Yoshida’s remarks were reported in the American press, but they were engulfed and soon forgotten in the din that followed the firing and that dogged MacArthur for the rest of his life. Three decades later most Americans, when they are reminded of MacArthur, think of Korea or of the brilliance of his military leadership in World War II. But his greatest legacy was pinpointed by Yoshida in the first moments after MacArthur’s career ended. “It is he who has salvaged our nation from postsurrender confusion and prostration,” Yoshida said of the man who was just then being keelhauled by his critics for brash trigger-happiness. “It is he who has firmly planted democracy in all segments of our society.”
His own role in the rebuilding of Japan was just as important, but the Premier was being characteristically modest. In fact MacArthur and Yoshida—victor and vanquished, Occidental and Oriental, general and politician—had together executed the swiftest and most dramatic transformation of a major nation in the history of the modern world.
MacArthur was an American giant, a man of legendary stature who embodied all the contradictions and contrasts of a legend. He was a thoughtful intellectual and a swaggering, egotistical soldier, an authoritarian and a democrat, a gifted and powerful speaker given to flights of Churchillian rhetoric that inspired millions—and sent most liberals right up the wall.
Yoshida was Japan’s temperamental and obstreperous leader in its darkest hour, a puckish, cigar-smoking former diplomat who helped his country snatch economic victory from the jaws of military defeat. Because of his intestinal fortitude, his sharp tongue, and his stout figure, and because he was raised to power at an age when most men have been retired for years, Yoshida has often been called the Churchill of Japan.
In 1945 MacArthur took control of a Japan beaten in body and spirit. Two million of its people, a third of them civilians, had died. Its factories were crushed. Foreign trade, the cornerstone of Japan’s strength in the 1920s and 1930s, had ceased to exist. There were critical shortages of food. Even worse, the Japanese people had invested all of their faith and energy in a war they thought heaven would not let them lose. Their Emperor had told them to lay down their arms and, for the first time in Japan’s history, endure the humiliation of surrender: Soon Emperor Hirohito would publicly renounce the myth of divinity in which emperors had wrapped themselves for centuries and which was the foundation of the Japanese religious system.
Rarely had military defeat left such a material and spiritual vacuum. Yet, nine years later, when Yoshida stepped down as Prime Minister, Japan was a flourishing, vibrant democracy that was in the process of building the second largest economy in the free world.
It is widely believed that all of this was MacArthur’s doing, because it was during his proconsulship, from 1945 to 1951, that most of the social, economic, and political reforms that transformed Japan were undertaken. I knew both him and Yoshida well enough, and know enough of their lives, to say that Japan was remade by both men working together in an extraordinary partnership in which MacArthur was the lawgiver and Yoshida the executive. MacArthur’s edicts were cast in the form of principle. Yoshida molded them to fit Japan. The result was the transformation in a few years of a nation from totalitarianism to democracy and of a ruined economy to one that has since proved itself among the strongest in the world.
For each it was an exercise in the unexpected. MacArthur’s critics had pegged him as a pompous martinet. He turned out to be one of the most progressive military occupation commanders in all history—and one of the few who were successful. Yoshida took office as a caretaker and had no experience in running for office or running a government. He became one of the postwar period’s best Prime Ministers and created a model of moderately conservative, probusiness government from which Japan has yet to deviate.
MacArthur cast a long shadow, and in many accounts of the Occupation Yoshida seems to slip into it. One reason for this is the difference in personality between the two men, which is clear enough in their own writing. MacArthur’s Reminiscences are dramatic and occasionally self-congratulatory; in them the Occupation appears to be almost a one-man operation—MacArthur’s. His only reference to Yoshida, besides the quotation of laudatory messages from Yoshida to himself, is to Japan’s “able” Prime Minister. In contrast Yoshida’s Memoirs are disarmingly modest. In them, he seems reluctant to take credit for many of his accomplishments.
Between these two versions is the truth about the Occupation, which is that Japan was run for seven years by two governments that sometimes meshed and sometimes clashed. MacArthur operated by proclamation, Yoshida by sometimes unseen and unrecorded smaller actions. Each man was as important as the other, but Yoshida was hard to see in the glare of MacArthur’s enormous power and towering personality.
To make matters worse, Yoshida’s seven years in office are habitually described by many scholars in negative terms. Some brand him as a disgruntled old-style conservative who spitefully reversed MacArthur’s labor, education, and police reforms as quickly as he could. Others say that Yoshida’s revision of these reforms was actually the work of the Americans suddenly conscious of the need for a strong anti-Communist ally in the Far East.
Yoshida was in fact a careful politician, with basically liberal instincts, who was justifiably concerned that the flurry of reform initiated by the Americans was a matter of too much, too quickly. The Japanese, probably the least xenophobic people on earth, had a long tradition of “borrowing” from other cultures, but they were always careful to regulate new influences so they would enrich Japanese society rather than disrupt it. It was no different with the concepts imported by MacArthur. He created democratic institutions and expected the Japanese to become democrats. Yoshida knew it would take time for his people to appreciate both the benefits and the responsibilities that came with their new freedom. He also knew that everything that worked in the United States would not necessarily work in Japan.
The vastly different roles MacArthur and Yoshida played required men of vastly different temperaments. My own first encounters with them reflect their differences.
I first saw MacArthur in 1951, when I was a U.S. senator and heard his “Old soldiers never die” speech to a joint session of Congress. Awash in the drama of one of the great confrontations of modern political history, he was almost Olympian in stature. His presentation was hypnotically powerful. Time after time he was interrupted by prolonged applause. When he finished with his emotional farewell—“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away”—the congressmen and senators, many of them in tears, leaped to their feet and cheered wildly. It was probably the greatest ovation ever given to anyone, including Presidents, who had addressed a joint session of Congress. Bedlam reigned as MacArthur marched majestically down the aisle and out of the chamber. One member said that we had just heard the voice of God. Another pro-MacArthur senator joked to me later that the speech had left the Republicans with wet eyes and the Democrats with wet pants.
I first met Yoshida two years later in Tokyo. When he arrived a few moments late for our first meeting, he was holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. He apologized profusely and said he had been attending to a nosebleed—which resulted, he added with an embarrassed chuckle, from eating too much caviar the night before. I remember thinking that few leaders would have been down-to-earth enough to admit such a thing, especially when it would have been so easy to make up some excuse about the urgency of government business.
The impressions I received from these encounters were borne out by later ones. MacArthur was a hero, a presence, an event. Those who were invited to meet with him, as I was during his retirement years in New York, listened in deferential silence as he paced around the room, declaiming upon whatever subject happened to be on his mind at the moment. Yoshida was as human and accessible as MacArthur was remote. Sitting low in a chair, his roguish grin sometimes hidden in a cloud of cigar smoke, he reveled in the good-humored give-and-take of a well-informed conversation.
They had their si
milarities. Both were well-read intellectuals. Both were in their seventies when they exercised their greatest power. Victorians by birth, each carried himself in public with a certain old-world dignity and austerity. But MacArthur never softened his bearing. A onetime assistant said, “Even in reproof and rebuff, he kept the lofty manners of a gentleman.” Yoshida, in contrast, could be refreshingly coarse when the moment demanded it, as when he called a Socialist in the Diet a “damned fool” or when he poured a pitcher of water over the head of an annoying photographer.
If I had had to guess from my first encounters with MacArthur and Yoshida which man was the lofty idealist and which was the stubborn pragmatist, I think I would have guessed right. As it turned out, postwar Japan needed both. Without MacArthur’s vision, the necessary reforms might not have taken place. Without Yoshida’s meticulous attention to detail, those reforms might have jarred Japan from confusion into chaos.
In essence MacArthur was an Occidental whose life unfolded East, while Yoshida was an Oriental whose life unfolded West. They shared a vision of the way their cultures could meet on the crowded archipelago of Japan and produce a new and powerful free nation.
• • •
Douglas MacArthur was one of the greatest generals America has produced. He was also one of the most flamboyant, and as a result his personal style sometimes attracted more attention than his accomplishments. Because of his aristocratic bearing and grandiloquent speech, he made an easy target for tastemakers and satirists, who portrayed him as a vainglorious anachronism, a haughty Victorian born fifty years too late. His speeches, often composed of towering, stirring invocations of the greatness of the American system, were laughed off by many as jingoism.
But his critics found it difficult to stereotype MacArthur. His was so richly complex a personality that, great actor though he is, even Gregory Peck was unable to capture it on film as George C. Scott so ably captured another great, but less complex, general, George Patton.
I first became keenly aware of MacArthur during World War II, when I was assigned as a Navy operations officer to a Marine combat air-transport unit in the South Pacific. What I heard was uniformly negative, because it was tainted both by the press, which was generally biased against MacArthur, and by the usual Army-Navy rivalry.
For example there were two kinds of seats in the C-47 cargo and transport planes we used: the uncomfortable bucket seats that were the lot of most servicemen, and a pair of more luxurious, airline-type seats for high-ranking officers. The latter were derisively called “MacArthur seats.”
As it turned out, the general’s reputation was completely at variance with the facts. During the seige of Bataan and Corregidor, MacArthur insisted on living in a house above ground rather than in a bunker, thus exposing himself and his family to Japanese shelling. Yet all we heard was that his men on Bataan called him “Dugout Doug.” When the situation became hopeless, MacArthur had every intention of staying on the island and dying after he had killed as many Japanese as he could with his derringer. President Roosevelt finally ordered him to leave, but all we heard was that MacArthur, when the going got rough, beat a hasty and cowardly retreat, taking along his wife, his three-year-old son, and their Chinese nursemaid.
It was ironic that MacArthur’s World War II nickname was Dugout Doug, because in World War I that is where he really was—in the dug-outs and trenches with the doughboys in France. As chief of staff and later commander of the Rainbow Division, he was admired, even revered, by his troops because of his tactical skill and his eagerness to face every risk they did. During more than one American charge he was the first man over the top, and in the course of a year he was wounded twice and collected seven Silver Stars for gallantry.
Throughout his career his brushes with death were so frequent as to be almost routine. During a dramatic reconnaissance mission at Vera Cruz in 1914, Mexican bullets tore through his uniform. During World War I he was gassed, his sweater was tagged by machine-gun fire, and his command post at Metz was destroyed the day after he moved out. In the midst of an earlier barrage at Metz he stayed calmly in his seat, saying to his understandably concerned staff, “All of Germany cannot make a shell that will kill MacArthur.”
After the war, when his car was pulled over by a highwayman in New York, MacArthur told the man to put down his gun and fight for his money. When the man learned that he was trying to rob General MacArthur, under whom he had served in the Rainbow Division, he apologized profusely and let him go.
During World War II MacArthur could often be found staying calmly in his chair during Japanese strafing runs, peering through binoculars at the action while others wondered which way they would jump if a shell hit, and ignoring officers and enlisted men who begged him not to endanger himself. The bullets, he would say, were not for him.
He frequently combined displays of courage with strokes of drama that bordered on rashness. When he landed in the Philippines in 1945 and visited Japanese POW camps that held the malnourished and mistreated remnants of his Bataan and Corregidor forces, he turned to his staff physician and said, “Doc, this is getting to me. I want to go forward till we meet some fire, and I don’t just mean sniper fire.” He strode forward, past the bodies of Japanese troops, until he could hear the fire from an enemy machine-gun nest directly ahead. Then he turned and walked slowly back, daring the Japanese to shoot him in the back.
MacArthur’s whole life, including the displays of fearlessness that sometimes verged on foolhardiness, was in a sense a struggle to do justice to the memory of his father, General Arthur MacArthur.
Whether by coincidence or design, the careers of father and son had much in common. In 1863 Arthur, then an eighteen-year-old adjutant in the Union Army, earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for being the first soldier to plant his division’s colors on top of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, which set the stage for Sherman’s march through Georgia. Douglas, too, won the Medal of Honor, for his heroism on Corregídor. Arthur spent much of his career stationed on America’s frontiers; first the Southwest, then the Philippines. Douglas, from 1935 until his recall in 1951, visited the U.S. only once.
MacArthur the Elder and MacArthur the Younger, as they were differentiated by the Filipinos, were both obsessed with the importance of the Far East and of the Philippines to the future of the West. And both men’s careers were marked by dramatic clashes with civilian authority—Douglas with President Truman and Arthur with William Howard Taft, president of the civil commission in the Philippines when he was military governor.
If Arthur was the example, MacArthur’s mother, Pinky, prodded him toward a lifelong compulsion to follow and even surpass it. When he went to West Point, she went with him to make sure he studied and to protect the handsome cadet from romantic entanglements that could distract him from his career. He was graduated first in his class. While thirty-eight-year-old Colonel MacArthur was fighting in the trenches of France during World War I, his mother was writing fawning letters to his superiors, including General Pershing, who had served under his father. Finally, when he was appointed the youngest Army chief of staff in history in 1930, she ran her hand over the four stars on his shoulder and said, “If only your father could see you now. Douglas, you’re everything he wanted to be.”
MacArthur always felt compelled to be different from those around him, and this led to certain glaring but harmless eccentricities. In the military, uniform dress is intended in part to reinforce the command hierarchy. But MacArthur wanted to stand out, not fit in. To another officer who asked about his unusual garb, he said, “It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous.”
At various times in World War I he wore a rumpled cap in place of the regulation steel helmet, a turtleneck sweater, a plum-colored satin necktie, and riding breeches. Once he was mistaken for a German and momentarily arrested.
When he was superintendent at West Point from 1919 to 1922, he could be seen walking across campus carrying a riding crop. Later, in the Pacific during World Wa
r II, his simple but unorthodox uniform—familiar to Americans from pictures of the general wading ashore on one South Pacific island after another—consisted of sunglasses, faded khakis, a worn cap, and a corncob pipe. He wore none of his twenty-two medals, only small circles of five stars on his shirt collar.
One would think that MacArthur’s refusal to deck himself out in gold braid, brass, and ribbons would have been endearing rather than irritating, especially since by the middle of the century the age of the common man was in full swing. But MacArthur’s appearance enraged Truman, for example, when the two men met at Wake Island in 1950 to discuss the Korean War. Many years later Truman blurted out that the general “was wearing those damn sunglasses of his and a shirt that was unbuttoned and a cap that had a lot of hardware. I never did understand . . . an old man like that and a five-star general to boot, why he went around dressed up like a nineteen-year-old second lieutenant.”
MacArthur did not have to dress bizarrely to stand out from the crowd, because he was one of the most handsome public figures of his time. He also had a powerful personal magnetism—which, abetted by his shrewd intelligence, helped him captivate audiences, inspire troops, and command absolute loyalty among the people who worked on his staff. His aide at West Point said, “Obedience is something a leader can command, but loyalty is something, an indefinable something, that he is obliged to win. MacArthur knew instinctively how to win it.”
MacArthur had a special knack for attracting and keeping the loyalty of subordinates. Both Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger, prominent members of both my administration and President Reagan’s, worked for MacArthur, and they still count him among their idols. Weinberger was a young captain on MacArthur’s staff in the Pacific near the end of World War II. Haig, as a lieutenant on the staff of the American Occupation in Japan, was the duty officer who first informed MacArthur that the Communists had invaded South Korea.
Leaders Page 12