Millions of Americans hardly doubted it. Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote: “it is doubtful if 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. . . . Certainly there has been nothing to match it since the Civil War.” Not until the death of President Kennedy would the nation experience so profound a simultaneous experience. “The citizen,” Rovere and Schlesinger observed, “was on MacArthur’s side. His private emotions had been deeply engaged.” Speaking on short notice, Truman told a nationwide radio audience that he had had no choice, that he had acted “with the deepest personal regret.” Walter Reuther rallied to his defense; so did the American Veterans Committee, the Amvets, Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union, and ad hoc committees at Harvard and Princeton. Eisenhower told reporters, “When you put on a uniform there are certain inhibitions you accept”—thereby widening the gulf between him and his former chief— but that was not the majority view. The White House mail room was swamped with protests. Short’s office ruefully conceded that in the first 27,363 letters and telegrams, those critical of the recall outnumbered those who supported it twenty to one; the percentage held until they passed the 78,000 mark, when Short’s staff stopped counting. George Gallup found that 69 percent of the voters backed MacArthur. Appearing at Griffith Stadium, Truman was booed—the first public booing of a President since 1932. Short announced that the chief executive had canceled a scheduled speech so as not to “detract” from the General’s return. Then the White House leaked Miss Anderson’s Wake transcript to the press.47
In Seattle, an enraged logger tried to drown a friend in a bucket of beer for taking Truman’s side. A Southern senator said, “The people in my part of the country are almost hysterical.” So were the people in other parts of the country. Improvised bumper stickers read: “Oust President Truman.” Flags were flown upside down or at half-mast from Eastham, Massachusetts, to Oakland, California. In San Gabriel, California, the President was burned in effigy; Ponca City, Oklahoma, burned an effigy of Acheson. Petitions were circulated. Clergymen fulminated in their pulpits. New anti-Truman jokes were heard: “This wouldn’t have happened if Truman were alive,” and “I’m going to have a Truman beer—just like any other beer except that it hasn’t got a head.” In Atlanta, a veteran wrapped his Bronze Star and sent it back to Washington. The VFW wired the General, asking him to lead a loyalty parade in Philadelphia. A Hollywood producer offered him three thousand dollars a week to star in The Square Needle, a movie about a commander being persecuted by politicians. The Minute Women of Baltimore organized a march on the capital. In New York, Irishmen who had been picketing the British consulate for two years set aside their Anglophobic signs for pro-MacArthur sandwich boards. The American Legion and the student body of Boston College went on record as backing the General. A Denver man founded a “Punch Harry in the Nose Club.” In Los Angeles, a husband and wife wound up in jail cells after belting each other over the dismissal.48
Workmen in Lafayette, Indiana, carrying “Impeach Truman” placards, paraded two miles through a rainstorm to a telegraph office to send the White House angry telegrams. A Houston clergyman dialed Western Union to dictate similar sentiments, spluttered, “Your removal of General MacArthur is a great victory for Joseph Stalin . . .” and dropped dead of apoplexy. In Charlestown, Maryland, a woman was told that she couldn’t send a wire to the White House calling the President a moron; she and the clerk riffled through a Roget’s thesaurus until they found the acceptable “witling.” If the addressee was not Truman, Western Union offices were more permissive. Among the telegrams from constituents inserted in the Congressional Record by their representatives on the Hill were IMPEACH THE IMBECILE; WE WISH TO PROTEST THE LATEST OUTRAGE ON THE PART OF THE PIG IN THE WHITE HOUSE; IMPEACH THE JUDAS IN THE WHITE HOUSE WHO SOLD US DOWN THE RIVER TO THE LEFT WINGERS AND THE UN; SUGGEST YOU LOOK FOR ANOTHER HISS IN BLAIR HOUSE; WHEN AN EX-NATIONAL GUARD CAPTAIN FIRES A FIVE-STAR GENERAL IMPEACHMENT OF THE NATIONAL GUARD CAPTAIN IS IN ORDER; IMPEACH THE B WHO CALLS HIMSELF PRESIDENT; IMPEACH THE LITTLE WARD POLITICIAN STUPIDITY FROM KANSAS CITY; AND IMPEACH THE RED HERRING FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL CHAIR.49
The firestorm also licked at the portals of local governments. The Los Angeles City Council adjourned “in sorrowful contemplation of the political assassination” of MacArthur. The California, Florida, and Michigan legislatures censured Truman. The Illinois Senate expressed shock that the administration had struck down an enemy of totalitarianism and resolved that “we express our unqualified confidence in General MacArthur and vigorously condemn the irresponsible and capricious action of the President in summarily discharging him from command and that we further condemn such action without an opportunity to General MacArthur and others of his command to inform the people of our Nation of the true condition of affairs in Korea and the Far East; and be it further resolved, that we further criticize and condemn the policies of the present administration for withholding information, if any exists, to justify this action.”
The working press, for neither the first nor the last time, disagreed with most newspaper readers. By better than six to one, correspondents covering the story told a Saturday Review surveyor that they thought the President’s move was justified. But most of them said he had handled it badly, and 15 percent thought the dismissal had harmed U.S. prestige abroad—“The midnight ride of Harry Truman,” one said, “made us look like a bunch of fools.” The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Times sided with the President—Arthur Krock called the General “an incorrigible egotist”—and the Christian Science Monitor said that it had become necessary for MacArthur “to conform, to resign, or to be removed.” There are few principles to which editors hew more steadfastly than civilian control of the military, and among the newspapers which were usually hostile to the administration but championed it in this instance were the Portland Oregonian, the Minneapolis Tribune, the Birmingham News, the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Daily News, the Boston Herald, the Denver Post, and the Washington Star. Business Week felt that “talk of impeachment proceedings against the President is silly and irresponsible” and that “there was nothing for the President to do at this late date but to relieve” the General. However, Business Week argued, Truman’s “course of holding on in Korea and, like Micawber, hoping something will turn up is alien to our national experience. . . . The General may not always be easy to deal with, but it is incredible that a policy could not have been worked out months ago. Why was this not done at Wake Island where the President and the General met in what was described as complete harmony? Later, why was MacArthur not ordered home to consult personally with the Joint Chiefs of Staff?”50
That was the gentlest position taken by conservative publications. The press barons of the right—McCormick, Hearst, Luce, David Lawrence, the Scripps-Howard editors—took a darker view. The Chicago Tribune, anticipating later critics of the Vietnam War, declared: “Mr. Truman can be impeached for usurping the power of Congress when he ordered American troops to the Korean front without a declaration of war.” Given the provocation to defy the President, Bascom Timmons wrote in the Houston Chronicle, MacArthur’s “restraint has been admirable.” The Daily Oklahoman called the dismissal “a crime carried out in the dead of night,” overlooking the fact that the dead of night in Oklahoma was broad daylight in Tokyo. Ardently, if inaccurately, U.S. News and World Report expressed the feeling that it was intolerable that this fresh blow should be dealt to “the man who saw the Stars and Stripes hauled down in surrender at Bataan at the start of World War II.” A New York Journal-American editorial suggested that Truman had been drugged (“Maybe the State Department gave him some kind of mental or neural anodyne”), and Harry H. Schlacht, the paper’s poet laureate, was moved to write: “We Thank Thee, Heavenly Father, for Gen. Douglas MacArthur.” Nick Kenny, Schlacht’s rival on the New York Mirror, composed a ballad which
reflected the General’s own sentiments, describing arrows bouncing off his breastplate while knives were sunk into his unshielded back. Kenny implored him: “Great soldier, statesman, diplomat / Keep high your shining sword!” adding, in a line apparently meant to rhyme, “‘Tis your name that they applaud!”51
Acheson’s primitives were in full cry. Joseph R. McCarthy charged that “treason in the White House” had been achieved by men who had plied the President with “bourbon and benedictine.” William E. Jenner said: “This country today is in the hands of a secret coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union.” Congressman Orland K. Armstrong of Missouri called the relief of the General the “greatest victory for the Communists since the fall of China.” Brigadier Julius Klein, military consultant to the Republican National Committee, said the Kremlin “ought to fire a twenty-one gun salute in celebration.” The GOP Policy Committee unanimously approved a statement accusing “the Truman-Acheson-Marshall triumvirate” of planning a “super-Munich in Asia” and asking: “As the authors of the . . . decision to abandon China to the Communists, do they now presume themselves free to resume the course interrupted by the Korean conflict?”52
One of the shrewdest exploiters of the General’s tragedy was Richard M. Nixon. “The happiest group in the country,” said the freshman senator from California, “will be the Communists and their stooges. . . . The President has given them what they have always wanted—- MacArthur’s scalp.” MacArthur, he said, had been “fired simply because he had the good sense and patriotism to ask that the hands of our fighting men in Korea be untied.” The senator then drafted a resolution declaring it to be the sense of the Senate “that the President of the United States has not acted in the best interests of the American people in relieving of his commands and depriving the United States of the services of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and that the President should restore General MacArthur to the commands from which he was removed.” In vintage Nixonese he told his senatorial colleagues: “Let me say that I am not among those who believe that General MacArthur is infallible. I am not among those who think that he has not made decisions which are subject to criticism. But I do say that in this particular instance he offers an alternative policy which the American people can and will support. He offers a change from the policies which have led us almost to the brink of disaster in Asia.” In twenty-four hours the senator received six hundred telegrams commending him. He said delightedly: “It’s the largest spontaneous reaction I’ve ever seen.”53
Truman weathered this storm, but he won no support for his conduct of the war. Neither did MacArthur win it for his more dangerous proposals, even though he left the world scene with applause ringing in his ears and his reputation as a great fighting general intact. It was one thing for Americans to acclaim a hero; to fling down a gauntlet to the Sino-Soviet foe was another matter. Gallup’s findings here are instructive. A bare majority approved of blockading China, bombing Manchurian bases, and defending Formosa, but most doubted that Chiang could ever recover the mainland, and only 30 percent were ready to fight Mao. Less than six years having passed since V-J Day, the voters were in no mood for another great war.54
Yet they were clearly disenchanted with the fighting on the peninsula. An impatient people, they had no stomach for a protracted struggle; idealistic to a fault, they would willingly go to war only if the issue was presented to them as a righteous crusade. Anything less smacked of “power politics,” which they, like their ancestors, despised. MacArthur’s contempt for half measures and a brokered truce, his determination to punish the evil men who had disturbed the peace—peace, in American eyes, being the normal relationship between nations—struck a chord deep within them. His moral challenge, his vow to crush wickedness, appealed to what they regarded as their best instincts. The fact that they could not respond to it saddened, even grieved, them, and they felt untrue to themselves.
Tokyo was stricken. After a half-decade under “Makassar Genui,” Field Marshal MacArthur, the Nipponese were the most prosperous, least troubled people in Asia. They “deeply respected MacArthur,” Sebald recalls; “he had managed with his superb instinct to act with restraint and deftness in the exercise of the unparalleled power of his position.” His remoteness, Sebald believes, was “often criticized, but not by the Japanese, who understood or respected the need for aloofness. The critics generally were non-Japanese writers and reporters who had no responsibility for the occupation and little understanding of MacArthur’s methods of dealing with a unique, sensitive, and alien people.”55
Three months earlier, the people of Kanagawa Prefecture, which includes Yokohama, had commissioned a bronze bust of him with the legend on the base: “General Douglas MacArthur—Liberator of Japan.” Now Yoshida, in a broadcast to the nation, said that the General’s accomplishments in Nippon were “one of the marvels of history. It is he who has salvaged our nation from post-surrender confusion and prostration, and steered the country on the road [to] . . . reconstruction. It is he who has firmly planted democracy in all segments of our society. It is he who has paved the way for a peace settlement. No wonder he is looked upon by all our people with the profoundest veneration and affection. I have no words to convey the regret of our nation to see him leave.” The Diet passed a resolution of gratitude; Naotake Sato, the president of the House of Councillors, and Kaotaro Tanaka, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, wrote the General of their personal anguish, and Hirohito appeared at the embassy, the first time an emperor had called on a foreigner with no official standing. Taking MacArthur’s hand in both of his, he told him of his own profound distress.56
Sebald noted that the General’s imminent departure “dominated the emotions of Japan and filled the newspapers.” The Nippon Times commented that “the good wishes of eighty-three million Japanese people” would go with him, that “mere words can never describe adequately all that he had meant to this nation.” Tokyo’s two great dailies joined in the tributes. Mainichi said, “MacArthur’s dismissal is the greatest shock since the end of the war. He dealt with the Japanese people not as a conqueror but a great reformer. He was a noble political missionary. What he gave us was not material aid and democratic reform alone, but a new way of life, the freedom and dignity of the individual. . . . We shall continue to love and trust him as one of the Americans who best understood Japan’s position.” Asahi followed: “The removal is a great disappointment to the Japanese, especially when the peace settlement is so near. Japan’s recovery must be attributed solely to his guidance. We feel as if we had lost a kind and loving father.” On the morning he left, Mainichi addressed him directly: “We wanted your further help in nurturing our green democracy to fruition. We wanted your leadership at least until a signed peace treaty had given us a send-off into the world community.”57
Jean was also praised, as “a symbol of the wifely devotion” which the Nipponese considered “a paramount virtue among women,” but at the time she was too busy to read any of the encomiums. Those days, says Huff, were “a mad scramble” to cram possessions in suitcases and footlockers. Among other things, time had to be found to brief Ridgway, who had temporarily moved into the Imperial Hotel. Asked, “How does it feel to take MacArthur’s place?” he replied correctly, “Nobody takes the place of a man like that. You just follow him.” The new supreme commander, fifteen years younger than his predecessor, gave one observer “the impression of boundless energy, restlessness, frankness, and a desire for team action,” whereas MacArthur, who rarely consulted anyone before issuing crisp orders, had projected “the impression of relaxed confidence.” The old General wore faded, often patched khakis; the new one, battle dress, complete with hand grenades hanging from a shoulder strap. MacArthur, the literate aristocrat, had written out all of his statements in longhand. Ridgway, the technician, delegated such tasks. The first had been a West Point cadet at the time of the Spanish American War; the second had graduated during World War I; a generational chasm lay between them.58
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