American Caesar

by William Manchester

  In his memoirs the General writes: “I was not a candidate and declined to campaign for the office . . . . It was a great mistake on my part not to have been more positive in refusing to enter into the picture.” The fact is that he was a candidate and very eager to enter that picture. In Sidney L. Mayer’s words, “A military strategist without parallel, a modernizing reformer of great stature, MacArthur now sought to establish himself as a major political thinker. It was a folly which was to lead to disaster.” The road to the debacle began in February 1948, when it became clear that the struggle for the Republican nomination would be determined in ten or twelve states, mostly in the Middle West, where the General was strongest. Now, if ever, he must make his move. On March 9 he buzzed for Whitney and handed him this statement, scrawled in pencil on a yellow pad: “I have been informed that petitions have been in Madison signed by many of my fellow citizens of Wisconsin, presenting my name to the electorate for consideration at the primary on April 6th. No man could fail to be profoundly stirred by such a public movement. I can say, and with due humility, that I would be recreant to all my concepts of good citizenship were I to shrink because of the hazards and responsibilities involved from accepting any public duty to which I might be called by the American people.”135

  Tokyo’s newspapers ran one-page extras, Nipponese shopkeepers hung “We Japanese Want MacArthur for President” signs in their windows, and Japanese wore MacArthur pins in their lapels. “Japanese editorial writers, who in this case probably reflected accurately the feeling of nearly all their readers,” the New Yorker observed, “hailed the MacArthur announcement with a mixture of approval and regret.” Typically, the Tokyo Mainichi declared: “We would, of course, be gratified if General MacArthur were elected President, as it would mean that we would have a U.S. President who would fully understand us. This benefit would offset our loss of the great General.” Japan’s leading financial paper, Nihon Keizai, predicted widespread disappointment among the Nipponese should MacArthur leave the country, but after expressing its “profound confidence’ in him and the “sincere thanks” of the people for everything he had done, and observing that “probably SCAP feels toward the Japanese not so differently from the way he feels toward his own countrymen,” the leader concluded that its readers should be willing to share him with the United States, since he “is not an individual the Japanese should monopolize but a character of world importance.” Tokyo’s Minpo reported that “Taft and Vandenberg are rapidly fading out of the picture,” and Dai Ichi commented that it was “regrettable that the eighty million Japanese people do not have the right to vote.”136

  But Taft and Vandenberg (and Thomas E. Dewey) were not fading rapidly, and American voters were not at all sure that they wanted President MacArthur at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “No doubt about it,” Time noted; “in the first week the boos were larger than the cheers. ” A GOP poll reported that Dewey’s strength among Republicans was triple MacArthur’s, and that Stassen, Taft, and Vandenberg had more support than the General. William Z. Foster, the Communist leader, attacked SCAP, which helped. Hearst’s endorsement, on the other hand, hurt his chances. The Los Angeles Examiner wickedly predicted that “MacArthur will wade ashore at San Simeon when he comes home,” and the Scripps-Howard Pittsburgh Press observed: “It looks as if General MacArthur has been booby-trapped. . . . Some weird things have been happening already in the campaign . . . but nobody else has suffered so extreme a handicap as that of becoming ‘the Hearst candidate.’ ” MacArthur’s first wife, now on her fourth husband, told a reporter: “If he’s a dark horse, he’s in the last roundup.”137

  U.S. News and World Report observed that “MacArthur sentiment is rising in Wisconsin and Illinois.” Nevertheless Arthur Krock noted a growing feeling, even among his supporters, that if he meant to be an active candidate he should resign his commission and come home. The Pentagon prohibited political involvement by serving officers, and the General’s position was becoming increasingly difficult. He didn’t help it by his treatment of reports that Veterans-Against-MacArthur clubs had been formed in a dozen large American cities. He took the news hard, and barred any mention of it in Stars and Stripes or over Tokyo’s armed-forces radio, explaining that it was “controversial.” Washington heard about it and sent him a rocket. Embarrassed, he lifted the ban.138

  Japanese support MacArthur’s presidential aspirations, 1948

  Another such Japanese sign

  It was ironic that many members of the old isolationist movement, the conservatives who represented his natural constituency, spurned him because he had become a symbol of America’s global presence. As former chairman of the America First Committee, his old friend Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck could have helped him here, but Wood, fearful of damaging the General with moderate and liberal Republicans, remained silent. The Sears chairman did solicit support from friends in Wisconsin, however. That would be a key primary, and insofar as MacArthur had a home state, Wisconsin was it. The most telling blows against him there were being delivered by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a Stassen backer. Philip LaFollette was hiring his own radio time to court votes for the General in the state, but McCarthy, though still obscure, was beginning to display his unique gifts as a gutter fighter. He accused MacArthur of railroading Billy Mitchell, dredged up details of his divorce, hinted broadly that he was a homosexual, and charged that the General was Stalin’s candidate.139

  MACARTHUR VICTORY DUE IN WISCONSIN, a New York Times headline guessed on March 29. It was wrong. The General won only eight delegates to Stassen’s nineteen. The following morning, when Sebald arrived on the Dai Ichi’s sixth floor for a conference, Paul J. Mueller, then SCAP’s chief of staff, held up a warning hand. “The General is as low as a rug and very disappointed,” Mueller said. He wouldn’t quit, though. Two days later he cabled the president of the Nebraska MacArthur-for-President organization that he was definitely still in the race. He ran fifth in the Nebraska primary, and that was the end of it; he asked that his name be withdrawn. Senators Kenneth Wherry and Styles Bridges wanted him to come home in May and testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee, reasoning that he would receive a hero’s welcome and thus raise his profile. MacArthur refused. It would be beneath him, he said, and he was right.140

  Probably he would have made a poor President. His introversion, his aloofness, and his contempt for the “science of the second best” would have crippled his administration. Moreover, his choice of subordinates—the officers who had been arguing that March over who would have which cabinet post—was not reassuring. Yet he deserved more from the Republicans than a deliberate show of disrespect, which was what he got at their national convention that June. Millions of slips supporting him, clipped from Hearst papers, had been mailed to the delegates in Philadelphia. Philadelphia Inquirer newsboys had been hired, at five dollars each, to distribute MacArthur-for-President leaflets during the demonstration for him, and Jonathan Wainwright, still weak from his imprisonment, was waiting in a hotel room to deliver a nominating speech. The managers of the convention delayed the speech and the demonstration until 3:40 A.M., when all the newsboys had gone home and Wainwright faced an empty auditorium. MacArthur received eleven votes on the first ballot and seven on the second. On the third ballot Dewey was chosen unanimously. The next day Whitney told a friend that he had “never seen the General look so disappointed.” It is impossible to tell which stung more, his poor showing or Wainwright’s mortification.141

  Manuel Roxas, MacArthur’s protégé in Manila, had been luckier. Defeating Osmeña in a close race, Roxas became the first president of the Republic of the Philippines and, as expected, amnestied colleagues accused of wartime treachery. Collaboration had been the chief issue in the election. Osmeña had asked the commonwealth’s congress to establish a people’s court which would try the accused, but Roxas had argued that re-arresting those who had been freed in 1945 would put them in double jeopardy. In a series of brilliant parliamentary maneuvers, he had f
orced Osmeña to grant bail, assuring his own continued control of a legislative majority until he could take office and grant blanket pardons.

  MacArthur had done Roxas several good turns during the campaign, permitting him to exploit their friendship, tacitly approving his split of the Nacionalista party, and declining to lend SCAP’s legal staff and counterintelligence files to the prosecutors of collaborationists. Harold Ickes unwittingly hurt Osmeña by threatening to cut off relief funds for the stricken islands unless the guilty were convicted and punished. This was resented in the islands; many thought it made Osmeña look like a stooge for the Americans. Others thought him a dupe of the Huks, now threatening reprisals against the Philippine establishment unless the new government introduced radical reforms. Frightened by the prospect of renewed bloodshed, middle-class Filipinos stomached their disdain for the wartime turncoats and rallied behind Roxas, who promised to enforce law and order and respect the sanctity of private property.142

  Once the votes had been counted, the new president decided to fly to the United States. He asked Paul McNutt, back in the Philippines for his second tour as high commissioner, to accompany him, and when their plane refueled at Atsugi, MacArthur was there to greet them. The General told the press: “Roxas is no collaborationist. I have known him intimately for a quarter of a century and his views have been consistently anti-Japanese. . . . The recent election, which selected Roxas for the Presidency, reflected the repudiation by the Filipino people of irresponsible charges of collaboration made in foreign countries by those who lack an adequate knowledge of the circumstances.” So much for Ickes. Then McNutt, speaking to the National Press Club in Washington, said, “General MacArthur, under whose orders Roxas served during the war, has vouched for his military record.” The New York Times took note of “the clean bill of health given Roxas by the late President Quezon and by General MacArthur.”143

  David Bernstein, an Osmeña partisan, writes bitterly: “The whitewash had succeeded. . . . The French executed Laval, while the Filipinos elected Roxas as President.” The analogy is inexact and unfair, but Bernstein is on firm ground in contending that MacArthur had “determined the future course of Philippine politics.” By the morning of July 4, 1946, when Manila sirens screamed, church bells sounded, and the American flag was lowered over Dewey Boulevard for the last time, the domestic policies of the emerging nation had already been determined by leaders whom the General had endorsed. He was the idol of the crowds that day, but his cheerers might have been less enthusiastic had they known what lay ahead. In vouching for the new president, he had absolved the whole oligarchy of upperclass politicians; Roxas, who died two years later, would be succeeded by another oligarchist, Elpidio Quirino, and the new leader of the Nacionalista party would be José Laurel, the wartime leader of the Japanese puppet state. In effect, MacArthur—with the full approval of McNutt and Truman—was supporting the Manila elite as a counterpoise to Filipino Marxists. This outcome was a dark mirror image of his bright record in Japan.144

  The Huks opened a seven-year insurgency which was ultimately suppressed with American military assistance. At one point they were fighting in the suburbs of Manila; armed escorts were needed to transport government officials from the capital to Clark Field. A U.S. mission led by Daniel W. Bell, a Washington banker, reported that the rebels’ grievances were valid, that the Roxas-Quirino administrations were squandering resources through graft, poor planning, and ineptitude. Bell found that the Filipinos had been better off before Pearl Harbor, yet “while the standard of living of the mass of people has not reached the prewar level, the profits of businessmen and the income of large landowners have risen very considerably.”145

  Support of these oppressors by the United States makes no sense unless it is seen against the backdrop of U.S. postwar foreign policy. On independence day in Manila, MacArthur had slapped Romulo on the back and said: “Carlos, America buried imperialism here today!” It had done nothing of the sort. Even as the Stars and Stripes slid down Philippine flagpoles, the United States was embarking on a new wave of expansionism; the Manila-Washington pact provided for ninety-nine-year American leases on military bases in the archipelago, part of a global net designed to contain, or encircle, Communism. The Pentagon wanted MacArthur’s cooperation in fashioning the Asian links of this chain. Naturally he needed no persuasion; he loathed Soviet aggrandizement as much as (though no more than) Truman. Later the General and the President would disagree over whether policy should be made in the Dai Ichi or the White House, and over the value of airfields on Formosa, but their goals were identical.146

  In those early postwar years MacArthur saw Russia in nineteenth-century terms, inspired less by Marxist idealism than by Slav imperialism under the guise of working-class solidarity. He liked to talk about “the Muscovite bulging his muscles and lusting for power” or “the menace of Imperialist-Mongoloid-Pan-Slavism.” He told Sulzberger that the Soviets, in their few days of war against Japan, had achieved what had eluded the czars for a century: total control over a large part of Korea. Therefore, he reasoned, “I think it is foolish to assume that the Russian would start an aggressive war now. He is doing so well under the present no-shooting war that he would probably and logically wish to continue the present successful system.” SCAP pointed out that although Stalin had 750,000 troops in the Far East, this army had to be supplied by a single railroad, had no amphibious capability, and lacked bases east of Lake Baikal. He argued: “The Soviet is a patient man. He thinks in terms of decades or centuries. He is not an Occidental but an Oriental. He is white; he is partially located in Europe; he has our gregarious instincts. But at heart he is a Tatar. He is like Genghis Khan. It is an Oriental trait to be patient.”147

  The General’s chief miscalculation, shared by every other major Western strategist, lay in his failure to anticipate client wars. Russian logistics were irrelevant if their fighting was to be done by surrogates: Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese. Otherwise MacArthur understood the Communists and addressed them in language they understood. Tokyo was an eye in the Cold War hurricane, and from time to time Derevyanko or another Soviet leader would accuse the Supreme Commander of “antidemocratic measures” which threatened a “revival of the old fascist order in Japan.” That was the kind of meat on which this Caesar fed. He called them “moth-eaten charges” which had been “dusted off to act as a smokescreen”; “unadulterated twaddle” representing “a callousness of hypocrisy I cannot fail to denounce” and an outrageous evasion of “the searchlight of public scrutiny.” A Soviet letter of complaint to him which was released to the press before its arrival in the Dai Ichi was a “provocative impertinence.” Another drew the reply: “I have received your note, and have carefully considered its context in vain search of some semblance of merit and validity. Rarely indeed have I perused such a conglomeration of misstatement, misrepresentation, and prevarication of fact.” He was shocked by its “blatant,” “gruesome,” “wicked,” “malicious,” and “egregious” distortions, and said so in overripe metaphors. One has the impression that both sides enjoyed these exchanges. They released immense voltage, stimulated the participants, and harmed no one.148

  They were largely irrelevant to SCAP policies, of course, and the Supreme Commander knew it. In conversations with subordinates and visitors he was matter-of-fact, even understated, on the Communist issue in Nippon. He knew that Stalin had once said, “With Japan, we are invincible,” believed it to be true, but dismissed the possibility of Russia’s achieving it as an impossible Kremlin dream. To Sulzberger he said, “I don’t think that more than 1 or perhaps 2 per cent of the [Japanese] population can be called Communist,” and he told G. Ward Price, a British journalist, that he doubted those few had “any direct link with Moscow.” He said to another correspondent: “I think practically all Japanese have a fear and hatred of the Russians. Everything emanating from Russia is detested. The fact that communism comes from there makes it impossible to introduce in Japan. I haven’t the slightest
fear of any internal trouble with the Japanese Communists but one must realize that external pressures are increasing.”149

  That was the rub. Japan did not exist in a vacuum. Its people affected, and in turn were affected by, events elsewhere, particularly in the Far East. Once its recovery had begun, once the hungry had been fed and the homeless housed, the shifting geopolitical kaleidoscope overseas became a factor in the daily reckonings of its prime minister, its cabinet, its Diet, and its Supreme Commander. MacArthur’s priorities were subtly altered. In the beginning he had been preoccupied with eliminating Nippon’s capacity for aggression. By the time he had finished the rebuilding of the country, he was weighing its role in the family of nations, particularly in that branch of the family then known as the Free World. Now he was less concerned with protecting Japan’s neighbors from Japan, more concerned with shielding Japan from them. Nippon, even more than the Philippines, was an invaluable military base. MacArthur would have been a poor general if he hadn’t seen it in that light.

  But he saw it in another light, too. In the Philippines he had been guided by the dead hand of the past: the Filipinos’; his father’s; his own; and the prewar agreements which paved the way for the ninety-nine-year leases. Japan was a clean slate, and the messages he wrote on it in the Dai Ichi were very different. One was fundamental: Dai Nippon was a sovereign power, and Tokyo must be permitted to negotiate with Washington as an equal. The difficulty here was Japan’s vulnerability to an enemy attack. By 1947 it was clear that the no-war article in the MacArthur constitution, hardly a year old, was already obsolete. MacArthur now foresaw the need for a national security force, or jietai, to cope with subversion and public disorder. The jietai’s initial strength would be 75,000. Later it would grow to 100,000, and its officers would be recruited from veterans of the old imperial army. But this was too slight a force to repel a full-scale assault from the Asian mainland. Should that come, it would have to be met by American troops, American ships, American planes.150