A Treasury of Great American Scandals

by Michael Farquhar

  Basking in the glow of victory, and perhaps intent on scoring a few political points, Truman flew to Wake Island in the Pacific to meet MacArthur for the first (and, as it turned out, last) time. By most accounts it was a cordial encounter, although the general was decidedly rude at times, refusing to salute his commander-in-chief, for example, and rebuffing his invitation to stay for lunch. While little of substance was discussed during the meeting, Truman did ask about the chances of Chinese or Soviet intervention in the war now that MacArthur’s military objective was the destruction of the North Korean forces in their own territory.

  MacArthur had in fact been given permission to cross the thirty-eighth parallel into North Korea after the success at Inchon, so long as Chinese or Soviet forces did not become involved and their borders with North Korea were kept off-limits to MacArthur’s forces. In assuring the president that there was little chance of intervention, MacArthur, as historian Geoffrey Perret writes, “delivered up one of the fattest hostages to fortune ever seen in a century that has been filled with calamitous bad guesses.” Sure enough, the Chinese did get involved.

  MacArthur had practically invited them, ignoring the administration’s restrictions against sending troops anywhere near the Chinese border. With only tepid resistance coming from Washington, he pushed far into North Korea, launching what he called one powerful “end-of-war” offensive that he said might get the troops “home in time for Christmas.” Instead, it got thousands of them slaughtered. The Chinese responded to MacArthur’s far northern push with a ferocious counterattack, sending down a horde of nearly 30,000 men who pushed MacArthur’s forces back below the thirty-eighth parallel and well beyond.

  Of those not killed in the retreat south, many died of hypothermia and pneumonia in the harsh Korean winter. President Truman was devastated. “His mouth drew tight,” witnessed author John Hersey, “his cheeks flushed. For a moment, it almost seemed as if he would sob. Then in a voice that was incredibly calm and quiet, considering what could be read on his face—a voice of absolute courage—he said, ‘This is the worst situation we have had yet. We’ll just have to meet it as we’ve met all the rest.’ ” MacArthur, too, was reeling. “This command . . . ,” he said, “is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength.” But in their views on how to deal with the terrible setback, the general and the commander-in-chief were utterly opposed.

  Truman was more determined than ever to avoid a greater conflagration. “There was no doubt in my mind,” he later wrote, “that we should not allow the action in Korea to extend to a general war. All-out military action against China had to be avoided, if for no other reason than because it was a gigantic booby trap.” MacArthur disagreed, of course, advocating a widening of the war by, among other things, bombing China. In addition, he warned that if another 200,000 troops were not immediately sent to Korea, either the U.N. Command would be annihilated or it would have to be evacuated. The administration’s restrictions in dealing with China amounted to “an enormous handicap without precedent in military history,” he told U. S. News & World Report in one of a series of face-saving public pronouncements.

  The general’s indiscretion enraged Truman. “I should have relieved General MacArthur then and there,” he later wrote. Though the administration quickly issued a gag order on all military commanders and senior civil servants, it was clearly aimed at one man—Douglas MacArthur. But it would take a lot more than an order from Washington to shut this general up, especially as events in Korea started to improve again.

  MacArthur had requested that Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway be appointed to serve under him as commander of the Eighth Army after the death of General Walton Walker. Ridgway, one of the finest combat commanders of World War II, was a brilliant choice on MacArthur’s part, although his great success in Korea would come to make MacArthur’s gloomy forecasts of imminent disaster look ridiculous. Ridgway quickly rallied the battered and demoralized Eighth Army and led it to a succession of crushing victories over the Chinese, decimating their forces and pushing them back to the thirty-eighth parallel. MacArthur later tried to claim credit for Ridgway’s outstanding performance, but “the mantle of military genius draped around him since Inchon was trailing in the mud,” writes Geoffrey Perret. Ridgway was now the man in Korea, while MacArthur, as General Omar Bradley put it, had become “mainly a prima donna figurehead who had to be tolerated.” Truman’s tolerance, however, was rapidly eroding.

  It didn’t matter to MacArthur how successful Ridgway had been in hammering the Chinese. He still wanted to widen the war and reunite Korea. At one point he even made the almost insane suggestion that the Korean peninsula be severed from China’s border by creating a radioactive desert of nuclear debris between them. The general was stunned, therefore, when the Truman administration took the great gains made by Ridgway as an opportunity to open peace talks with China. He was convinced that the president’s nerves were at the breaking point, as he later wrote, “not only his nerves, but what was far more menacing in the Chief Executive of a country at war—his nerve.” Settling with China now would be an outrage, he felt, keeping the situation in Korea more or less the same as it was before the North Korean invasion. This would be not a victory but a stinging insult to the thousands of men who had died fighting.

  Rather than allow what he saw as a shameful capitulation to Communism, MacArthur determined to short-circuit the administration’s peace feelers by issuing a direct threat to the Chinese on his own initiative. He called on them to admit defeat or face the risk of “a decision by the United Nations to depart from its tolerant efforts to contain the war to the area of Korea” by expanding military operations to China’s coastal areas and interior bases, which “would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.” In one subversive stroke, MacArthur had sabotaged Truman’s peace efforts.

  “I couldn’t send a message to the Chinese after that,” the president later said of MacArthur’s brazen threat. “I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea. . . . I was never so put out in my life. . . . MacArthur thought he was the proconsul for the government of the United States and could do as he damned pleased.” And yet Truman felt powerless to act. The country was firmly behind the famous general, and it would take another major misstep for the president to move against MacArthur. He wouldn’t have to wait long.

  House Minority Leader Joe Martin had given a speech early in 1951 calling for the use of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops in Korea and accusing Truman of a defeatist policy. “What are we in Korea for,” he demanded, “to win or lose? . . . If we are not in Korea to win, then this administration should be indicted for the murder of American boys.” Martin then sent a copy of his speech to MacArthur, who candidly responded in a letter that he heartily endorsed the speech. With no pretense of confidentiality, the general criticized, among other things, the Eurocentricism of American foreign policy, which was at the expense of the Far East. “If we lose this war to Communism,” he wrote to Martin, “the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it, and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom.” In the end, though, what galled MacArthur most was the prospect of how the Korean War was going to end. “There is no substitute for victory,” he exclaimed. On April 5, Joe Martin read the text of MacArthur’s letter on the House floor, claiming that the administration’s misguided policy in Korea compelled him to do it.

  That same evening Truman wrote in his diary: “This looks like the last straw. Rank insubordination.” MacArthur had to go. The general seemed to know it, too. After meeting with one of his field officers, Edward Almond, he said, “I may not see you anymore, so goodbye, Ned.” Confused, Almond asked him why. “I have become politically involved,” MacArthur responded, “and may be relieved by the President.”

  The end came after several days of high level discussions within the Truman administration. The president knew he was in for “a great furor,” but was willing to endure it. He signed the order relieving M
acArthur of all his commands on April 10, 1951. Word leaked out, though, and the president was warned that if MacArthur heard about the order before it reached him, he might preempt it by resigning first. “The son of a bitch isn’t going to resign on me,” Truman fumed. “I want him fired!” The dismissal was announced in a hastily arranged press conference that night. MacArthur, who didn’t find out until the next day, was almost the last to know.

  “Publicly humiliated after fifty-two years in the Army,” he reflected bitterly. Years later he wrote, “No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies.” While MacArthur’s dismissal perhaps could have been handled with more decency, Truman made no apologies for the deed itself: “The American people will come to understand that what I did had to be done.”

  10

  LBJ vs. RFK

  President Lyndon B. Johnson was seething. Paul Corbin, a member of the Democratic National Committee and a supporter of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was orchestrating a movement to get his man on the ticket as Johnson’s running mate in the upcoming 1964 New Hampshire primary. Johnson despised Kennedy and wanted Corbin’s Bobby-for-veep campaign stopped cold. “We either make him desist or get rid of him,” Johnson demanded, adding later through an intermediary that Kennedy himself should fire Corbin.

  “Tell him to go to hell,” the attorney general snorted upon hearing the president’s order. Since very few would be willing to tell the president of the United States where he could stick his order, Kennedy had to face Johnson himself in a most unpleasant meeting at the Oval Office. “It was a bitter, mean conversation,” Kennedy later recalled. “It was the meanest tone I’d ever heard.” Indeed the president was in no mood for niceties, and bluntly gave notice that he wanted Corbin out of New Hampshire and off the DNC. “He was loyal to President [John F.] Kennedy; he’ll be loyal to you,” Johnson barked. “Get him out of there. Do you understand? I want you to get rid of him.”

  Johnson’s deep animosity toward his attorney general, brother of the late president and inherited from that administration, was certainly mutual. “I don’t want to have this kind of conversation with you,” Kennedy said in response to Johnson’s tirade. Corbin, he said, was harmless, and not his responsibility anyway. “He was appointed by President Kennedy, who thought he was good.” This was just what Johnson, already self-conscious of the fact that his accidental presidency was due only to JFK’s assassination, did not want to hear. “Do it,” he demanded. “President Kennedy isn’t president anymore. I am.” Johnson’s vitriol stunned and wounded Kennedy, who struggled to maintain his composure. “I know you’re president,” he said evenly, “and don’t you ever talk to me like that again.” With that, the attorney general stormed out of the White House in a white rage.

  Unpleasant as it was, the scene between Johnson and Kennedy was just one episode in the epic feud that consumed both men for nearly a decade. To Johnson, Bobby Kennedy was a “snot-nosed little son-of-a-bitch,” who sought to undermine him at every opportunity. Kennedy, on the other hand, felt nothing but contempt for Johnson, whom he viewed as a liar, a bully, and a pretender to the throne. “This man . . . ,” he said, “is mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” As historian Jeff Shesol writes, the antagonism between the two men “spawned political turf battles across the United States. It divided constituencies [they] once shared and weakened their party by forcing its members to choose between them. It captivated the newly powerful media that portrayed every disagreement . . . as part of a prolonged battle for the presidency or a claim on the legacy of the fallen JFK. It helped propel one to the Senate and drive the other from the White House.” And, Shesol might have added, it was as entertaining a clash of personalities as any in American history.

  The tenor of the relationship between LBJ and RFK was established early on, late in 1959, when Kennedy, then acting as campaign manager for his brother Jack’s nascent presidential bid, visited Johnson at his Texas ranch to find out if the powerful Senate majority leader had any presidential ambitions of his own. Johnson assured Kennedy that he did not, and took his guest deer hunting. Upon spotting a deer, Kennedy fired his borrowed shotgun at the quarry. The gun’s powerful recoil knocked him to the ground, cutting his forehead. Johnson seemed to revel in Kennedy’s humiliation. “Son,” he said, “you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.”

  To the scrappy young man once considered the runt of the Kennedy litter, and whose parents feared he would grow up to be a sissy, Johnson’s crack must have stung. But any shame Bobby Kennedy might have felt at the time was soon replaced by anger when he found out that Lyndon Johnson had lied to him and entered the presidential race. He was further inflamed when Johnson implied that his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had been a Nazi appeaser while serving as ambassador to Great Britain at the dawn of World War II. “You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you’re gonna get yours when the time comes!” he fumed at Johnson aide Bobby Baker. Kennedy would prove to be true to his word.

  Johnson’s presidential campaign had fizzled when Jack Kennedy began considering him as a possible running mate, despite the earlier mudslinging. What followed was an awkward dance. Would Kennedy actually offer Johnson the spot, and if so, would LBJ take it? On the morning of July 14, 1960, Jack Kennedy met with Johnson. Accounts vary as to the substance of the conversation, but from Bobby Kennedy’s point of view, his brother was merely trying to gauge Johnson’s feelings—to dangle the vice presidential prospect before him—and no firm decisions about a running mate had been made. He was horrified, therefore, when JFK returned from the meeting with the grim news that LBJ had interpreted his overtures as an actual offer and had accepted. Bobby later told his biographer Arthur Schlesinger that “the idea that [JFK would] offer him the nomination in hopes that he’d take [it] is not true. The reason he went down [to Johnson’s suite at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles] . . . was because there were enough indications from others that [Johnson] wanted to be offered the nomination. But [JFK] never dreamt that there was a chance in the world that he would accept it.” It now fell to Bobby Kennedy to undo what he termed “the terrible mistake.” His efforts at doing so only served to further alienate the two men.

  Several meetings between the Kennedy and Johnson camps solved nothing, a situation further aggravated by the fact that Jack Kennedy had decided at one point that it would be unwise to try to remove Johnson once word leaked out to the convention that he would be on the ticket. Bobby Kennedy, apparently unaware of his brother’s final decision, which had already been confirmed with Johnson, again visited LBJ’s suite hoping to get him to withdraw. Wounded by the contradictions coming from the Kennedys, and believing them to be maliciously orchestrated by Bobby, Johnson refused to budge. LBJ, Bobby Kennedy later said, “is one of the greatest sad-looking people in the world. You know, he can turn that on. I thought he’d burst into tears. . . . He just shook, and tears came into his eyes, and he said, ‘I want to be Vice President, and if [JFK] will have me, I’ll join him in making a fight for it.’ It was that kind of conversation.” Kennedy wasn’t privy to other conversations in which an outraged Johnson called him “that little shit-ass,” among other epithets even more colorful. He was convinced that RFK had deliberately, and of his own initiative, set out to sabotage his political future.

  After John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, Lyndon Johnson—like so many before him—was left impotent in the role of vice president. Robert Kennedy was determined to keep him that way. As attorney general and one of his brother’s closest advisors, RFK was, in the words of the president, “the second most powerful man in the world.” U.S. News & World Report proclaimed him to be “the number two man in Washington . . . second only to the president in power and influence.” The attorney general rarely missed an opportunity to lord his status over the vice president, barging in on Johnson’s private meetings with the presid
ent to address business he considered more important, or making a mockery of him among the political and media elite who gathered at his Hickory Hill estate.

  On one occasion, President Kennedy had to leave a White House meeting with a group of civil rights leaders and asked LBJ to conclude the session for him. Johnson, rarely given much of a role in anything, seemed pleased to do so. Bobby Kennedy, also in attendance and itching to leave as well, instructed a staffer to tell the vice president to cut it short. The staffer was reluctant to perform such a potentially unpleasant task, however, and did nothing. Irate, Kennedy called him over again. “Didn’t I tell you to tell the vice president to shut up?” he snapped. With that, the frightened staffer eased his way over to Johnson’s chair and whispered to him the attorney general’s order to wrap it up. Johnson glared up at him, but kept on talking—and talking, going on for another ten or fifteen minutes while Bobby Kennedy stewed.

  On another occasion, the attorney general stormed into a meeting of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, of which Johnson was chairman, and began bombarding committee members with questions about employment progress and other issues in Birmingham, Alabama. Johnson listened to Kennedy’s barrage with growing impatience, finally interjecting the committee’s position on many of the issues the attorney general was raising. Unsatisfied, Kennedy began lobbing questions at the vice president. “It was a brutal performance, very sharp,” recalled one person in attendance. “It brought tensions between Johnson and Kennedy right out on the table, and very hard. Everybody was sweating under the armpits.”