by Conrad Black
Marshall was not particularly needed at the Pentagon, and Robert Lovett, who succeeded him, would have been perfectly adequate had he assumed the office a year earlier. Acheson was a very able secretary of state, but he had contributed at least as much to the Korean imbroglio post–November 1950 by his January 12 speech to the National Press Club as MacArthur had by carrying out his orders from Truman and the UN, from which neither Marshall nor Acheson dissented. And Bradley, a popular soldiers’ general, but out of his depth in the same exalted five-star company as Marshall, Eisenhower, and MacArthur, to which he was elevated for mistakenly opposing the epochally brilliant Inchon operation, was completely dispensable and easily replaceable, unlike MacArthur, whose dismissal the limited-war and orderly-retreat advocates now persistently demanded, in a buzz that was constantly in the president’s ears.
Truman was a man of good sense, high courage, absolute integrity, keen intelligence, and impeccable sense of duty, but he uncharacteristically erred in trying to support MacArthur while endorsing a policy that MacArthur cogently opposed. MacArthur had either to be backed in his recommended policy or told that he would have to mend his ambitions to conform to the administration’s views or retire back to the military government of Japan, where all conceded his effectiveness. By allowing the chasm between himself and the theater commander to widen, Truman gave hostages to the Chinese, and created a fissure that would require measures to resolve that were so draconian that they terminated, prematurely and acrimoniously, the careers of both men, a great general and a distinguished president.
British prime minister Clement Attlee, at the first mention (by Truman) of atomic weapons, rushed across the Atlantic with his coat-tails trailing behind him, to offer to broker America’s evacuation of Korea. British military units were loyally and capably serving (in modest numbers) in the United Nations forces in Korea, but the British were chiefly concerned not to provoke the Chinese to attack Hong Kong or to increase the pressure already being asserted in the so-called civil war in Malaya (which the Chinese stoked up but the British were resourcefully fighting). Truman declined and said that there would be no use of nuclear weapons, but that he would rather be ejected in honorable defeat than enter the cowardly negotiations that Attlee was offering, though he stressed his confidence that no such fiasco was in prospect. The allies were panicking as dissension sapped Truman’s own inner circle.
10. TRUMAN AND MACARTHUR
Field commander Walton Walker died in an automobile crash on December 23, 1950, and MacArthur requested, and Truman immediately agreed on, General Matthew Ridgway as his replacement. Ridgway arrived on Christmas Day and was given absolute authority over his command by MacArthur and began a very swift shaping up of what had become a rather shaggy and demoralized army. The New Year, 1951, opened on this relatively upbeat note as Ridgway started to reenergize his command, but MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs were all asking for the use of atomic weapons in Manchuria, a step Truman would not countenance. In strictly military terms, the senior officers were correct; atomic weapons would have ended the Chinese intrusion in Korea and Stalin would not have attempted a reprisal. But there were larger, humanitarian and policy considerations, and the ultimate potential of productive relations with China (which Truman lived to see) to be considered. And the service chiefs had to be weaned away from the facile reflex of demanding use of the ultimate weapon whenever something disagreeable happened. No retaliation would have occurred then, but Truman sagely saw that the United States could not revert to atomic weapons whenever the conventional going got rough, and be confident that it would never be the recipient of the use of such arms. The United Nations was not going to be pushed back to Pusan, but there was no visible way to end the war except by a variant of what MacArthur was proposing, including use of Nationalist Chinese forces and conventional bombing of Manchuria. MacArthur was in fairly open disagreement with the administration, with a good deal of encouragement from the service chiefs and the Republicans and southern Democrats, in a way that Truman’s ambivalence had somewhat encouraged. It had become a policy schism that was becoming increasingly necessary, and difficult, to heal.
Truman wrote MacArthur on January 13—expressing what Acheson, who had been fired for insubordination by Roosevelt and was at least as pig-headed as MacArthur, considered “infinite” (i.e., excessive) “patience,” that “great prudence” must be shown not to involve “Japan or Western Europe in large-scale hostilities,” even envisioning the possibility that “if we must withdraw from Korea, it be clear to the world that that course was forced on us by military necessity and that we shall not accept the result politically or militarily until the aggression has been rectified.” This was the crux of the command problem: Truman was correct not to consider the use of nuclear weapons, but he should not have contemplated—and there was no military reason to consider, and MacArthur assured him there was no reason to fear—being evicted from the peninsula. Truman should have called for an expanded conventional war. There was no reason not to respond to the direct aggression by China. In those respects, though not in declining to dissent from the Joint Chiefs’ proposed nuclear hip-shooting, MacArthur was correct. But Truman was the commander-in-chief; presidents have the constitutional duty to exercise their best judgment and the right to make mistakes, and insubordination from any commander is intolerable. MacArthur was getting perilously close to it, egged on by hawks of both parties in Congress, and not subject to serious efforts at dissuasion by the Joint Chiefs or even Defense Secretary Marshall, who both had the authority to contradict the theater commander in the name of the president.
Truman declared a national emergency, imposed wage and price controls, and completed the quadrupling of the defense budget in the course of the year to over $50 billion. On January 17, Marshall read Truman a report over the telephone from Korea that Ridgway was confident that he could repel any attack, and that no evacuation of Korea was in prospect. The theory has arisen that MacArthur had forecast being pushed out of Korea and that Ridgway was responsible for a miraculous resurrection of the Eighth Army.146 This is not sustained by an analysis of the cables. The CIA had made that claim, but MacArthur had said that “Under the extraordinary limitations and conditions imposed upon the command in Korea ... its military position is untenable, but it can hold if overriding political considerations so dictate, for any length of time up to its complete destruction” (which would only occur if suicide attacks from the Chinese continued indefinitely and his own losses were not replaced). MacArthur disagreed with a defined objective short of victory, and disputed the morality of asking draftees to risk and give their lives for an objective short of victory, but he never suggested that he could be thrown out of Korea, unless he were abandoned virtually as he had been at Corregidor nine years before.
Ridgway commanded his army very well and aggressively, and retook Seoul on March 15, and regained the 38th parallel at the end of that month. He had 365,000 men (counting the South Koreans and other allies) to 480,000 for the enemy, which, given United Nations air superiority, made any eviction from Korea inconceivable. But MacArthur wanted a united Korea, and was accused by Acheson in particular of “fighting the Pentagon” while “Ridgway was fighting the enemy.” This was an unfair allegation. MacArthur was the theater commander and cannot be excluded from credit for retrieving the situation yet again; he enjoyed the substantial agreement of a waffling Pentagon (including two other five-star generals, Marshall and Bradley), and was far from morose at the gains of his own forces, contrary to the claims of his opponents.147
Truman submitted a draft cease-fire proposal to the 17 other UN allies in the UN on March 21, and MacArthur was sent the highlights of it the day before. The MacArthur faction concluded that Truman had lost his nerve, and the Truman faction shortly concluded that MacArthur had taken leave of his senses, as he issued a statement on March 24 threatening to expand the war by blockading China and conventionally bombing the Chinese interior, which he predicted would produce the
collapse of the People’s Republic. (He was not, contrary to some of the cacophonous name-calling that ensued, threatening or advocating the use of atomic weapons.)
The die was cast and Truman, whatever the strategic rights and wrongs, had to assert the authority of his office, within the U.S. command structure, and vis-à-vis his allies, who undoubtedly preferred the Truman to the MacArthur view (except for the South Koreans and Nationalist Chinese, who were the most important allies in the war), and also to be clear to the Chinese and the Russians. Acheson, Marshall’s under secretary, Lovett, and Bradley, along with juniors such as Rusk, wanted MacArthur fired, and Truman was enraged, but on March 14, the Gallup organization put the president’s popularity at 26 percent. MacArthur had immense prestige and he was offering victory in a war that had now inflicted 169,000 casualties on the South Koreans and 57,000 on the United States (and barely 3,000 on all the other allies together).
Truman was commissioning research on Lincoln’s dismissal of General McClellan in 1862 (Chapter 6), as if there were the slightest comparison between the generals or the circumstances, but the issue blew up on April 5 when Republican House leader Joe Martin (the durable subject of FDR’s “Martin, Barton, and Fish” speech in 1940, and once and future Speaker of the House) read in the House an exchange of correspondence he had had with MacArthur in the previous month. MacArthur had not described as confidential his reply to Martin’s request for his “views” on a speech censorious of the administration that Martin had given, and in his reply MacArthur agreed that the Nationalist Chinese should be used and stated that “There is no substitute for victory.”
Despite the obviously impossible impasse, Truman kept his own counsel, Marshall and Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson (Vinson’s role in this is even more incongruous than Harriman’s or Rusk’s) urged caution, the Joint Chiefs were divided (as usual throughout these matters), and even Acheson was hesitant, while Speaker Sam Rayburn was non-committal. They were all afraid to bell the cat. Truman’s entourage was full of hot-headed advice about disposing of MacArthur, which was certainly understandable. But Truman could easily have retrieved matters even at this late date by warning MacArthur in dire terms and inciting the inference in the camps of friends and foes that he and MacArthur were coordinating a stick-and-carrot approach to the Communists; Mao and Stalin were so morbidly suspicious, they probably assumed that that was what was happening anyway.
On April 8, the Joint Chiefs finally concluded that MacArthur had to go, because he had divided his forces (though he had sought and received the authority to do so), because he had launched his November offensive without adequate intelligence (though he was relying on the CIA, which he did not command and which had a wholly inadequate capacity to assess guerrilla activities and forces), because the Chiefs had concluded that MacArthur had lost confidence in himself (a gratuitous and utterly fatuous observation entirely beyond their capabilities and authority to make), and because of MacArthur’s insubordination toward the president, but not to them, since he had contravened no instructions from the Joint Chiefs. The last was the only legitimate ground they invoked, and the erratic and sometimes Iago-like activities of Bradley are suspect here, as he had opposed Inchon and undercut MacArthur. There were also a lot of irritating junior-level busybodies, led by Harriman and Rusk. They were constantly demanding MacArthur’s dismissal, although the only standing they had was Truman’s practice to consult rather widely, unlike most other successful U.S. presidents. (Roosevelt almost never consulted anybody about anything, and when he did, he rarely paid any attention to the advice he received.) At the last minute, Truman, who had been convinced that MacArthur wished to be fired, suddenly became almost neurotic that he was going to resign and so held a press conference at 1:00 a.m. on April 11 to dismiss MacArthur, having sent Secretary of the Army Frank Pace to Tokyo to hand the general personal notice of his dismissal and spare him the embarrassment of having such a message come through lower-level communication channels.
The outcry exceeded even what had been anticipated. Thousands of longshoremen walked off their jobs, four state legislatures condemned the president, and a unanimous Republican congressional leadership called for an impeachment inquiry and invited MacArthur to address a special session of Congress. The Los Angeles city council adjourned for a day of “sorrowful contemplation of the political assassination of General MacArthur,” and flags throughout the country were lowered or flown upside down. A few senators, Walter Lippmann, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other liberal media, as well as the British and the French, who had token forces in Korea, supported Truman. MacArthur received overwhelming popular welcomes in San Francisco when he arrived on April 17 and in other cities, and addressed the Congress on April 19.
It was one of the most eloquently formulated and delivered speeches in American history. Though best remembered for the ending, invoking a barrack ballad about how “Old soldiers never die,” the core of the address was his statement “I know war as few other men now living have known it, and nothing to me is more revolting. But once the aggressions of an enemy have forced war upon us, there is no alternative but to apply every available means to bring that war to the swiftest possible victorious conclusion at the minimum possible cost in American and allied lives.... In war, there is no substitute for victory.”
He buttressed this with what he called “my understanding that the above views are shared by practically every military commander familiar with the Korean theater including our own Joint Chiefs of Staff.” By this time everyone in the administration was fighting for his life against the tide of MacArthur support, and Truman, Marshall, and Bradley had to, and did, get the Chiefs into a goal-line defense of the president. On April 20, MacArthur received the greatest personal welcome in American history, a stupefying turnout of an estimated 7,500,000 cheering supporters in New York City.
Hearings on Korea and the dismissal of MacArthur opened before the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Democratic senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, on May 3. MacArthur was eloquent but unphilosophical, completely self-absorbed, and incapable of admitting a possibility of his own error, and he parried all questions about strategic problems that could be triggered by events in the Far East or in other theaters, such as Europe. Marshall and the Joint Chiefs testified under intense but very courteous questioning for 19 days. To all but the lunatic McCarthyite right, Marshall’s prestige was as great as MacArthur’s, and Marshall spoke of MacArthur, whom he had sponsored for the Congressional Medal of Honor nine years before, as a great soldier and commander for whom he had “tremendous respect.” Marshall emphasized that the administration had not renounced a possibility of easy victory (which is not what MacArthur had suggested), and compared it to the “notable victory” in Berlin (the airlift), which had taken five months longer to achieve than the current duration of the Korean War. (They were hardly comparable, as Marshall was perfectly aware, since a shot had not been fired nor a casualty sustained in the Berlin airlift.)
Marshall implied, but did not say, that the choice was between saving South Korea and tolerating the continued existence of North Korea, and a much wider and possibly world and atomic war. This was just speculation, and in the light of subsequent events is known to be mistaken, and should have seemed so then. Stalin was in no position to exchange atomic fire with the U.S., and no one was going to help Mao Tse-tung, whose staying power after 30 years of civil and foreign war in a primitive country was not unlimited. Even if his reserves of manpower might have appeared so, his numbers of adequately trained forces were very limited. The United States could have turned the entire Soviet Union into a radioactive rubble heap in a few days at minimal risk to itself, though the reluctance of Truman to consider such a denouement was to his credit. But he should have remembered who he was dealing with in Stalin, who would certainly take such a threat seriously, as the Chinese did when Truman’s successor made it two years later.
Bradley followed, and uttered the most famous lin
e of the hearings—that following MacArthur’s recommendations would “involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Strategically, MacArthur was correct, and Bradley’s quip was bunk. It would not have been so difficult to expel China from Korea, and the failure to do so has inflicted the terribly tedious and vexing burden of North Korea on the world for all posterity to date. MacArthur was not adequately advised of the change in mission statement from the reunification of Korea that he was ordered to effect after salvaging the campaign at Inchon, to the limited war to hold the 38th parallel after the Chinese intervention. Truman had every right to conclude that getting rid of North Korea was not worth the cost, as his successor also concluded, but he and his entourage should have been more careful about endlessly professing to think it was a choice between the 38th parallel and a world—atomic, or otherwise prohibitively terrible—war.
Truman and his admirers have translated the firing of MacArthur into a triumph of selfless courage, but it was both unnecessary and a disaster. The ultimate issue was insubordination, but it should not have been allowed to develop as it did, and the absolute, belatedly recognized, and negligently aggravated necessities of a great office should not be mistaken for courage, as Truman’s partisans have claimed, with general success. The fact that Harry S. Truman certainly was a courageous man and president makes his dithering and ultimately overreaction in this case the more disappointing. Truman should have moved earlier to curtail MacArthur’s undoubted egomania, as the inexhaustibly confident patrician, Roosevelt, did a number of times (resolving one disagreement with the point that he, not MacArthur, had been elected president, though allegedly allowing that it could have been a case of mistaken identity). Truman should have warned MacArthur to accept administration policy as it evolved or retire gracefully back to Tokyo. Sacking him from all positions in the middle of the night was a shabby, fearful, and spiteful act. All the nonsense about the two men cracking up was terribly undignified, considering their stature—MacArthur compared himself to the music critic who had panned Margaret Truman’s talents and received a threatening letter from her father; Bradley had compared MacArthur to Forrestal, ultimately an acutely paranoid suicide case.