American Caesar

by William Manchester

  On his arrival at the Dai Ichi, one spectator remembers, MPs in starched uniforms and mirrorlike helmets went through an elaborate manual of arms, “a jig with rifles,” executing a “parade ballet of thunder and blazes: turning, stepping, snapping to, and saluting in four directions, like Tibetan lamas at prayer” while “MacArthur, head lowered, indifferent, tossed a massive salute to cover the guard and those civilians and Japanese who always clustered there but were harshly cordoned off at a distance.” White lines painted on the sidewalk marked the General’s route, and Bowers, watching him proceed between them, would breathe more freely, glad to be relieved of the responsibility. He often wondered what had passed through the General’s mind in the car, and occasionally during their trips he tried to strike up a conversation with him. Once he had the temerity to ask him his opinion of Eisenhower’s European campaigns. MacArthur said: “He let his generals in the field fight the war for him. They were good and covered up for him. He drank tea with kings and queens. Just up Eisenhower’s alley.” His former aide’s name came up on another occasion, when a Stars and Stripes headline reported that the Canadians had named a mountain after Eisenhower. MacArthur was glum. He said he knew the place. Then he brightened. He said, “You know, it’s a very small peak, considering the Canadian terrain.”40

  His views of the Japanese countryside were largely confined to the tree-lined embassy drive, the pink-walled Okura Museum of Chinese Art, a baseball sandlot, the Mantetsu Apartments, the concrete Finance Building, the firebombed ruins of the Navy Ministry, the Sakurada Gate of the Imperial Palace, and the palace moat. Unless a sandlot game was in progress—he peered out keenly when there was one—the only Nipponese he saw on a typical day were the bowing policemen, the worshipful group outside the Dai Ichi, and selected officials. But he hadn’t seen much more of armies he had directed in battle. He knew how to use his staff, how to cross-examine visitors, and how to glean information by scanning official documents. Rising at 7:30 A.M., he read the New York Times and wire-service copy after breakfast, frequently sending instructions on urgent matters to his staff, which was preparing for his arrival. Once in the Dai Ichi, he never used the phone. Nor did he have a secretary or an assistant through whom he could work. He wanted to see men—they had to be men; he hated to receive women, and almost never did—face-to-face. Customarily, writes Sebald, he would “think out loud,” using others “as a sounding board.”41

  It was an oddity of the building that fire escapes were concealed tubes, or chutes, which, having been built for Japanese, were too small for American men. (Jean would have fitted, but she never came here.) Most of the rooms were spacious enough, though crowded; running an entire country required many men, and although MacArthur mainly relied on the officers who had been with him since Australia, he also needed twenty-two hundred civilian officials. Soon SCAP had to erect Quonset huts and take over, first the adjacent Forestry Ministry, and then other nearby buildings.42

  MacArthur’s roost was on the Dai Ichi’s top floor, as might be expected, but his quarters were not particularly desirable; he assigned the large corner offices to his chief aides and chose for himself a small interior room which had been used for storage. The walls were walnut-paneled, the rug cadet-gray. In the beginning there was no air conditioning, and here, as in the Southwest Pacific, everyone sweated except the General. An onyx clock stood on a bookcase. Worn leather chairs were placed on either side of a long, scarred leather divan “where,” Bowers remembers, “visitors sat like Hudson Valley family portraits.” A pipe rack held seventeen pipes, five of them corncobs. SCAP’s swivel chair faced a baize-covered mahogany table-desk on which lay a letter opener, pencils, and in- and out-baskets. At the end of each day it was as neat as a West Point locker; his firmest rule was that nothing should be postponed until tomorrow.43

  During the uproar over his refusal to readmit the uppity Newsweek correspondent, the Supreme Commander told the newsmagazine’s foreign editor in ringing tones, “I love criticism.” He didn’t, of course, and two framed quotations on his walls attested to his hatred of it. One of them, from the Roman general Lucius Aemilius Paulus, ran, “In every circle, and truly, at every table, there are people who lead armies into Macedonia. . . . These are great impediments to those who have the management of affairs . . . . I am not one of those who think that commanders ought at no time to receive advice . . . . If, therefore, any one thinks himself qualified to give advice respecting the war which I am to conduct, which may prove advantageous to the public, . . . he shall be furnished with a ship, a horse, a tent; even his traveling charges shall be defrayed. But if he thinks this is too much trouble, and prefers the repose of a city to the toils of war, let him not, on land, assume the office of a pilot.” The heart of the other quotation, from Lincoln, was: “If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, these shops might as well be closed to any other business. I do the very best I know how, and I mean to keep doing so to the end. ”44

  MacArthur told a reporter, “My major advisers now have boiled down to almost two men—George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. One founded the United States, the other saved it. If you go back in their lives, you can find almost all the answers.” Clark Lee, however, believed that the two greatest influences on his political thinking were the two Roosevelts, and those who were with him in Tokyo recall that he often quoted Plato’s Republic. Certainly his philosophy of government belonged to an earlier time. In an age of pragmatic politicians, the General sought footholds on the bedrock of principles. To him, Frazier Hunt wrote, “issues automatically became moral issues, his decisions resting on the simple test of what is right and what is wrong. . . . The ancient verities still remained the basis of the great decisions that MacArthur made.” One of his great strengths in Asia was his open contempt for advocates of white supremacy, what Lee called his “complete absence of any trace of racial prejudice.”*45

  The General appointed no deputy, and, loving detail, he insisted on making such minute decisions as whether a visiting American should stay at the Hotel Imperial, or, if not, where. Most twentieth-century statesmen employ speech writers. SCAP regarded that as deceitful—he also doubted that anyone else could match his eloquence—and he spent hours drafting remarks for such occasions as New Year’s Day, the anniversary of V-J Day, and, later, the promulgation of the new Japanese constitution, in the creation of which he took the greatest pride. Although he seldom allowed anyone else to act in his behalf, he relied heavily upon his officers for information. A 7:00 P.M. summons to the Dai Ichi was not unusual, nor was a phone call in the small hours of the night if the midnight radio news had aroused his interest. He pushed himself hard, sometimes refusing to quit until he could no longer focus on the clock. He goaded his staff, too. One civilian adviser told him that he was working them to death. The General snapped: “What better fate for a man than to die in the performance of his duty?”46

  He permitted himself three diversions: reading, private movie showings, and, in the fall, Monday-morning quarterbacking. As the years passed, his emotional tie to West Point had grown ever stronger. From the Dai Ichi he sent the Long Gray Line a message recalling the day he took the plebe’s oath and adding that his “pride and thrill of being a West Pointer has never dimmed. And as I near the end of the road, what I felt when I was sworn in on the plain so long ago I can still say—‘That this is my greatest honor.’ ” His mystic commitment to the plain expressed itself most clearly in his love of football. He watched the progress of all U.S. college teams in the sports pages of American newspapers, and his predictions of each Saturday’s results were surprisingly accurate, with one exception: he always picked Army to win. When the Black Knights lost, he felt the squad would benefit from his advice. A lively correspondence developed between him and coach Red Blaik. Blaik sent him long data sheets, and MacArthur could reel off the height, weight, class, and position of every player. Once he dismayed a recent West Point graduate by asking why a certain tackle hadn’t started
the Navy game—the unfortunate shavetail hadn’t even noticed the lineman’s absence—and in the middle of a complex discussion of occupation policy one Sunday he startled his officers by suddenly saying, “I see Army started its second-string backs yesterday. That’s good generalship.” Blaik treasures a sheaf of baroque correspondence from the Dai Ichi, including such vintage MacArthur as: “The introduction of the new substitution system opens up a wide range of ramification in the tactical handling of a football game . . . . It makes the game more and more in accord with the development of the tactics of actual combat.” And: “It could not have failed to be a great blow to lose simultaneously your line and backfield coaches, both apparently excellent men. However, this again follows the technique of war, for you always lose your best men in the heat of battle.”47

  Except on autumn mornings after Army games, the General’s first task, on arriving at the office, was to go through his mail. Two neat stacks awaited him, one of dispatches that had arrived overnight and demanded his immediate attention, the other of mail addressed to him personally. Unless they were in Japanese, letters to him reached his desk unread; as always, the envelopes were partially slit so he could open them easily. Touching a buzzer, he summoned Whitney or Larry Bunker, handing him some reports and mail with instructions for disposition of them. The rest of the letters he retained. Since he hated to dictate, he composed his replies in longhand on ruled pads; these were then given to a typist. Many of his holographs survive among his papers. They are remarkable for their immaculateness and their sheer bulk. On his birthdays, for example, about three hundred congratulatory cables would arrive; each well-wisher received a personal answer.48

  Staff meetings were infrequent. When one was necessary, he would invariably open it by saying, “Gentlemen, sit down,” and then greeting each officer by his first name. They called him “Sir,” or “General.” Behind his back he was “Mac,” “Old Mac,” “the Old Man,” “the C. in C.,” or, more obscurely, “Bunny.” Individually, they could confer with him by scheduling an appointment with Bunker, who sat in his outer office. Whitney was an exception. A back door near his own office gave him access to MacArthur. The General let him use it. He also permitted Whitney to continue his practice of eavesdropping on MacArthur’s meetings with important visitors. Bunker thinks that irritated them, but he may reflect the staffs jealous sparring for the General’s attention. “Close to the throne,” Bowers recalls, was the expression they used. Like FDR, the Supreme Commander tolerated, and even encouraged, the cliques competing for his favor.49

  The only Japanese politicians to whom the General was always available were the prime minister, the chief justice, and the two leaders of the bicameral Diet. Americans were another matter. Almost any U.S. visitor of stature was welcomed—politicians, businessmen, clergymen, editors, Washington officials, professors, diplomats, traveling generals and admirals, distinguished journalists, or anyone else MacArthur wanted to impress. Most of them seem to have found the experience electrifying, or at the very least flattering. He would have a staff officer prepare an advance memorandum on a visitor’s field and interests, so that the caller would be impressed by the range of the Supreme Commander’s knowledge. These briefings were supplemented by his extraordinary memory; talking to a man who had once been his neighbor, MacArthur recalled particulars of a house he hadn’t seen in forty years. His familiarity with contemporary America, which he had last glimpsed during his 1937 honeymoon, was astonishing. Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union told Bunker as he left, “Why, he knows more about civil liberties than I do!” James M. Gavin was amazed by his familiarity with airborne operations in Europe. A labor leader, after a MacArthur lecture on the history of collective bargaining, said, “Why, he even knows union lingo.” John J. McCloy said simply: “What a man!”50

  Expecting five minutes with him, they would find themselves remaining for a half hour, or even an hour. He liked to give each the impression that this meeting was the high point of his day. Extending his thin, finely wrinkled hand and gazing into his visitor’s face with his penetrating eyes, he would wave the man to the couch and sink into a chair himself, filling and lighting his pipe as though he had nothing else to do. If the visitor also produced a pipe, MacArthur would sigh, “Ah, a man after my own heart!” He knew the master politician’s trick of establishing immediate rapport. Callers from Milwaukee, New York, or Manila returned home with the impression that the General meant to retire to, respectively, Milwaukee, New York, or Manila. Europeans heard glowing praise of their homelands, churchmen of their churches, patriots of the flag.51

  Crooking his leg over an arm of his chair, he would begin the overture softly, pausing to relight his pipe from time to time and shaking a box of matches for emphasis. Then, springing up, he would begin his pacing, gesticulating with a sweeping arm or stabbing the air with his forefinger for emphasis. “His vocabulary, ” a journalist wrote, “ranged from double-barreled phrases to surprisingly blunt idiom.” His voice would be low and guttural one moment; high, thin, and dramatic the next. In a few sentences he could pass from serenity to amusement to trembling excitement. Knuckling his thinning hair and requiring several matches to relight his pipe, his tone now quivering with anger and now humming resonantly, he would approach his climax: America’s role in Asia. Japan was the “bulwark” of freedom, the “springboard of the future.” The U.S. frontier lay here, “where more than half the world’s population lives.” Americans hadn’t “begun to realize its vast potentialities.”52

  Seldom searching for ideas or phrases, he so overwhelmed most men that afterward they did not realize, as Frank Kelley and Cornelius Ryan wrote, that it had been “a very one-sided conversation,” that “you do not talk with MacArthur; he talks at you.” These sessions were more than exhibitions of vanity, however. In his talks with congressmen, the General planted the seeds which later bore fruit in the peace treaty between the United States and Japan, and according to Brines, “two allied foreign ministers changed their policies after visiting him.” Few of his callers, whatever their profession, departed unconverted, though some had reservations. Gunther wondered whether it was wise to have a Supreme Commander who, apparently, had never had a pessimistic moment in his life. “Of course,” he observed, “great egoists are almost always optimists.” More tellingly, he wrote: “MacArthur’s qualities are so indisputably great in his own field that it comes as something of a shock to explore the record and find that in others he can be narrow, gullible, and curiously naive. He treads on unsure ground when he steps off the path of what he really knows.” He knew almost nothing, Gunther found, “in two unhappy realms—politics and the realm of news.” Sulzberger reported that what the General had to say was “a curious cocktail of earnest, decent, hopeful philosophy; a certain amount of rather long-range thinking and a good deal of highly impractical poppycock.”53

  Visitors found little opportunity to question him, and one question, which fascinated many of them and was put to him from time to time when he paused for breath, was never answered. They wanted to know what the future might hold for Douglas MacArthur. As a military man he had won virtually every decoration from the Medal of Honor down, victories which outshone those of any other commander in U.S. history, and political omnipotence matching Caesar’s and Napoleon’s. Only the White House had eluded him. Leading Republicans still regarded him as a serious candidate, but if he coveted that grand prize, he should have shown himself to the voters after V-J Day. Among those baffled by his failure to do so was President Truman. In his memoirs Truman notes that twice in 1945, on September 17 and October 19, he invited MacArthur home “to receive the plaudits of a grateful nation. I felt that he was entitled to the same honors that had been given to General Eisenhower. And, like Eisenhower, he could have returned to his post after a brief sojourn here. But the General declined.” MacArthur’s reply to the first of these communications was: “Appreciate very much your message. I naturally look forward to a visit home, from whic
h I have been absent more than eight years. The delicate and difficult situation which prevails here, however, would make it unwise to leave until conditions are more stabilized than at present. I believe a considerable period of time must elapse before I can safely leave.” On October 21 he answered the second invitation: “The desperation of the coming winter here cannot be overestimated. I would feel as though I were failing in my duty and obligations were I to delegate this responsibility.”54

  Truman was dissatisfied with these explanations; so was George Marshall. And they were right. His real reason for remaining in Tokyo was far less rational. It was fascinating, even fantastic. In what may have been the most egocentric statement in an immodest career, he told one of his officers: “If I returned for only a few weeks, word would spread through the Pacific that the United States is abandoning the Orient.”55