America had achieved that goal in the Philippines, he said, and was doing so in Japan, its former enemy. “The Japanese people since the war have undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history….Politically, economically, and socially, Japan is now abreast of many free nations of the earth and will not again fail the universal trust.” That the world owed this massive turnaround to one man, himself, he did not have to add.
With China, by contrast, the United States had failed in its historic mission.
There, American weakness had permitted a Soviet satellite to take shape and threaten its neighbors. Instead of a free democratic China, America’s failed policies had left behind a militarized China that “has become aggressively imperialistic, with a lust for expansion and increased power normal to this type of imperialism.” MacArthur had no doubts that this China would soon follow its own destiny without regard to its current ally the Soviet Union (it was not a view shared by many in Washington, but in a few short years his prediction would prove correct). But it would nonetheless threaten America’s strategic position in Asia, and the independence of its postwar allies, including Japan.
For that reason, MacArthur insisted, America now had to stand by Chiang Kai-shek and Formosa more than ever, as a vital hub of the “protective shield for all the Americas and all the free lands of the Pacific Areas.” Likewise, the Pacific itself would become “a vast moat to protect us as long as we hold it” by land, air, and sea. “Indeed,” he went on, “it acts as a protective shield for all of the Americas and all free lands of the Pacific Ocean area. We control it to the shores of Asia” itself, thanks to a island chain linked together by U.S. naval and air bases extending from the Aleutians to the Marianas, from which “we can dominate with sea and air power every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore”—and keep the Soviet Union and its allies from making any hostile moves into the Pacific Ocean.
Now in Korea, he concluded darkly, America was again failing in its mission to protect Asia from Chinese expansionism—and to protect America from any future Communist threat.
“While I was not consulted prior to the President’s decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea,” he added, “that decision, from a military standpoint, proved a sound one.” MacArthur and the United Nations forces had been able to throw back the North Korean invader and decimate their armies.
“Our victory was complete and our objectives within reach when Red China intervened with numerically superior ground forces.”
MacArthur vehemently cast aside the accusation Dean Acheson and others were making, that he himself had somehow triggered the Red Chinese intervention by his advance into northern North Korea—possibly even deliberately in order to widen the war into China itself. “No man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China and such was never given a thought,” he thundered.
Still, “the new situation did urgently demand a drastic revision of strategic planning if our political aim was to defeat this new enemy as we had defeated the old.”
But in fact, as MacArthur had soon discovered to his sorrow, that was not the aim of the president and his advisors at all. He had presented to them his four-point plan to secure victory, including a naval blockade of China and releasing Chiang’s forces on Taiwan to join the fight, and they had turned him down. He had even been severely criticized for drafting a plan designed “to bring hostilities to an end with the least possible delay and at a saving of countless American and Allied lives.”
In short, the Truman administration had rejected all his calls for a decisive end to the war by military action. “I have been called a war-monger,” he noted with scornful indignation. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Few in the current armed services had seen firsthand as much of the horror and destruction of war as he had, starting in the First World War. His views on the future of war had been made clear on the deck of the USS Missouri in September 1945, when he said that with the new destructiveness of nuclear war, mankind had no alternative to peace.
“But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war, there can be no substitute for victory.”
At that moment the chamber exploded in a storm of applause and approbation. Those words from his letter to Joe Martin had become a catchphrase around the country—words that were either immortal or misleading and dangerous, depending on one’s political stance. But at that moment they seemed to sum up a lifetime of one man’s achievement—and the hopes of an America desperate to escape an ongoing quagmire in Korea.
“The tragedy of Korea is further heightened by the fact that as military action is confined to its territorial limits,” he added, “it condemns that nation, which it is our purpose to save, to suffer the devastating impact of full naval and air bombardment, while the enemy sanctuaries are fully protected from such attack and devastation” in Red China. At the same time, “my soldiers asked of me, why surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field? I could not answer.”
Then he said, “I have just left your fighting sons in Korea. They have met all tests there and I can report to you without reservation they are splendid in every way….Those gallant men will remain often in my thoughts and in my prayers always.”
Finally he talked about himself.
“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 Plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that—
“ ‘Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.’ ”
By now there were few dry eyes left in the chamber.
“And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away,” he said with a wry smile. “An old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him light to see that duty.”
Then he finished with a halting “Goodbye.”
—
His biographer Clayton James, no fan of the speech or this phase of MacArthur’s career, wrote that it must be ranked “as one of the most impressive and divisive oratorical performances of recent American times”—although James himself found its basic proposition “faulty” and even “downright dangerous.” Dean Acheson dismissed the speech at once as “demagogic.”10 Most recent historians of the Korean War and the Truman-MacArthur controversy have expressed similar negative sentiments.
MacArthur partisans, on the other hand, have generally agreed with former president Herbert Hoover’s remark after the speech, that MacArthur was “the reincarnation of Saint Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East.” Representative Dewey Short of Missouri did Hoover one better: “We saw a great hunk of God in the flesh, and we heard the voice of God.”
Yet in retrospect, it is hard to find much in MacArthur’s speech to disagree with—including his views on Communist China. That Mao would eventually split from his Soviet ally was something MacArthur already sensed but that even the Acheson-Kennan team hadn’t realized; and that China would become an aggressive military imperialist power in East Asia was a sound strategic judgment, the truth of which seems more relevant today than ever.
As for MacArthur’s views on the growing Communist threat in Asia, those too seem prescient in light of events in Indochina and Vietnam that were unfolding at the time, and that would grow in significance in less than a decade. Even the theme of “no substitute for victory” would carry forward in the so-called Powell Doctrine of the 1990s. In that sense, MacArthur’s views take on fresh, hard relevance in the light of recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Finally, MacArthur’s remarks about the folly of allowing an enemy sanctuaries from
which to freely operate, along with his view that “history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement begets new and bloodier wars…like blackmail, [appeasement] lays the basis for new and successively greater demands, until, as in blackmail, violence becomes the only alternative” seem remarkably sane, rather than demagogic or dangerous.
So then what was the real quarrel critics had, and continue to have, with MacArthur’s speech? Without a doubt, it was publicly questioning the strategic assumptions of the Truman-Acheson team—the assumptions that led them to decide that MacArthur’s policy on Korea was no longer in sync with their own and that he should be removed.
The key assumption was that Korea was a no-win proposition. Once China intervened, they concluded, the best outcome that could be hoped for was a negotiated cease-fire along the 38th parallel, followed by a voluntary Chinese withdrawal and a permanently divided Korea. To point out that this is in fact what happened—as most MacArthur critics do—does not imply that Truman and Acheson were right and MacArthur was wrong. It simply recognizes that once MacArthur had been removed, no other options existed. Even though General Ridgway’s views on driving the Chinese out of Korea were similar to MacArthur’s, including using chemical weapons, which MacArthur had to veto, he was not the man with the power to carry it out alone—or a man with the larger geopolitical vision in which drawing out the war with Mao’s China would make sound strategic sense.
The truth was that, far from opposing MacArthur’s strategy for winning in Korea, Truman, Acheson, George Marshall, and the Joint Chiefs had been on record endorsing, even encouraging, him up to the point that China massively intervened—that is, until the going got difficult, and MacArthur’s forces found themselves on the defensive. Then the administration quickly reversed itself. In a matter of weeks, it came to accept the viewpoint of its European allies that the war was unwinnable without a drastic expansion of its size and scope, including the use of nuclear weapons, and that it was time to cut a deal.
From that moment, MacArthur’s aggressiveness ceased to be an asset and became a liability. That he refused to adjust himself, and his public statements, to the new strategy, was perfectly true; but that it was a new, even unprecedented, change in American military policy was also true.
In that sense, MacArthur’s removal was inevitable—not for insubordination or because he had dared to challenge civilian leadership of the military, as some critics charged then and later. It was because he was an inconvenient reminder of the Korea strategy that the president had endorsed, until it struck a reef. Starting over with Ridgway as CINCFE meant for everyone a clean break from an embarrassing past—and from relations with a proud, overbearing officer that none of the White House team could stand, anyway.
Yet MacArthur had put his finger on the fatal flaw of containment. If not victory, then what? Stalemate? It was difficult to imagine America’s military leadership devoting themselves to a strategy that involved denying objectives to an enemy, for example preventing a Communist takeover of a foreign country, while resigning themselves to achieving none of their own aims, for instance, destroying that Communist power’s forces and their ability to fight. But what if the foe chose not to accept stalemate and decided to fight on? Then the alternative was endless war, with American forces and their allies constantly blocking enemy attacks and taking casualties, and having only momentary respites as the enemy regrouped and refitted before trying again. This kind of endless war would become all too familiar to the American military and public in the coming years, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the constant knife-edge tension of the Cold War itself. It would become the long, bitter legacy of containment, even after the Cold War: an America resigned to fighting wars that its political leadership is determined not to win, until the public finally loses patience and insists that its leaders call it quits.
By rejecting the MacArthur alternative of no substitute for victory, Washington had committed the nation to maintaining a world in which if there were no more wars among the great powers, there certainly would never be peace.
There was, however, one statement in MacArthur’s address that was false and misleading. It was when he said his plan was now “just to fade away.”
Nothing could have been further from his mind. His goal was now to use his vast, unchallenged popularity to galvanize the country in a new direction for dealing with Korea and the global Communist threat, as well as its future direction as a country.
In San Francisco, a reporter asked if he had any political plans. “I do not intend to run for any political office….The only politics I have is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—God Bless America!” This was less than ingenuous. MacArthur had every intention of now making himself a major figure on the American political scene. And as the last rousing cheers in the House chamber died away on April 19, and the last handshakes with his friends and political allies both old and new were over, he must have wondered just where his new preeminence might take him.
Yet his national preeminence had just crested, and his ability to influence events would steadily slip away until in less than a decade he would become a largely forgotten figure and a virtual hermit.
—
It certainly didn’t seem that way the next day, as he and Jean and Arthur now wrapped up their visit in Washington in preparation for heading to New York City.
After a triumphant luncheon with Congressman Martin and forty of his colleagues, MacArthur gave brief speeches at Constitution Hall and then to an immense throng on the National Mall before setting off again for National Airport.
The motorcade down Pennsylvania Avenue drew a crowd of more than a quarter million; in New York the crowds were even greater during a nineteen-mile parade through Manhattan. When he arrived at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, mailbags containing 150,000 approving letters and 20,000 telegrams were waiting for him—many of them arranged by his Republican allies on the Hill. Over the next weeks more bags of fan mail arrived almost daily.11
The Waldorf Astoria would now become his home in retirement, as he and Jean took an immense ten-room penthouse suite in the next-door Waldorf Towers for their permanent residence. For MacArthur it must have been a moment of sardonic triumph, to be living in the hotel from which he had once been expelled for wearing spurs at a victory dance. Eventually room after room would become filled with mementos, books, pictures, Asian art, and furniture from their years in Japan. Almost nothing survived from their years in the Manila Hotel, and even less from his life in America or with his parents. But in the Waldorf Astoria he and Jean made a new life for themselves and their son, Arthur; one reflecting his status as America’s greatest living soldier.
For now, however, there was only travel, to virtually every major city in the United States, where the crowds, speeches, and parades became almost indistinguishable from one another.
“It is with a sense of high honor that I appear on this rostrum to address you,” he told the assembled legislature at the state capitol in Austin, Texas, on June 21, “a State which has contributed so abundantly to American progress and in which I feel so sincere a personal interest.” He told the Massachusetts legislature on July 15 that “in this historic forum I recall vividly and reverently the memory of those great architects and defenders of liberty who immortalized the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. To this section of the country men point as the cradle of our freedom.”12
And so on. In each city, in front of every legislature or august group, the message was the same: the danger of appeasement; the needless sacrifice of men in Korea without a clear goal of victory; the threat from within of Communism and Communist sympathizers (without naming names) who “have already so drastically altered the character of our free institutions—those institutions which formerly we hailed as something beyond question or challenge—those institutions we proudly called the American way of life.”
If he wasn’t a presidential candidate, he was certainly sounding like one—and officials
in the Republican National Committee were carefully making sure that every speech and press interview got plenty of coverage in local newspapers and the national media. From the perspective of Democrats in Washington it must have looked grim. Truman for one, though, wasn’t worried. One of his staffers recorded in his diary: “The President did not seem too upset by the uproar that has resulted throughout the country from his recall of General MacArthur from Tokyo. He has suggested that within the Administration nothing be said to keep the fire going.”13
Perhaps Truman wasn’t worried because he sensed Republicans would blow this opportunity, as they did every other time. He was right. The MacArthur juggernaut would begin to break down almost from the moment the joint congressional hearings on Korea began on May 3, with MacArthur as the first witness.
MacArthur’s three days of testimony should have been the capstone of his popular comeback, an opportunity to expand on his views from the April 19 speech and further explain his larger strategy for winning in Korea. MacArthur himself had seen his testimony that way. “The concept that our forces withdrew in disorder [in December 1950] or were badly defeated is one of the most violent prevarications of the truth that was ever made,” he stated baldly. He continued to insist that the source of the difficulty had been the failure to adequately bomb the bridges over the Yalu, and that his four-point plan for winning after China’s intervention could still prevail, if only the administration would give up its defeatist attitude.
He also rejected the notion, current in Democratic and liberal circles, that any strong response to Chinese aggression would trigger World War Three. He said his strategy would “tend to not precipitate a world war, but to prevent it,” because the risk of global conflict would increase if the war were allowed to go on, or “if we practice appeasement” of Mao’s China. He even suggested that Stalin would prefer to see China not become too powerful, and might be pleased to see “this new Frankenstein” that he had helped take power in Beijing come a cropper in Korea—something that Truman’s architects of containment, who assumed that Moscow called the shots and Beijing and Pyongyang only moved in lockstep, had never considered.14
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