But then, on the morning of Wednesday, January 17, Marshall telephoned Truman to read an astonishing report just in from General Joe Collins, who had flown to Korea for talks with Ridgway. “Eighth Army in good shape and improving daily under Ridgway's leadership,” Marshall read. “Morale very satisfactory…. Ridgway confident he can obtain two to three months' delay before having to initiate evacuation…. On the whole Eighth Army now in position and prepared to punish severely any mass attack.”
Plainly, MacArthur's bleak assessment of the situation, his forecasts of doom, had been wrong—and the effect of this realization was electrifying. As word spread through the upper levels of government that day, it would be remembered, one could almost hear the sighs of relief. The long retreat of the Eighth Army—the longest in American military history—had ended. On January 25, 1951, less than a month after Ridgway's arrival, the Eighth Army began “rolling forward,” as he said.
By the end of March, having inflicted immense casualties on the Chinese, the Eighth Army was again at the 38th Parallel. Yet Ridgway's progress seemed only to distress MacArthur further. Unless he was allowed to strike boldly at the enemy, he said, his dream of a unified Korea was impossible. He complained of a “policy void.” He now proposed not only to massively attack Manchuria but to “sever” Korea from Manchuria by laying down a field of radioactive wastes, “the by-products of atomic manufacture,” all along the Yalu River. As so often before, his request was denied.
Talking to journalists on March 7, MacArthur lamented the “savage slaughter” of Americans inevitable in a war of attrition. When, by the middle of March, the tide of battle “began to turn in our favor,” as Truman wrote, and Truman's advisers at both the State Department and the Pentagon thought it time to make a direct appeal to China for peace talks, MacArthur refused to respond to inquiries on the subject. Instead, he decried any “further military restrictions” on his command. To MacArthur, as he later wrote, it appeared that Truman's nerves were at a breaking point—“not only his nerves, but what was far more menacing in the Chief Executive of a country at war—his nerve.”
Truman ordered careful preparation of a cease-fire proposal. On March 21 the draft of a presidential statement was submitted for approval to the other seventeen U.N. nations with troops serving in Korea. On March 20 the Joint Chiefs had informed MacArthur of what was happening—sending him what Truman called the “meat paragraphs” of the statement in a message that seems to have impressed MacArthur as nothing else had that there was indeed to be no all-out war with Red China. His response so jarred Washington as to leave a number of people wondering if perhaps he had lost his mind. Years afterward Bradley would speculate that possibly MacArthur's realization that his war on China was not to be “snapped his brilliant but brittle mind.”
On the morning of Saturday, March 24, in Korea (Friday the 23rd in Washington), MacArthur, without warning, tried to seize the initiative in a manner calculated only to inflame the situation. He issued his own florid proclamation to the Chinese Communists—in effect, an ultimatum. He began by taunting the Red Chinese for their lack of industrial power, their poor military showing in Korea against a U.N. force restricted by “inhibitions.” More seriously, MacArthur threatened to expand the war.
The enemy, therefore, must by now be painfully aware that a decision of the United States to depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the areas of Korea, through an expansion of our military operations to his coastal areas and interior bases, would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.
In conclusion, MacArthur said he personally “stood ready at any time” to meet with the Chinese commander to reach a settlement.
All Truman's careful preparations of a cease-fire proposal were now in vain. MacArthur had cut the ground out from under him. Later, MacArthur would dismiss what he had said was a “routine communiqué.” Yet his own devoted aide, General Courtney Whitney, would describe it as a bold effort to stop one of the most disgraceful plots in American history, meaning the administration's plan to appease China.
In his Memoirs, Truman would write that he now knew what he must do about MacArthur.
This was a most extraordinary statement for a military commander of the United Nations to issue on his own responsibility. It was an act totally disregarding all directives to abstain from any declarations on foreign policy. It was in open defiance of my orders as President and as Commander in Chief. This was a challenge to the President under the Constitution. It also flouted the policy of the United Nations….
By this act MacArthur left me no choice—I could no longer tolerate his insubordination….
And yet … MacArthur was not fired. Truman said not a word suggesting he had reached such a decision. He sent MacArthur only a restrained reprimand, a message he himself dictated to remind the general of the presidential order on December 6 forbidding public statements that had not been cleared with Washington.
Meantime, on March 14, the Gallup Poll had reported the president's public approval at an all-time low of 26 percent. And soon there were appalling new statistics: U.N. forces had now suffered 228,941 casualties, mostly South Koreans but including 57,120 Americans.
Truman was dwelling on the relationship between President Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan during the Civil War, in the autumn of 1862, when Lincoln had been forced to relieve McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac. Truman had sent one of his staff to the Library of Congress to review the details of the Lincoln–McClellan crisis and give him a report. Lincoln's troubles with McClellan, as Truman knew, had been the reverse of his own with MacArthur: Lincoln had wanted McClellan to attack, and McClellan refused time and again. But then, when Lincoln issued orders, McClellan, like MacArthur, ignored them. Also like MacArthur, McClellan occasionally made political statements on matters outside the military field. Truman later wrote that
Lincoln was patient, for that was his nature, but at long last he was compelled to relieve the Union Army's principal commander. And though I gave this difficulty with MacArthur much wearisome thought, I realized that I would have no other choice myself than to relieve the nation's top field commander….
I wrestled with the problem for several days, but my mind was made up before April 5, when the next incident occurred.
On Thursday, April 5, at the Capitol, House Minority Leader Joe Martin took the floor to read a letter from MacArthur that Martin said he felt dutybound to withhold no longer. In February, speaking in Brooklyn, Martin had called for the use of Chiang Kai-shek's troops in Korea and accused the administration of a defeatist policy. “What are we in Korea for—to win or to lose? … If we are not in Korea to win, then this administration should be indicted for the murder of American boys.” Martin had sent a copy of the speech to MacArthur, asking for his “views.” On March 20, MacArthur had responded— and virtually all that he said was bound to provoke Truman, as Martin well knew. Since MacArthur's letter carried no stipulation of confidentiality, Martin decided to make it public.
The congressman was right in calling for victory, MacArthur wrote, right in wanting to see Chinese forces from Formosa join the battle against Communism. The real war against Communism was in Asia, not in Europe. “There is no substitute for victory.”
The letter was on the wires at once. At the Pentagon, Bradley called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs. “I did not know that Truman had already made up his mind to relieve MacArthur,” he remembered, “but I thought it was a strong possibility.” The Joint Chiefs, however, reached no conclusion about MacArthur.
On Friday, April 6, official Cadillacs filled the White House driveway. Marshall, Bradley, Acheson, and Harriman met with the president for an hour. Saying nothing of his own views, Truman asked what should be done. When Marshall urged caution, Acheson agreed. To the latter it was not so much a problem of what should be done as how it should be done. He later remembered:
The situation could be resolved only by relieving the General
of all his commands and removing him from the Far East. Grave trouble would result, but it could be surmounted if the President acted upon the carefully considered advice and unshakable support of all his civilian and military advisers. If he should get ahead of them or appear to take them for granted or be impetuous, the harm would be incalculable.
“If you relieve MacArthur,” Acheson told Truman, “you will have the biggest fight of your administration.”
Harriman, reminding the president that MacArthur had been a problem for too long, said he should be dismissed at once. “I don't express any opinion or make known my decision,” Truman wrote in his diary. “Direct the four to meet again Friday afternoon and go over all phases of the situation.”
He was a model of self-control. For the next several days, an air of unnatural calm seemed to hang over the White House. “The wind died down,” remembered Joe Martin. “The surface was placid … nothing happened.”
On Saturday, Truman met again with Marshall, Acheson, Bradley, and Harriman, and again nothing was resolved. Marshall and Bradley were still uncertain what to do. They were hesitating in part, according to Bradley's later account, because they knew the kind of abuse that would be hurled at them personally—an understandable concern for two such men at the end of long, distinguished careers.
On Monday, April 9, the same foursome convened with the president once more, this time at Blair House. But now the situation had changed. The Joint Chiefs had met the afternoon before and concluded that from a military point of view, MacArthur should be relieved. Their opinion was unanimous. Truman, for the first time, said he was of the same opinion. He had made his decision. He told Bradley to prepare the necessary papers.
“Rarely had a matter been shrouded in such secrecy at the White House,” reported The Washington Post on Tuesday, April 10. “The answer to every question about MacArthur was met with a ‘no comment’ reply.” In Tokyo, according to a United Press dispatch, a member of MacArthur's staff said meetings between the general and Secretary of the Army Pace were “going forward with an air of cordiality”—thus seeming to refute dismissal rumors. A photograph on page 1 of the Post showed a smiling MacArthur welcoming an even more smiling Pace at the Tokyo airport.
At the end of a routine morning staff meeting, the president quietly an-nounced—“So you won't have to read about it in the papers”—that he had decided to fire General MacArthur. He was sure, Truman added, that MacArthur had wanted to be fired. He was sure also that he himself faced a political storm, “a great furor,” unlike any in his political career. From beyond the office windows, the noise of construction going on in the White House was so great that several of the staff had to strain to hear Truman. At 3:15 that afternoon, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman reported to the Oval Office, bringing the drafted orders. Truman looked them over, borrowed a fountain pen, and signed his name.
The orders were to be sent by State Department channels to Ambassador Muccio in Korea, who was to turn them over to Secretary Pace, who by now was also in Korea, with Ridgway at Eighth Army headquarters. Pace was to return at once to Tokyo and personally hand the orders to MacArthur—this whole relay system having been devised to save the general from the embarrassment of direct transmission through regular army communications. All aspects of the issue thus far had been kept secret with marked success, but it was essential that there be no leaks in the last critical hours. Announcement of the sensational news about MacArthur was not to be made until the following morning.
The next several hours passed without incident, until early evening. Harriman, Bradley, Rusk, and six or seven of Truman's staff were working in the Cabinet Room, preparing material for release, when Press Secretary Joe Short received word that a Pentagon reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Lloyd Norman, was making inquiries about a supposed “major resignation” to take place in Tokyo—the implication being that somehow MacArthur had already learned of Truman's decision and was about to resign before Truman could fire him.
Bradley telephoned Truman at about nine o'clock to report there had been a leak. Truman, saying he wanted time to think, told Bradley to find Marshall and Acheson. Marshall, it was learned, had gone to a movie, but Acheson came to the White House immediately; he thought it would be a mistake to do anything rash because of one reporter's inquiry. As he had from the start, Acheson stressed the importance of the manner in which the general was dismissed. It was only fair and proper that he be informed before the story broke.
Meantime, something apparently had gone wrong with the transmission of the president's orders. Nothing had been heard from Muccio about their receipt. By ten-thirty Truman had decided. Short telephoned the White House to have all the orders—those relieving MacArthur, as well as those naming Matthew Ridgway his successor—mimeographed as quickly as possible.
“He's not going to be allowed to quit on me,” Truman reportedly said. “He's going to be fired!” In his diary Truman recorded dryly, “Discussed the situation and I ordered messages sent at once and directly to MacArthur.”
From a small first-floor study in his Georgetown home, Dean Acheson began placing calls to various officials. At the State Department, Rusk spent a long night telephoning the ambassadors of all the countries with troops in Korea. “Well, the little man finally did it, didn't he,” responded the ambassador from New Zealand.
At the White House, switchboard operators began calling reporters at their homes to say there would be an extraordinary press conference at one A.M. And at one A.M. on Wednesday, April 11, Press Secretary Joe Short handed out the mimeographed sheets in the White House pressroom. Truman, in his secondfloor bedroom at Blair House, was by then fast asleep.
General MacArthur learned of his recall while at lunch in Tokyo, when his wife handed him a brown Signal Corps envelope. If Truman had only let him know how he felt, MacArthur would say privately a few hours later, he would have retired “without difficulty.” Where the Tribune reporter got his tip was never revealed. MacArthur would later testify that he had never given any thought to resigning.
According to what MacArthur said he had been told by an unnamed but “eminent” medical authority, Truman's “mental instability” was the result of malignant hypertension, “characterized by bewilderment and confusion of thought.” Truman, MacArthur predicted, would be dead in six months.
TRUMAN FIRES MACARTHUR
The headline across the early edition of The Washington Post on April 11, 1951, was the headline everywhere in the country and throughout much of the world, with only minor variations. The reaction was stupendous, the outcry from the American people shattering. Truman had known he would have to face a storm, but however dark his premonitions, he could not possibly have measured what was coming. No one did; no one could have.
The day on Capitol Hill was described as “one of the bitterest … in modern times.” Prominent Republicans, including Senator Robert Taft, spoke angrily of impeaching the president. The full Republican leadership held an emergency meeting in Joe Martin's office at nine-thirty in the morning, after which Martin talked to reporters of “impeachments,” the accent on the plural. “We might want the impeachments of 1 or 50.” A full-dress congressional investigation of the president's war policy was in order. General MacArthur, announced Martin, would be invited to air his views before a joint session of Congress.
In New York, two thousand longshoremen walked off their jobs in protest over the firing of MacArthur. A Baltimore women's group announced plans for a march on Washington in support of the general. Elsewhere, enraged patriots flew flags at half-staff, or upside down. People signed petitions and fired off furious letters and telegrams to Washington. In Worcester, Massachusetts, and San Gabriel, California, Truman was burned in effigy. In Houston, a Protestant minister became so angry dictating a telegram to the White House that he died of a heart attack.
In the hallways of the Senate and House office buildings, Western Union messengers made their deliveries with bushel baskets. According to on
e tally, of the 44,358 telegrams received by Republicans in Congress during the first forty-eight hours following Truman's announcement, all but 334 condemned him or took the side of MacArthur, and the majority called for Truman's immediate removal from office.
A number of prominent liberals—Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Justice William O. Douglas—publicly supported Truman. Further, throughout Europe, MacArthur's dismissal was greeted as welcome news. But most impressive was the weight of editorial opinion at home in support of Truman—in-cluding some staunch Republican newspapers—despite vehement assaults in the McCormick, Hearst, and Scripps Howard papers, as well as the renewed glorification of MacArthur in Henry Luce's Time and Life.
Nothing had so stirred the political passions of the country since the Civil War. At the heart of the tumult were anger and frustration over the war in Korea. Senator Kenneth Wherry had begun calling it “Truman's War,” and the name caught on. People were sick of Truman's War, frustrated, and a bit baffled by talk of a “limited war.” America didn't fight to achieve a stalemate, and the cost in blood had become appalling. The country wanted it over. MacArthur at least offered victory.
Except for a brief broadcast from the White House the night after his dismissal of MacArthur, Truman maintained silence on the matter. General MacArthur was “one of our greatest military commanders,” he told the nation, but the cause of world peace was far more important than any individual.
The Cold War Page 12
