Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  All in all, MacArthur’s testimony contained many intelligent, even perceptive observations on the future of the Cold War, but they got lost in the furor over the rest of the hearings. Here the Republicans made two mistakes. First, instead of focusing on strategy in Korea and fighting the Cold War, they became obsessed with showing that MacArthur’s dismissal was the result of a deliberate pro-Communist conspiracy—something they couldn’t prove because it didn’t exist. The removal of MacArthur had been nothing but a legitimate act of executive authority, however misguided.

  The second was that while MacArthur got three days and 300 written pages of testimony to prove his case, the administration got twenty-eight days and 772 pages to refute it—almost half the entire testimony of the hearings. It was a steady parade of administration heavyweights led by Dean Acheson, General Marshall, Omar Bradley, Lawton Collins, and General Vandenberg—a display of military uniforms and medals as well as executive branch power and prestige.

  Their message was coherent, compelling, and unified. General MacArthur had made a series of disastrous military decisions culminating in the attack from China and the retreat south of the 38th parallel; he had disregarded specific instructions from the Joint Chiefs regarding his advance into North Korea that triggered the Chinese intervention; and above all, his actions and words had challenged the fundamental principle of civilian leadership of the American armed forces.

  “It became apparent that General MacArthur had grown so far out of sympathy with the established policies of the United States that there was grave doubt as to whether he could any longer be permitted to exercise the authority in making decisions that normal command functions would assign to a theater commander,” General Marshall told the senators. “In this situation, there was no other recourse but to relieve him” once he began publicly voicing his disagreements with the policies of the commander in chief.15

  That indeed is the charge that has continued to stick with regard to MacArthur’s dismissal, that he had challenged the president’s authority and so had to go. Otherwise, so goes the argument, the principle that America’s soldiers follow the bidding of their elected civilian superiors rather than the other way around would be irrevocably and disastrously overthrown.

  MacArthur’s own view of the subject was made clear in his memoirs.

  “The legal authority of a President to relieve a field commander, irrespective of the wisdom or stupidity of the action, has never been questioned by anyone. The supremacy of the civil over the military is fundamental.” But, MacArthur asserted, that “was not an issue in this case.” The real lesson is that MacArthur was removed “without a hearing, without an opportunity for defense, with no consideration of the past,” including the fact that Truman had been praising MacArthur’s strategy and efforts almost up to the day he was removed.16

  We now know at one level that this was not true. The discontent over what MacArthur was doing, and had been saying, had been brewing for weeks. Yet MacArthur’s larger point was correct. There had never been a full and frank exchange of differing views on Korea between the president or the Joint Chiefs and their theater command, followed by an ultimatum: carry out our new strategy, or we will find someone who will. That very likely would have led to MacArthur’s resignation, which Truman could have accepted—and which could have spared the country a major uproar and very possibly have spared the Democrats a humiliating defeat in the presidential election of 1952.

  But now that was not to be. A Republican was destined to take the White House the next November—but it would not be Douglas MacArthur. Instead, he would be outmaneuvered and upstaged by the man he still considered his subordinate and protégé, but who was increasingly his rival as soldier-statesman: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  —

  Meanwhile, removing MacArthur hadn’t helped the war effort in Korea. After he left, in fact, things went rather badly.

  Even as Bataan II was leaving Japan for the States, Mao Zedong launched his fifth great offensive of the war, backed by some 700,000 troops. I Corps had to take the brunt of the attack, in a series of bloody slogging matches in which Ridgway’s superior firepower with aircraft and artillery beat back the numerically superior Chinese attackers, who kept regrouping and attacking to receive the same punishment. From the 22nd of April to the 25th, 1951, battles at Imjin River and Kapyong finally drove the Chinese offensive to ground along a line just north of Seoul.

  Undaunted, Mao’s forces struck again in May, this time against X Corps and a reorganized ROK army. Again, initial Chinese gains were erased in a hailstorm of bombs and artillery fire, with UN troops grimly pressing home counterattacks until they drew up at what came to be known as “Line Kansas.” There Ridgway’s forces would stay, for all of the rest of the year and until December 1952.

  It was stalemate, World War One style—almost exactly what the Truman people had wanted. Except that casualties kept mounting, as one effort to negotiate a cease-fire after another failed and Beijing continued fighting, oblivious to the slaughter of its own troops. The Battle of Bloody Ridge (August 18–September 5, 1951); the Battle of the Punchbowl (August 30–September 21, 1951); the Battle of Heartbreak Ridge (September 13–October 15, 1951); the Battle of Old Baldy (June 26–August 4, 1952); the Battle of White Horse (October 6–15, 1952); the Battle of Triangle Hill (October 14–November 25, 1952): forgotten fights in what was coming to be known as the Forgotten War, except by those families who received telegrams regarding the death of another son or brother or husband, in a conflict that seemed without purpose or end point. America was learning that there might not be a substitute for victory after all—certainly not one that could stop the killing.

  Eventually the man the public turned to, to end it, was Eisenhower. He had been primed for the presidency since 1948—except as a Democrat then rather than a Republican. By the time MacArthur was ready to enter the political arena, he had been out-spent, out-organized, and out-caucused by both Eisenhower and his principal opponent, Robert Taft.

  The irony was that Ike owed a large part of his push into the presidency to MacArthur. According to Eisenhower in an interview in 1967, when he visited his former chief in Tokyo in 1946 all MacArthur could talk about, from after dinner until 1 A.M., was why Ike should run for president. It was a MacArthur full-court press; the man of destiny—“He was a man who sincerely believed he was a man of destiny,” Eisenhower told his interviewer, “above others and unique”—speaking to someone who could fulfill America’s mission when MacArthur himself felt he could not. Ike asked why MacArthur himself didn’t run. “I’m too old for the job,” he said, dismissing the idea out of hand. Six years later, he may have regretted he pressed Ike so hard—and that he had eliminated himself from the running on the basis of an advancing age he neither showed nor felt.17

  But it was too late for regrets. He did have the honor of delivering the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, which opened in Chicago on the Fourth of July, 1952. He spoke as he had for the past several months, of “those reckless men who, yielding to international intrigue, set the stage for Soviet ascendancy as a world power and our own relative decline” at Yalta and Potsdam, and “the tragic weakness of our leaders reflected in their inability to rebuild our strength and restore our prestige, even after our commitment to war in Korea more than two years ago dramatically emphasized the inadequacy of our security preparation.”

  But it was an anticlimax after the drama of the joint session speech the year before. For once, he was ill at ease and seemed hesitant as the words poured out into the amphitheater and over the airwaves to eighteen million television viewers.

  “That party of noble heritage”—meaning the Democrats—“has become captive to the schemers and planners who have infiltrated the ranks of leadership to set the national course unerringly toward the socialistic regimentation of a totalitarian state.”18

  Did he really believe it? It’s hard to say—he was certainly more conservative in his domestic views th
an he had been when he left America in 1935, and his audience was more conservative as well. But the man who had brought sweeping top-down social and economic reforms to Japan in a progressive program that many had attacked as socialistic, made a strange prosecuting attorney against Truman’s Democrats.

  When he left the podium, there was applause—but hardly the thunderous ovation that had usually greeted him over the previous year. His political star had already faded; he was already a figure from the past rather than the future. Republicans were looking to new heroes to lead them. There was Joe McCarthy, “Tail-gunner Joe” and scourge of the Democrats’ tolerance for Communists and crypto-Communists in their ranks; Robert Taft, the prophet of economic laissez-faire and cutting back on the New Deal welfare state; and now Dwight Eisenhower, whose entire presidential campaign that year hinged on a single promise: “I will go to Korea.”

  In the end, Eisenhower’s solution to the Korean quagmire came ironically close to the one that MacArthur had proposed two years earlier, in December 1950. He let it be known that he was prepared to use nuclear weapons to break the deadlock on the battlefield. The Soviets got the message; the message got to both Mao and Kim Il Sung. By March 1953, UN and Communist forces agreed to an armistice, and the fighting was over. The war was not, however; no final peace treaty was ever signed, and American troops, 30,000 strong, continue to guard the border along the 38th parallel to this day.

  When MacArthur heard the news of the Armistice, his worst fears were realized. Communism, and Red China, now had their secure foothold in East Asia; it would embolden, he believed, every Communist insurgency across the region, from Indochina and Vietnam to Malaya. Less than a year later would come the defeat of the French by Ho Chi Minh’s forces at Dienbien Phu and the agreement at Geneva establishing yet another Communist government in Asia, this one headquartered in Hanoi. Ike’s advisors warned him that Laos was next. The dominoes were starting to fall, even before anyone had used the term as a metaphor for Communist expansionism in Asia.

  MacArthur had been thinking about these matters for many months when his friend John Dulles, then secretary of state designate, arranged a private meeting between Ike and MacArthur in New York City on December 17 to discuss what should be done about Korea.

  “A successful solution to the problem of Korea involves political as well as military considerations,” the former CINCFE wrote in a secret memo he prepared for Ike on the basis of their discussions. He noted the growing strength of North Korean and Chinese forces since his departure in April 1951: the growth of a Communist-led jet-powered air force prepared to challenge, if not actually overturn, American air superiority; growing artillery and motorized capacity on the part of the Chinese and their KPA allies; better communications on the battlefield.

  In short, the advantages that United Nations forces had possessed when MacArthur had been in charge were slipping away. The issue, he now believed, could no longer be resolved on the battlefield (Ike was inclined to agree, as his subsequent bid for a cease-fire proved). Instead, he advocated cutting through the entire Gordian knot of East-West relations by proposing a head-to-head summit between Ike and Stalin. “To that end our consideration of the Korean problem should be broadened in the search of peace,” he urged, not just in East Asia.

  The proposal should include: the unification of both Germany and Korea by popular referendum, with the declaration of neutrality of both countries along with Japan and Austria (which was still occupied by Russian troops in 1952); withdrawal of all foreign forces from both Europe and East Asia, including U.S. forces in Japan; a mutual agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to end war as an instrument of national policy.

  If Stalin failed to agree to these terms, MacArthur wrote matter-of-factly, he should be told that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons “to clear North Korea of enemy forces”—and to “neutralize Red China’s capacity to wage modern war,” as well. America’s advantage in nuclear weapons would fade fast, he warned Dulles and Eisenhower; it was time to use it for the best possible leverage—not just to end the war in Korea but to bring a peaceful end to war as an institution.19

  Needless to say, Eisenhower did not take MacArthur’s sweeping advice.

  He did use America’s nuclear leverage to end the fighting in Korea, but the larger goal of ending war altogether was not on his agenda, or anyone else’s in the administration.

  It was on MacArthur’s, however. Perhaps surprisingly, over the next five years he would take up the cause of international disarmament with the passion of a new convert—albeit a strange one for a former five-star general. He told frequent audiences that “war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides” and “no longer is it the weapon of adventure whereby a short cut to international power and wealth—a place in the sun—can be gained.” If you lose, you are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose later.

  “The great question is,” MacArthur told one such audience, the American Legion of Los Angeles, in 1955, “does this mean that war can now be outlawed from the world? If so, it would mark the greatest advance in civilization since the Sermon on the Mount.”20

  It was the inspiring, even quixotic, hope that would inspire his declining years, along with a passionate belief that America’s cause in Asia was still not lost, in spite of Korea. It was a subject that he would hold forth on for anyone who cared to listen, and in April 1961 one of those listeners was John F. Kennedy.

  The president was paying a courtesy call on the eighty-one-year-old MacArthur at his penthouse in the Waldorf Towers. Kennedy found himself spellbound. He later told his aides that the old general was one of the most fascinating conversationalists he’d ever met, “politically shrewd and intellectually sharp.” In fact, their two-hour conversation was engaging enough that the pair became friends, with a later luncheon visit to the White House that lasted all afternoon.

  “You’re lucky to have that mistake happen in Cuba,” the general said, referring to the abortive invasion at the Bay of Pigs, “where the strategic cost was not too great.” He warned Kennedy not to make the same mistake in Asia, and above all in Vietnam. He reminded the president of the importance of Asia to America’s future, and how the loss of China to Communism had been not only a betrayal of a wartime ally but a dramatic shift in the balance of world power.

  He also warned him that American involvement in the growing conflict in Indochina would backfire, and advised against sending any troops to Vietnam. Neither Kennedy nor his successor Lyndon Johnson would heed MacArthur’s parting words: “Anyone who gets in a land war in Asia should have his head examined.” Certainly if anyone knew the bitter truth behind those words, it was MacArthur.

  President Kennedy also provided MacArthur and his family with the plane that took him on his last trip to the Philippines in 1961, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Bataan and Corregidor. There MacArthur received the miles of cheering crowds and the unquestioning mass adulation from officials and the media that he had always craved from his fellow Americans but had never quite gotten. To Filipinos he was still a national hero without peer—and for the octogenarian MacArthur, that was now enough. “When I saw the happiness in their faces, as I saw the prosperity of the community,” he wrote, “a great weight was lifted from my heart, and I thanked God that I was one of those who had helped them to freedom.”

  He returned home ill and frail, and when he went to West Point that next year to accept the academy’s Sylvanus Thayer Award, many realized that it would be his final public appearance.

  But not his last word. That would come in his memoirs, Reminiscences, which he would begin writing in October 1962 in a firm, confident hand on hundreds of legal pads (they survive, without a single crossing-out or erasure). It wasn’t until he was finished, in August 1963, that MacArthur and publisher Henry Luce reached an agreement to publish seven installments in Life magazine, with the complete publication in book form, for a sum of $900,000.21

  It se
ems strange that MacArthur hadn’t written more about his life before.

  He had, however, prepared the way with a two-volume work, The MacArthur Record, which he and Courtney Whitney organized as their own official history of the war in the Pacific after the United States Army’s version proved disappointing and (they felt) unfairly critical of MacArthur’s record, especially in the Philippines.

  There is also every indication that Whitney’s own biography of MacArthur was largely written by MacArthur himself—which goes a long way to explain why it resembles Reminiscences in many key passages.

  The goal of Reminiscences, however, was neither self-vindication nor to supply information on his life that others had forgotten or left out. Indeed, what makes it fascinating reading is what MacArthur himself decided to omit (the events of his first marriage, for example, and his winning of the Medal of Honor).

  Instead, the book was “merely my recollection of events,” as MacArthur explained in the preface, many of which took place beyond the memory of many still living, so that “it may assist the future historian when he seeks to account for the motives and reasons which influenced some of the actions in the great drama of war.”

  The other audience, he stated, was “the rising generation, who may learn therefrom that a country and government such as ours is worth fighting and dying for, if need be.”22

  It was that rising generation that a bent and gaunt Douglas MacArthur met on the Plain at West Point on May 12, 1962, as he arrived to inspect the 2,200-strong Cadet Corps—more than twice the size of the Corps from the days when he had been superintendent. There to meet him was the current superintendent, who would go on to have his own controversial career: Major General William Westmoreland, later supreme commander in Vietnam—ironically, the very same ground war MacArthur had warned against.