The plane door shut; Anthony Story throttled the Bataan II’s engines and the plane quickly taxied away. The crowd watched as it roared off the runway, banked, and then headed up into the clear blue sky until it became a speck that finally vanished.
“The accomplishments of General MacArthur in the interest of our country are one of the marvels of history,” Prime Minister Yoshida had said in his radio broadcast of farewell to MacArthur. “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.”73
In truth, Japan owed MacArthur more than it knew at the time. By turning occupied Japan into his major logistical base for operations in Korea, MacArthur had resurrected Japan’s economy. As historian Michael Schaller has noted, “war orders benefited the textile, construction, automotive, metal, communications, and chemical industries. At the peak of the Korean conflict, nearly 3000 Japanese firms held war-related contracts while many others arranged with U.S. companies and the Defense Department to acquire new technology.” In 1950–51 alone, procurements for the U.S. military totaled 40 percent of all Japan’s exports—and in 1952 that amount more than doubled.74 Truck sales for Toyota Motor Company, for example, shot up from barely 300 vehicles a year before the war to 5,000 a year later—almost all to the U.S. Army. It can truly be said that MacArthur had laid the foundations of Japan’s “economic miracle” in the sixties and seventies, first during the occupation and then during the Korean War, by turning America’s former enemy into its military-industrial workshop.
The importance of all this lay in the future. At the time everyone’s attention was consumed by MacArthur’s dismissal and what the political repercussions would be. There was, however, one American who understood all that MacArthur had accomplished not just in Japan but in Korea. This was John Foster Dulles, who had been with MacArthur when the war first broke out that disastrous Sunday. As it happened, Dulles was now flying back to Japan, and high over the Pacific his plane passed MacArthur’s and the two men talked—not by radio but by Morse code.
“I asked him for advice,” Dulles later told Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, “and he gave me concrete suggestions as to what it would be most useful for me to do and say when I got to Tokyo. His whole concern was for the success of his mission there,” and “there was not one word of bitterness.”
Then Dulles told Judd soberly, “I never had greater admiration for a man. Under such provocation, he still uttered not a word of personal bitterness; he considered only the cause of his country.”
Dulles paused, and added: “As long as America can produce men of that stature and caliber it will be safe.”75
The question now was how many in the United States would understand the same thing.
* * *
* Actual U.S. casualties in the Korean War were 133,409 killed, wounded, and missing.
CHAPTER 33
FADING AWAY
War’s very object is victory—not prolonged indecision.
In war, indeed, there is no substitute for victory.
—DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, APRIL 19, 1951
The crowds were bigger than anything he had ever seen in his life.
The moment the MacArthurs stepped down the ramp at the San Francisco airport on April 18 at 8:30 P.M., tens of thousands of cheering yet anxious Americans broke through the police barriers surrounding the field. News of his removal from command had spread like quicksilver across the United States. Newspapers from Boston to Los Angeles proclaimed the news in banner headlines: MACARTHUR DISMISSED. The overwhelming public consensus that April was that Truman’s action was a blunder, even a catastrophic one. A Gallup poll on April 14 showed that two out of three Americans disapproved of MacArthur’s removal; in the Republican-dominated Congress the feeling against Truman ran even higher.1
Congressional leaders who weren’t shocked at the sudden dismissal were outraged. Some, like Republican Styles Bridges of Maine, tried to get Truman to reconsider. Others simply sat in stunned dismay. Perhaps surprisingly, the president’s own party was probably the most upset. They knew this would give the majority Republicans, including their rising paladin in the Senate, Joe McCarthy, the excuse to do what they had wanted to do since the fall of China to Communism: tear into the Truman foreign policy record. They doubted it would win more Democratic votes.
Indeed, both Senate and House Republicans soon assured the public that there would be hearings—long, probing hearings—into why MacArthur had been fired, with plenty of time for the general to defend himself—and to refute his foes.
Senator Richard Nixon introduced a resolution calling for MacArthur’s reinstatement. William Jenner of Indiana took it a step further, calling for Truman’s impeachment and proclaiming that “this country today is in the hands of the secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union.” Joe McCarthy went even further, calling the decision “a great Communist victory” that “may well have condemned thousands of American boys to death, and may well have condemned Western civilization.”2
MacArthur’s stalwart supporters in the Hearst, McCormick, and Scripps-Herald newspaper syndicates echoed the same themes, though Truman found support on the editorial pages of The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. In general, the overwhelming majority of journalists and reporters, including those in Japan and Korea, thought the dismissal had been the right thing to do. The media in Britain and Europe agreed—as did, of course, the press in Communist countries.
For most ordinary Americans, however, the situation was clear. To them, MacArthur was the great hero of Bataan and World War Two, and the architect of victory—or near victory—in Korea. Now, suddenly and without warning, he had been fired just as he had reversed the Red Chinese tide and final victory seemed within America’s grasp. Millions of Americans wanted to know why, and they would demand that Congress find out who was responsible. But for now they were content to show their support for the man they believed had been shamefully, possibly treasonously, treated—the man who, many believed, was all that stood between victory and defeat over international Communism.
On the fourteen-mile drive from the airport to the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco, some half a million people lined the road in the darkness to greet their returning hero. The next day an even bigger crowd watched a ticker tape parade for the general and his family through the streets of San Francisco, while 100,000 jammed themselves in front of city hall to hear MacArthur deliver a short impromptu speech before waving to the roaring throng and returning to his hotel.
For MacArthur, the massive show of public approbation was naturally gratifying, but also surprising. He had been out of the country for nearly fifteen years; he had last been there when Franklin Roosevelt was president and pro–New Deal feeling was running high, as was a blatant isolationism. This was a more conservative, even more religious America, one much more worried about threats from the outside world after the traumas of Pearl Harbor and World War Two. Even in the fading shadow of total victory, American public opinion had become highly suspicious of their former ally the Soviet Union and its allies, including Communist China. The sudden attack on South Korea in 1950 had confirmed the widespread sense that those, like MacArthur, who had warned of a vast conspiracy to undermine America’s position in Asia had been right—even that some in the Truman administration might be part of it, or at least woefully blind to the danger.
When Truman tried to explain his decision to a national radio audience the evening of April 11, even Dean Acheson had to concede that the result was “a complete flop.” Truman said almost nothing about why MacArthur had been fired, which seemed doubly mysterious. Instead, he spent his time on the air reiterating the administration’s policy in Korea, which most listeners thought was a failure anyway. As a result, Truman’s always brittle approval ratings began to collapse. Polls soon showed that 66 percent of Americans thought dismissing MacArthur was a mistake. Mail to con
gressmen showed the pro-MacArthur supporters running ten to one.3
In the meantime, supporters swamped MacArthur’s motorcade everywhere it went.
“My welcome through the entire land defies description,” MacArthur later wrote. “America took me to its heart with a roar that will never leave my ears.” In New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Austin, and a dozen other cities it was the same rapturous scene: the drive down the main avenue, waving from the open limousine to the cheering throngs, the ticker tape, the massive police escorts, the waving American flags, and other paraphernalia associated with the greeting of returning heroes like Charles Lindbergh or, later, returning astronauts.
All his life he had been used to receiving praise, honors, rewards, even adoring admiration when he first arrived in Australia or in the days after the liberation of the Philippines. But never had Douglas MacArthur received adulation like this—certainly not from his fellow Americans. It was bound to turn anyone’s head, and it turned his.
“Men, women, and children,” he reflected later, “rich and poor, black and white, of as many different origins as there are nations on the earth, with their tears and smiles, their cheers and handclaps, and most of all, their heart-lifting cries of ‘Welcome home, Mac!’ ”4
It would be rash to suggest that it affected MacArthur’s judgment. He had been determined for some time to defend himself and his record when he returned to America, and what he would say and how he would say it had been on his mind long before his plane touched down in San Francisco. But the rapturous receptions he met, including those from some of America’s most powerful politicians, did give him hope that if Truman’s decision on removing him could not be reversed, perhaps MacArthur himself would soon be in a position to affect the crucial decisions on Korea and on fighting Communism in Asia, from his own desk in the Oval Office.
President Douglas MacArthur. Was it really so far-fetched a dream? After he had toyed with the idea briefly in 1944 and then again in 1948, that ultimate reward for a half century of heroic public service must have seemed closer to reality than ever, in those heady days of late April 1951. That was especially true when he arrived in Washington, D.C., to deliver what would be the climax of his nationwide tour: an address to a joint session of Congress on April 19.
MacArthur had worked on the address almost from the moment the invitation had arrived from House Minority Leader Joe Martin—ironically, the man more responsible than any other for MacArthur’s dismissal—and the Senate Majority Leader, Ernest McFarland. He had worked on it on the plane across the Pacific, despite a bout of airsickness; he had tried to find time to work on it when they touched down in Hawaii, where he got his first glimpse of the adulation that was coming when a crowd of more than 100,000 greeted him in Honolulu and the university presented him with an honorary doctorate of law.5
For MacArthur, the address would be the most important speech he would ever make. It was an opportunity to summon all his knowledge, all his oratorical powers and flair for the dramatic, not only to justify his actions and policies in Korea but to awaken Congress and the nation to what he conceived to be America’s long-term interests in Asia. It was his moment to spell out the promise and perils awaiting the world’s most powerful democracy in the Pacific Rim.
In effect, the grand vision of America’s future in the Pacific, which, seventy years earlier, his father had painfully typed out to his own army superiors in a forty-page memorandum, Douglas MacArthur would now take to center stage in a joint session of Congress.
—
The plane landed at National Airport at a quarter after midnight on April 19. President Truman was not there to greet him, of course; nor was Dean Acheson. But George Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, and Truman’s military aide, Major General Harry Vaughan, did show up and were waiting for MacArthur on the darkened tarmac. Someone spotted Jim Wainwright in the crowd, and he was asked to join the tiny greeting party.6 As the MacArthurs descended from the plane and briefly shook hands with Marshall and the others, the crowd, more than 12,000 strong, charged forward. The police had difficulty restoring order; it took more than half an hour just to get the MacArthurs to their car. Courtney Whitney was pushed to the ground in the crush; at one point the general didn’t even know where Jean was as the people surged between them, cheering and reaching for his hand or just to touch his sleeve.
Finally, with police sirens wailing and lights flashing, they set off for the Statler Hotel. “It looked like the entire District of Columbia greeted our arrival,” MacArthur wrote later.7 The normally thirty-minute drive took hours, as they crept past the swarming crowds and the traffic snarls, until finally the exhausted party reached their destination.
The landing on Leyte; the surrender ceremony on the deck of the Missouri; the first meeting with Emperor Hirohito; the landing at Inchon. These had all been moments of personal triumph as well as great landmarks in history. But on this day he believed he would chart a new course not just for the nation and the world, but for himself. The era of Douglas MacArthur, American soldier, was over. The era of Douglas MacArthur, American statesman—American president, even—was about to begin.
At noon the representatives and senators and members of the Supreme Court began to arrive in the Capitol’s House chamber and take their seats. One row of seats, however, was conspicuously empty—those usually reserved for the president’s cabinet, all of whom were conspicuously absent. Undismayed, Speaker Martin arranged that those seats be given to Jean MacArthur, Arthur, and the other members of the MacArthur party instead. One of them was the always loyal Sid Huff. They had come a long way together since they had escaped together from Corregidor, sharing a wave-soaked mattress in the well of a speeding PT boat. Now Sid was there to hear MacArthur speak to America.
Every American television network would be showing the speech live; more than twenty million Americans would be listening in on their radios. A sudden thought crossed Huff’s mind, something MacArthur had said when they had stared out the windows of Bataan II at the tremendous crowd waiting for them at the San Francisco airport, with the beacons of light flashing through the blackness.
“I hope,” MacArthur had muttered, watching the throng, “that they are not cheering because they feel sorry for me.” He and Sid and Jean were about to find out.8
At 12:31 P.M., the door of the House creaked open and the House doorkeeper announced in a deep voice, “Mister Speaker, General Douglas MacArthur.”
The chamber exploded in a roar of sound. MacArthur strode in, escorted by a phalanx of Republican congressmen, as the cheering echoed up from the House floor and down from the packed visitors’ gallery. House Speaker Sam Rayburn introduced him and then Douglas MacArthur stepped to the podium.
He wore no medals or ribbons. Only a trim waist-length military jacket with five gold stars attached to the collar. He stood tall and somber for three minutes as the applause went on and on. Then the audience was seated, silence fell, and the general began.
“Mister President, Mister Speaker, and distinguished Members of the Congress: I stand on this rostrum with a deep sense of humility and great pride—humility in the wake of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this forum of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised.”
The chamber exploded again in massive applause. In fact, the entire thirty-seven-minute address would be interrupted by applause more than fifty times. MacArthur, however, never let the standing ovations throw him off his pace—or off message. “From his first words,” one observer noted, “it was clear that he was in complete command of the situation.”9 And that message would be that there could be no surrender to Communism in Asia, and that stalemate in Korea would be as bad as surrender.
America’s relationship with Asia past, present, and future was uppermost in his thoughts and words. “While Asia is commonly referred to as the gateway to Europe, it is no less true that Europe is th
e gateway to Asia, and the broad influence of the one cannot fail to have its impact upon the other…[To] consider the problems of one sector, oblivious of those of another, is but to court disaster for the whole.”
That in truth is what MacArthur saw happening to the country’s current approach to the global Communist threat. Failing to check its advance in East Asia, including Korea, would only guarantee its future victory elsewhere, including in this new globally interconnected world in which America now found itself.
Then he spoke of the Asia he had known since his first visit with his father almost forty years before. “Long exploited by the so-called colonial powers, with little opportunity to achieve any degree of social justice, individual dignity, or a higher standard of life such as guided our own noble administration of the Philippines, the people of Asia found their opportunity in the war just past to throw off the shackles of colonialism and now see the dawn of new opportunity, a heretofore unfelt dignity and the self-respect of political freedom” for half the world’s population and 60 percent of its available resources.
America had a vital destiny to play in kindling that freedom and helping to foster that social justice and individual opportunity—and not just for altruistic reasons. At one time the Pacific had seemed a protective barrier to America’s western approaches, he explained. After Pearl Harbor and during the Second World War, however, America had come to realize that its forward western flank, running from Hawaii and Midway to Guam and the Philippines, was “not an outpost of strength but an avenue of weakness along which the enemy could and did attack.” In short, fostering freedom and democratic allies in Asia was the best way for America to defend itself in the future.
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