The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  One thing Ridgway did not see in Korea was the Sun King of the Army, Gen. MacArthur, who remained in Japan for many weeks. “He didn’t come to visit me until I got the Eighth Army turned around and started forward,” Ridgway remembered.

  Ridgway’s performance on the battlefield also had a surprising side effect on American civil-military relations. His success suddenly deflated the standing of MacArthur, making the old general seem far less an indispensable man and much more just a troublesome blowhard. As Ridgway arrived in Korea, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were engaged in a frenetic debate with MacArthur about whether to abandon Korea in a Dunkirk-like amphibious evacuation or to start a major war with China, which appeared to be the only two alternatives under discussion. The Joint Chiefs favored the former option, instructing MacArthur at the end of 1950 to determine when to evacuate Korea. “It appears from all estimates available that the Chinese Communists possess the ability of forcing United Nations Forces out of Korea if they chose to exercise it,” the Chiefs wrote. “We believe that Korea is not the place to fight a major war. . . . Since developments may force our withdrawal from Korea, it is important, particularly in view of the continued threat to Japan, to determine, in advance, our last reasonable opportunity for an orderly evacuation.”

  MacArthur thought it would be better to go to war against Communist China. He responded the next day with a recommendation to the Joint Chiefs that he be allowed to carry out operations to “blockade the coast of China, . . . destroy through Naval gunfire and Air bombardment China’s industrial capacity to wage war,” and encourage the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan to attack the mainland. When the Chiefs rejected starting a regional war, MacArthur reverted to discussing bugging out. Gen. Collins, the Army chief of staff, would recall that as 1950 ended, MacArthur’s cables were “pretty frantic.” Early in the new year, MacArthur informed Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the Army’s deputy chief for operations, that “it can be accepted as basic fact that, unless authority is given to strike enemy bases in Manchuria, our ground forces as presently constituted cannot with safety attempt major operations in North Korea.”

  Yet even as MacArthur was writing that letter, Ridgway was proving its assertion wrong. That basic fact, combined with MacArthur’s increasing belligerence in his policy recommendations to Washington, was altering the political balance of power between MacArthur and Truman.

  CHAPTER 13

  MacArthur’s last stand

  By January 1951, Gen. MacArthur had become, as Secretary of State Dean Acheson succinctly put it in his memoirs, “incurably recalcitrant and basically disloyal to the purposes of his Commander in Chief.” MacArthur dug into an all-or-nothing position against his superiors in Washington, refusing to permit any middle ground. Whatever their question, his answer was: Either we go to war with China or American forces in Korea will be destroyed. Anyone disagreeing was deemed an appeaser, a defeatist, or worse. Ridgway, by contrast, less flamboyantly but demonstrating more military effectiveness, decided to advance to the Han River, in central Korea, and then dig in and use his advantage in firepower to destroy Chinese forces as they attacked him.

  During this period, with Ridgway taking the reins in Korea, MacArthur increasingly became a figurehead, bypassed and ignored as much as possible by Washington. In early 1951, he repeatedly violated Truman’s executive order of the previous December to stop issuing independent policy statements. No one but MacArthur knew why he acted in this manner. One theory is that he became publicly insubordinate in order to extricate himself from the war, using “every means at his disposal to provoke President Harry Truman to relieve him so that he, MacArthur, would not have to face the indignity of the inevitable stalemate in Korea,” wrote one historian. Another, equally plausible theory is that MacArthur genuinely believed he could take on Truman and perhaps succeed him as president. A third is that MacArthur did not believe, despite the warning reportedly given him at Wake Island, that Truman would call him on it—that a failed haberdasher and accidental president could take on a general who had been a major figure in American life for decades.

  Whatever was going on inside MacArthur’s head, he was becoming a major problem in the conduct of the war. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a memorandum to MacArthur making suggestions about how to improve the command structure in the war, MacArthur “wrote back a very insulting telegram,” recalled Bradley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “I say insulting. If you read between the lines, he just thought we were a bunch of kids and didn’t know what we were talking about. And we were kids to him. We were only fifty-eight and sixty years old.” By mid-February of 1951, MacArthur was spinning in circles, finding himself at odds not only with the president and the Joint Chiefs but even with Ridgway, his subordinate commander in Korea. In a Tokyo press conference, he all but denounced Ridgway’s approach: “The concept advanced by some that we should establish a line across Korea and enter into positional warfare is wholly unrealistic and illusionary.” But that was just what Ridgway was doing—and operating far more successfully than MacArthur had the previous fall.

  An often overlooked aspect of Ridgway’s generalship was his shrewd handling of MacArthur in this difficult period. It is always a delicate task to manage relations with a shaky superior. In order to minimize the impact of MacArthur’s bombast, especially during his flying visits to Korea, Ridgway took time early in 1951 to brief reporters on an impending American offensive. He used the occasion to praise the “freedom of action” MacArthur had given him, and so tacitly underscore it. He also made careful records of his private conversations with MacArthur, with exact quotations noting the time and place of the old general’s words to him. He was, possibly, establishing a paper record to protect himself in case his erratic commander turned on him.

  Yet MacArthur still found a way to undercut Ridgway, arriving in the midst of the successful offensive to announce that, because of the restraints placed on him by Washington, the war was becoming deadlocked. “Assuming no diminution of the enemy’s flow of ground forces and material to the Korean battle area, a continuation of the existing limitation upon our freedom of counteroffensive action, and no major additions to our organizational strength, the battle lines cannot fail in time to reach a point of theoretical military stalemate,” he announced to reporters, reading from a penciled manuscript, according to historian Robert Leckie. He highlighted the “abnormal military inhibitions” imposed on him by his civilian overseers. This soon became known to skeptical American soldiers as MacArthur’s “die for a tie” proclamation. One can imagine Ridgway’s frustration at that phrase, coming after his months of work to improve American troop morale.

  Ridgway responded five days later, distancing himself from MacArthur’s formulation. “We didn’t set out to conquer China,” he responded at his own press conference. “We set out to stop Communism. We have demonstrated the superiority on the battlefield of our men. If China fails to throw us into the sea, that is a defeat for her of incalculable proportions. If China fails to drive us from Korea, she will have failed monumentally.” In Ridgway’s view, charging to the Chinese border at the Yalu River, as MacArthur advocated, was no solution, he explained later:

  The seizure of the land [in northern Korea] . . . simply would have meant the seizure of more real estate. It would have greatly shortened the enemy’s supply lines by pushing him right up against his main supply bases in Manchuria. It would have greatly lengthened our own supply routes, and widened our battlefield from 100 miles to 420. Would the American people have been willing to support the great army that would have been required to hold that line? Would they have approved our attacking on into Manchuria? On into the heart of the great mainland of Asia, a bottomless pit into which all the armies of the whole free world could be drawn and be ground to bits and destroyed? I doubt it.

  MacArthur, by contrast, believed it was the right time for a war with China. In late March 1951, he issued a statement that seemed
to threaten the new Communist Chinese government with destruction, saying that it should be “painfully aware” that “expansion of our military operations to his coastal areas and interior bases would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.” MacArthur had recovered from his despair of December 1950 and swung back to the bellicose optimism of November. Marine Gen. Smith, who saw MacArthur and some of his aides in March, said later, “I got the impression talking to his staff officers that they had an absolute contempt for the Truman Administration. Their idea was that the only man in the world who knew anything about the situation in the Far East was General MacArthur.”

  MacArthur spoke up again in response to a speech by Rep. Joe Martin, the House Republican leader, who had concluded, “If we are not in Korea to win, then this Truman Administration should be indicted for the murder of thousands of American boys.” When Martin sent a copy of the speech to MacArthur, the general wrote back to express his agreement with this denunciation of his commander in chief. He added, “There is no substitute for victory,” effectively challenging the administration’s more limited goals for the war. Martin released the general’s letter to the public.

  Those two final violations of the presidential order to cease making policy statements lit the fuse for MacArthur’s firing. The dismissal finally came on April 11, 1951. Through a series of miscommunications, word leaked out early, forcing the White House press secretary to hold a dramatic press conference at 1 A.M. Truman’s statement opened with a concise one-statement summary of the issue: “With deep regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States government and of the United Nations in matters pertaining to his official duties.” This explanation had the benefit of being true.

  MacArthur, who had treated Truman with such contempt, was surprised to be so disrespected himself. “No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies,” he railed in his memoir, still indignant thirteen years after the event. It was, wrote his intelligence chief, Gen. Willoughby, an “infamous purge.” The gap between the president and the general was so wide that each concluded that the other must be mentally unhinged. MacArthur privately told Ridgway that Truman was an unhealthy, confused man, suffering from “mental illness.” Truman, for his part, later said that there were times when MacArthur was “out of his head and didn’t know what he was doing.”

  MacArthur returned home to the welcome of a conquering hero. He was given one parade in Honolulu, two each in San Francisco and Washington, and a final triumph in New York City, bigger than that given for Charles Lindbergh. He addressed a joint session of Congress and used it to accuse the Truman Administration of appeasement of Communism and “defeatism.” It was time to take on China, he said, though he pulled his punches a bit and did not call for bombing of its air bases, as he had recommended internally. If the United States did not prevent a Communist takeover of Taiwan, he added, then it might well start think about defending itself “on the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington.”

  But after the initial hoopla, seeing MacArthur up close seemed not to build his support among Americans but to erode it. At congressional hearings on his firing, beginning on May 3, 1951, he used three days of testimony to try to cast the debate over the conduct of the Korean War as one of military professionals being frustrated by inept civilians. That gambit failed when it became clear from other testimony that he also had been deeply at odds with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  In fact, Truman’s ouster of MacArthur did not provoke outrage among senior military officers. The men running the American armed forces in the early 1950s had been the successful younger generals and admirals of World War II, and they knew how MacArthur had abused his subordinates, always insisting on glory for himself and denying it to underlings. During the war, they knew, he had killed a recommendation of Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger for a Medal of Honor, and after that action had found other ways to humble the man. One afternoon in 1947, one of Eichelberger’s aides was called into that general’s office, only to find him looking out the window with tears coursing down his cheeks. Eichelberger explained that he had been summoned to MacArthur’s office for a 10 A.M. appointment, only to be kept waiting in an anteroom as others came to see MacArthur and left. Finally, at 2 P.M., Eichelberger was told that MacArthur simply was too busy to see him. “I have never been so humiliated in my life,” Eichelberger confessed to the aide. He retired the following year.

  The most memorable line from the congressional hearings on MacArthur’s dismissal came not from the old bull but from a younger Army general, the far less eloquent and flamboyant Omar Bradley, the Joint Chiefs chairman who had rejected MacArthur’s advocacy of taking on China by bombing its military bases and blockading its ports. “Frankly,” he stated, “in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this strategy would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

  For his part, MacArthur’s most striking statement during the hearings might have been his laughable insistence that “no more subordinate soldier has ever worn the American uniform.” His credibility was further undermined by the deliberate leak of the Wake Island meeting minutes, given to a reporter from the New York Times on the “direct order” of Truman, according to the White House staff member who did it. The record of the meeting showed the public that MacArthur had badly miscalculated the likelihood and impact of a Chinese intervention in the war, damaging his credibility and even making him look a bit foolish. At first, mail to the White House ran overwhelmingly in favor of MacArthur, but eight weeks later, by the end of the hearings on his dismissal, on June 27, polls ran against him.

  Despite being officially still on active duty, MacArthur spent the following twelve months barnstorming the country, wearing his Army uniform while giving speeches in which he denounced Truman and those around him. His travels were bankrolled by, among others, a trio of wealthy Texas ultraconservative oilmen—H. L. Hunt, Roy Cullen, and Clint Murchison. Meanwhile, a less ideological, more business-oriented group of Texas oil billionaires led by Sid Richardson were intent on enticing MacArthur’s old assistant, Dwight Eisenhower, into the presidential race.

  In 1952, according to longtime MacArthur aide Charles Willoughby, the general entered into a private agreement to join Robert Taft on the Republican ticket if Taft won the nomination. MacArthur would be more than a mere vice president—under a written agreement Willoughby reported drafting with Taft, he also would be named “deputy commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.” By the time the Republican National Convention got under way in Chicago in July 1952, the MacArthur-for-president boomlet was waning, but he had one last chance: He was to deliver the keynote address at the convention. It would be his first time speaking in civilian clothes, which may have affected his delivery. “A tremendous demonstration preceded his arrival on the dais, and there was enormous excitement during the first 15 minutes of his address,” C. L. Sulzberger, a New York Times correspondent, wrote in his diary that night. But as MacArthur droned on, he continued, “One could feel the electricity gradually running out of the room. I think he cooked his own goose.” By the time MacArthur finished, witnesses agreed, it was difficult to hear him over the chatter of the delegates. In his presidential memoirs, Eisenhower offhandedly mentions that MacArthur was the Republican convention’s keynote speaker but coldly says nothing else about the speech or his former commander’s appearance in Chicago. In a sign of the times, MacArthur’s speech was followed by an appearance by Joseph McCarthy, the Communist-hunting senator from Wisconsin.

  The convention would in fact go on to nominate a famous Army general as its presidential nominee, but it would not be MacArthur. Instead, in one of history’s more remarkable rebukes, the party turned to the man he had demoted fourteen years earlier: the quiet, steady, and discreet
Eisenhower, who had departed MacArthur’s headquarters in Manila to become, a few years later, George C. Marshall’s most prominent protégé. Ike, when he left, had not been happy with MacArthur. In January 1942, barely six weeks after Pearl Harbor, he commented in his diary that MacArthur was “in many ways . . . as big a baby as ever.” Ike probably had heard by 1948 that MacArthur had referred to him in his headquarters as “that traitor Eisenhower.” He certainly knew that MacArthur, meeting with journalists near the end of the war, had been openly critical of Ike’s handling of Europe.

  Eisenhower certainly was more of an internationalist than the Republican Old Guard was. By 1952 he was concerned about the future of Europe and the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and that may have encouraged him to run for president. But he also may have been motivated by his loathing of MacArthur and a concern that if he did not run, MacArthur might become president. According to his longtime friend Mark Clark, Ike years earlier had seriously considered eventually running for president, telling Clark one night just after World War II ended, while they were on a trip to hunt Alpine chamois in Austria, that “I’ll have to see when I get home just what the situation is.” But in 1948, Ike was so persuasive in telling his wartime aide and confidant Harry Butcher that he would not run for president that Butcher stated in a radio broadcast that it would not happen. A year later, when his old friend Gen. Charles “Cowboy Pete” Corlett implored him to consider running, Ike flatly responded that he would not. “Dear Pete,” he wrote, “I simply hate the thought of my direct connection with partisan politics—I cannot think of any more difficult chore for me than to touch that field ever, even indirectly.”

  Yet a problem remains here, in what Eisenhower’s decision to run for president might say about the Marshall system. Even if Ike became president in order to stop MacArthur from doing so, it still is difficult to reconcile Marshall’s studied distance from politics with the fact that his chief protégé moved into politics and in fact into the White House. Marshall hardly was responsible for Eisenhower’s actions. The two were very different men. Indeed, Ike managed in the presidential campaign to mistreat his old mentor. Traveling and appearing in Wisconsin with that state’s Senator McCarthy, who had denounced Marshall, Eisenhower—in a moment of weakness—allowed advisers to delete a defense of Marshall from the draft of a speech he was to deliver in Milwaukee. This act of cowardice “haunted Eisenhower for the rest of his life,” according to one of Marshall’s best biographers, Mark Stoler. Ike would argue, rather weakly, that he allowed the portion of the speech supporting Marshall to be removed because he already had defended Marshall in a speech in Denver.