MacArthur knew the firing was coming. The day before he had seen Ned Almond. “I may not see you anymore, so good-bye, Ned,” he had said. Almond was puzzled and asked what MacArthur meant. He answered: “I have become politically involved and may be relieved by the president.” That was absurd, Almond insisted.
The firing itself, despite Truman’s largely generous words, was badly botched. Frank Pace, the secretary of the Army, was supposed to tell MacArthur personally, but in Washington, the Chicago Tribune, ever hostile to the president, was on to the story, and the White House feared that MacArthur might resign before he could be fired, attacking Truman in the process and placing the White House on the defensive. Because of that, the White House decided to rush the announcement. The news was given out at a rare 1 A.M. briefing on April 11, Washington time, and it reached Tokyo by radio before the general had been officially notified, making the White House look infinitely more callous and MacArthur far more the victim. Even as he was being fired, his aides suggested, he remained the great MacArthur. Though the general himself did not meet with the press at first, Major General Courtney Whitney, one of his top aides, did. “I have just left him,” Whitney told reporters at the time. “He received the word of the president’s dismissal from command magnificently. He never turned a hair. His soldierly qualities were never more pronounced—this has been his finest hour.”
50
THE ASSAULT ON Truman was immediate. “Seldom has a more unpopular man fired a more popular one,” wrote Time magazine, whose publisher, not unlike the general himself, was not that hostile to the idea of a larger war with China. MacArthur, Time added, was “the personification of the big man with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership…. Truman was almost a professional little man.” The immediate reaction in the country was similarly partisan and exceptionally violent. Richard Nixon, who was a considerable political beneficiary of Chiang’s collapse in China and the tensions generated with the Chinese during the Korean War, called for MacArthur’s immediate reinstatement. Senator William Jenner of Indiana, who had already accused George Marshall of treason, now said, “I charge that this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman.” MacArthur was quickly cast (much as he intended) as both hero and martyr; and the president who stood for civilian control over the military in firing him, as the villain. After a long and often distinguished career, MacArthur’s lesser side had finally caught up with him; he had become, in the end, too much like his father. He was, as Max Hastings summed up, “too remote, too old, too inflexible, too deeply imprisoned by a world view that was obsolete to be a fit commander in such a war as Korea.”
Truman and his advisers had expected a serious explosion, but it was much worse than any of them had imagined. Huge crowds turned out for MacArthur everywhere. It began in Tokyo, where, as he departed, some 250,000 Japanese, many of them weeping, most of them waving small Japanese and American flags, lined the streets. Giant crowds gathered in Hawaii, where he landed after midnight, and an even larger one met him in San Francisco, again after midnight—a crowd so immense and so emotional that the security people could not hold them back. When he eventually came to New York for a ticker-tape parade, it was said that 7 million people turned out, twice as many as Dwight Eisenhower had drawn on returning victorious from World War II. The reaction continued to be deeply emotional. “It is doubtful that there has ever been in this country so violent and spontaneous a discharge of political passion as that provoked by the president’s dismissal of the general,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Rovere in their book on the confrontation. “Certainly there has been nothing to match it since the Civil War.”
It was a political and geopolitical confrontation of the utmost gravity and presented the country with the ultimate kind of constitutional crisis. George Reedy, later a press officer for an enterprising young senator from Texas named Lyndon Johnson, but then a young reporter for United Press, later recalled that it was the only time in his life when he thought the government of the United States was truly in danger. He had felt, he said, watching MacArthur go up Pennsylvania Avenue on his triumphal arrival in Washington, that if the general had said, “‘Come on, let’s take it,’ the adoring crowd that thronged the streets would have gone with him.” It was as if the country were about to explode with long suppressed rage from all the frustrations of this new, unsatisfying postwar incarnation. The struggle seemed to cut across every fault line in the country. There were fights in bars between strangers and fights on commuter trains between old friends. When Dean Acheson got into a taxi in Washington right after the firing, the cabdriver looked at him and asked, “Aren’t you Dean Acheson?” “Yes, I am,” the secretary of state answered. “Would you like me to get out?”
In a way that few understood at the time, it was a kind of giant antiwar rally, not just anti–Korean War, but probably anti–Cold War as well, a reflection of a kind of national frustration with a conflict that was so unsatisfying and distant and gray and brought so little in the way of victories and seemed so strangely beyond the reach of our absolute weapons. It was about the frustration of living side by side with an unwanted enemy who was real and powerful in an age that, because of the sheer terror of weaponry, seemed to preclude any concept of total victory. It bridged eras in a way. It was the last hurrah for a great hero of World War II, combined with a powerful, visceral protest by a nation that did not enjoy its new superpower status. It was produced by almost equal parts of love and anger. It was very powerful stuff.
It was also very political—not the acclaim of the crowds, the millions of Americans who rallied to MacArthur’s cause, which they saw as something simpler than it was, but the challenge of the Republican right. Herbert Hoover, filled with distaste for the country’s political direction after his own unfortunate presidency, his own political wounds still uncommonly raw, spoke for the forces long beaten down who now felt they were on the ascent. After meeting with MacArthur upon his return from Tokyo, Hoover talked of “the reincarnation of St. Paul into the persona of a great General of the Army who had come out of the East.”
At first, the general had it all his way. He was in complete control of this drama, and his villains were, for the moment, compelled to play their roles much as he scripted them. It all culminated in a single powerful, if somewhat overly sentimental speech he gave before a joint session of Congress. There, he had made his case, and seemingly made it effectively. There was, he said, as he had said in letters to so many of his admirers, no substitute for victory. In this entire matter, he claimed, the Joint Chiefs were in agreement with him, as were almost all military leaders he knew. Those who did not see what he saw, those who did not want to use all of America’s force in Korea, were guilty of appeasement. The A-word was in play several times, and there was no doubt who his target was. The people who would “appease Red China” were, he said, “blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war.” Those who thought we lacked the forces to hold the Communists in both Europe and Asia were wrong. Considering that particular view, he swore he “could think of no greater expression of defeatism.” He had wanted reinforcements, but could not get them from Washington. He had wanted to use the six hundred thousand Nationalist soldiers on Taiwan, but was not granted them. “Why, my own soldiers asked me,” he said, suggesting endless nonexistent conversations with ordinary soldiers in their foxholes, “surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” He could not, he insisted, answer them. That day, even before his final summation, the applause was tumultuous; the Democrats, already on the defensive, sat silently in their seats.
Then came the great peroration, rich and powerful, full of nostalgia and bathos, but virtually irresistible and perfect for the emotions of the occasion: “I am closing my fifty-two years of military service. When I joined the Army even before
the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plains of West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day, which proclaimed most profoundly that—‘Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.’ And like the old soldier of that ballad I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.” These were the seemingly modest words of one of the nation’s most immodest men, who had absolutely no intention of fading away. The spontaneous response was overwhelming. “We saw a great hunk of God in the flesh and we heard the voice of God,” said Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri. Truman was, predictably, blunter: “It was nothing but a damn bunch of bullshit.” Acheson thought that there was a certain relief to having it all over. It reminded him, he said, of the father who lived just outside an Army post with his very beautiful daughter and spent all his time worrying about her virginity. Finally, one day she showed up pregnant. “Thank God that’s over,” he had said.
For so many Americans, rarely had their nation’s policies seemed so errant, and rarely had one figure—a famed, bemedaled general—spoken so confidently of what seemed like an easier course, one that would quickly settle a war with so much less American bloodshed. All of this set the stage for an epic moment in a democracy, though not many people saw it that way at the time. To them the epic moment was MacArthur’s speech with its high-octane emotions; what followed, the analysis of the choices at stake, and the consequences of those choices, debated as they were in Senate hearings, lacked the same glamour but were far more important. At first it did not seem like an entirely fair fight: one side had title to all of those passions; the other side was forced to make an unpopular case for an unpopular war that, in effect, no one wanted to hear—that it was a victory merely to limit a localized war, that victory now was simple human survival.
For any serious student of what was soon to come, there were important warnings that MacArthur’s next appearance in Washington would not be so pleasant or heroic. When Truman and MacArthur had met on Wake Island six months earlier, Vernice Anderson had by chance (or not, as later claimed by the general’s angry partisans) sat outside the open door to the main meeting and kept that stenographic record of the talks, including MacArthur’s cavalier assurance that the Chinese would not enter the war. That she had kept a record was not exactly a secret. When the Truman team returned to Washington, her notes were typed up and sent to various participants, including MacArthur, for approval. On November 13, 1950, just before the main Chinese attack but after the Unsan and Sudong ones, Stewart Alsop had mentioned in one of his regular columns for the New York Herald Tribune MacArthur’s assurances that the Chinese would not enter the war.
None of this had created much of a stir. After the main Chinese entry, a conservative magazine had asked MacArthur directly whether or not he had said that the Chinese would not enter the war, and he had denied it—it was, he insisted, “entirely without foundation.” There were a few stories printed, based on limited leaks by an irritated administration, that indicated that MacArthur had indeed given those assurances. But when, after his firing, the assault on Truman grew ever more violent, the White House decided to answer back by releasing the transcript. Tony Leviero, the New York Times White House correspondent, was already sniffing around the story. When he spoke with George Elsey, a senior White House aide, about the Wake meeting, Elsey immediately went to Truman. Leviero was considered straight and reasonably friendly by the White House.
If there was to be a leak, Elsey suggested, then here was the right man with the right paper for the job. “Okay—you can give it to Tony,” the president said, and with that Leviero and the Times got the full transcript. The paper published it on April 21, and the next year Leviero won the Pulitzer Prize. The MacArthur people were furious; it was a smear, General Courtney Whitney said. If it was not nearly enough to cripple the growing assault on the White House, then anyone knowledgeable about how things like this played in Washington now had reason to wonder just how well the general and his record would fare in Senate hearings scheduled to begin on the Hill.
The showdown finally came in the Senate hearings. The Republican right was sure the momentum was going its way. Its leaders in the Senate had no doubt that MacArthur, forceful and charismatic as ever, had all the answers (which were their answers) and spoke for real Americans. What was it MacArthur had said at San Francisco’s City Hall in front of half a million adoring citizens? “I have just been asked if I intended to enter politics. My reply was ‘No.’ I have no political aspirations whatever. I do not intend to run for any political office. I hope my name will never be used in a political way. The only politics I have is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—‘God Bless America.’” That, as Joseph Goulden noted, was the general’s own coy way of signaling that he might indeed be available for a political run, for one last try.
Given the power of the emotions now in play, none of the top Democrats was eager to lead the hearings and get in the way of so powerful a force. So it fell to Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat and senior senator on the Armed Services Committee—a truly conservative man in the old-fashioned sense of the word, with unparalleled respect among his peers in the Senate and, because of the nature of the one-party South, completely immune to the political pressures of the moment—to head the committee. He was a towering figure of the Senate, probably closer personally and ideologically to conservative Republican senators than to liberal Democratic ones, though he could never run successfully for national office because of the issue of race; he was an all-out segregationist. In other circumstances, a figure holding such a gavel in such crucial hearings, as Robert Caro noted in his book Master of the Senate, might have had a chance to become an instant national figure and a household name. But to take the gavel now was a dubious honor. It was not a role Russell sought, but it was a role, however odious, he felt obliged to accept. The MacArthur committee would be a joint one, combining the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. The Democrats would technically have an advantage because they were the majority party and because some of the Republicans, like Leverett Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, were Eastern internationalists, but the emotions of the moment, to which all senators were finely attuned, greatly favored MacArthur.
WHAT THE REPUBLICANS hoped for was a great national platform for the general. He would be the great patriot who had been wronged and betrayed by wimpy politicians, and here in the national spotlight he could slay his—and, more important, their—opponents with that great voice and that all-encompassing knowledge of the world. He would dismantle on their behalf not just Truman, Acheson, and Marshall, but their policies over the previous decade. What the Republican right wanted was nothing less than for these Senate hearings to launch the 1952 presidential election campaign. There was, however, a serious problem for MacArthur. The passions his return had triggered had not actually represented an endorsement of his policies, most especially not of a wider war in Asia. Instead, the emotional welcome for him and support for his policies were two very different things—especially as those policies were placed under increasingly serious scrutiny, and the consequences of following them became clearer.
What then do you do in a democracy when passions outpace the realities of the moment? Richard Russell pondered that question, and eventually decided that slowing the process down to focus on substance might limit the passions. He wanted, to the degree that he was able, to marginalize the headline-hunting. So it was that the most critical thing Russell did was to disarm the emotions of the hearings. The hearings, he decided, would be full; they would be as thoughtful and judicious as he could make them and they would not be covered live—they would be covered instead almost live. Reporters would not be allowed in the hearing room, nor would the cameras
of that new media form, television, be allowed in—even though, with its audience beginning to grow, as many as 30 million Americans might have watched every day. There would be a record, and it would be given out to reporters almost as soon as someone had testified. But they were going to be talking about issues of national security even as the war went on, and Russell was in no rush to have a discussion of the most secret aspects of American foreign policy made available to the country’s enemies. Thus, the stenographic record of the hearings would be edited immediately by censors from the Defense and State departments.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 82
