His attitude toward Peking led him to hint in 1951, when the U.S.-Japan peace treaty was before the U.S. Senate, that he intended to open relations with the mainland. John Foster Dulles, who had negotiated the treaty, told Yoshida that the Senate might reject it if he recognized the Chinese—who were then fighting Americans in Korea—and the Premier dropped the idea. One of my assignments on my 1953 trip was to reiterate Dulles’s warning. While Yoshida did not disagree with my prediction that there would be a strongly negative U.S. reaction to any move he might make toward the Chinese Communists, it was obvious that I had not shaken his own support of a rapprochement with Peking. Had he not retired in 1954, Japan might well have reopened relations with China in the 1950s rather than the 1970s.
I was therefore not surprised that the Chinese question was still high on Yoshida’s agenda in 1964. Yoshida and his Japanese guests were worried about the opening of diplomatic relations between France and China in January of that year, a move de Gaulle had made without informing the Japanese beforehand. Yoshida asked me whether I thought the United States might do the same thing. When I replied that I could not speak for the Johnson administration, the former Japanese Ambassador to the United States, Koichiro Asakai, said that he had some bitter experiences in Washington when officials announced policy decisions affecting Japan without informing him in advance. He predicted that at some time in the future the U.S. would negotiate directly with Peking without informing Tokyo. I replied—somewhat prophetically, as it turned out—that I could not rule out that possibility.
When we conducted the negotiations that led to the surprise announcement in July 1971 that I would visit China the following year, these discussions had to be kept secret from the Japanese as well as from our other friends throughout the world. Any leak might have torpedoed the initiative. When I made the announcement, it was immediately branded in Japan as the “Nixon shock.” While the U.S. opening to China is often cited as the spark for the Sino-Japanese rapprochement that came in September 1972, the Chinese and the Japanese had actually been trading and conducting informal relations for years. For some time, groups of Japanese, including politicians, had been visiting China. The establishment of official relations between the two countries was less a result of the Nixon shock than it was the culmination of the gradual reconciliation that Yoshida had envisioned two decades before.
Yoshida’s preoccupation with this kind of continuity in government, through which the work begun by one leader can be finished by others, was clear in one poignant moment as he escorted me to the door at the end of my visit. I told him that I looked forward to the day when we would meet again. He laughed and said, “No, I don’t think we will. I am afraid I am too old. But you are a very young man [I was fifty-one at the time]; you can provide leadership in the future.”
Of all the leaders I have met, Yoshida shares with Herbert Hoover the distinction of growing old most gracefully. Part of the reason was that although he was personally out of power, his policies were being continued by men he had prepared for leadership and who still valued his counsel. He was at peace with himself because he was confident that his good works would live after his death.
He died in late 1967 at Oiso, at the age of eighty-nine. Prime Minister Sato was on a state visit to Indonesia when he heard the news. Sato immediately flew home to Japan, went to Oiso, and wept openly at the bed where his mentor lay in state. A few days later Yoshida was given the first state funeral to be held in Japan since World War II.
• • •
In a political sense the last eleven years of MacArthur’s life were wasted. His intellectual powers were undiminished, but in the 1950s and early 1960s, because of a combination of circumstances, they were not put to use as they should have been.
One reason was that he had become tainted by partisan politics. While serving in Japan in 1948, he made a stab at the Republican presidential nomination, but got only a humiliating eleven delegate votes on the first convention ballot. When he returned from Korea in 1951, he addressed Congress and then campaigned against Truman’s Asian policies from one end of the country to the other.
MacArthur openly favored Senator Robert Taft over Eisenhower for the nomination in 1952. He was selected to give the keynote address at the Chicago convention in July, and we in the Eisenhower camp were concerned that his speech might deliver the convention for Taft. The general himself thought the delegates might even turn to him as a dark-horse candidate.
But the speech was a disappointment. It was well written and well delivered, but somehow, as Lincoln might have put it, “it just didn’t scour.” Part of the reason was that the delegates were bone tired by the time he began to speak at 9:30 P.M. They grew more and more distracted as he plodded along. It was almost embarrassing. Instead of giving him the rapt attention he had received at the joint session in 1951, some of the delegates coughed, some wandered around the floor and politicked, and others left for the men’s room. He kept pressing to lift them out of their lethargy, but the chemistry and magic of the “Old soldiers never die” speech were missing. Then he had risen brilliantly to a dramatic occasion. Now the memory of the brilliance remained, but the drama of the occasion could neither be duplicated nor recaptured. The inevitable result was a feeling of anticlimax and letdown. MacArthur, the first-class showman, had made an uncharacteristic mistake: He had tried to top a performance and failed. The speech was the end of his chances as a political candidate.
FDR once said to MacArthur, “Douglas, I think you are our best general, but I believe you would be our worst politician.” He was right. MacArthur was not a good politician, and eventually he realized it. He quotes Roosevelt’s pronouncement himself in his memoirs. His greatest political miscalculation, in fact, was to appear to be interested in politics at all, to attempt personally to convert his enormous prestige into political capital. He should have left the active politicking to those who were willing to act on his behalf.
I believe that Eisenhower wanted to be President as much as MacArthur did, but he was clever enough not to admit it. Though Eisenhower always insisted that he was just an amateur politician, he was in fact a masterly political operator. He instinctively knew that the best way to get the prize was to appear not to be seeking it. When I first met him at the Bohemian Grove in California in July 1950, the business and political heavyweights who were there were all talking about the possibility of his being the Republican candidate in 1952. All, that is, except Eisenhower. When the question came up, he deftly changed the subject to the future of Europe and the Atlantic alliance.
In May 1951 his fellow Kansan, Senator Frank Carlson, insisted that I call on Eisenhower during a trip I was scheduled to make to Europe. He felt sure that the general was going to throw his hat in the ring and he wanted me to support him if he did. I saw Eisenhower for an hour at the Allied military headquarters in Paris. He greeted me cordially. Instead of talking about himself, he complimented me for my fairness in conducting the Alger Hiss investigation and asked for my evaluation of American sentiment toward NATO. He had the rare ability to make his visitors come away thinking they had done well rather than that he had done well. As a result, most left meetings with him, as I did, enthusiastic Eisenhower supporters.
The appearance of letting the office seek him rather than the other way around enhanced his chances of winning the presidency. MacArthur, on the other hand, gave every appearance in 1948 of running for office while on active duty in Japan. The impression that he was eager politically was strengthened by his action after Truman had fired him.
This is not to say that MacArthur would not have made a good President. He had a profound understanding of foreign policy issues. In Japan he demonstrated that he could handle domestic issues, running the gamut from labor relations to educational policy, in an intelligent, evenhanded manner. He was obsessed with maintaining the stability of the currency and with the pursuit of moderate, consistent fiscal policies. In fact he grew more conservative economically as he grew older
, a development I also noticed in the careers of Eisenhower and de Gaulle. During the 1950s and early 1960s, when it was clear MacArthur would probably never hold another public office, he often lectured me about balancing the budget, cutting taxes, and going back to the gold standard.
MacArthur’s major problem as President would have been that of adapting to the fact that his power over the government was more circumscribed than his power over troops had been as a general or his power over Japan had been as Supreme Commander. He would have found it difficult to tolerate and then master the seemingly endless stream of petty detail that comes with the presidency. In the U.S. as in Japan, MacArthur would have needed a Yoshida to implement his imaginative and creative policies.
Aside from running up on the shoals of politics, MacArthur was the victim of shifts in popular and military fashions. In World War I he was the doughboys’ hero for his daring exploits in the trenches of France. In World War II, when he was in his sixties, he was “Dugout Doug” in spite of an equally impressive record of bravery.
Between the world wars, the values MacArthur represented—valor, patriotism, love of liberty—had begun to go out of style. They were revived during World War II but weakened once again by Korea and nearly dealt a deathblow by Vietnam. Even during World War II generals like Eisenhower and Bradley—fatherly, unobtrusive, accessible—were more palatable to the intellectual establishment and even to GIs, who were, after all, among the first fully grown products of what was being called the century of the common man. As is often the case, MacArthur’s accomplishments, among them a battle strategy in the Pacific that saved tens of thousands of GIs’ lives, could not outweigh the burden of his image as an aristocratic poseur.
He still managed to strike a chord with the American public, as the deafening welcome he received from coast to coast upon his return from Korea showed. But soon even the public turned from him and elected his rival, Eisenhower, to the office they both coveted. It was a choice of a man who represented unity and moderation over another who was at times blatantly partisan and unfailingly controversial.
• • •
Douglas MacArthur liberated the Philippines, rebuilt Japan, and, at Inchon and after, prevented Communist control of South Korea. He came home a subject of intense controversy and was soon a political exile in his own country. The reason was that few understood Asia, MacArthur, or what one meant to the other. Few understood that MacArthur’s destiny was to protect American interests in the Far East, almost single-handedly, for two decades.
As an admirer of MacArthur, I have never fully understood how a man whose accomplishments were so vast and self-evident could be so unpopular in American intellectual circles. The vicious attacks that plagued MacArthur during most of his career could be explained in part by Lord Blake’s analysis in the epilogue of his classic biography of Disraeli.
He noted that while Disraeli and Gladstone were mortal enemies, they were alike in being subjected to violent and often unfair criticism by many of their contemporaries. He wrote, “The truth surely is that both were extraordinary figures, men of genius, though in widely differing idioms, and that, like most men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy, they inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.”
Had MacArthur retired to the Philippines or Japan, where he had lived almost without interruption since 1935, his last years would have been less empty. The Japanese revered him, and those who remember his years as Supreme Commander revere him still. When he made his sentimental journey to the Philippines in 1961, he learned that in the Philippine army his name was called at every muster, and a sergeant answered “Present in spirit!” Many Americans credit MacArthur for avenging the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese, the Filipinos, and the South Koreans saw him not as an avenger but a liberator. He freed the Japanese from totalitarianism and Emperor worship, freed the Filipinos from the Japanese, and freed the South Koreans from the Communists.
MacArthur may have seemed anachronistic to many U.S. political commentators, but throughout his career in Asia he demonstrated extraordinary foresight. At the turn of the century, after his tour of the Far East with his father, he speculated that the Japanese might have hegemonic designs on their neighbors. In the 1930s he warned of the growing Japanese threat to peace in the Pacific. In Japan his progressive reforms surpassed both in scope and in vision the blueprint that had been written for the American Occupation by desk officers in Washington. And in Korea he understood that the Communists were fighting not for South Korea but for control of all Asia.
The common denominator was always Japan. He was either preoccupied by the threat it posed to the Far East or, after the war, preoccupied with the threat others posed to it. During his five years of governing Japan, two seeming paradoxes emerged. First, though a skilled man of war, MacArthur proved to be a committed man of peace. Second, he applied the tools of the absolute autocrat to the task of freeing Japan forever from autocracy.
The first, of course, is not really a paradox. The idea that soldiers and generals by nature promote constant international belligerency is only a bit of philosophical debris from the 1960s. As MacArthur said in his magnificent farewell address at West Point in 1962, “The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
No man in American history has been given absolute power in peacetime. In a democracy power is diffused among different sectors of society to prevent abuses. MacArthur, however, had absolute power in Japan for five years. The real paradox is that true democracy could not have been established there any other way.
One commentator on the Occupation wrote, “MacArthur was in control. Japan would be made a peace-loving, democratic, prosperous, industrial nation if it took violence, tyranny, and economic chaos to do it.” The statement was intended to be facetious, but it was still basically true. The Japanese are quick studies, and they soon learned to mouth, as if by rote, the abstract principles of democracy. It was quite another thing to teach them to believe in democracy in their hearts.
Two hundred and thirty years ago, confronting the thorny question of how just political systems could be established, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote:
Men . . . do not govern themselves by abstract views; one does not make them happy except by forcing them to be, and one has to make them feel happiness in order to make them love it. There is a job for the talents of the hero. . . .
Rousseau’s point was that in the earliest stages of a new society, its values must be imposed from above by some wise and forward-looking hero. In the case of Japan, MacArthur was the hero who made the Japanese feel democracy and therefore love it. Along with Yoshida he made them cherish liberty and therefore want to safeguard it. In fact no figure in modern political history has come as close as MacArthur to being the semimythical being called a lawgiver—a man of such towering political vision that he can single-handedly reinvent a society according to an ideal model.
Like Japan’s own Meiji reformers, he used his privileged position to introduce sweeping political reforms, though he abolished the easily abused absolute power of the Emperor, which the Meiji system depended on. At first he took all of Hirohito’s vast real and spiritual authority on his own shoulders. Then, after cracking the toughest nuts himself—a new constitution and land reform—he gradually began to shift more and more power to Yoshida, the elected representative of the Japanese people. Importantly Yoshida, both before and after the Occupation, was able to modify what MacArthur had set in place. This unique partnership produced modern Japan, a great and free nation that represents the best hope that the rest of Asia may someday share in the heritage of liberty, justice, and prosperity.
KONRAD
ADENAUER
The West’s Iron Curtain
IN 1963 AN aging but still formidable Konrad Adenauer was overseeing one of his last sessions of the West German Bundestag. The end of
his career had come. Badly damaged politically by the Berlin Wall crisis, the eighty-seven-year-old Chancellor had barely been reelected in 1961. He had bowed to pressure from younger politicians and agreed to step down after two years of his fourth term. Fourteen years of extraordinary accomplishment were behind him. Four years of restless, bitter retirement were ahead.
A longtime Bundestag adversary, who perhaps felt he could afford to be kind now that the implacable Adenauer was being put out to pasture, rose from his chair and told the Chancellor that he had been right after all when he had engineered West Germany’s admission to NATO in 1954.
Adenauer eyed the man stonily and then delivered a terse reply. “The difference between you and me,” he said, “has been that I was right on time.”
In those few words Adenauer himself summed up the essence of his career and in an important way the essence of all great leadership. Many, like the opposition deputy, have the gift of hindsight; Adenauer had the gift of foresight. In power during the unsettled period after World War II, when alignments of nations were set that would last for generations, he had the wisdom and courage to take action when action was needed—and the political skill to overcome the objections of those who were afraid or unwilling to act. Winston Churchill was seldom off the mark in evaluating world leaders. In 1953 he told the House of Commons that Adenauer was “the wisest German statesman since Bismarck.”
• • •
Adenauer was the major architect of the postwar order of Western Europe. As a Rhinelander, he had always sought rapprochement between Germany and France, and throughout his life he cherished an ideal vision of a united Europe in which the conflicts that plagued earlier generations would never recur. He also recognized from the start that the Soviet Union represented what was bad about the old Europe, not what was good about the new. As a result he held the eastern ramparts of free Europe with rock-hard determination.
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