MacArthur landed at San Francisco on Tuesday, April 17, to a delirious reception. He had been away from the country for fourteen years. Until now the American people had had no chance to see and cheer him, to welcome the hero home. Ten thousand were at the San Francisco airport. So great were the crowds on the way into the city, it took two hours for the motorcade to reach his hotel. “The only politics I have,” MacArthur told a cheering throng, “is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—God Bless America.”
When Truman met with reporters the next day, at his first press conference since the start of the crisis, he dashed all their expectations by refusing to say anything on the subject. Scheduled to appear before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on Thursday, April 19, the day MacArthur was to go before Congress, Truman canceled his speech, because he felt it should be the gen-eral's day and did not wish anything to detract from it.
There would be “hell to pay” for perhaps six or seven weeks, he told his staff and the Cabinet. But eventually people would come to their senses, including more and more Republican politicians who would grow doubtful of all-out support for the general. Given some time, MacArthur would be reduced to human proportions. Meanwhile, Truman could withstand the bombardment, for in the long run, he knew, he would be judged to have made the right decision. He had absolutely no doubt of that. “The American people will come to understand that what I did had to be done.”
At 12:31 P.M. Thursday, April 19, in a flood of television lights, Douglas MacArthur walked down the same aisle in the House of Representatives as had Harry Truman so often since 1945, and the wild ovation from the packed chamber, the intense, authentic drama of the moment, were such as few had ever beheld. Neither the president's Cabinet nor the Supreme Court nor any of the Joint Chiefs were present.
Wearing a short “Eisenhower” jacket without decoration, the silvery circles of five-star rank glittering on his shoulders, MacArthur paused to shake hands with Vice President Barkley, then stepped to the rostrum, his face “an unreadable mask.” Only after complete silence had fallen did he begin: “I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country.”
There was ringing applause and the low, vibrant voice went on, the speaker in full command of the moment. The decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea had been sound from a military standpoint, MacArthur affirmed. But when he had called for reinforcements, he was told they were not available. He had “made clear,” he said, that if not permitted to destroy the enemy bases north of the Yalu, if not permitted to utilize the eight hundred thousand Chinese troops on Formosa, if not permitted to blockade the China coast, then “the position of the command from a military standpoint forbade victory….” And war's “very object” was victory. How could it be otherwise? “In war, indeed,” he said, repeating his favorite slogan, “there can be no substitute for victory. There were some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They were blind to history's clear lesson, for history teaches, with unmistakable emphasis, that appeasement begets new and bloodier war.”
He was provocative, and defiant. Resounding applause or cheers followed again and again—thirty times in thirty-four minutes. He said nothing of bombing China's industrial centers, as he had proposed. And though he said “every available means” should be applied to bring victory, he made no mention of his wish to use atomic bombs, or to lay down a belt of radioactivity along the Yalu. He had been severely criticized for his views, he said. Yet, he asserted, his views were “fully shared” by the Joint Chiefs—a claim that was altogether untrue but that brought a deafening ovation. Republicans and most spectators in the galleries leaped to their feet, cheering and stamping. It was nearly a minute before he could begin again.
To those who said American military strength was inadequate to face the enemy on more than one front, MacArthur said he could imagine no greater expression of defeatism. “You cannot appease or otherwise surrender to Communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.” To confine the war only to Chinese aggression in Korea was to follow a path of “prolonged indecision.”
“Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” He paused; then, softly, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “I could not answer.”
A record thirty million people were watching on television, and the performance was masterful. The use of the rich voice, the timing, surpassed that of most actors. The oratorical style was of a kind not heard in Congress in a very long time. It recalled, as one television critic wrote, “a yesteryear of the theater,” and it held the greater part of the huge audience wholly enraptured. Work had stopped in offices and plants across the country, so people could watch. Saloons and bars were jammed. Schoolchildren saw the “historic hour” in classrooms or were herded into assemblies or dining halls to listen by radio. Whether they had any idea what the excitement was about, they knew it was “important.”
“When I joined the army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams,” MacArthur said, his voice dropping as he began the famous last lines, the stirring, sentimental, ambiguous peroration that the speech would be remembered for.
The hopes and dreams have long since 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 the 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 light to see that duty.
Good-bye.
A “hurricane of emotion” swept the room. Hands reached out to him. Many in the audience were weeping. “We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!” exclaimed Republican Representative Dewey Short of Missouri, a former preacher. To Joe Martin, it was “the climaxing” of the most emotional moment he had known in thirty-five years in Congress. Theatrics were a part of the congressional way of life, Martin knew, but nothing had ever equaled this.
It was MacArthur's finest hour, and the crescendo of public adulation that followed, beginning with a triumphal parade through Washington that afternoon, and peaking the next day in New York with a thunderous tickertape parade, was unprecedented in U.S. history. Reportedly 7.5 million people turned out in New York, more than had welcomed Eisenhower in 1945, more even than at the almost legendary welcome for Lindbergh in 1927.
In fact, not everybody cheered. There were places along the parade route in New York where, as MacArthur's open car passed, people stood silently, just watching and looking, anything but pleased. In Washington, one senator had confided to a reporter that he had never feared more for his country than during MacArthur's speech. “I honestly felt that if the speech had gone on much longer there might have been a march on the White House.”
Truman had not listened to MacArthur's speech, nor watched on television. He had spent the time at his desk in the Oval Office, meeting with Dean Acheson as was usual at that hour on Thursdays, after which he went back to Blair House for lunch and a nap. At some point, however, he did read what MacArthur had said. Speaking privately, he remarked that he thought it “a bunch of damn bullshit.”
As Truman had anticipated, the tumult began to subside. For seven weeks in the late spring of 1951, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees held joint hearings to investigate MacArthur's dismissal. Though the hearings were closed, authorized transcripts of each day's sessions, edited for military security reasons, were released hourly to the press.
MacArthur, the first witness, testified for three days, arguing that his way in Korea was the way to victory and an end to the slaughter. He had seen as much blood and disaster as any man alive, he told the senators, but never such devastation as during his last time in Korea. “After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children
and everything, I vomited. Now are you going to let that go on … ?” The politicians in Washington had introduced a “new concept into military operations—the concept of appeasement,” its purpose only “to go on indefinitely … indecisively, fighting with no mission….”
But he also began to sound self-absorbed and oddly uninterested in global issues. He would admit to no mistakes, no errors of judgment. Failure to anticipate the size of the Chinese invasion, for example, had been the fault of the CIA. Any operation he commanded was crucial; other considerations were always of less importance. Certain that his strategy of war on China would not bring in the Soviets, he belittled the danger of a larger conflict. But what if he happened to be wrong? he was asked. What if another world war resulted? That, said MacArthur, was not his responsibility. “My responsibilities were in the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various agencies of the Government are working night and day for an over-all solution to the global problem. Now I am not familiar with their studies. I haven't gone into it….” To many, it seemed he had made the president's case.
The great turning point came with the testimony of Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs, who refuted absolutely MacArthur's claim that they agreed with his strategy. Truman, from the start of the crisis, had known he needed the full support of his military advisers before declaring his decision about MacArthur. Now it was that full support, through nineteen days of testimony, that not only gave weight and validity to the decision but discredited MacArthur in a way nothing else could have.
Never, said the Joint Chiefs, had they subscribed to MacArthur's plan for victory, however greatly they admired him. The dismissal of MacArthur, said all of them—Marshall, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs—was more than warranted; it was a necessity. Given the circumstances, given the seriousness of MacArthur's opposition to the policy of the president, his challenge to presidential authority, there had been no other course. The fidelity of the military high command to the principle of civilian control of the military was total and unequivocal.
Such unanimity of opinion on the part of the country's foremost and most respected military leaders seemed to leave Republican senators stunned. As James Reston wrote in The New York Times, “MacArthur, who had started as the prosecutor, had now become the defendant.”
The hearings ground on and grew increasingly dull. The MacArthur hysteria was over; interest waned. When, in June, MacArthur set off on a speaking tour through Texas, insisting he had no presidential ambitions, he began to sound more and more shrill and vindictive, less and less like a hero. He attacked Truman, appeasement, high taxes, and “insidious forces working from within.” His crowds grew steadily smaller. Nationwide, the polls showed a sharp decline in his popular appeal. The old soldier was truly beginning to fade away.
Truman would regard the decision to fire MacArthur as among the most important he made as president. He did not, however, agree with those who said it had shown what great courage he had. (Harriman, among others, would later speak of it as one of the most courageous steps ever taken by any president.) “Courage didn't have anything to do with it,” Truman would say emphatically. “General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That's all there was to it.”
But if the firing of MacArthur had taken a heavy toll politically, if Truman as president had been less than a master of persuasion, he had accomplished a very great deal and demonstrated extraordinary patience and strength of character in how he rode out the storm. His policy in Korea—his determined effort to keep the conflict in bounds—had not been scuttled, however great the aura of the hero-general, or his powers as a spellbinder. The principle of civilian control over the military, challenged as never before in the nation's history, had survived, and stronger than ever. The president had made his point and, with the backing of his generals, he had made it stick.
The Man Who Saved Korea
THOMAS FLEMING
One has to go back almost to 1914 and the Battle of the Marne to find military fortunes that seesawed as breathlessly as those first months of the Korean War. First there was the surprise North Korean attack and the drive that penned in a battered and demoralized U.N. force and the remnants of the South Korean army in the Pusan Perimeter, that small southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula. Then came another surprise, this time an American one, the September 15 landing at Inchon, the port of Seoul, the final masterstroke of Douglas MacArthur's career, and the melting away of the North Korean army, followed by the advance to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. A few U.N. units got as far as the Yalu River, which separated North Korea from China. The war—which Truman (in a phrase that would come back to haunt him) termed a “police action”—seemed as good as over. MacArthur predicted that the bulk of his troops would be “home in time for Christmas.” That was at the end of October 1950, just four months after the fighting had begun. Suddenly, the U.N. faced a new enemy, this time Chinese “volunteers.” (The Chinese Communists chose the designation in hopes of avoiding a more widespread war with the U.S.)
The story of how MacArthur misread the signs has been told many times. The immediate cause of the Chinese intervention seemed to be his decision to advance above the 38th Parallel and strike for the Yalu. (The British were antsy, afraid that the Chinese would use the attack into North Korea as a pretext to seize Hong Kong.) But apparently, Mao had taken Truman's sending of the Seventh Fleet to patrol the Straits of Taiwan as an act of war, even though its actual purpose was to prevent the broadening of hostilities. Washington, too, misread the signals. It failed to recognize the depth of Chinese resentment caused by the forestalled invasion. Mao reluctantly canceled preparations for the Taiwan invasion in August but had already begun a build-up of forces in northeast China. As his generals advised him, “One should always open an umbrella before it starts to rain.” Meanwhile, Stalin, dismayed by the failure of his North Korean gamble, appealed to the Chinese for help. He also promised further military aid to the North Koreans, especially air support.
In the last days of October, the Chinese attacked, badly roughing up the American and ROK vanguard. After a few days, they abruptly withdrew, disappearing into the barren, hilly landscape. It was a warning that MacArthur failed to heed. Though some of his generals urged withdrawing to safer positions, he elected to resume his advance. On November 24, the Americans observed Thanksgiving. No effort was spared to make sure the men of the Eighth Army were served turkey dinners with all the trimmings.
The next day the Chinese attacked. It was a type of warfare that Americans had never experienced and for which they were unprepared. They were in effect facing a huge guerrilla army whose very primitiveness was its greatest strength. No wireless radio activity, movement of tanks, air reconnaissance, or sudden appearance of supply depots had warned of the Chinese approach. They lacked almost all the technological basics of modern war making. They did not advance along roads but swooped down from the hills, usually at night, announcing their coming with drums, bugles, and flutes that unsettled and paralyzed defenders. The mortar, the machine gun, and the grenade were their principal weapons, infiltration their favored tactic. Failure to anticipate, failure to adapt, failure to learn: This, the historian Eliot A. Cohen tells us, is the surest recipe for military misfortune, and the Eighth mastered the combination. In November and December 1950 it suffered one of the notable defeats in the history of American wars.
Seoul fell again; the Chinese pushed the U.N. forces back a hundred miles, and the commander of the Eighth Army died in a jeep accident. The prospect of an American Dunkirk loomed. (The mid-December evacuation of the X Corps from Hungnam, accomplished without panic or loss, was just that.) There was, to be sure, the epic withdrawal of the 1st Marine Division from the frozen Chosin Reservoir, which amounted, Martin Russ has written, to “a series of tactical victories within the overall context of a strategic defeat.” In Washington and Tokyo desperation mounted. Should we drop atomic bombs on China? Unleash Chiang to invade the mainland? Blockade China? Would t
he Soviets choose this moment to invade Europe, using the atomic bombs that they now had? The end of 1950 had to be one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War.
This was the situation that the new Eighth Army commander, Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, faced when he arrived in Korea the day after Christmas. Ridgway's revival of that army, Thomas Fleming writes here, became “the stuff of legends, a paradigm of American generalship.” It was a leadership feat that has to be as notable as the disaster that preceded it.
THOMAS FLEMING is the author of more than forty books, including The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II; Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America; Liberty!: The American Revolution; The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I; and Washington's Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge.
IF YOU ASKED A GROUP of average Americans to name the greatest general of the twentieth century, most would nominate Dwight Eisenhower, the master politician who organized the Allied invasion of Europe, or Douglas MacArthur, a leader in both world wars, or George C. Marshall, the architect of victory in World War II. John J. Pershing and George S. Patton would also get a fair number of votes. But if you ask professional soldiers that question, a surprising number of them will reply: “Ridgway.”
When they pass this judgment, they are not thinking of the general who excelled as a division commander and an army corps commander in World War II. Many other men distinguished themselves in those roles. The soldiers are remembering the general who rallied a beaten Eighth Army from the brink of defeat in Korea in 1951.
The son of a West Pointer who retired as a colonel of the artillery, Matthew Bunker Ridgway graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1917. Even there, although his scholastic record was mediocre, he was thinking about how to become a general. One trait he decided to cultivate was an ability to remember names. By his first-class year, he was able to identify the entire 750-man student body.
The Cold War Page 13