The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  The last thing the people in Washington wanted, now that they seemed able to contain the Chinese armies, was an additional war with their own theater commander. But a war it would be. On March 7, for instance, MacArthur started out a press conference in Korea by tweaking President Truman, with references to what he called the serious, indeed abnormal inhibitions placed on him, the lack of additional forces given him and other restraints imposed from Washington. Then, at a moment when Washington was just beginning to contemplate trying to move Beijing to the peace table, he mocked the Chinese for their failures and their own limitations—virtually taunting a proud enemy that had just defeated him. That in itself greatly angered the president because MacArthur had just made it a great deal harder to negotiate with China.

  In a military sense, MacArthur was also becoming increasingly critical of Ridgway’s strategy. All that Ridgway had gained, he now said publicly and with contempt, was “an accordion war”—a war where the UN forces might move up twenty or thirty miles during an offensive, only to move back when the Chinese attacked again in force. If no one in Washington thought such a war was ideal, they were convinced that it was punishing the Chinese infinitely more than their own forces, perhaps on a casualty ratio of ten or fifteen to one, and that the alternatives were much worse. Yet it was an insulting phrase, and Ridgway smoldered when he heard it. Here was his superior speaking so condescendingly about what he and, perhaps even more important, the men fighting under him had seen as a considerable success. It was an assault on their morale, if nothing else, from someone who was supposed to be on their side. Five days after the MacArthur press conference, Ridgway held his own. For UN troops to reach the thirty-eighth parallel, he said, would be a “tremendous victory.” Then he added—as clear a dissent from the views of MacArthur as he had yet uttered—“We didn’t set out to conquer China. 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.” Years later, MacArthur paid Ridgway back. Although he had been MacArthur’s own choice to succeed Walker, in an interview with Jim Lucas, a star writer for the Scripps Howard chain, which was always favorable to him, he ranked Ridgway “at the bottom of the list” of his field commanders.

  There was, of course, more to come. MacArthur wrote Hugh Baillie, the head of United Press International, and one of his chief journalistic admirers, that with a force of the size needed to hold the line at the thirty-eighth parallel, as Washington now wanted to limit the war, he could also drive the Chinese back across the Yalu. Most assuredly Matt Ridgway did not agree. That was his fourth violation of the gag rule. Two far more important assaults on the administration were still ahead. On March 20, MacArthur received a top secret cable from Washington notifying him that the administration felt it was the right time for a major peace initiative. With the new successes that Ridgway had enjoyed on the battlefield, there was a chance of talking, and eventually stabilizing the lines at the thirty-eighth parallel and ending this grim, mutually hopeless war. It was an embryonic feeler at best, and there was an awareness that Mao might not yet be ready to move forward, but at least it was a beginning.

  The important thing was that Washington was ready to talk. Truman intended to make a major speech in the near future suggesting that both sides go to the negotiating table and end up somewhere back near where the war started. To MacArthur that kind of stalemate was nothing less than a defeat. Informed of what Washington intended to do, he set out quite deliberately to sabotage it. On March 24, as he was paying another of his visits to Korea, his office released a communiqué again taunting the Chinese military leadership.

  “Of even greater significance than our tactical success,” his communiqué said, “has been the clear revelation that this new enemy, Red China, of such exaggerated and vaunted military power, lacks the industrial capacity to provide adequately many critical items essential to the conduct of modern war.” He then enumerated some of what he saw as China’s weaknesses: the Chinese enemy “lacks manufacturing bases and those raw materials needed to produce, maintain and operate even moderate air and sea power, and he cannot provide the essentials for successful ground operations, such as tanks, heavy artillery and other refinements science has introduced into the conduct of military campaigns.” He then mentioned China’s inability to control the sea and air. When these limitations were “coupled with the inferiority of ground fire power, as in the enemy’s case, the resulting disparity is such that it cannot be overcome by bravery, however fanatical, or the most gross indifference to human loss.”

  It was a remarkable, singularly insulting document, a simultaneous assault on two capitols, Beijing and Washington. With its publication, whatever chance there was of a first step toward a peace process was lost for the time being. It was, in Blair’s words, “the most flagrant and challenging” violation of the Truman directive yet. His communiqué reached Washington about ten o’clock on the night of March 23. Dean Acheson, Bob Lovett (by then the number two man at Defense), and Dean Rusk were together at Acheson’s house and they were all livid. “A major act of sabotage,” Acheson called it. Truman gave no inkling of his own personal decision on what the next step should be, but Acheson, probably the counselor best attuned to him, later wrote that his state of mind “combined disbelief with controlled fury.” His daughter, Margaret, later quoted him as saying, “I couldn’t send a message to the Chinese after that. He [MacArthur] prevented a cease fire proposition right there. I wanted to kick him into the North China Sea right there.”

  The communiqué had taken the struggle between the president and the general to a new level. It went to the question of who the commander in chief was. The next day, Truman met with his top people, and the idea of a peace proposal was dropped. With that, the central issue became not so much whether to fire MacArthur, but when. Lovett, usually so low-key, wanted to do it then and there. Marshall fretted about the anger such an act might create on the Hill, and its effect on the defense appropriations bill. Acheson was nervous about its broader political ramifications. There was also the question of the Joint Chiefs—would they come along without a dissenting voice? Getting senior military men to turn on one of their own was always a sensitive business. If just one chief failed to go along with them, MacArthur’s position would be greatly enhanced. But there was also no doubt that Truman had made his decision and was merely waiting for the right moment.

  That came soon enough. MacArthur had received, at roughly the same time, a letter from the Republican leader in the House, Joe Martin, a passionate backer of Chiang and a China Lobby member, soliciting his views about Asia, and in particular the use of Chiang’s troops in opening a second front against the Chinese. This was something Martin greatly favored. “Your admirers are legion and the respect you command is enormous,” Martin wrote. MacArthur, he added, could answer confidentially or publicly. To most military men this might seem like a trap set by a tricky politician to catch an innocent, unworldly general: to MacArthur it was nothing less than a golden opportunity.

  When MacArthur answered Martin on March 20, he set no restrictions on how Martin could use his words. His views, he said, were “to meet force with maximum counterforce, as we have never failed to do in the past. Your view with respect to the utilization of the Chinese forces on Formosa is in conflict with neither logic, nor this tradition.” Then he added, a now familiar litany of explanation and complaint: “that we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there fight it with words; that if we lose the war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe would most probably avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.”

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  JUST AS MACARTHUR wanted, Joe Martin took the bait and read the MacArthur letter on the floor of the House on April 5. Nothing could have been more political or more
potentially injurious to so embattled a government (or, for that matter, more terrifying to its allies).

  There was one additional thing that strongly affected Truman and the men immediately around him in those days that was not part of the public record, but helped generate the feeling that MacArthur was a rogue general. As Joseph Goulden wrote in his authoritative book on the Korean War, the National Security Administration, the supersecret institution that was in charge of listening covertly to the rest of the world when it thought it was communicating privately, was picking up intercepts from its listening station at Atsugi Air Base near Tokyo. Mostly that station was used for listening in on the Chinese, but sometimes it listened in on friendly countries as well. In the late winter of 1950–51, the people there picked up a series of intercepts from both the Spanish and Portuguese embassies in Tokyo. Those were embassies with which MacArthur had closer ties than Washington because of Charles Willoughby’s affinity for their respective dictators, Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar. In these messages the Spanish and Portuguese diplomats told their home offices that MacArthur had assured them he could turn Korea into a larger war with the Chinese. Paul Nitze of Policy Planning and his deputy Charles Burton Marshall eventually saw the messages, as did the president. According to Goulden, when Truman read them he slapped his desk in anger. “This is outright treachery,” he exclaimed.

  The day after Martin revealed the general’s letter, Truman wrote in his diary: “MacArthur shoots another political bomb through Joe Martin, leader of the Republican minority in the House. This looks like the last straw. Rank insubordination.” Then he listed for his own purposes some of MacArthur’s previous actions. He ended the diary note, “I’ve come to the conclusion that our Big General in the Far East must be recalled.” He was still careful at the meetings with his own top people, however, to withhold word on his own decision. He and the men around him were, they knew all too well, in a lose-lose situation. There was no upside now. A president who dismissed a famed and honored general in the middle of a highly unpopular war could not but suffer in the short term. The immediate political impact would undoubtedly favor the general. History was another thing. Truman was confident that the historians would come along and rescue him, perhaps after he left office, although they might take their own sweet time getting there. He was a shrewd enough politician to know that he would pay dearly in the coin of his administration’s present value. That said, he did not waver. MacArthur’s behavior, he believed, cut to the very core of a democratic society, to civilian control of the military. As for the general’s vision of the war, he later wrote, once again summoning history, it reminded him of Napoleon saying, after he had advanced all the way to Moscow in his ill-fated invasion of Russia, “I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere.”

  All of that made the choice surprisingly easy. Truman also believed that there was a curious historical precedent for what was happening. If MacArthur saw himself as someone descended lineally from Washington and Lincoln, Harry Truman saw him less flatteringly, as the modern reincarnation of George McClellan. McClellan was the general who, in Truman’s view, not only served Lincoln poorly in the field, but had treated him with open contempt, often deliberately keeping him waiting before their scheduled meetings. McClellan openly referred to Lincoln as “the original gorilla.”

  McClellan’s ego was enormous, greatly exceeding his talents. He had seen himself as nothing less than the savior of the country. If, he said, “the people call upon me to save the country—I must save it & cannot respect anything that is in the way.” There were countless letters to him from ordinary citizens, he liked to claim, urging him to run for the presidency or to become the dictator of America. He greatly preferred the idea of dictator, and he was willing, he sometimes added, to make that sacrifice. He hungered to run against Lincoln, which he finally did, unsuccessfully, in 1864, gaining 21 electoral votes to Lincoln’s 212. “A great egoist,” Truman later said of McClellan. “A glorified Napoleon. He even had his picture taken with his hand in his overcoat, like Napoleon.”

  In the winter of 1950–51, Truman assigned Ken Hechler, a thirty-six-year old White House staffer, to research the Lincoln-McClellan relationship in the Library of Congress stacks. The parallels, he discovered, were startling, though McClellan, in contrast to MacArthur, was an overly cautious general. He was, Hechler wrote, “so supremely self confident that he could not take orders well; he dabbled in politics; he thought his commander-in-chief Lincoln was crude, ignorant, and uncouth; and he expressed too freely his opposition to emancipating the slaves.”

  McClellan’s constant statements on politics, in effect unsolicited political advice—not unlike those of MacArthur—became a steady irritant to Lincoln. Hechler’s memo detailed the lengthy correspondence between the president and the general, culminating, after a year of increasingly contentious messages, in Lincoln’s decision to relieve him of command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862. Hechler handed his research in to the president, only to discover, to his surprise, that Truman knew almost all of it anyway and already took some comfort from it. After all, nearly ninety years later, Lincoln was the most honored of presidential names and McClellan among the least valued of military ones. The president understood that history in this case was going to be his ally, that he was not the first president to have trouble with a general with a superiority complex.

  Nonetheless, Truman moved cautiously. Martin spoke on a Thursday. That Friday, April 6, Truman met with Marshall, Acheson, Bradley, and Harriman and, without giving away his own inclinations, asked them what he should do. Marshall was still cautious. Acheson wanted to fire him, but warned, “You will have the biggest fight of your Administration.” Harriman pointed out that Truman had been struggling with the MacArthur conundrum since August 1950. Truman then asked them all to meet again later the same day. He asked Marshall to review all the messages that had gone back and forth from Washington to MacArthur, to check out whether he had actually been insubordinate. Bradley was assigned to check out the feelings of the Joint Chiefs, so critical in any forthcoming political battle. When they met later that day, Marshall suggested not firing MacArthur but bringing him home for consultations. Acheson and Harriman were strongly opposed to that—they envisioned the political circus that would take place. Because Joe Collins was out of reach, it was decided to wait until Bradley could talk to him. They all met again on Saturday, slowly, surely focusing on the inevitable.

  When that meeting was over, Marshall and Bradley went back to Marshall’s office. Both were soon to retire. Marshall had already taken a great deal of abuse from the right wing, while Bradley, who had not been in the China line of fire, was still unscathed as a grand figure of World War II. If they relieved MacArthur, Bradley knew, he and a military career of sterling quality would no longer be immune to the ugly virus of the ongoing political struggle. In addition, both men feared that firing MacArthur might politicize the Joint Chiefs. They tried drafting a letter that would, in effect, tell MacArthur to shut up, but it was a little late in the game for that. There were no half measures left. The general had forced their hand.

  That Sunday, Bradley met with the Joint Chiefs. They were still trying to figure out some way to avoid a vote on MacArthur’s relief, so odious a decision for senior military men dealing with the most senior military man of all. There was some talk about separating MacArthur from the Korean command, leaving him only with the defense of Japan, but they knew he would never accept such a solution. In the end they all signed on to relieving him. With that the Chiefs met with Marshall. It was a grim and sobering meeting. Firing MacArthur was like tearing pages out of your most prized history book. Marshall went to each of them and asked if he would concur in the decision should Truman fire MacArthur. Each did, as did Bradley, though he was not a voting chief.

  On Monday, April 9, Truman met with his senior people again and for the first time revealed his own position—that MacArthur had to go. Ridgway would replace hi
m and Jim Van Fleet, who had risen to prominence during the Greek civil war, would take command of the Eighth Army in Korea. This, he told them, was about elemental constitutional processes, not about politics. Nothing revealed his attitude as clearly as a mild rebuke he gave to one of his speechwriters working on a statement just before he announced the decision. There had been an argument between Charlie Murphy, a senior White House figure, and Ted Tannenwald, a junior member of the staff and a Harriman man, over the announcement. Tannenwald wanted to include the fact that the decision had been made with the unanimous agreement of the Joint Chiefs and the president’s most senior civilian cabinet members, especially Marshall, whose name still held real authority for many Americans.

  At their final meeting on the statement, the president went around the room in what was a speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-tongue moment. Tannenwald again suggested that the president add the fact that he was doing this at the unanimous suggestion of the Joint Chiefs and his senior officials. But Truman quickly cut him off. It might have been as fine a moment as he enjoyed as president, a reflection of his rare ability to understand what the office truly was about and to rise to its needs. “Not tonight, son,” he told Tannenwald. “There’ll be plenty of time for that later. But tonight I’m taking this decision on my own responsibility as President of the United States and I want no one to think I’m trying to share it with anyone else. That will [all] come out in 48 or 72 hours, but as of tonight this is my decision and my decision alone.”

  So it was done and the president prepared to address the nation. At the last moment, Averell Harriman noticed that the statement did not mention that Ridgway was replacing MacArthur, so they wrote it in by hand, ushering in, in addition, a more modern era. (The first thing Ridgway did when he took MacArthur’s job was to move a telephone into MacArthur’s old office, thus connecting the commander with the outside world.) The reason he had made the decision, the president said, was irreconcilable differences over policy. Then he added: “General MacArthur’s place in history as one of our greatest commanders is fully reestablished. The Nation owes him a debt of gratitude for the distinguished and exceptional service which he has rendered his country in posts of great responsibility. For that reason I repeat my regret at the necessity for the action I feel compelled to take in his case.” He was sure, he told staffers, that MacArthur had wanted this confrontation: “I can show just how the dirty so and so double crossed us. I’m sure MacArthur wanted to be fired. He’s going to be regarded as a worse double crosser than McClellan.” Everyone, he added, “seems to think I don’t have courage enough to do it. We’ll let them think so and then we’ll announce it.” Later, privately, he spoke of MacArthur in much blunter terms: “The difficulty was that he wanted to be the Pro-consul, the Emperor of the Far East. He forgot that he was just a general in the army under his commander in chief, the President of the United States.”