Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  How effective were MacArthur’s reforms? Most critics on the left then and now saw them as ineffectual, or even a sham. One SCAP economist, Eleanor Hadley, acidly noted in September 1947 that out of sixty-seven designated holding companies only two had been dissolved—while in another 1,100 subsidiary companies, “not a single stock reorganization plan had as yet been set in motion.”56

  On the other hand, a leading article in Newsweek back in the States condemned MacArthur’s reforms as going too far. It argued that “25,000 to 30,000” Japanese businessmen were faced with pink slips, along with their relatives to the third degree: “thus making a total of 250,000 victims.” How was Japan expected to recover economically if its ranks of business, industry, and finance were being thus weeded out? the article asked, and called for a congressional investigation as to “why American capitalist principles are being undermined by American occupation authorities.”57

  MacArthur fired off a furious counterblast defending the purges. “It is fantastic that this action should be interpreted or opposed as antagonistic to the American capitalist economy,” when of course in MacArthur’s mind the zaibatsu were in truth state socialists, and feudal ones at that.

  “It was these very persons, born and bred as feudalistic overlords, who held the lives and destiny of the majority of Japan’s people in virtual slavery.” They deserved no place in the development of Japan’s future, and even if their removal hurt Japan’s economic recovery, which MacArthur very much doubted, then that was the problem of the Japanese who had supported their power for so long.

  That same year, 1947, saw two of the most sweeping anti-zaibatsu reforms ever envisioned. The Anti-Monopoly Law in April outlawed interlocking directorates and mergers and established the Fair Trade Commission, with enforcement powers. In July MacArthur ordered the breakup of the two biggest Japanese megacompanies, Mitsubishi and Mitsui—so big that each spawned more than two hundred separate corporations.58

  All the same, the Newsweek article signaled a change in the wind for American policy toward the occupation, and toward MacArthur. It would crystallize more than a year later when a plane touched down at Tokyo airport, bearing news that the days of MacArthur’s free hand were almost over.

  CHAPTER 28

  HEADWINDS

  We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.

  —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, SEPTEMBER 2, 1945, ON THE DECK OF THE USS MISSOURI

  On September 2, 1947, the head of SCAP issued a statement from the Dai-ichi building.

  It began: “Two years have now passed since the fateful September 2, on the Missouri, when the Allies on the one hand and the Japanese on the other entered into the solemn commitments underlying surrender conditions.”

  MacArthur then reminded his readers of all that had been accomplished in those two years. The establishment of peace, the demobilization of Japan’s military forces, and the first stirrings of the nation’s postwar economy. “The industrial output has now risen to over 45 percent of pre-war normal, and the improvement can be expected to continue,” he noted, while also heralding the prospect of a final peace treaty between the Allies and Japan, which he had been pushing for months. At the end of the message, MacArthur pointed out that “Japan today stands out as one of the few places in a distraught world where, despite an economy of critically short supply, there is a minimum of fear, of confusion, and of unrest.”1

  The rhetoric may sound overblown, but in very profound ways MacArthur was right. Japan under his aegis was fast becoming the still point in a turning, churning world, particularly in Asia.

  Europe was in growing turmoil even as Stalin’s grip relentlessly tightened over Soviet-occupied countries, first with a pro-Communist coup in Hungary and then in Czechoslovakia in 1948. China had redissolved into civil war in 1946, with Chiang’s Nationalist forces steadily losing ground to Mao Zedong’s Communists as the United States dithered about sending more aid. India, too, seemed on the verge of civil war as Hindus turned against Moslems and the prospect of a violent struggle for independence and partition loomed larger. On the Korean peninsula efforts to arrange an Allied withdrawal were swept up in the mounting tension between competing nationalist groups; in Indochina Communist-led insurgents were on the brink of full-scale war with their French colonial masters.

  In August 1946 MacArthur had returned briefly to the Philippines to find that country in turmoil as well. A month earlier, on July 4, the United States had finally recognized Philippine independence. The man that both MacArthur and Quezon had envisioned as leader of the country, Manuel Roxas, was now president despite his brief collaborationist past. Yet there were many in the Philippines who saw Roxas as a puppet, first of the Japanese and now of the Americans. Accusations of corruption were rife as postwar Filipino politics turned out to be an ugly and bitter cockpit for the struggle for power, rather than a cradle of democracy as MacArthur had hoped.

  MacArthur was there, however, to celebrate a hero of the past, not to fight the feuds of the present. The body of former president Quezon was being brought home from the United States to be reinterred in Manila, and MacArthur was to speak at the ceremony.

  “Of all men of all time, none more truly merited the appellation of patriot-statesman,” MacArthur said on August 1. “Few could, as did he, replace the uniform of the soldier with the mantle of statecraft.” It was not difficult for Douglas MacArthur, the son of Arthur MacArthur, to forget that when the guerrilla leader Aguinaldo had surrendered to the Americans, the one disciple who turned away from his master in rage and bitterness had been Manuel Quezon. Trust in the Americans had been a hard struggle for Quezon; the relationship with the son, Douglas, had been crucial in that process.

  What Quezon had thought of his old friend, at the very end, no one knows. He had sensed that MacArthur had betrayed him, and the Philippines, with promises of armed support in 1941–42 when none had been forthcoming, though he rightly blamed Roosevelt and the decision makers in Washington more.

  Still, MacArthur owed his career, and his future fortune, to Quezon. It was Manuel Quezon who in 1935 had brought MacArthur, then the retired chief of staff, out to the Philippines to build the defenses of a new nation. It was Quezon who made him, for better and worse, the man of the hour when Japanese planes passed over the Philippines and plunged both countries into war.

  MacArthur continued:

  Throughout his long years of public service, never did he compromise the principle he thus espoused—never did he divert his gaze from the goal which he thus resolutely sought….That his native land now stands as one of the free and independent nations of the world is responsive, more than to all else, to the indomitable will by which he developed in the conscience of his people a firm belief in their destiny as a race….Father of his infant Republic, which he planned but never saw, he has returned. He has come home forever.2

  As MacArthur returned to the airport for the flight back, he was determined never to break the bond of trust that he had built with the Japanese people, as he and America had with the Philippines.

  Indeed, in 1947 MacArthur’s influence and popularity in Japan was at its height. The new constitution had been promulgated to everyone’s acclaim; and in July the Far Eastern Commission had endorsed MacArthur’s plan for the permanent demilitarization of Japan.3 New educational reforms had been launched, with the purge of more than six thousand ultranationalist teachers and officials from schools and universities. A new liberalized national curriculum had been created under the twin measures of the Fundamental Law of Education and the School Education Law, both of which passed in 1947. Both laid the foundation of the education system of modern Japan, and the intellectual foundations of the future Japanese economic miracle.4

  Another foundation was laid by GHQ’s Scientific and Technical Division. There a group of American and Australian scientists and engineers worked with
Japanese counterparts to create a series of new national bodies to oversee scientific and technical research. Freed from the need to serve the old imperial military-industrial complex, Japan’s scientists found new areas for research in a wide range of areas from medicine and physics to engineering and industrial development. One of those research sites was the Ministry of Commerce and Industry—later to become the Ministry of International Trade and Industry or MITI. SCAP’s contribution to Japan’s economic future also included inviting American quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming to speak to Japanese business managers and engineers. Those speeches and Deming’s writings would become virtually Holy Writ for a generation of Japanese industrialists, who would lead companies like Toyota, Toshiba, and Sony into the forefront of the global economy.5

  There was, however, one scientific area where MacArthur’s efforts were completely frustrated. That was the fate of Japan’s four cyclotrons, two at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research and one each at Kyoto University and Osaka University. Allied investigators were shocked to discover how far along the Japanese had gotten in the development of an atomic bomb. Given Japan’s wartime record, Washington quickly decided that the four cyclotrons needed to be destroyed.

  MacArthur vehemently disagreed. One of the principal architects of the American bomb, Dr. Karl Compton, had come out to visit and inspected two of the Japanese cyclotrons. He and MacArthur were of one mind: the existing cyclotrons posed no military threat, and they were useful scientific instruments “inadequate to a very large factor, to produce explosive quantities of anything.” They should be preserved. The War Department, however, said no. When MacArthur protested, the department overruled him. When American scientists, including Compton, raised their objections, officials in Washington put them off by implying it was MacArthur’s decision, not theirs.

  So the machines were destroyed. “It was an unhappy affair,” MacArthur wrote later, “and the attempt of the War Department to falsely shift the blame left a bad taste in my mouth.”6 In fact, we now know that the decision to destroy the cyclotrons was largely the result of a miscommunication between General Leslie Groves’s Manhattan Engineer District office and the War Department. Whether saving them would have made a major contribution to science is hard to say; whether the incident further embittered relations between Washington and GHQ is not.7

  Things were better at home.

  The day at the MacArthurs’ began at 7:30 A.M., when little Arthur had his breakfast and Jean would join him and sip a cup of coffee. Then at 8:00 A.M., four dogs would gather at the foot of the hill below the residence. They were Uki, a white Akita dog; a Japanese Shiba terrier named Brownie; a cocker spaniel named Blackie after a stray dog MacArthur had found during the advance on Manila and had adopted until Doc Egeberg found the dog so ridden with illness he had to be put down; and Koko, a cocker belonging to Bataan Gang aide Sid Huff.

  Promptly at 8:00 the dogs would charge up the hill at a servant’s whistle, to join the general for breakfast. He was in his ever-faithful gray dressing gown with its West Point “A,” and would feed scraps to the dogs while Arthur played with them until finally the boy’s tutor had to get a bell that rang loudly at 8:30 to summon him to his lessons.8

  Then the dogs trotted along to watch the general do his calisthenics. They involved a series of muscle and bending exercises, done every day, and when he came to the last one, deep knee bends, the dogs would leave the room—all except Blackie, who would follow MacArthur into the bathroom while he washed and shaved.

  Then four times a day, seven days a week, policemen across Tokyo would switch the traffic lights so that MacArthur’s Cadillac limousine would pass from one green light to the next, until he reached the Dai-ichi building by 10:00 or 10:30. He would pass the door, ignoring the crowds that gathered outside (especially on Sundays when hundreds of American soldiers and sailors joined the throngs of Japanese to watch MacArthur mount the steps), and head for the elevator to the sixth floor.9

  The Cadillac reappeared in time to whisk him back to the embassy for lunch at 1:30 or even 2:00, where he would entertain a round of guests until 3:00. Then he would nap. Like Winston Churchill, MacArthur used his afternoon nap to recharge and preserve his energy; like Churchill, he took a long nap of an hour or more. When he awoke, the limousine would return him to the Dai-ichi building for another three or four hours of work.

  It was a twelve-month, seven-days-a-week schedule. His staff, of course, kept very different hours. They were expected in the office by 8:00 A.M. and did not dare leave until Sir Boss headed home in the evening. But MacArthur scoffed at the idea of vacations—just as he scoffed at telephones and typewriters. Both of those were tools for office personnel, who answered calls and typed up memos that he wrote out in longhand on a legal pad. Letters from others, on the other hand, he answered conscientiously, starting at breakfast, when he and Jean would sort through the mail and decide what to write to whom.

  Indeed, it was a rare correspondent that didn’t get a personal letter back from MacArthur, no matter how humble or how exalted—or even an invitation to lunch. “The general is from this point of view extremely accessible,” noted a member of his staff. “All anybody needs to do to gain his attention is to write a letter.”10

  William Sebald remembered “there was always a touch of drama” when a visitor entered MacArthur’s inner sanctum. “The quick bounding from his leather desk chair; the strong handclasp; the hearty words of welcome, always personal and warming; the penetrating eyes.” MacArthur would seat the visitor on the leather divan, then plunge into the chair next to him or her. But not for long: in a moment or two he would be pacing back and forth, “restless and eager,” talking and breathing confidence in the mission of SCAP and the future of Japan—and America’s mission in Asia.

  MacArthur hated formal dinners, and avoided cocktail parties and other social functions. The main form of entertainment for the many guests and visitors who flocked to Tokyo during the MacArthur years was luncheons at the American embassy. MacArthur would usually appear after all the guests arrived—American senators or Japanese politicians or European ambassadors, it didn’t matter. He would go first to Jean, who would have been talking and charming the guests, saying “Hello, my dear!” and kissing her. Then he would greet each visitor with a handshake and personalized welcome, usually some minute detail of the last time they had met, even if it had been when he was superintendent of West Point or when he had testified on the Hill as army chief of staff.

  Then MacArthur would take the guest of honor by the arm, announce that everyone must be hungry, and lead the party into the dining room. There was little formal protocol; once six ambassadors found themselves shoved together in the middle of the table, the distinctly junior position for lunch.11 Once coffee was served, the MacArthurs would depart. “The party was over”—and the second half of the workday had just begun. Sebald remembered being summoned to MacArthur’s office at seven or even eight in the evening to discuss an important topic.

  Other times he would get an early-morning call on some urgent matter; for a man who despised the telephone in the office, MacArthur used it extensively to set the day’s agenda before leaving home in the morning.

  “He was a general in every action,” Sebald remembered, “with the naturalness of a lifetime in positions of command,” exuding an air not just of confidence but serenity. Only two things regularly got under MacArthur’s skin: adverse decisions by the multinational Far Eastern Commission or its advisory arm, the Allied Council for Japan, and criticism in the press of the SCAP mission. Commission pronouncements he could safely ignore, since his power was unchallengeable, but the press comments made his eyes flash with anger, especially since many were repeated in official State Department telegrams.

  Sebald would point out in vain that foreign service officers were only doing their duty in summarizing press views in their respective countries, without in any way taking sides. MacArthur was not mollified. “Have the State Depar
tment stop this criticism of the Occupation and SCAP!” When Shanghai newspapers launched a vicious attack on the American occupation in early 1948, MacArthur personally ordered Sebald to compile a lengthy press release in rebuttal, which he did—even though Sebald knew the stories were pure Communist propaganda and needed no answer.12

  Yet nothing prepared MacArthur for the critical storm that broke out when an airplane bearing diplomat George Kennan and General Cortlandt Schuyler touched down at Haneda Airport on March 1, 1948.

  Kennan was a key advisor to Acheson and Truman’s foreign policy team, and author of the 1947 article in Foreign Affairs that became known as “the Long Telegram,” which charted a bold new course for dealing with the Soviet Union in the growing Cold War, called containment. Kennan’s views on how to conduct a similar containment policy in the Far East were explicit. “We are greatly overextended” in the current model, he argued, and although he agreed with MacArthur that Japan and the Philippines should be “the cornerstones of a Pacific security system” conjoined with American interests, he disagreed strongly on how to accomplish it.

  Kennan believed the steps MacArthur had taken to revive Japan’s economy had been too slow—and the limits he had imposed on its military potential too harsh. Like Germany, Japan needed to brought back to life as quickly as possible in order to help contain the Communist advance in both Europe and Asia. If that meant slowing its transformation into a fully democratic society, so be it.13

  The attack on MacArthur’s democratizing policies had gotten started the previous year, first with the Newsweek article, then in September 1947 with a Policy Planning Staff secret document calling for a major change in Japan policy. The “idea of eliminating Japan as a military power for all time is changing,” it stated. “Now, because of Russia’s conduct, [the] goal is to develop Hirohito’s islands as a buffer state”—and a bulwark against Communism both politically and economically. MacArthur’s policies had made it more difficult to do both.