Then came spring, and all that changed. On April 11 Harry Truman presented them with a martyred hero. He fired Douglas MacArthur, turned the Great Debate into a greater debate, and touched off the country’s greatest emotional convulsion between V-J Day and Dallas twelve years later.
***
Unlike Eisenhower, MacArthur was not widely admired by fighting men. But generals are not measured by popularity. On any rating of performance, MacArthur eclipses other U.S. military leaders of his generation, and he may have been the most brilliant commander in the country’s history. In 1918 he was named commander of the Rainbow Division in France, thereby becoming, at thirty-eight, the youngest general in the Army. Coming out of retirement to lead U.S. land troops against the Japanese, and then ruling postwar Japan as a kind of presidential viceroy, Douglas MacArthur had, by 1951, become a deity for many Americans. In forty-eight years as an officer, he had learned and practiced every soldierly virtue, with one exception: he made a poor second in command.
We shall never know what was in his mind that terrible winter after the Chinese came into the war. This much seems certain: he had lost his fighting spirit. According to Major General Chester V. Clifton, then aide to General Bradley and later military aide to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided as early as January that the general would have to be recalled on military, not political grounds: “What really counted was that MacArthur had lost confidence in himself and was beginning to lose the confidence of his field officers and troops…. And when he committed the final error of insubordination to the Commander-in-Chief—and there’s absolutely no question about that—they had no trouble at all deciding what had to be done.” Most Washingtonians doubted that the President had the nerve to tell him off, however. The Washington Post headline on the morning of April 11 read: MACARTHUR RECALL RULED OUT BY PRESIDENT, HILL HEARS; REPRIMAND IS STILL SEEN POSSIBLE.
By then the entire country knew of the dispute between the two men. The spirit of Wake had been long forgotten. As early as December the general had begun sniping at the President in the press, sending sharply worded letters to U.S. News & World Report and the president of the United Press. “I should have fired MacArthur then and there,” Truman later said. Instead he had the Joint Chiefs tell the general that “no speech, press release, or public statement” on policy was to be released without prior clearance in Washington. After Christmas the President wrote MacArthur, praising his talents while gently reminding him that it was a presidential responsibility to “act with great prudence as far as extending the area of hostilities is concerned.” To make certain that MacArthur understood the directive, two of the Chiefs—Collins and Hoyt S. Vandenberg—flew to Tokyo on January 12, delivered the letter to him in the Dai Ichi Building, and told him they were prepared to provide any additional clarification he might require. He said he needed none. During the next two months he was inaccessible to reporters. Then, in Dean Acheson’s words, he perpetrated “a major act of sabotage of a Government operation… sabotage of an operation of which he had been informed, and insubordination of the grossest sort to his commander in chief.”
The President had felt it was time for a cease-fire and peace negotiations. On March 20 he drafted a statement saying so, and copies were sent to each of the U.N. allies for comment. The Joint Chiefs dispatched the text to Tokyo in confidence, whereupon, to their amazement and horror, MacArthur called in the press and announced that he was prepared to negotiate with the enemy on his own terms. This torpedoed the Truman plan while achieving nothing. The general offered Peking annihilation, and as Walter Lippmann dryly noted, “Regimes do not negotiate about their survival.” The Red Chinese merely reaffirmed their faith in victory. The peace offensive had failed before it could get started, leaving the President in a thin-lipped rage. He later wrote, “MacArthur left me no choice. I could no longer tolerate his insubordination.” Then, before he could act, he was confronted by the last straw: a letter from the general to Congressman Joe Martin.
Martin, the Republican leader in the House, was one of several men on the Hill who had been treating MacArthur as a friendly foreign prince. Another of them, Republican Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan, actually proposed that a congressional committee go to Tokyo so they could learn, from the general’s own lips, what the goals of American policy should be and how to reach them. Since Martin was known to be one of Truman’s more ferocious critics, MacArthur must have known that the only result of a letter to him would be mischief. On April 5 Martin rose in the House, declaring, “I owe it to the American people to tell the information I have from a great and reliable source.” The information was a full-fledged assault on the administration by the general and a demand for the deploying of Nationalist Chinese troops on the Korean front. Later that day word came from London that MacArthur had made the same statements, for publication, in an interview with Lieutenant General H. G. Martin of the British Army. That evening Acheson received word that the President wanted to confer with him and General Marshall the next morning, immediately after the cabinet meeting. “I was,” Acheson said in his memoirs, “in little doubt what the subject of our discussion would be.”
The next day was April 7, a Friday. None of those close to him now doubted what Truman’s response to MacArthur’s latest insubordinations should be, but Acheson suggested that he wait until after the weekend for an opinion from the Joint Chiefs. On Monday Marshall reported that the Chiefs unanimously recommended that MacArthur be stripped of all his commands and replaced by Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, and that he and Bradley concurred in the recommendation. The next step was notifying MacArthur, and it cannot be said that this was handled well. Learning that the Chicago Tribune had the story, Truman snapped, “He’s not going to be allowed to quit on me. He’s going to be fired!” He ordered Bradley to push the thing through as quickly as possible. From the Pentagon Bradley sent word to Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, who was in Korea, advising him of the change of command and telling him to fly to Japan at once to inform MacArthur. Unfortunately for those who wished to soften the blow to the general’s pride, Pace was cut off by a power failure, trapped in a tent during a hailstorm. Meanwhile the White House press secretary announced the news to a hastily called 1 A.M. press conference, releasing the text of the message which, Truman mistakenly thought, had just been delivered in Tokyo:
***
To General MacArthur from the President.
I deeply regret that it becomes my duty as President and Commander-in-Chief of the United States military forces to replace you as Supreme Commander, Allied Powers; Commander-in-Chief, United Nations Command; Commander-in-Chief, Far East; and Commanding General, U.S. Army, Far East.
You will turn over your commands, effective at once, to Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway. You are authorized to have issued such orders as are necessary to complete desired travel to such place as you select.
My reasons for your replacement will be made public concurrently with the delivery to you of the foregoing message.
But it wasn’t concurrent; the hailstorm fixed that. As Pace waited for it to abate, reporters at the White House hastily copied the presidential statement—“With deep regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States and of the United Nations…”—and sent it flashing around the world. In Tokyo, where the time was 3 P.M., an aide who happened to be listening to a news broadcast told Mrs. MacArthur and then the general, who was lunching with Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington.
***
Mac is Sacked, the London Evening Standard announced, and Murray Schumach of the New York Times cabled from Seoul, “The widespread feeling among officers of field rank is that the relationship between General Headquarters in Tokyo and the Eighth Army in Korea will become more pleasant.” But that was not the reaction in the United States. There a large part of the public, frustrated by the war no one could win, register
ed its displeasure with Harry Truman in every way short of actual violence. Flags were flown upside down or at half-mast from Eastham, Massachusetts, to Oakland, California. In San Gabriel, California, and Worcester, Massachusetts, Truman was burned in effigy; Ponca City, Oklahoma, burned an effigy of Acheson. Petitions were circulated. Clergymen fulminated in their pulpits. New anti-Truman jokes were heard: “This wouldn’t have happened if Truman were alive,” and “I’m going to have a Truman beer—just like any other beer except that it hasn’t got a head.” The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner suggested that the President was befuddled by drugs, and the Daily Oklahoman called the dismissal “a crime carried out in the dead of night,” overlooking the fact that the dead of night in Oklahoma was broad daylight in Tokyo.
The Los Angeles City Council adjourned “in sorrowful contemplation of the political assassination” of MacArthur. The California, Florida, and Michigan legislatures passed resolutions censuring Truman. In Charlestown, Maryland, a woman was told she couldn’t send a telegram to the White House calling the President a moron; she and the clerk rummaged through a Roget’s Thesaurus until they found the acceptable “witling.” Other Western Union offices were more permissive. Among the wires from constituents inserted in the Congressional Record by proud representatives on the Hill were IMPEACH THE IMBECILE; WE WISH TO PROTEST THE LATEST OUTRAGE ON THE PART OF THE PIG IN THE WHITE HOUSE; IMPEACH THE JUDAS IN THE WHITE HOUSE WHO SOLD US DOWN THE RIVER TO THE LEFT WINGERS AND THE UN; SUGGEST YOU LOOK FOR ANOTHER HISS IN BLAIR HOUSE; WHEN AN EX-NATIONAL GUARD CAPTAIN FIRES A FIVE-STAR GENERAL IMPEACHMENT OF THE NATIONAL GUARD CAPTAIN IS IN ORDER; IMPEACH THE B WHO CALLS HIMSELF PRESIDENT; IMPEACH THE LITTLE WARD POLITICIAN STUPIDITY FROM KANSAS CITY; AND IMPEACH THE RED HERRING FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL CHAIR.
The White House mail room was swamped. The President’s press office ruefully acknowledged that in the first 27,363 letters and telegrams counted, critics of the dismissal outnumbered those who supported it twenty to one. George Gallup found that 69 percent of the voters backed MacArthur, and only 29 percent Truman. Truman was booed at Griffith Stadium—the first public booing of a President since Hoover in 1932. Senator Jenner said, “This country today is in the hands of a secret coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union.” Senator McCarthy told a Milwaukee meeting that the President was “a son of a bitch” surrounded by henchmen drunk on “bourbon and benedictine,” and Congressman Martin, in whose office the first GOP caucus was held the morning after the dismissal, told reporters that “the question of impeachments was discussed,” implying that not just Truman but his entire administration might be tried.
After that caucus Martin invited MacArthur to address a joint session of Congress. The general accepted immediately; for an orator of his gifts, this was the chance of a lifetime. He was accepting his ouster philosophically, even serenely. “I have just left him,” Major General Courtney Whitney told the press. “He received the word of the President’s dismissal from command magnificently. He never turned a hair. His soldierly qualities were never more pronounced. This has been his finest hour.” On April 17 the Bataan put down at the San Francisco airport and he set foot on his native soil for the first time since his first retirement from the Army fourteen years earlier. As he appeared at the head of the gangway, his gold-encrusted hat and his dramatic trench coat bathed in spotlights, the elated crowd surged toward him. Two hours were required for his motorcade to crawl through fourteen miles of cheering people to the St. Francis Hotel, where the city’s police force linked arms to save him, his wife, and thirteen-year-old Arthur MacArthur II from being trampled to death. Next day one hundred thousand Californians hurrahed again when he stood on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall and declared, “The only politics I have is contained in a single phrase known well by all of you—God Bless America!”
At Washington National Airport MacArthur was greeted by a seventeen-gun salute and the Joint Chiefs, who presented him with a silver tea service. There was an awkward moment then. He was cordial to the Chiefs, unaware of their role in his martyrdom, but frosty toward the President’s representative, an old National Guard crony of Truman’s. Harry Vaughan slipped away muttering, and the way was clear for the hero’s triumphant ride through three hundred thousand rooting Washingtonians. The hour’s most memorable moment came at 12:30 P.M., April 19, when the listening country heard the radio networks pick up the House doorkeeper’s announcement: “Mr. Speaker, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.”
The general strode to the rostrum and stood erect and impassive as the senators and congressmen cheered until they were hoarse. “I address you,” he said at last, “with neither rancor or bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: To serve my country.” They went wild again. And again. And again. Altogether his thirty-four-minute address was interrupted by thirty ovations. Of those who argued that America could not fight a two-front war he said, “I can think of no greater expression of defeatism. If a potential enemy can divide his strength on two fronts, it is for us to counter his effort. You cannot appease or otherwise surrender to Communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.” His voice dropped a register: “Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” After a pause he almost whispered, “I could not answer.”
In tears, he said at the end: “I am closing out 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. Since I took the oath at West Point, the hopes and dreams have all vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day, which proclaimed most proudly that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the right to see that duty. Good-bye.”
***
Sperry Rand had announced that MacArthur had joined its board of directors, but obviously he was not going to fade away there or elsewhere. His peroration had struck so deep a chord in the hearts of his admirers that some of them thought of him as divine. “We heard God speak here today,” cried Representative Dewey Short of Missouri, “God in the flesh, the voice of God.” Herbert Hoover, another President whom the general had crossed, now spoke of him as “a reincarnation of St. Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East.” One senator said, “It’s disloyal not to agree with General MacArthur,” and six thousand Daughters of the American Revolution, whom he addressed later in the afternoon, agreed. It was the DAR’s Sixtieth Continental Congress in Constitution Hall. The ladies had voted to remove their hats so they wouldn’t obscure one another’s view of the general. He didn’t disappoint them. “In this hour of crisis, all patriots look to you,” he said, and “I have long sought personally to pay you the tribute that is in my heart.”
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 agreed with one voice, to strike the word “probably.” By then MacArthur was in New York, the center of a historic demonstration. Over 2,859 tons of litter were being dumped on him, four times the previous record (for Eisenhower). Police put the number of spectators at 7,500,000, which was absurd, but it was certainly the largest crowd Manhattan had ever seen. Forty thousand longshoremen walked off their jobs to be there. Schools were closed. People crossed themselves as the general’s limousine passed. Women sobbed into handkerchiefs. Eighteen victims of hysteria were hospitalized. Enterprising notion vendors with MacArthur buttons, pennants, and corncob pipes from the 1948 MacArthur-for-President campaign were sold out, and the only other business in business was Tin Pan Alley, whose tune-smiths were turning out five recordings of:
Old soldiers never die, never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die,
They just fade away.1
“The country,” said Senator James Duff of Pennsylvania, “is on a great emotional binge.” Florists were offering a Douglas MacArthur tea rose (“needing no coddling or favor”) and MacArthur orchids, cacti, gladioli, geraniums, peonies, and irises. At the Waldorf Astoria, where the MacArthurs checked into a $130-a-day suite, the switchboard began receiving three thousand calls a day from people who wanted to speak to the general. There he paid his respects to Hoover and was himself visited by Cardinal Spellman and a parade of powerful Republicans: Senator Taft, Senator Styles Bridges, Colonel McCormick, Henry Luce, and William Randolph Hearst. It was evident that politics was very much on the general’s mind. In a series of speeches before state legislatures, beginning in Massachusetts, he attacked Truman’s “appeasement on the battlefield” and his “timidity” in domestic and foreign policy. The President let these criticisms pass until MacArthur, speaking to an American Legion convention, claimed that his March offer to negotiate with the enemy had wrecked a “secret plan” by U.S. leaders to abandon Formosa to the Chinese Communists and give Peking a U.N. seat in exchange for peace in Korea. Truman said that was a lie, and that the general knew it. But by then the emotional binge was over. MacArthur was in politics up to his pipe and braided cap, and everybody knew it now, for he had been chosen to deliver the keynote address at the 1952 Republican National Convention.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 84