MacArthur was almost never ill. Though his only formal exercise was calisthenics, he paced constantly, sometimes miles each day, in his office and living room, in airplanes, or on the decks of ships during attacks. MacArthur himself attributed his good health and physical condition to his afternoon naps, his near-abstention from drinking, moderate eating habits, and his ability to fall asleep almost at will. He was a profoundly religious man but not a churchgoer.
MacArthur was a totally disciplined man in thought, speech, and action. While he is best remembered for his “Old soldiers never die” speech and his farewell address at West Point, one of his best public performances was during the Senate Korea hearings. I did not participate in the questioning, since I was not a member of the committee conducting the hearing. I dropped by the first day just to see how MacArthur would handle himself under intensive questioning and expected to stay only a few minutes. His performance was so brilliant and spellbinding that I stayed for the entire three days of his testimony. Democratic senator William Fulbright and others came well prepared and asked some brutally tough questions aimed at demonstrating that MacArthur had violated presidential directives and had refused to accept the principle of civilian control of the military.
A lesser man would have crumbled under this assault. But MacArthur remained in command throughout. He was never trapped into a damaging admission; he used every question to get across a point he wanted to make in his answer; he was as quick and sharp at the end of a long, grueling day as at the beginning.
But even more impressive than what he said was how he said it. What particularly impressed me was his ability to put things in perfect, orderly English no matter how complex the issue was that he might be discussing. As was the case with de Gaulle, there were no pauses, no incomplete thoughts, no stopping a sentence and going back to start it again. It was almost as if he had written out his answers beforehand and memorized them. I was soon to see firsthand that he talked that way in private conversation as well.
• • •
It was at Robert Taft’s funeral in August 1953 that I first spoke with MacArthur. I mentioned that Taft had been one of his most loyal friends. MacArthur replied expansively, “I was his greatest friend!”
Shortly thereafter I received a message from his aide, General Courtney Whitney, that MacArthur would like to see me the next time I was in New York. I shall never forget that day. First I had breakfast with President Hoover in his suite in the Waldorf Towers, 31A. I always profited from my meetings with the man we affectionately called The Chief. Hoover, as was his custom, asked me for my views and listened attentively as I replied to his questions about the administration’s budget and the prospects for maintaining the Korean truce.
He was a man who was at peace with himself. He had been a Taft supporter, but now his only interest was in ensuring the success of the Eisenhower administration. The only uneasy moment came when he asked me to join him in smoking one of his fine Cuban cigars after breakfast. I had never smoked a cigar in the morning before, and twenty-five years passed before I tried it again.
After our talk I took the elevator up to MacArthur’s suite, 37A. General Whitney met me at the door and escorted me into the drawing room. Hoover’s suite was impressive in its simple, uncluttered dignity. MacArthur’s, while the same size, was spectacular. The memorabilia that covered the walls, gathered during his years of service in the Pacific, gave me the feeling that he rather than Hoover had served in the highest position America could offer. He also had a fine collection of Japanese art.
MacArthur walked toward me as I entered the room and took both of my hands in his. He said, “How good of you to come” and introduced me to Mrs. MacArthur, then and now one of the most gracious and charming women it has ever been my privilege to meet. She asked me about Mrs. Nixon and the children and then excused herself.
It was the first of what would become a series of conversations I had with him over the next eight years, all of them fascinating. We usually discussed the American political scene and current foreign policy issues—or, rather, he discussed and I listened. While Hoover had always asked for my thoughts on the various topics we discussed, MacArthur almost never did. A meeting with him was like a graduate seminar in whatever subject he was discussing, and the best policy for a visitor was either to listen quietly or to take notes. One colonel booked a fifteen-minute appointment with MacArthur during the Japanese Occupation, but was so stunned by the formidability of the general’s monologue that he forgot to bring up the reason for his visit. Later the colonel learned that MacArthur had judged him a “fascinating conversationalist.”
As it turned out, my meetings with MacArthur were among the very few high-level contacts between him and the Eisenhower administration. I did not report on them to the President, and in fact I cannot recall ever discussing MacArthur with Eisenhower. I always had the distinct impression that any mention of MacArthur would be unwelcome.
These two great American generals had held each other at arm’s length ever since the 1930s, when Eisenhower was MacArthur’s aide. During the 1950s I knew that MacArthur desperately wanted to come to Washington. He would describe to me, at great length and with extensive accompanying detail, how he would trim the military budget or how he would “straighten out the Pentagon in a month” if he were appointed Secretary of Defense or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the call never came.
While Eisenhower probably had good reason not to install the controversial five-star general in his administration—many in the Pentagon would have chafed at taking orders from him—there can be no doubt that MacArthur was hurt by the way he was treated. He would never speak disparagingly of Eisenhower in a direct way, but he did sometimes manage a backhanded jibe. Once, when talking with me about Eisenhower’s years as his aide, MacArthur said, “He could write a brilliant paper for a position or against a position. You just had to tell him what the position was.”
When Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack in 1955, setting off speculation about whether he would or should seek a second term, I received a message from MacArthur through Courtney Whitney. “General MacArthur is in the Vice President’s corner all the way,” Whitney told me. “He says that what should happen is that the other fellow should get out of there right away.” MacArthur’s message was highly inappropriate under the circumstances and would have been embarrassing to me, to say the least, if Eisenhower had learned of it. I recall thinking at the time that MacArthur was probably more eager to see Eisenhower out of the White House than to see me in it.
MacArthur resented Eisenhower’s popularity. He also believed that the attention paid to Eisenhower and Europe during and after World War II encouraged Washington’s neglect of the U.S. position in the Far East. Eisenhower, in turn, thought MacArthur, though a great general, was pompous and overly theatrical. While he usually kept such opinions to himself, he once wrote in his diary after receiving some strategic advice from MacArthur in 1942, “Wonder what he thinks we’ve been studying all these years. His lecture would have been good for plebes.”
While MacArthur did not play a public role in the 1960 presidential campaign, he did take pains to let me know that he was on my side. In June I sent him a wire congratulating him on receiving an award from the Japanese government for his work promoting Japanese-American friendship. I warmly praised his “heroic” contributions to history and expressed confidence that these would leave their mark “on the heritage of free people everywhere.” He wired in reply, “You have sent me a magnificent message. I have given it to the press to show my complete support of your candidacy for the presidency.” Perhaps only a man of MacArthur’s ego would have assumed that his releasing the text of my praise of him showed his support of me, but he seemed completely unabashed about making the assumption.
Often he made comments to me that were highly disapproving of Kennedy. Not surprisingly I appreciated them—before the election because they buoyed me up, and after the election because they hel
ped salve the wounds. Once before the election he spoke disparagingly of Kennedy’s PT boat exploit, saying that Kennedy was “brave but very rash” and that “he could have been court-martialed for his poor judgment in the episode.” In June 1961, two months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he was brutally critical of Kennedy. He mentioned that he had recently had a conversation with Jim Farley, the legendary former Democratic National Committee chairman and FDR confidant. Farley had made the point that Kennedy had a very quick, agile mind. MacArthur’s response was that he did not think that Kennedy had judgment—the kind of broad judgment that involves weighing all the factors before reaching a decision. MacArthur went on to tell me that “a commander’s most important function is to separate the five percent of intelligence he receives which is important from the ninety-five percent which is not important.” He said he thought Kennedy had failed that test in making his decisions on the Bay of Pigs and that, as a result of the fiasco, Kennedy had unfortunately totally lost confidence in the military and the CIA. He did credit Kennedy with being “clever” politically and attributed to politics Kennedy’s having provided MacArthur with a plane for his sentimental journey to the Philippines. But he called Kennedy “just dumb when it comes to decision making.” Having said that, however, he added very emphatically—he always spoke emphatically—that “Kennedy will take Cuba. Now is not the time, but later he must do it and he will do it.”
Nearly always MacArthur’s comments got back to Asia at one point or another. He once told me that, looking back, he believed that if he had had half a million Chinese Nationalist troops under his command at the Yalu, he could have split China in two and, in one stroke, changed the world’s balance of power. But that opportunity was gone. He had grown pessimistic about Asia’s future because of Communist encroachments, but thought it would be a grave mistake for the U.S. to become involved in an Asian land war. His last advice to a U.S. President was his urging of Lyndon Johnson not to commit more forces to Vietnam. He felt that all we could usefully do was to continue to bluff and to support local governments against Soviet- or Chinese-supported insurrections.
His attitudes on political matters were also unequivocal. He said that living in New York and serving as board chairman of Remington Rand had given him the opportunity to study Wall Street businessmen more closely, and he had found that they had “no character” whatsoever. “They will never stand up for principle,” he said. “The only guideline they follow is to pick a winner and support him regardless of what he may stand for.” In the early 1960s he told me that high taxation was the major issue and that the country was turning more conservative. But before the 1964 Republican convention he emphatically expressed the view that Goldwater could not be nominated because he was too conservative.
He told me in 1961 that Kennedy had seemed “almost a Socialist” when Kennedy’s father had brought him to meet MacArthur at the Waldorf in 1951. He did credit Kennedy with a “remarkable memory,” recalling that when he had seen him after he became President, Kennedy’s memory of their first meeting ten years earlier had been remarkably accurate. What particularly fascinated me about this was what it showed about MacArthur’s memory.
MacArthur gave me one bit of personal advice that many believe I should have followed. When I asked him whether he thought I should run for governor of California in 1962, he grasped my hand and said, “Don’t do it. California is a great state but it is too parochial. You should be in Washington, not Sacramento. What you should do is run for Congress.” Herbert Hoover had given me the advice just two hours earlier and six floors below.
My conversations with MacArthur are always linked in my own mind with those I had with Hoover. Both were aging, both were wise, both lived in the Waldorf Towers, and I usually visited both on the same day. Often the comments of the two offered curious parallels and contrasts.
My last conversation with Hoover was on August 10, 1963, when I dropped in to see him on his eighty-ninth birthday. His nurse told me that he had been very sick and it was a miracle for him to have recovered, but that his mind had never wavered. She said that he often got up in the middle of the night to write on his yellow pad. For years Hoover had answered each of his hundreds of birthday cards with a personal letter. His nurse said that he still read each card but was unable to answer them personally.
As she wheeled him into the room in his wheelchair, I was saddened to see how painfully thin he was. But his handshake was firm, his voice was surprisingly strong, and his comments on issues were succinct and to the point. Despite his hard-line anticommunism, he supported the test-ban treaty, which was signed that month by the U.S. and the Soviets. His view was that “at least it gives some present relief from tension.” As he put it, “ ‘Khrush’ needs friends because of the Chinese.” He disagreed with Adenauer’s view that we should play the Chinese against the Russians. He pointed out that they were in an early stage of communism and therefore especially aggressive. Also, he told me the Chinese were a highly emotional people who could be “bloodthirsty” both against foreigners and against their own people.
Hoover’s attitude was colored by his experiences while working as a mining engineer in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. He and his wife had a hand in defending a settlement of foreign families at Tientsin against the xenophobic Boxer rebels. Both the Boxers and the government troops committed horrible atrocities against one another; Hoover reported seeing thousands of bodies floating in the river that ran by his settlement. To him the carnage of the Chinese revolution was just another chapter of the same story. He predicted that the Chinese people had not been changed by twenty-five years of Maoism because “a national heritage is slow to change,” and said that the U.S. should have as little to do with them as possible.
He was more generous to Kennedy than MacArthur had been, commenting that “he was much better than I had anticipated.”
Hoover also differed with MacArthur about Goldwater. His view was that it might be best to give the extreme right a chance to try itself and to “get it out of our system.”
Although MacArthur and Hoover had very similar outlooks on a wide range of issues, I cannot recall an occasion when either one mentioned the other. At first I assumed that they rarely saw each other. But I learned later from Mrs. MacArthur that President Hoover invited the MacArthurs to his suite for private dinners five or six times a year, and that these events were the setting for some fascinating conversations between two of the most eminent leaders of our time.
• • •
MacArthur’s disregard for military policy was not confined to the officers’ dress code. Soldiers are supposed to obey their superiors to the letter, which MacArthur did not always do, even if the superiors in question were Presidents of the United States.
Often enough MacArthur was right and his superiors were wrong. In World War II he leapfrogged his forces across the South Pacific so expertly that he suffered fewer casualties from 1942 to 1945 than the Americans suffered in the Battle of the Bulge alone. His successes in this encouraged him to second-guess orders from Washington.
Once the Pentagon told him a plan to recapture the Philippine island of Mindoro was too risky. MacArthur went ahead anyway and succeeded. After taking the big island of Luzon, he began to take the other islands in the archipelago without authorization—losing only 820 men in the process. And in Japan his forays into social and economic reform went way beyond the letter of his authority as Supreme Commander, but his achievements were so brilliant that President Truman, who later fired him for insubordination, sent him nothing but praise.
In addition to his father’s example, two factors in particular contributed to MacArthur’s disregard of higher authority. First, from the beginning of his career he suspected other officers of trying to torpedo him. During World War I he mistrusted the men around General Pershing at the Allies’ Chaumont headquarters in France. Later his major antagonists were officers like George Marshall, who had himself been at Chaumont with Pershing.
In a conversation with me Herbert Hoover, Jr., an admirer of MacArthur, called these officers the “Pentagon Junta.” They were men whose overseas experience had been in Europe and whose outlook remained primarily European. MacArthur thought many of them, particularly Marshall, were intent upon thwarting his every move in the Pacific for both political and personal reasons. He also believed that Truman and his military advisers had not done enough to resist the Communist victory in China and that the administration’s unclear Asian policy had left South Korea open to Communist invasion.
MacArthur also had contempt for desk men. He was a field commander at heart, and he felt he understood better than men in offices what needed to be done on the battlefield. Presidents of the United States, of course, are the ultimate desk men, and MacArthur was no more intimidated by them than he was by his superiors in World War I or the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II.
None of MacArthur’s relationships with the Presidents he served from the 1930s on was ideal, though the irritants were different in each case.
With Hoover there was the famous “Bonus March” during the Depression, when 25,000 veterans and their families came to Washington demanding cash bonuses. Army Chief of Staff MacArthur questioned the marchers’ motives and personally went into the field against them. Hoover sent orders to MacArthur not to send his troops into the marchers’ makeshift camp, but MacArthur ignored Hoover’s orders and routed the protesters.
With Franklin Roosevelt, despite a veneer of cordiality, there were disagreements with MacArthur over the Army and Air Force budget in the 1930s and the general’s resentment over FDR’s decision not to reinforce the soldiers on Bataan. When MacArthur learned of Roosevelt’s death in 1945, he said to a member of his staff, “So Roosevelt is dead: a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well.”
But no two American leaders had greater distaste for each other than MacArthur and Truman. As early as June 1945, Truman noted in a memorandum to himself that a big question for the U.S. after the war would be “what to do with Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur.” He added, “It is a very great pity we have to have stuffed shirts like that in key positions. I don’t see why in hell Roosevelt didn’t order [Bataan commander Jonathan] Wainwright home and let MacArthur be a martyr [on Corregidor].” MacArthur, in turn, thought Truman was ignorant about Asia, “subject to paroxysms of ungovernable rage” (such as when he threatened physical assault on a critic who panned his daughter’s singing), and inclined to lose his nerve at crucial moments. The tension between the two came to a head over Korea.
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