THIS WAS ONE of the moments to which Hugh Sidey was referring when he wrote that “when the U.S. got into trouble … Russell would … stick a forefinger into his somber vest and amble down those dim corridors to see if he could help his country. Everybody watching felt better when he arrived.”
Republican senators, who would be in the minority no matter which Senate body conducted the hearings, wanted them chaired by a Democrat they could count on to be nonpartisan, impartial, fair. They petitioned Russell to have the Armed Services Committee hold the hearings, so that he would be chairman. As for Democratic liberals, they were aware that unless the hearings were run with a very firm hand, they would become merely another stage on which MacArthur would star, bolstered this time by a chorus of approval from the GOP’s Neanderthals. On international issues, if not domestic, they knew, the firmest, and fairest, hand was that of the Senator from Georgia. No other senator, the Democrats felt, could defuse this most explosive of situations. And certainly none of the liberals wanted the chairman’s gavel for himself, no matter how great the potential for publicity contained in that piece of wood; it contained also the potential for the political destruction of the chairman, who would, in having to gavel down MacArthur and his allies, be standing in the face of overwhelming public opinion. Democratic liberals also wanted Dick Russell—Russell and no one else. When Tom Connally claimed jurisdiction for his Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate, confronted with a jurisdictional dispute, ruled that the two committees would hold joint hearings, but that the chairman of Armed Services, not the chairman of Foreign Relations, would preside. Although Russell, “leader of the Southern bloc,” was regarded as the Enemy by most liberals, “that did not prevent them from running to him for shelter” when MacArthur returned, Reedy says. “It was rather amusing to see the speed with which the Senate just automatically gravitated to Russell.”
Russell knew the necessity of holding hearings. Admiring though he was of MacArthur the battlefield technician and even of MacArthur the theater commander, he understood the terrible dangers of the policies of MacArthur the global strategist. And he was very aware of the danger inherent in MacArthur’s challenge to the President’s authority; Russell had, Reedy was to say, “a deep sense of the vital necessity of reestablishing the principle of civilian control over the military.” And he understood as well the role of the Senate: that the Senate could not be hurried, could not be stampeded—that the Senate was uniquely insulated against the phrensy of public opinion, that the Senate was equipped to be calm, judicious, fair. The hearings, he felt, must not be one-sided. Heated argument was not what was necessary; what was needed was a cool look at all sides of an exceedingly complex issue. “Russell believed … that what was happening here was a tremendous upsurge of emotion, and that if time was given to look at the MacArthur position, that the ridiculousness of it would eventually become apparent, but would not become apparent if there was an adversary investigation…. So therefore it was a question of gaining time, gaining time so that the American people would really look at it….”
Russell knew, moreover, that he was the best man to preside over the hearings. He had no false modesty about his expertise on the military and on global strategy; no false modesty about his knowledge of Rome and of Greece and of all the great empires of the past, nor of his ability to evaluate this controversy in the light of history. And he had no false modesty about his stature in the Senate. “He believed,” says his biographer, Gilbert Fite, “that he had enough power and influence to direct the investigation along the lines that would be most useful to the country.”
And he knew he had no choice but to preside over the hearings; he had to do it: it was his duty, he was a Russell of the Russells of Georgia; noblesse oblige.
HARDLY HAD RUSSELL accepted the chairmanship when a dispute erupted that seemed to make utterly impossible the nonpartisan, impartial, calm inquiry he had planned—a dispute over whether the hearings would be open to the press and the public, or closed.
Part of Russell’s desire to keep them closed was as political as that of other Democrats, who, as Time put it, “were anxious to keep General MacArthur’s thundering rhetoric out of earshot of the microphone, and his dramatic profile off the screen of 12 million television sets.” But there was something more. The hearings, Russell knew, would center around America’s deepest-held military and strategic secrets. “We are entering doors that have been barred, we are unlocking secrets that have been protected in steel safes,” he was to say. When it was suggested that he invoke Truman’s support for his position, he said there was no need to do so; he knew he was right, he said; never talked to Truman about “whether closed or open,” he scribbled on a telephone notepad. When the Republicans—not the Republicans on his committee, moderate internationalist Republicans like Lodge and Saltonstall, but midwestern right-wingers like Wherry and Capehart—demanded that the hearings be open, he rose on the floor of the Senate to argue against them in words that could have been written by Madison: “I have been disturbed in recent days because of the way we are running the government, by taking action here in response to a quick expression of uninformed desire.” It was not, he said, a question of hiding facts from scrutiny; there would be facts spoken and documents discussed about which the Communists should not know. “There is something here that is more important than continued tenure in the Senate or even the election of the President of the United States in 1952.” Four times the Republicans forced a vote; each time it was close, but each time Russell won.
He wanted as many of the facts as possible released, since he felt that if the public was permitted to see all sides of the argument, the weaknesses in MacArthur’s position, and the menace of nuclear war which it posed, would become obvious, and the emotionalism would die down, the Administration would be vindicated, and the cause of world peace advanced. To accomplish this, while safeguarding strategic secrets, he announced that as the stenotypists in the Armed Services Committee room finished typing each page of the testimony, the page would be taken to an anteroom, where two censors—one from the State Department, one from Defense—would read it, cutting out any information that shouldn’t be released. The edited transcript would then be run off on a mimeograph machine in the anteroom, and handed to reporters, who thus could read the testimony, shorn only of sensitive information, within minutes after it had been given.
THE HEARINGS were scheduled for 10 a.m. in Room 318 of the Senate Office Building, the great Caucus Room, on Thursday, May 3, 1951. General MacArthur arrived almost twenty minutes late (“Couldn’t get him down from the Cross,” one Democratic senator growled under his breath), and strode with a casual wave through a crowd of secretaries and reporters as photographers’ flashbulbs popped; the tall doors of the Caucus Room slammed shut, three uniformed Capitol policemen stationed themselves in front of them. Gaveling the hearings to order, Russell welcomed MacArthur in the most complimentary of terms. “On the permanent pages of our history are inscribed his achievements as one of the great captains of history…. But he is not only a great military leader, his broad understanding and knowledge of the science of politics has enabled him to restore and stabilize a conquered country and to win for himself and for his country the respect and affection of a people who were once our bitterest enemies.” And then, as Time put it, “for three amazing days, Douglas MacArthur sat at the center of the stage to make his case against the foreign policy of his Commander in Chief.”
He made his case as well as it could be made, with the forceful, colorful rhetoric of which he was such a master. His strategy would not enlarge the war, he argued; on the contrary, it would lead to the defeat of the Chinese Communists, force Mao Tse-tung to sue for peace, and thus produce a clear-cut “victory.” Of course, he didn’t propose invading China with American troops, he said; “no man in his proper senses would advocate throwing our troops in on the Chinese mainland.” He hadn’t been opposing the Administration’s policy, he said; “I was operating in what I c
all a vacuum. I could hardly be said to be in opposition to policies which I was not even aware of. I don’t know what the policy is now….” “There is no policy! There is nothing, I tell you, no plan, no anything.” And, he said, by continuing to fight “indecisively,” America would incur staggering casualties. “It isn’t just dust that is settling in Korea, Senators; it is American blood.” The Truman Administration’s attempt to make war “piecemeal” would lead to a broader conflict, as “appeasement” always did. As to the risk that by bombing Manchuria, blockading China, and using Chiang’s troops to invade it, America would push China into the war on a full scale and perhaps Russia, too, he said that the risk of that was small, but that no matter how large it might be, it was a risk that should be taken. “I believe if you let it go on indefinitely in Korea, you invite a third world war.” And, he said, and he said it very firmly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with this view. “I am not aware of having had any differences with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on military questions at all…. The position of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and my own, so far as I know, were practically identical.” To support this contention, he quoted a JCS study which recommended, among other things, removal of “the restrictions on air reconnaissance of Chinese coastal areas and of Manchuria.”
But when the General had finished, the chairman had some questions. Some were about MacArthur’s contention that his position had been “practically identical” with that of the Joint Chiefs. Senator Russell asked mildly, “There is quite a difference between reconnaissance and attack, is there not?” “Yes, sir,” MacArthur replied. “Did the Joint Chiefs ever suggest in addition to reconnaissance that these bases be attacked?” Russell asked. “Not that I know of.”
Some of the questions—by Russell and other senators, including moderate, internationalist Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts and Brien McMahon of Connecticut (and Lyndon Johnson, in his role as a member of the Armed Services Committee; he had also loaned Reedy to Russell for the hearings, since Russell did not have an adequate public relations man of his own, and Donald Cook and Gerald Siegel were drafting questions for committee members)—were about the specific proposals MacArthur was making, and they brought out some implications that MacArthur had not mentioned.
Russell’s questions were asked in the most courteous of tones. “I do not understand exactly what you would have done about [Chiang Kai-shek’s] Nationalist troops [on Formosa],” he said, and when MacArthur replied, “I recommended to Washington that the wraps be taken off the Generalissimo,” the Senator had another question. “General, would you mind advising the committee and the Senate what you think is the real strength of the Generalissimo’s forces on Formosa?” MacArthur said there were half a million “excellent” men, “exactly the same as these Red troops I am fighting.” Then, Russell said, you feel that if they were landed on the mainland, they could maintain themselves without American help? This question MacArthur did not answer directly, and Lodge brought up another implication of the proposed “unleashing,” brought it up also in the most courteous of tones. “What would happen with regard to Formosa if Chiang were to land on the mainland and then be wiped out?” Lodge was asking if America would have to then defend Formosa itself, but MacArthur said, “Senator, that is a hypothesis that is very difficult to speculate upon.”
In his dramatic speech, MacArthur had assured the Senate that if the Chinese were driven out of Korea Mao Tse-tung would sue for peace. But, he was asked now, what if Mao didn’t sue for peace? Suppose when the Chinese were chased back across the Yalu River, they refused to sign a treaty—what then? What if they massed near the river, on their own territory, forces that could be used for a new offensive in Korea. MacArthur refused to take that premise seriously. “Such a contingency is a very hypothetical query. I can’t quite see the possibility of the enemy being driven back across the Yalu and still being in a posture of offensive action,” he said. But the senators did not let the matter drop, and by the end of that line of questioning, it had begun to be clear that at least a strong possibility existed that MacArthur’s proposals would have drastically widened the conflict.
And, of course, China was not the only opponent that might be drawn into the war if MacArthur’s policies were followed, as Russell, speaking in his calm, courteous voice, brought out. Tell me, General, he said, if the United States were—hypothetically, of course—to have to aid Chiang’s troops on the mainland of China; if hypothetically, the United States were to be forced to assume the defense of Formosa, if the United States was busy fighting China—what would happen if Russia then attacked Japan? And when MacArthur said, “I do not believe that it would be within the capacity of the Soviet Union…. I believe that the disposition of the Soviet forces are largely defensive,” Russell asked quietly, “How about the submarine strength of the Soviet in that area?”
And, Russell asked, what if Russia, seeing her allies being defeated, decided to enter the war on a larger scale? What if she attacked in Europe? What if she launched an atomic attack? “If we go into all-out war, I want to find out how you propose in your own mind to defend the American nation against that war?”
“That doesn’t happen to be my responsibility, Senator,” MacArthur replied. “My responsibilities were in the Pacific.”
Did the General know the number of atomic bombs the Russians possessed?McMahon asked. No, MacArthur said, he did not. “Do you think that we are ready to withstand the Russian attack in Western Europe today?” McMahon asked.
“Senator,” Douglas MacArthur said, “I have asked you several times not to involve me in anything except my own area. My concepts on global defense are not what I am here to testify on. I don’t pretend to be an authority now on those things…. I have been desperately occupied on the other side of the world.” “That was the point,” McMahon said. “The Joint Chiefs and the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, has to look at this thing on a global basis and a global defense. You as a theater commander by your own statement have not made that kind of study, and yet you advise us to push forward with a course of action that may involve us in that global conflict.”
By the end of the three days, even Time had to admit that “When General MacArthur replaced the hat of a theater commander with the hat of a global strategist, he seemed less sure of his ground.” “Among themselves,” as William Manchester reports, “the committee members agreed that MacArthur’s bold proposals were … unrealistic.”
And when MacArthur had completed his testimony—with, of course, a compliment from the chairman, who praised his “patience, thoroughness and frankness” (there was no praise for his wisdom)—another General of the Army, George Catlett Marshall, entered Room 318 to sit before the senators. He was dressed in a civilian’s gray suit, as if to symbolize, as Time put it, “the civilian authority of the Secretary of Defense,” and he testified for five days, calmly, carefully, even ploddingly, in “a flat, unemotional voice and sparse phrases that contrasted sharply with his antagonist’s flow of words and orotund delivery,” and that fit in perfectly with the judicial atmosphere the chairman had established. By the end of the five days, the Secretary’s testimony, and the senators’ questions, had made clear that, at the very least, the question of escalating the war in Korea was far more complex than it had seemed when MacArthur first charged “appeasement” and said there was “no substitute for victory,” “no policy … no plan, no anything.” Russell led Marshall through testimony that showed that the Administration did have a policy: “To contain Communist aggression in different fashions in different areas without resorting to total war.” That policy, Marshall said, had worked in Berlin, it had worked in Greece, and it would work in Korea. Despite MacArthur’s ridicule of limited war, Marshall said, MacArthur’s proposals “might well mean formal Soviet intervention.” Contrary to MacArthur’s contention that the Soviets did not have sufficient forces in the Far East to pose a real threat, Marshall said they had plenty: not only a submarine
fleet but “a considerable force in the vicinity of Vladivostok, Darien, Port Arthur, Harbin.” In a very quiet voice, Russell asked Marshall to tell the committee “what might occur if the Soviet intervened,” and with Marshall’s reply there were suddenly, in the Caucus Room, new realities. “That would immediately involve the defense of Japan, Hokkaido in particular,attacks on our air all over Japan, all over Korea … and we couldn’t accept that without the maximum retaliation on our part which inevitably means a world war….” And a world war might well mean nuclear war—and the end of mankind. “My own view was—and I think it is similar to that of the Chiefs of Staff—that we were risking a hazard that had such terrible possible consequences that what we would gain was not comparable to what we were risking….”
THE CONTEST BETWEEN these hearings and the usual headline-hunting Senate investigation could hardly have been greater. The method of releasing quickly edited transcripts turned what could have been a circus—the typical senatorial investigative circus—into what White was to call a “proceeding … quiet, unruffled, orderly and strangely at variance with the investigative habits of the Institution.” The hearings, White was to say, in an opinion echoed by Rovere and other Washington correspondents, dramatically increased the public understanding of the Korean War, of the Cold War as a whole, and of arguments for and against a policy of containment as opposed to that of all-out war. And this detailed presentation of facts and complexities had the effect of calming the waves of public indignation stirred up by MacArthur’s clarion call. Soon Rovere was writing that “it is possible to discern a slight dropping off of interest in the hearings….”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 61
