The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Marshall believed that Monty was driven by “overwhelming egotism” but withheld his fire until the war was nearly over. Finally, in January 1945, at a stormy meeting in Malta with the British chiefs, he asked for a closed session at which he ripped into Montgomery, venting what Field Marshal Alan Brooke, Churchill’s principal military adviser, termed “his full dislike and antipathy.” No records were kept of the closed session, but Marshall’s biographer, who interviewed him about it, said that Marshall’s primary charge was that Montgomery was “unwilling to be a member of the team.” That attitude was, of course, in Marshall’s eyes ample justification for relief.

  Misunderstanding between Eisenhower and Montgomery would only deepen after the war, as each published his own account of what had happened. “Ike is now one of my dearest friends,” Montgomery claimed in his 1958 memoir. If that was true, it was a sad indicator of how isolated Montgomery really was. Eisenhower, stung by Montgomery’s portrayal of him in that very book, did not agree, telling a historian that in fact he had cut off contact with Montgomery: “I was just not interested in keeping up communications with a man that just can’t tell the truth.”

  For all that, one point upon which Montgomery and his American antagonists did agree was on the need for swift relief. As Montgomery wrote in his memoirs, “Commanders and staff officers at any level who couldn’t stand the strain, or who got tired, were to be weeded out and replaced—ruthlessly. . . . There was an urgent need to get rid of the ‘dead wood’ which was hampering the initiative of keen and efficient young officers.” One brutal example he offered was being told that a corpulent colonel might be killed by completing a seven-mile run Montgomery had ordered for all: “I said that if he was thinking of dying it would be better to do it now, as he could be replaced easily and smoothly.” His rule of relief was that “if, having received the help he might normally expect, a man fails—then he must go.”

  With the passage of time, Montgomery’s relationship with Eisenhower increasingly appears to resemble George McClellan’s with President Lincoln during the Civil War—that is, a small-minded contempt that never comprehends that the less sophisticated superior actually has a stronger and larger sense of strategy. Their eventful meeting in Brussels would stick in Ike’s mind, causing him many years later, on September 10, 1959, to pause as president and remember in his diary that “today, fifteen years ago, I met Monty at Brussels airfield. . . . He made his preposterous proposal to go to Berlin.”

  Ike’s handling of Montgomery, and of the British in general, may in fact have been his greatest contribution of the war. He made it look so natural that the lesson of his impressive performance might have been lost. In subsequent wars, American generals often did not treat their coalition partners as thoughtfully. In Vietnam especially, had the Americans worked more closely and less contemptuously with their South Vietnamese allies, not elbowing them aside but instead supporting them whenever possible as the leading edge of the fight, the conduct of that war might have been somewhat different.

  CHAPTER 7

  Douglas MacArthur

  The general as presidential aspirant

  Douglas MacArthur was the great anomaly of World War II, the end of the old order. He does not fit the Marshall template of the low-key, steady-going team player, which might be one reason he was managed at important points as much by President Roosevelt as by Gen. Marshall. Like Montgomery, MacArthur illustrates that when a general believes he cannot be removed, the quality of strategic discourse with his superiors—both military and civilian—tends to suffer, and with it the effectiveness of their collective decision-making process. Historically, he might be most significant for the negative influence he had on civil-military discourse, lingering well into the Vietnam War.

  The son of a Civil War general, MacArthur rose to prominence in World War I, when he was chief of staff of the 42nd (Rainbow) Division and later a brigadier general. After the war, he was superintendent of West Point and then, starting in 1930, the Army chief of staff for five years. In the 1940s, when he was the U.S. commander against the Japanese in the Southwest Pacific theater, MacArthur was notably out of step with the Army’s emerging style of leadership. Marshall, Eisenhower, and Bradley favored the quiet, determined, cooperative officer. MacArthur had none of those traits. “MacArthur’s sense of duty was to himself,” concluded the historian Robert Berlin. “His style of leadership was abrupt, emotional and highly personal.”

  At one point in the early 1930s, when he was chief of staff of the Army, MacArthur may have tried to stymie Marshall’s career. “General MacArthur kept General Marshall down until the time he [Marshall] became chief of staff,” Omar Bradley once alleged. A lesser man than Marshall likely would have come to resent MacArthur bitterly. “Marshall is the exact antithesis of MacArthur’s character,” Matthew Ridgway, who served with both men repeatedly over the course of several decades, said near the end of his life. “Marshall was always keeping himself in the background, giving full credit to every subordinate. MacArthur was just the opposite. He wanted to take all the credit for himself.”

  Ultimately, MacArthur and the political problem he represented may even have been responsible for Marshall’s not being given command of the D-Day landings in France, perhaps the greatest invasion in history. FDR famously remarked that he thought Marshall deserved to command the landings but that he could not send the general to do so because, FDR confessed, he wouldn’t be able to sleep without him in Washington.

  There is no question that FDR needed Marshall as Army chief of staff to help him puzzle through the complex questions of the war. But there also is evidence that Marshall’s presence was required in Washington because he was the sole Army officer capable of reining in MacArthur—and even then, just barely. In August 1942, Marshall felt the need to get MacArthur back in line on American strategy, writing to him that a Washington Post article sent from his headquarters had created “the impression that you are objecting to our strategy by indirection. I assume this to be an erroneous impression.” (Of course, it was not an erroneous impression, but Marshall knew to give MacArthur an avenue of retreat.) In February 1943, Marshall again wrote to MacArthur, this time to get him to cooperate with the U.S. Navy. MacArthur had declined to meet with the secretary of the Navy and the commander in chief for the Pacific, Adm. Chester Nimitz. Marshall noted that he had been told that “a message was received from you pointing out that no useful purpose might be served by such a conference.”

  In 1944, Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, noted in his diary that Marshall was playing a unique role, “as a matter of fact keeping his hand on the control of the whole thing.” Part of that “whole thing” was treading carefully around MacArthur while containing him. The same year, Stimson went out of his way to announce that MacArthur would not be retired from the military at the statutory age of sixty-four. If Marshall were dispatched to lead the D-Day force, then he would have to be replaced as chief of staff in Washington by Eisenhower—who then would face, on top of everything else in a world war, the near-impossible task of managing his former boss, MacArthur, whom he held in some contempt. As Gen. Albert Wedemeyer once put it about Ike and MacArthur, “I heard both of them talk terribly about each other.”

  Simply removing MacArthur appears to have been out of the question. Whatever his military abilities, he seems to have been kept in command in the Pacific in part because his political standing made it easier to have him inside the Army rather than outside it, criticizing the president. In his monumental study of FDR’s relationships with his top military officers, the historian Eric Larrabee went a step further in his analysis. Larrabee argued that the president kept MacArthur on in part because the old general was less politically dangerous while in uniform, but also because of a Machiavellian calculation that MacArthur was exactly the sort of useful idiot FDR needed to maintain a bipartisan coalition in support of the war. It is easy to forget now that there still existed a poten
tially powerful brew of anti–New Dealers, Republican isolationists, and Midwestern pacifists. “After our entry into the war,” Larrabee observed,

  the domestic forces that had passionately opposed it were still in being, momentarily stunned into joining the consensus for victory but still vocal and alert, still amply represented in the Congress. To keep them in the consensus there should ideally be a conservative, neo-isolationist military hero, preferably a figure who was large enough to rally around but naive enough to be no real threat, who was possessed of bona fide anti–New Deal credentials yet was located at a safe distance in the Far East. . . . This goes a long way, I think, to explain the President’s otherwise enigmatic handling of Douglas MacArthur, who fitted these conditions to perfection and was therefore—up to a delicately chosen point—nurtured and indulged.

  Supporting Larrabee’s interpretation is the fact that after MacArthur was ordered to leave the Philippines, Marshall pushed to give him the Medal of Honor, in part to obscure the fact that the general, willingly or not, had left behind his besieged troops. The documentation for the award itself was composed by Marshall and polished by Eisenhower—who, even as he edited, argued against bestowing the medal. The awarding of the nation’s highest honor to MacArthur may have been one of Marshall’s most calculated acts, and it came close to sheer cynicism. “I wanted to do anything I could to prevent them from saying anything about his leaving Corregidor with his troops all out there in this perilous position,” he revealed years later. “I thought a Medal of Honor would be helpful. . . . I drafted the citation.” MacArthur himself understood well the political uses of medals, in June 1942 giving the Silver Star to Lyndon Johnson, then a visiting congressman, for riding in a malfunctioning aircraft that had come under Japanese attack. “No other crew member, not even the pilot who landed the crippled plane, received a decoration,” noted historian and Army officer H. R. McMaster.

  But MacArthur’s Medal of Honor stuck in the craw of some others. Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger remembered being told by Eisenhower, after the war, that his friend Ike had refused a Medal of Honor for the North Africa campaign, “because he knew of a man who had received one for sitting in a hole in the ground—meaning MacArthur.” MacArthur’s receipt of the medal became especially galling because during the war he had thwarted efforts to bestow the Medal of Honor on Eichelberger and another subordinate, Maj. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, who, after the surrender of U.S. forces in the Philippines, had become the highest-ranking American prisoner of the war. (After the war, Gen. Marshall would revive the nomination for Wainwright, and this time it would be successful.) MacArthur also turned down a request from Marshall to allow Eichelberger to be transferred to a command in Europe. It is no accident that MacArthur’s senior subordinate commanders—Eichelberger, Walter Krueger, Oscar Griswold, and Alexander Patch—are unknown today. “Eisenhower raised his officers’ profiles among contemporaries and historians by giving them credit and press for their accomplishments,” noted historian Stephen Taaffe, while MacArthur “deliberately denied his subordinates much public recognition.”

  FDR hardly was naive about MacArthur. He had been keeping a wary eye on the general for years. When MacArthur was Army chief of staff and FDR a presidential candidate, the politician had privately cracked that the general was “one of the two most dangerous men in the country.” The other, he explained to friends and aides, was Huey Long—a useful context, because it indicates that Roosevelt saw both men as threats to a troubled American system, the soldier from the right and the senator from the left. The point about Long and MacArthur, Roosevelt continued, thinking ahead to his presidency, was that “we must tame these fellows and make them useful to us.”

  Not long after becoming president, FDR was confronted by MacArthur, then the Army chief of staff, who was irate over the meagerness of the Army’s budget. “I spoke recklessly” at a meeting at the White House, MacArthur wrote in his memoirs, “and said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.”

  Roosevelt roared back: “You must not talk that way to the president!” MacArthur wrote that he promptly apologized, then went outside and vomited on the White House steps.

  So if MacArthur was going to be kept in place to play the role of unwitting supporter of the political consensus supporting the war, he would need to be watched closely. And that meant Marshall could not go to Europe.

  MacArthur the presidential candidate

  MacArthur had a very different conception of the role of a general than did Marshall and other top American military officers of his time. As such, he is the exception who proves the rule in a way that the examples of Patton, Clark, and Allen do not. They were challenges to the Marshall system but operated within it. MacArthur stood outside of it. “Most of the senior officers I had known always drew a clean-cut line between the military and the political,” Eisenhower wrote near the end of his life. “But if General MacArthur ever recognized the existence of that line, he usually chose to ignore it.”

  The irony of this is that MacArthur actually was not particularly adept at understanding American politics, in part because he had not visited the United States for over a decade—from before the beginning of World War II until he was fired as commander of the Korean War, in 1951. Eisenhower, who was on MacArthur’s staff in Washington from 1933 to 1935 and then worked for him in the Philippines in the years before World War II, once fell into a heated argument with MacArthur about who would win the 1936 presidential election back in the United States. MacArthur was so certain that Alf Landon would be the victor that he made plans around it. “The general has been following the Literary Digest poll and has convinced himself that Landon is to be elected, probably by a landslide,” Ike wrote in one of the few personal entries in his diaries, which generally were more intermittent journals he used to occasionally work out his thinking on issues. “I showed him letters [from a friend in Ike’s and Landon’s home state] . . . which predict that Landon cannot even carry Kansas, but he got perfectly furious.” MacArthur dressed down Ike and an officer who took Ike’s side, saying that they were “fearful and small-minded people who are afraid to express judgments that are obvious from the evidence at hand.”

  MacArthur also had different ethical standards from those of Ike and many other officers. In 1942, he accepted a $500,000 gift from the government of the Philippines. Eisenhower turned down a similar gift, recognizing that accepting such a payment from a foreign government was contrary to both Army custom and regulation. Eisenhower also noted that MacArthur pushed the government of the Philippines to give him the title of field marshal, which Ike found “pompous and rather ridiculous,” because the Philippine army was “virtually nonexisting.” Ike additionally remembered MacArthur’s ire at learning that Marshall, rather than Hugh Drum, his preference, would be nominated to be Army chief of staff: “What he had to say was something out of this world.”

  It is not clear when MacArthur began considering himself presidential material, but the prospect was certainly on his mind midway through World War II. In 1943 and early 1944, he discussed running for president with his subordinates. “My Chief talked of the Republican nomination for next year,” Gen. Eichelberger, then a corps commander, wrote to his wife on June 2, 1943. “I can see that he expects to get it and I sort of think so too.” During the war, MacArthur dispatched his chief of staff and his chief intelligence officer back across the Pacific to Washington and New York to explore the notion with Republican luminaries such as Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and former president Herbert Hoover. Vandenberg, an influential Republican, calculated that the general’s only chance of securing the nomination would be if the nominating convention deadlocked between Thomas Dewey and Wendell Willkie, but by April 1944 Willkie had withdrawn, after being
soundly defeated in the Wisconsin primary, leaving Dewey the presumptive nominee. Even so, in the same month, MacArthur scored 550,000 votes in a preferential, nonbinding Illinois primary. Just after that vote, Rep. Albert Miller of Nebraska released two exchanges of letters he had with the general. “I am certain that unless this New Deal can be stopped this time our American way of life is forever doomed,” the freshman congressman had written the previous September. “You owe it to civilization and the children yet unborn to accept the nomination. . . . You will be our next president.” Miller added that he was certain that MacArthur would carry all forty-eight states. MacArthur had responded in October that he didn’t agree with the “flattering predictions,” but did “unreservedly agree with the complete wisdom and statesmanship of your comments.” There were similar sentiments in a follow-up set of letters early in 1944. By releasing them, Miller had been seeking to reenergize the MacArthur candidacy, but his efforts failed. At the Republican National Convention, Dewey received 1,056 votes, and MacArthur just 1, the unanimity broken by a Wisconsin delegate protesting a fast move by party leaders to keep the general’s name from being placed in nomination.

  Later in 1944, MacArthur revealed the extent of his political naïveté when he took the astonishing step of lecturing FDR, a political grandmaster, on the possible domestic political implications of any decision to bypass the Philippines in the offensive against Japan. At a meeting in Hawaii, he told the president, according to a MacArthur aide and hagiographer, “I dare to say that the American people would be so aroused that they would register the most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall.” Such ill-considered talk must have reassured FDR that he had MacArthur exactly where he wanted him.