seem costly, but not compared to an atomic war. There had been complaints of stalemate, demands for quick, decisive solutions at the time of the Berlin crisis, too, he reminded the senators. The war in Korea was in its tenth month, but the Berlin crisis had lasted almost fifteen months before ending in a “notable victory.”
Just what did Secretary Marshall consider the “Korean business,” he was asked. “A police action? A large or small war?…”
“I would characterize it as a limited war which I hope will remain limited,” Marshall replied evenly.
Bradley, his first day in the witness chair, testified with unexpected vigor and delivered a telling blow with what would be the most quoted line of the hearings. MacArthur’s program to step up and widen the war with China, Bradley said, would “involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
Never, said the Joint Chiefs, had they subscribed to MacArthur’s plan for victory, however greatly they admired him.
From a purely military standpoint, General Collins was asked, had General MacArthur’s conduct of the war in Korea been compatible with General MacArthur’s outstanding conduct of the war in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945? That, said Collins, was a question he would prefer not to answer, and no one insisted.
The dismissal of MacArthur, sa
id all of them—Marshall, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs—was more than warranted, it was a necessity. Given the circumstances, given the seriousness of MacArthur’s opposition to the policy of the President, his challenge to presidential authority, said Marshall, there had been “no other course but to relieve him.”
The fidelity of the military high command to the principle of civilian control of the military was total and unequivocal.
Such unanimity of opinion on the part of the country’s foremost and most respected military leaders seemed to leave Republican senators stunned. As James Reston wrote in The New York Times, “MacArthur, who had started as the prosecutor, had now become the defendant.”
The hearings ground on and grew increasingly dull. The MacArthur hysteria was over, interest waned. When in June, MacArthur set off on a speaking tour through Texas, insisting he had no presidential ambitions, he began to sound more and more shrill and vindictive, less and less like a hero. He attacked Truman, appeasement, high taxes, and “insidious forces working from within.” His crowds grew steadily smaller. Nationwide, the polls showed a sharp decline in his popular appeal. The old soldier was truly beginning to fade away.
The furor of the MacArthur crisis had taken a heavy toll. It had spread confusion and increasing doubt about the war in Korea, increasing skepticism about the leadership in Washington and particularly about the President himself. Politically, the damage to the administration and to the Democratic Party had been serious. Even among Truman’s strongest supporters, he was criticized for both the way the dismissal had been handled and for failing to convince the country that he was right. Where was the eloquence, the power of “the bully pulpit” of the presidency when it was so desperately needed? “Having made this courageous decision, Truman failed to mobilize the country behind him,” Bradley would write in retrospect. Truman’s address to the nation the night of the MacArthur dismissal had been, in Bradley’s estimate, “a complete flop.”
A Gallup Poll in late May showed that while support for MacArthur had dropped to 30 percent, support for Marshall and Bradley was only 19 percent, and three out of four of those polled regarded the MacArthur hearings as “just politics.”
Many then, and more in time to come, would say that Truman’s biggest mistake had been not firing the general months before, a view with which Truman himself wholeheartedly concurred.
Truman would regard the decision as among the most important he made as President. He did not, however, agree with those who said it had shown what great courage he had. (Harriman, among others, would later speak of it as one of the most courageous steps ever taken by any President.) “Courage didn’t have anything to do with it,” Truman would say emphatically. “General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That’s all there was to it.”
But if the firing of MacArthur had taken a heavy toll politically, if Truman as President had been less than a master of persuasion, he had accomplished a very great deal and demonstrated extraordinary patience and strength of character in how he rode out the storm. His policy in Korea—his determined effort to keep the conflict in bounds—had not been scuttled, however great the aura of the hero-general, or his powers as a spellbinder. The principle of civilian control over the military, challenged as never before in the nation’s history, had survived, and stronger than ever. The President had made his point and, with the backing of his generals, he had made it stick.
“Truman’s conflict with MacArthur,” wrote Dean Rusk, “was more than a clash of egos or contest of wills; Truman was concerned about the presidency…. I am convinced that 95 percent of Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur hinged on the relationship of the president as the Commander in Chief to his general and on civilian control of the military.”
MacArthur did truly believe that he was above the President. MacArthur himself later told the historian Samuel Eliot Morison that a theater commander should be allowed to act independently, with no orders from the President, the United Nations, or anyone; then, to be sure that there could be no mistaking his meaning, MacArthur repeated the statement.
President Harry S. Truman was President and Commander in Chief still, and he was Harry S. Truman still, anything but disconsolate or defeated. Already, before the Senate hearings ended, he had reemerged and begun fighting back in his own way, sounding often as he had in the 1948 campaign. Speaking at an Armed Forces Day dinner on May 18 at the Statler, Truman reminded his full-dress audience that even as “we sit here tonight…partaking of food on white tablecloths and enjoying ourselves…there are men fighting and dying…to reach that peace for which we have been striving since World War II…. You must quit your bickering here at home…you must quit playing petty politics….”
Of the war in Korea, he said, “We are fighting for time…for us. There is always an emphasis on the casualties in Korea…. But did it ever occur to you that [they] will be one small drop in the bucket from one of those horrible bombs of which we talk so much.
“Think—think—think,” he said, his voice low, almost shaking, “what a responsibility your President faces. If you would think, and think clearly, you would get behind me and help win this peace…. It is up to you.”
If “victory” in Korea meant risking a world war—a war of atomic bombs—Truman would settle for no victory in Korea. That was the line he had drawn. There was a substitute for victory: it was peace. And he would stand by his policy of limited war for that specific objective.
“And look at the alternatives these critics have to present,” he said in a speech at Tullahoma, Tennessee.
Here is what they say. Take a chance on spreading the conflict in Korea. Take a chance on tying up all our resources in a vast war in Asia. Take a chance on losing our allies in Europe. Take a chance the Soviet Union won’t fight in the Far East. Take a chance we won’t have a third world war. They want us to play Russian roulette with the foreign policy of the United States—with all the chambers of the pistol loaded.
This is not a policy…. No president who has any sense of responsibility for the welfare of this great country is going to meet the grave issues of war and peace on such a foolish basis as that.
In the same speech, delivered June 25, almost a year to the day since his decision to go into Korea, he said, in effect, that he was ready to negotiate a settlement of the war at the 38th parallel.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Jacob Malik, had just proposed a Korean armistice. At Tullahoma, Truman gave the Soviets his fast answer.
“We are ready to join in a peaceful settlement in Korea now, just as we have always been.”
17
Final Days
I have tried to give it everything that was in me.
—TRUMAN
I
In the summer of his seventh year in office, the sixty-seven-year-old President looked the picture of health. His color was good; his clothes, impeccable as always, fit perfectly; his walk was firm and full of purpose. He saw people all day, yet seemed to have time for everyone. Visitors to the Oval Office found a man who stood immediately to greet them, shoulders back and smiling, and who, at his desk, gave them his full attention. Radiating vitality and confidence, he seemed completely at home in his job, as one could only be with experience. Mens sana in corpore sano was the old adage he had learned in high school Latin, “a sound mind in a sound body.” Clark Clifford, who dropped by on occasion, would say he never knew anyone of the President’s age who remained physically and psychologically so sound and solid.
He still walked two miles “most every morning,” Truman had recorded in his diary.
I eat no bread but one piece of toast at breakfast, no butter, no sugar, no sweets. Usually have fruit, one egg, a strip of bacon and half a glass of skimmed milk for breakfast; liver and bacon or sweet breads or ham or fish and spinach and another nonfattening vegetable for lunch with fruit for dessert. For dinner I have a fruit cup, steak, a couple of nonfattening vegetables and an ice, orange, pineapple or raspberry…So—I maintain my
waist line and can wear suits bought in 1935!
The morning bourbon—an ounce of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey taken after the two-mile walk and a few setting-up exercises and the rubdown that usually followed the morning walk—had also become routine. Whether the bourbon was on doctor’s orders, or a bit of old-fashioned home medicine of the kind many of his generation thought beneficial to the circulation past age sixty (“to get the engine going”), is not known. But it seemed to agree with him.
And how Harry Truman looked, how he carried himself, the timbre of his voice, his air of confidence were all subjects of increasing interest in the summer of 1951, once the MacArthur crisis had passed, as a means of divining whether he intended to carry on in the job beyond the next election. Did he or did he not plan to run again in 1952?
At a press conference, a visiting reporter from Macon, Georgia, said with a drawl, “Mr. President, this is my first conference. My impression of you is that you look a lot younger than I thought you would.” With everyone in the room, Truman laughed.
“Could you tell me if you feel like you are in better physical condition now than you were when you first became President?”
He never felt better, Truman said, looking pleased. “I am still young enough to make a good race—foot race, I mean.” And there was more laughter.
“That wouldn’t be an announcement, would it?”
“No, no.”
To those at the White House who saw him daily, at all hours and often under extremely trying circumstances, he was still the Truman of old, hardworking, cheerful, never short with them, never petty. He seemed to have some kind of added inner balance mechanism that held him steady through nearly anything, enabling him not only to uphold the fearful responsibilities of his office and keep a killing schedule, but to accept with composure the small, silly aggravations that also went with the job. It was a level of equanimity that at times left those around him hugely amused and even more fond of him.
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