• • •
The most spectacular event of MacArthur’s command in Korea, and possibly of his career, was his amphibious landing at Inchon, a classic example of his “Hit ’em where they ain’t” battle strategy.
In Korea in the fall of 1950, U.N. troops were holed up at Pusan, in the southeast corner of the peninsula. Rather than risk the high casualties that might result from an assault against the North Korean Communists massed along the Pusan front, MacArthur decided to stage a surprise landing at Inchon, the port of Seoul, on the west coast of Korea. After the landing he planned to seize the South Korean capital from the Communists and seal off the enemy troops in the south in much the same way he had isolated the Japanese on islands he passed over in the Pacific.
Inchon was a treacherous place for a landing, and at first MacArthur’s superiors were hesitant. In August Truman sent one of his advisers, Averell Harriman, to Tokyo to meet with the general and survey the situation in Korea. Harriman’s military aide was Vernon Walters, later a close friend of mine whom I appointed deputy director of the CIA.
Over breakfast one morning in the dining room of the American embassy in Tokyo, where MacArthur lived with his family during the Occupation, the general gave Harriman a list of the reinforcements he would need at Inchon.
“I cannot believe that a great nation such as the United States cannot give me these few paltry reinforcements for which I ask,” MacArthur said as Walters, fascinated, listened. “Tell the President that if he gives them to me, I will, on the rising tide of the fifteenth of September, land at Inchon, and between the hammer of this landing and the anvil of the Eighth Army, I will crush and destroy the armies of North Korea.” Walters told me later, “The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.”
Harriman was also impressed. MacArthur got his reinforcements—and approval of his plan by the Joint Chiefs. On September 15, 1950, with their seventy-year-old commander watching from aboard the command ship Mount McKinley, troops spearheaded by the First Division of the U.S. Marines landed at Inchon and defeated a North Korean force of over 30,000, losing only 536 men in doing it. By the end of the month MacArthur had driven the Communists back over the 38th Parallel and returned Seoul to a grateful Syngman Rhee.
After Inchon the U.N. Security Council voted that the objective of MacArthur’s forces was to unify Korea, an action that echoed a policy the Truman administration had already decided upon unilaterally. But in late November, as MacArthur’s forces pressed toward the Yalu River, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops under Lin Biao—their movements had been misjudged by both the CIA’s and MacArthur’s intelligence teams—surged down from the hills, forcing the general to execute a humiliating but typically expert and orderly retreat.
The following spring, after learning that Truman had decided to seek a truce, MacArthur issued a military appraisal of the Korean situation that included pointed references to the inferiority of the Chinese forces and hinted that the Communists ought to come to terms. MacArthur argued later that any commander in the field had the right to issue such a message to the enemy. What was probably unwise was the contentious tone of his appraisal, which drew violent criticism in Peking and Moscow and forced Truman to delay his own diplomatic initiative.
To make matters worse, a few days before his call for the Chinese to negotiate became public, MacArthur had written a letter to House Republican leader Joe Martin, who had asked the general’s opinion about whether troops under Chiang Kai-shek should be used in the war. MacArthur wrote that they should be used and added that diplomats were trying to fight the war against communism with words. Communist victories in Asia would lead to the fall of Europe, he said; “win [the war] and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom.” He added, “There is no substitute for victory.”
When Martin read this letter on the floor of the House, it created a firestorm that swept over the Capitol and down to the White House. Even the usually staid Senate, where I was then serving, was in an uproar. Although Martin had made the letter public without MacArthur’s permission or knowledge, Truman announced his decision to fire the general. MacArthur suffered the additional humiliation of learning first from a news program that he had been removed from all his commands. Former President Hoover managed to reach him directly on the telephone and urged him to come home immediately and tell his side of the story to the American people—sixty-nine percent of whom, according to a Gallup poll, supported MacArthur against Truman.
After MacArthur was fired, I introduced a resolution in the U.S. Senate calling for his reinstatement. “Let me say that I am not among those who believe that General MacArthur is infallible,” I said in what was my first major speech in the Senate. “I am not among those who think that he has not made decisions which are subject to criticism. But I do say that in this particular instance he offers an alternative policy which the American people can and will support. He offers a change from the policies which have led us almost to the brink of disaster in Asia—and that means in the world.”
In retrospect I believe this summary of the matter stands the test of time in that it puts the blame on both parties. MacArthur had defied the principle of civilian control of the military and had in effect interfered with the President’s conduct of foreign policy. But the Truman administration’s policy had been timid and equivocal. For years it had been a source of enormous frustration to MacArthur, one of the few U.S. leaders at that time who knew enough about Asia to see that ominous forces were at work there and that we courted disaster by failing to counter them resolutely.
The Martin letter and the military appraisal were not the first examples of MacArthur’s comments on Washington policy decisions. Turman said later he had considered removing MacArthur from the Korea command the previous August, over a letter about the defense of Formosa that the general had sent to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but had not done so because he did not want to “hurt General MacArthur personally.”
Throughout the war MacArthur’s stock with the Truman administration seems to have risen and fallen according to the administration’s political requirements. After the VFW letter he was nearly fired. After the triumph at Inchon, Truman flew to Wake Island for a conference whose only apparent purpose was to generate news photographs of the beleaguered President and the popular general standing together. After the second U.N. capture of Seoul, MacArthur’s convictions about total victory became an obstacle to a negotiated settlement. As Charles de Gaulle said in a speech four days after the firing, MacArthur was a soldier “whose boldness was feared after full advantage had been taken of it.”
In the end the President who claimed to have cared so much about MacArthur’s personal feelings did not even get a personal message through to him. MacArthur wrote, “No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies.”
• • •
The personal clash between MacArthur and Truman was the most dramatic highlight of the dispute over Korea. But the dispute can also be explained as a struggle between MacArthur, with his predominately Asian outlook, and a U.S. foreign policy that was excessively weighted in favor of Europe.
Truman’s policies in Europe—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Berlin airlift, for example—were strong and forthright. His Asian policies, however, were curiously mixed. The idea that the Communist victory in China or the Korean stalemate presaged the fall of other Asian or Southeast Asian nations to communism seemed outlandish to many of the administration’s policymakers. It seems less outlandish now.
This myopia regarding the Far East was shared by most Americans, perhaps because their roots are in Europe. MacArthur, however, spent much of his life in Asia, and many speculated that he was more comfortable with Asians than with fellow westerners. When he served in the Philippines in the 1920s and 1930s, he ignored the traditional “color bar” by which Filipinos and westerners had always been segregated. At his din
ner parties in Manila in the 1930s there were often few white faces to be seen.
Now that China has once again been brought onto the world stage—and now that the threat the Japanese economic miracle poses to American economic dominance is becoming more and more obvious—Americans are beginning to realize that the history of the world for the next several generations may well be dictated by the men and women of the Orient. This lesson has taken a long time to sink in.
• • •
In 1953, my first year as Vice President, I undertook a two-month tour of nineteen Asian and Pacific countries at the request of President Eisenhower, who felt the previous administration had neglected Asia and wanted to get a firsthand report on conditions there before making major decisions that might affect the area. Along the way Mrs. Nixon and I met hundreds of leaders and thousands of people of all backgrounds. We saw the enormous potential of the region, but at the same time saw clear evidence of the ominous thrust of direct and indirect Communist aggression emanating from both Peking and Moscow. We were concerned that some countries, especially those in French Indochina, were not getting the quality of leadership they needed to meet this threat. Most of all, our visits and discussions convinced me that Asia could well become the most important part of the world, as far as U.S. policy was concerned, for the rest of the century. This was the thrust of my report to President Eisenhower and to the nation at the conclusion of my trip.
But one trip by a Vice President could not begin to change the attitudes of an entire nation. The U.S. continued to face west. In a 1967 article I wrote, “Many argue that an Atlantic axis is natural and necessary, but maintain, in effect, that Kipling was right, and that the Asian peoples are so ‘different’ that Asia itself is only peripherally an American concern.”
A half-century before, MacArthur had made his own survey of the Far East, and he, too, fell under its spell. After leaving West Point in 1903, he joined his father on an inspection tour of Japanese positions in Asia and of European colonies throughout the Far East. The whole tour took nine months, and it was one of the most important events in MacArthur’s life.
“Here lived almost half the population of the world, and probably more than half of the raw products to sustain future generations,” he wrote later. “It was crystal clear to me that the future and, indeed, the very existence of America, were irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts.” Following his three years as the reform-minded superintendent of West Point (where he ordered maps of Asia displayed so cadets could study them), MacArthur’s personal history was caught up with the history of the American presence in the Pacific for more than two decades.
MacArthur’s influence over America’s position in the Orient began in 1930 when, as Army chief of staff, he had responsibility for keeping the Army and Air Force ready to fight. Winning adequate military budgets during peacetime is a frustrating and difficult job, and in the Depression the going was even tougher.
In 1934 MacArthur was able to dissuade Franklin Roosevelt from making further drastic cuts in the defense budget in an explosive confrontation in the White House. “In my emotional exhaustion,” MacArthur wrote later, “I spoke recklessly and said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.” When he left the President’s office, the Secretary of War told him he had “saved the Army”; MacArthur, aghast at his own audacity, vomited on the White House steps.
In 1935 MacArthur returned to the Philippines, then a U.S. commonwealth, to take charge of its armed forces. Like his father, he believed the islands were crucial to any U.S. defense scheme in the Pacific, but his military spending requests went largely unmet. It was the first of many brushes MacArthur would have—before, during, and after World War II—with what he called “North Atlantic isolationism”: Washington’s neglect of U.S. interests in the Far East and its obsession with developments in Western Europe.
Though Washington finally sent MacArthur more money in 1941, the Philippines fell to the Japanese the following year. From the island fortress of Corregidor, after MacArthur had directed a brilliant retreat onto the Bataan peninsula, he promised his struggling troops that Roosevelt was sending help, but the help went instead to the European theater—embittering him toward Roosevelt and feeding his suspicions about the “Pentagon Junta.”
When he was Supreme Commander in Japan, he lamented to visitors that Americans had not yet begun to recognize the importance of Japan to Asia and of Asia to the world—or to appreciate Asia’s vast potential. After Acheson’s statement in January 1950 that Formosa and South Korea were outside the U.S. defense perimeter, MacArthur concluded that the Secretary of State was “badly advised about the Far East.” He invited Acheson to Tokyo, but Acheson said his duties prevented him from leaving Washington—though he found time to go to Europe eleven times while in office. In 1950 the Communists invaded South Korea, and MacArthur was called to arms for the last time.
MacArthur’s dispute with Washington over Korea must be viewed in this context. MacArthur believed the Chinese intervention in the Korean War demonstrated “the same lust for the expansion of power which has animated every would-be conqueror since the beginning of time.” A compromise with the Chinese would encourage further Communist adventures in Asia and even Europe. With adequate support from Washington, MacArthur believed he could hand the Communists a defeat that would discourage them from such adventures. At that time the rift between the Chinese and the Soviets was still years away, and many of us in Congress agreed with MacArthur that defeating the Chinese Communist “volunteers” in Korea was essential to the containment of aggressive forces that threatened all of free Asia.
MacArthur challenged Truman not because he was eager to extend the war into China for the sake of doing so. In fact he never proposed using American ground troops to counter the Chinese intervention and contended until the end of his life that sending U.S. soldiers to fight on the Asian mainland would be folly. He challenged Truman because of his longtime suspicion that policymakers in Washington did not understand Asia and the threat that Communist expansion posed to it. He also believed it was dangerous to let the idea get around that an aggressor could safely have a small war with the U.S.
He understood from experience what Whittaker Chambers grasped intuitively. “For the Communists,” Chambers told me in urging support for Truman’s decision to commit American forces in Korea, “the war is not about Korea but about Japan. If Korea is taken over by Communists when Japan is in a very unstable condition and trying to recover from the devastation of war, the Communist movement in Japan will be given enormous impetus.”
MacArthur thought Truman already had two strikes against him in Asia. He had failed to hold China, and his ambiguous Korea policy may have encouraged the Communists to attack the south. Now, with Chinese troops in the war, MacArthur thought Truman and Acheson had once again lost their nerve. It was his fear that the administration’s timorousness could eventually imperil the entire Far East, including Japan, that prompted the actions for which he was fired.
• • •
On the day of MacArthur’s dismissal, William Sebald, the head of the Occupation’s diplomatic section and one of America’s ablest foreign service officers, received orders from Washington to meet with Prime Minister Yoshida and assure him that U.S. policy toward Japan was unchanged. By the time Sebald was ushered into Yoshida’s upstairs study, the Premier—who had been dressed in western clothing during his garden party that afternoon—had changed into a kimono. He was “visibly shaken,” his guest wrote later.
Sebald, upset by the news himself, feared that Yoshida would resign, both as a characteristically Japanese gesture of responsibility and because the Premier was so close to MacArthur. He told Yoshida that the Japanese people would need strong leadership in the days and weeks ahead to help them rec
over from the shock of MacArthur’s departure. At the end of the interview Yoshida promised Sebald that there would be no resignation.
Though Yoshida remained in office for over three more years, one of postwar history’s greatest partnerships had ended. Except for a brief period when Yoshida was out of office, he and MacArthur had been working together since 1946 to raise a new Japan from the ruins of the old.
MacArthur’s part in this effort is relatively common knowledge. Yoshida, however, is one of the unsung heroes of the postwar world. Vigorous, compassionate, articulate, politically skilled, selfless, and deeply loyal to his country, he was a giant among postwar leaders of nations. He was also one of the few whose influence lasted beyond his retirement and death. It continues even today, for Japan is still governed in 1982 according to basic principles of moderation and restraint Yoshida established over three decades ago.
Yet in a world in which every schoolchild knows the names Churchill and de Gaulle, Yoshida, who was in many ways the equal of these men, is unknown to almost all except the Japanese, academics, and those who had the privilege, as I did, of knowing him personally.
Yoshida was as captivated by the West as MacArthur was by the Orient. Along with many other educated Japanese of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was eager to find ways for Japan to advance its own interests through its foreign relations. In a sense his life was a reflection of a dichotomous nation that for centuries encouraged foreign influences without allowing them to disrupt what was fundamentally Japanese about Japan.
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