Congress was still drying its eyes when MacArthur rode down Pennsylvania Avenue under an umbrella of air-force jets. Over 500,000 Washingtonians cheered him that afternoon, half of them in one rumbling mass around the Washington monument. There he received the official key to the city while Arthur was being given a necktie with the MacArthur tartan and a watch which told him the time, the day, the month, the year, and the phases of the moon. Then the General entered Constitution Hall for a few remarks to six thousand Daughters of the American Revolution, meeting in the DAR’s sixtieth Continental Congress. The ladies had voted to remove their hats so they wouldn’t obscure one another’s view of him, and he didn’t disappoint them. “I have long sought personally to pay you the tribute that is in my heart,” he said. “In this hour of crisis, all patriots look to you.” Striking a note which he would repeat before other conservative groups, he said: “The complexities and confusion, resulting largely from internal subversion and corruption and detailed regimentation over our daily lives, now threaten the country no less than it was threatened in Washington’s day. Under these harmful influences, we have drifted far away . . . from the simple but immutable pattern etched by our forefathers.” Reading her minutes the next day, the DAR recording secretary-general, Mrs. Warren Shattuck Currier, observed that the General’s speech was “probably the most important event” in the history of the hall. Instantly Mrs. Thomas B. Throckmorton was on her feet. She moved, and the convention unanimously agreed, to strike the word “probably.”71
By then MacArthur was in New York. Once more he had arrived late in the evening and once more the mob was enormous, but this time he was in a city with vast experience in welcoming celebrities. At Idlewild he was met by Manhattan’s official greeter, Grover Whalen, who had probably shaken more famous hands than anyone in history, and the ten members of the city police department’s Bureau of Special Service and Investigation, who led him to their “special dignitary car,” the two-tone Chrysler bearing the famous license plate 4C-2602—the same vehicle which had carried Eisenhower through the city upon his triumphant return from Europe. Already these bodyguards knew that the turnout for MacArthur was going to be larger than Ike’s. Louis Sullivan, who was one of them, recalls that despite the fact that the official parade wasn’t scheduled until the next day, there were already people perched in trees, on ledges, and on rooftops, many screaming, “Give ‘em hell,” and “Don’t take it.” When the MacArthur’ checked in at the Waldorf Astoria, 150,000 letters and 20,000 telegrams awaited them, with more, an aide remembers, pouring in “by the sack-load.”72
In the morning MacArthur entered the Chrysler with Whitney and Mayor Vincent P. Impellitteri; the bodyguards stood on the running boards of the backup car, and Jean, Arthur, and the mayor’s wife were in the third limousine. Nearly seven hours were required to cover the 19.2-mile motorcade route; every foot of curbing was occupied by bellowing humanity. Manhattan had never seen anything to equal it. “It roared and shrilled itself to near-exhaustion,” the Times reported next day; “the metropolis formed a gigantic cheering section rocketing its shouts of approval for the 71-year-old soldier-statesman.” The crowd numbered several million, the largest the city had ever seen—forty thousand longshoremen, among others, had walked off their jobs to be there. Factory sirens were tied down, ocean liners honked deeply, tooting fireboats spouted water, and aviators overhead spelled out WELCOME HOME and WELL DONE in celestial messages over a mile long.73
The General left the convertible twice, once to pump the hand of Francis Cardinal Spellman, who was standing in his red robes outside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and once at City Hall, to tell sixty thousand New Yorkers—eighteen of whom were later hospitalized with nervous exhaustion—“We do surrender.” Fifth Avenue, Sullivan recalls, was “like a herd of hysterical sheep.” Women were weeping into handkerchiefs, men were crossing themselves, children were holding up banners and placards reading, “MacArthur Will Never Fade Out,” “Welcome Home, MacArthur,” and “God Save Us from Acheson.” After it was all over the Department of Sanitation reported that over 2,859 tons of litter had been dumped on the General, four times Eisenhower’s record.74
Entrepreneurs who had cashed in on MacArthur’s fame in 1942 were prospering again. Long-stemmed corncob pipes, toby jugs bearing the General’s image, and MacArthur souvenirs of every description had been rushed through production lines. Enterprising notions vendors were selling MacArthur buttons, pennants, and corncobs left over from the 1948 MacArthur-for-President campaign. Florists were offering a Douglas MacArthur tea rose (“needs no coddling or favor”) and MacArthur orchids, cacti, gladioli, geraniums, peonies, and irises. Jewelers sold brooches with gems arranged to resemble the General’s profile, while tunesmiths on Tin Pan Alley were turning out five recordings of:
Old soldiers never die, never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die,
They just fade away.
Obviously this soldier was not going to disappear soon. At the Waldorf Towers, where the MacArthur’ moved into suite 37A, switchboard operators began logging three thousand calls a day from people who wanted to speak to him. Presents for Arthur began to pile up: a racing bicycle from California, and, from Leo Durocher, a New York Giants cap, a mitt, a Giants wind-breaker, and two autographed baseballs. Arthur’s father, meanwhile, had paid his respects to Hoover and then settled back like a medieval lord to receive his vassals. Among those who came were Spellman, Luce, Hearst, Colonel McCormick, and a delegation of Republican senators led by Taft and Bridges. This naturally intensified speculation that the General, his San Francisco disclaimer notwithstanding, was about to enter politics. Reporters asked Whitney about it. He said the General wished them to consult John 20:20-29. There they found the tale of Doubting Thomas, the apostolic skeptic who refused to credit the Resurrection “except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and . . . thrust my hand into his side,” and to whom Jesus said, after showing him these wounds, “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”75
One Doubting Thomas on Capitol Hill was Georgia’s powerful Senator Richard Russell. On May 3, 1951, his gavel opened a joint inquiry of the upper house’s Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees in the Senate Office Building. Their instructions from their colleagues were to investigate MacArthur’s relief and “the military situation in the Far East,” but in reality the hearings—held in the marble-paneled, high-ceilinged caucus room, the scene of all first-class Senate meetings—were a contest between the two parties. The twenty-five senators split along factional lines over the question of whether or not their meetings should be open to the press; the Republicans favored it, while the Democrats, Time reported, were determined “to keep General MacArthur’s thundering rhetoric out of earshot of the microphones and his dramatic profile off the screens of twelve million television sets.” In the end the committeemen compromised; the press would be excluded, but correspondents would be given transcripts after a navy flag officer had deleted sensitive information which he thought the public should not have.76
Russell, a loyal Democrat who mistrusted the General’s hawkishness, nevertheless won his confidence by describing him as “one of the great captains of history,” whose “broad understanding and knowledge of the science of politics has enabled him to restore and stabilize a conquered country and win for himself and his country the respect and affection of a people who were once our bitterest enemies.” The chairman overwhelmed those who had predicted a quick whitewash by the sheer volume of the testimony taken, 2,450,000 words from 13 witnesses in 42 days. “Never before in the history of Western parliaments,” said Time, “has there been an examination of fundamentals so painstaking in detail, so sweeping in scale.” Most deservedly, Russell earned the gratitude of his President, who wrote that his “skillful handling of the MacArthur committee hearing demonstrated his ability, wisdom, and judicious temperament as a chairman.” Truman especially
appreciated the senator’s sympathy for his conviction that there are times “when the Executive must decline to supply Congress with information, and that is when he feels the Congress encroaches upon the Executive prerogatives . . . for the sole purpose of embarrassing the President—in other words, for partisan political reasons.” Each time the administration declined to submit material on these grounds, Russell deferred to the necessities of national security.
New York’s ticker-tape parade for the MacArthur’
On Thursday, May 3, while Jean waded through mountains of mail and Arthur went to a ball game clutching a fielder’s glove from Joe DiMaggio, MacArthur flew to the capital for the committee’s first session; his testimony, he said, would be his “final official act.” He had no prepared statement, he told the senators; “my comments were made fully when I was so signally honored by the Congress in inviting me to appear before them. I appear today not as a voluntary witness at all, but in response to the request of the committee, and I am entirely in the hands of the committee.” In fact, he turned out to be not only cooperative but loquacious. Slouching comfortably in a straight-backed chair, puffing on an old briar pipe, his simple blouse bereft of ribbons, he testified for three full days, flying back to the Waldorf each evening. At his suggestion, senators took no lunch break; sandwiches and coffee were brought by messengers. The General didn’t even leave for the toilet. A Democratic member said, “I don’t believe MacArthur is 71 years old. Why, he must have the bladder of a college boy!”77
Each morning he greeted reporters outside the caucus room with a casual half wave, half salute. They noticed that he carried no briefcase, that he needed neither documents nor notes. Speaking extemporaneously, he gave the senators, one observer wrote, “a vivid display of his historical knowledge, culture, passionate sincerity, vision, and cogency. “ A single question would touch off a ten- or fifteen-minute performance in free association, during which he might cite the Caesars, medieval customs, the Magna Carta, the French Revolution, England’s nineteenth-century corn laws, Ireland’s potato famines, and the average daily caloric consumption of Japanese farmers. Despite the hopes of the Republicans and the fears of the Democrats, he passed up opportunities to criticize the Joint Chiefs or Truman—though he was saving a knife for Marshall—and he wasn’t even jolted when Brien McMahon of Connecticut quoted a statement he had made in the early 1930s, affirming the need for Presidents, not generals, to determine military strategy; MacArthur genially said that he was “surprised and amazed how wise I was.” At the end of the third day a senator congratulated him on “the vastness of your patience and the thoughtfulness and frankness with which you have answered all the questions.”
He had been courteous, but his views were unchanged. In a colloquy with Leverett Saltonstall, he said that the theory of finite war introduced “a new concept into military operations.” His own concept was “that when you go into war, you have exhausted all other potentialities of bringing the disagreements to an end.” If he understood the State Department’s position, it proposed “a continued and indefinite campaign in Korea, with no definite purpose of stopping it until the enemy gets tired or you yield to his terms,” and that “introduced into the military sphere a political control such as I have not known in my life or ever studied.” But he didn’t really believe the administration’s design was that coherent. At one point his voice rose as he protested: “The inertia that exists! There is no policy—there is nothing, I tell you—no plan, or anything!” He asked whether the United States could continue to “fight in this accordion fashion—up and down—which means that your cumulative losses are going to be staggering. It isn’t just dust that is settling in Korea, Senator,” he said, giving Acheson the back of his hand; “it is American blood.”78
His differences with the “politicians,” as he described his civilian superiors, lay in several areas. Unlike the advocates of collective security and like the nationalists who had become his camp followers, MacArthur distrusted the Europeans. Washington’s reluctance to offend them, he said, allowed the weaker members of the alliance to dictate the American policy: “If one nation carries ninety percent of the effort, it’s quite inappropriate that nations that carry only a small fraction of the efforts and the responsibility should exercise undue authority upon the decisions that are made.” Senator Theodore F. Green of Rhode Island asked what would happen if the other UN governments with troops in Korea objected adamantly to an aggressive American strategy.
MACARTHUR: My hope would be of course that the United Nations would see the wisdom and utility of that course, but if they did not I still believe that the interest of the United States being the predominant one in Korea would require our action.
GREEN: Alone?
MACABTHUR: Alone, if necessary. If the other nations of the world haven’t got enough sense to see where appeasement leads after the appeasement which led to the Second World War in Europe, if they can’t see exactly the road that they are following in Asia, why then we had better protect ourselves and go it alone.79
The General was not an isolationist—unlike his congressional supporters, he enthusiastically endorsed economic aid to the emerging nations—but he returned again to the idea, unacceptable to him, that war can be “applied in a piecemeal way, that you can make half-war, not whole war.” He explained: “When you say, merely, ‘We are going to fight aggression,’ that is not what the enemy is fighting for. The enemy is fighting for a very definite purpose—to destroy our forces in Korea.” He told one senator: “You are a bridge player. You know that the first rule in bridge is to lead from your strength.” He said: “I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at that wreckage, and those thousands of women and children and everything, I just vomited.” That was why he couldn’t bear to see it drag on indecisively. Even defeat was preferable: “Now there are only three ways that I can think of, as I said this morning. Either pursue it to victory; to surrender to the enemy and end it on his terms; or what I think is the worst of all choices—to go on indefinitely and indefinitely, neither to win or lose, in that stalemate; because what we are doing is sacrificing thousands of men while we are doing it.”80
Three views of MacArthur during Senate hearings on his recall
He urged the committee to adopt four goals: “to clear out all North Korea, to unify it and liberalize it”; to “cripple and largely neutralize China’s capacity to wage aggressive war”; to spread the ideal of democracy evangelically throughout Asia; and to thereby safeguard the peace of Europe, “which would inevitably be strengthened because the issue in Korea was global.” So “interlocked” were the stakes there and those on the Continent “that to consider the problems of one sector oblivious to those of another is but to court disaster for the whole; while Asia is commonly referred to as the gateway of Europe, it is no less true that Europe is the gateway to Asia, and the broad influence of one cannot fail to have its impact on the other.” As he saw it, Korea was the right war at the right place at the right time with the right enemy—the most populous, aggressive, and imperialistic power in the world. If Peking wasn’t stopped in the peninsular war, he argued, China would be recognized as “the military colossus of the East.” U.S. prestige would plummet, and the world’s new nations would gravitate toward neutralism. They would not understand, as he did not, why the United States did not press all its advantages, including the availability of the Gimo’s friendly, eager army on Formosa.
RUSSELL: I did not understand exactly what you would have done about the Nationalist troops.
MACARTHUR: There was a concentration of Red Chinese troops on the mainland which threatened Formosa seriously . . . . I recommended to Washington that the wraps be taken off the Generalissimo. . . . The slightest use that was made of those troops would have taken the pressure off my troops.81
At times the General now sounded like what Senator J. William Fulbright later described
as a “modern ideological crusader against Communism.” There could be, he said, “no compromise with atheistic Communism—no halfway in the preservation of freedom and religion. It must be all or nothing.” He accused the administration leaders of being willing to take that stand in Europe but not in Asia. Their preoccupation with the Continent amounted to “North Atlantic isolationism.” He said: “I believe we should defend every place from Communism. I believe we can. I believe we are able to. I have confidence in us. I don’t believe we should write off anything and accept the defeat that is involved in it. . . .1 don’t admit that we can’t hold Communism wherever it shows its head. ” He observed that “there are those who claim our strength is inadequate to protect us on two fronts. I can think of no greater expression of defeatism.” Here he seemed to be at odds with his Republican backers, who felt, as Hoover had put it, that “we must not overcommit this country. . . . There is a definite limit to what we can do.” The General recognized that the course he advocated might lead to a wider war, but he told McMahon: “Everything that is involved in international relationships, Senator, amounts to a gamble, risk. You have to take risks.”82
Despite administration views to the contrary, however, he deemed the chances of Soviet intervention to be slight. Moscow had not “sufficiently associated” itself with the peninsular war “to believe that the defeat of Red China to the extent of her being forced to evacuate Korea would necessarily produce a great prejudice to the Soviet cause in other parts of the world.” Nor did he think it “within the capacity of the Soviets to mass any great additional increment of force to launch any predatory attack from the Asian continent.” Petroleum reservoirs and maintenance facilities in Siberia were inadequate. Russian dispositions in the vicinity of Korea were “largely defensive.” The Soviets knew they were no match for U.S. naval and air power in the Far East. Moreover, their stockpile of nuclear weapons was inferior to America’s; if the United States had to fight them, now would be better than later. In a subsequent letter to Senator Harry F. Byrd, the General enlarged on this theme, raising “the indeterminate question as to whether the Soviets contemplate world conquest. If it [sic] does, the time and place will be at its initiative and could not fail to be influenced by the fact that in the atomic area the lead of the United States is being diminished with the passage of time. So, likewise, is the great industrial potential of the United States. . . . In short, it has always been my belief that any action we might take to resolve the Far Eastern problem now would not in itself be a controlling factor in the precipitation of a world conflict.”83
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