American Caesar

by William Manchester

  The Pentagon, accepting this responsibility, opposed an early peace treaty between the United States and Japan on the ground that only an army of occupation could guarantee Nippon’s defense. MacArthur thought that absurd; he believed, Sebald writes, that “United States forces could be retained in Japan through a voluntary agreement with the Japanese government. ” The Joint Chiefs wouldn’t budge, so the General, for neither the first time nor the last, resorted to a dangerous stratagem: manipulation of the press. Twice SCAP had been invited to lunch at the Tokyo Correspondents Club, twice he had refused. At noon on March 17, 1947, he entered unannounced, took a chair, and said he was prepared to talk for the record. Some newsmen were taken so unawares that they lacked paper and pencils. While the others fumbled hastily, MacArthur told them that he divided the occupation tasks into three phases: demobilization of the Nipponese, political reform, and economic revival. The first was complete and the second was approaching completion. As for the third, he declared, continued SCAP interference would only bring “economic strangulation.” Then he went to the heart of the matter. He said: “The time is now approaching when we must talk peace with Japan.” When, one man inquired, might a treaty be negotiated? He replied: “I will say as soon as possible.” Afterward, William Costello reported in the New Republic, “MacArthur laughed heartily when asked to name his favorite song. He said unhesitatingly, ‘You can say my favorite tune is “Home, Sweet Home.” ’ ”151

  According to Sebald, “The General’s highly articulate and well-prepared comments on a peace treaty were . . . astounding . . . . I doubt if any correspondent had spent any time, up to that point, in exploring a peace treaty, amid the other chores of keeping abreast of the fast-moving occupation. MacArthur’s gesture succeeded, however, in implanting the subject so firmly that speculative stories on the peace were not unusual thereafter. I have no doubt that this was his major purpose.” With the Washington press corps clamoring for comment, the Truman administration could not ignore the issue, though it might as well have done so. Its first draft treaty, Sebald recalls, “was based upon the then prevailing concept that resurgent Japanese militarism was Asia’s greatest menace and, to prevent it, Japan must remain indefinitely under allied control. . . . This was, in general, a Draconian approach which would have perpetuated the bitterness of World War II. To my mind, the draft was unworkable and self-defeating and made the approach to peace retaliatory. It was the Treaty of Versailles all over again, and this indicated that we had learned little from the experience of the previous twenty-seven years. The draft was not made public, of course, but it served as an explicit example of the psychology then prevailing in Washington and in the capitals of most nations which had suffered from Japanese aggression.”152

  The Joint Chiefs voted to continue the occupation indefinitely. MacArthur, for his part, was content to let his proposal ferment in the olla podrida of world opinion. He had not changed his mind, however, and after Truman’s surprise victory over Dewey he began corresponding with political figures who shared his view of weltpolitik. Some of them, like John Foster Dulles, another advocate of a quick treaty with Japan, were eminent. Others were less respectable. He wrote with alarming candor to right-wing Republicans who had backed him in Wisconsin and Nebraska, speculating, for example, on “How many Hisses are there in the State Department?” and regretting the absence of a sound U.S. foreign policy. William Knowland and Senator H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey received a SCAP opinion that Formosa was vital to U.S. defense, thereby drawing fire from Walter Lippmann, who observed that soldiers had “no right to conduct a public agitation, using the press and politicians as their mouthpiece, to challenge and discredit the policies of their government.” (“Can’t a General Speak to a Senator, Even in Confidence?” asked an editorial headline in the Republican Saturday Evening Post.) Even more unpropitious, MacArthur was in touch with Joe Martin, now minority leader of the House of Representatives. This was one of the Supreme Commander’s more unfortunate correspondences. Martin had led the prewar fight which had rejected legislation to fortify Guam and Wake—arming them, he had said, might provoke the Japanese—and he had voted against providing Americans with programs which SCAP was giving the Nipponese, including the right to collective bargaining, public housing, and a social-security base for medical aid for the elderly. But he distrusted the Truman administration, and that, apparently, was enough for MacArthur. Later it would be the General’s undoing.153

  With the Japanese no longer his enemies, it was perhaps inevitable that his need for foes in Washington would grow. Some were old adversaries, like the stoic George Marshall; some, like the elegant Acheson, were new. Much of the time the bland Eisenhower’s name was at the top of his list. As Ike grew in stature across the sea, in the Dai Ichi his stock dwindled. The Supreme Commander later wrote virtuously of him: “I have always felt for him something akin to the affection of an older man for a younger brother.” In fact it was more like the feeling Cain had for Abel. That anyone should surpass MacArthur was bad enough; that the surpasser should be a former subordinate was almost unendurable. SCAP thought the point system preposterous—troops should have been sent home by units, he thought—and he blamed it on Eisenhower. As Chief of Staff, Ike visited Japan. His reception in the Dai Ichi was tepid. Later MacArthur said of him: “He came out and told the soldiers he would get them home to mother, and they gave him, ‘Three cheers and a Tiger. Hip, hip, hooray.’ So our army dissolved.”154

  Decimated divisions, sinking morale—the General wondered whether he could, if pressed, throw an invader back into the sea. To top it all, he had to train one chief of staff after another. Sutherland, sent home for reasons of “health,” had no fewer than five successors. Increasingly the General leaned on Whitney. Everyone then in the Dai Ichi seems to have agreed that Whitney was a deplorable influence, and two men, McNutt and Dick Marshall, told SCAP so. MacArthur’s response to each was identical: “I know. Don’t tell me. He’s a son-of-a-bitch. But, by God, he’s my son-of-a-bitch.” That was tart but unconvincing. Surely he could have found a better officer, equally loyal. Whitney was just the man to encourage his letters to men like Knowland and Martin, to whisper rumors about other Hisses in Washington, to put in a friendly word for Roxas and call the Huks Bolsheviks, and, on top of that, to fuel the General’s hostility toward Washington officials, especially Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson.155

  MacArthur and Eisenhower in Japan, May 1946

  Johnson was Truman’s son-of-a-bitch, a rumpled, bumbling, Democratic Joe Martin who Acheson thought was afflicted with “a brain malady. ” By 1949 he had become the worst stumbling block to a U.S.-Japanese treaty. He and Omar N. Bradley flew to Tokyo to argue that such a pact would be “premature.” Acheson, who agreed with MacArthur, noted with satisfaction: “The oracle gave his military colleagues small comfort.” The General said he thought the United States should ignore its foot-dragging allies, sign a covenant with Japan, and support its application for membership in the United Nations. In a memorandum to Johnson, he wrote: “The Japanese have faithfully fulfilled the obligations they assumed under the instrument of surrender and have every moral and legal right to the restoration of peace.” The non-Communist powers should guarantee Nippon’s borders and respect its right to abstain from war, he continued; failure to do so would be “a foul blemish upon modern civilization. ‘ The United States “should not . . . be deterred from moving invincibly forward. . . . We should proceed to call a peace conference at once.” In a characteristic touch, he told Sebald that he “would not refuse an invitation to act as its chairman.”

  Although Johnson and Bradley were unconvinced, the tide of opinion in Washington was moving against them as the decade ended. MacArthur by then was wholly preoccupied with the pact—he told J. P. McEvoy that it was “long, long overdue”—and with thoughts of the future’s judgment of him: “Historians a thousand years from now may give the last war only a line, saying, ‘And then the whole world was swept by a
conflagration.’ But I believe there will be a page, maybe a chapter, telling how freedom and democracy were brought to the Far East by the United States—one of the greatest and perhaps the noblest single achievement of our country.” He was proud of his viceregal accomplishments and resentful that so many Americans, their eyes still focused on Europe, did not share his pride. He had not, however, forgotten his professional identity. Proconsul he might be; military officer he had to be. That was why he felt entitled to a voice in America’s debate over the tumultuous developments on the Asian mainland. Indeed, his most effective argument for a swift settlement with Japan was, not a plea for justice, but a calculated appeal to the self-interest of the United States. The United States needed a friendly power in the Far East, he advised Washington, because it was about to lose its old ally, China.156

  The collapse of Nationalist China, like the fall of Rome—or that of the British Empire—did not happen in one day, one month, or even one year. The strength of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) crumbled slowly, village by village and province by province, the victim of a metastasizing malignancy whose many remissions could not alter the inevitable outcome. Every old China hand turned away with the same diagnosis. It was a lingering, terminal case. As time is measured in Asia, however, the end came suddenly. On April 4, 1949, the day the NATO alliance was signed in the new State Department Building under Acheson’s approving eye, a Communist general named Chu Teh began massing a million of Mao Tse-tung’s troops on the north bank of the Yangtze, the last natural barrier between Mao and the few southern outposts still loyal to Chiang. Chu Teh’s veterans lunged across the Yangtze on April 24, meeting only token resistance; Chiang had withdrawn 300,000 of his most reliable soldiers to form a rearguard perimeter around Shanghai. In the first week of May, Chu Teh was hammering at Shanghai’s gates, and Chiang fled to Formosa, taking as many Nationalist Chinese with him as he could. By now the mainland was lost to him. A few formalities remained: on June 26, KMT gunboats began blockading mainland ports; Mao proclaimed Red China’s sovereignty on September 21; and on December 8 Chiang announced the formation of his new government in Taipei. The world now had two Chinas. Sun Yat-sen’s fifty-year-old vision of a democratic China was dead, and Franklin Roosevelt’s expectation that Chiang would provide the non-Communist world’s eastern anchor had died with it.

  The American public’s response was slow. Troops had been fighting in China under one flag or another since September of 1931. U.S. newspapers had carried regular accounts of Mao’s offensives since V-J Day. But China was so vast, the movements of its unmechanized armies so sluggish, and its geography, like that of the Southwest Pacific, so unfamiliar, that the general reader in the United States had lost interest in the distant battles. If developments there became important, he reasoned, his government would tell him about them. It did. With the collapse of the Kuomintang, Acheson decided to lay the whole story before the people. On August 5, 1949, the State Department issued a 1,054-page White Paper, conceding that the world’s largest nation had fallen into Communist hands, announcing the cessation of aid to Nationalist China, and setting forth the chain of events which had led to the tragic end. Three American generals—Stilwell, Patrick J. Hurley, and George Marshall—had tried in vain to persuade Chiang to break the power of his KMT warlords and rid the Nationalist army of corruption and defeatism. Over two billion dollars of U.S. aid, as much as Japan had received, had gone to Chiang since V-J Day. Virtually all of it had been wasted. Over 75 percent of the arms shipped to the KMT had wound up in Mao’s hands. In his introduction to the White Paper Acheson bluntly called Chiang’s regime incompetent, venal, and insensitive to the needs of its people. He added: “The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the . . . result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result . . . . It was the product of internal Chinese forces, which this country tried to influence but could not.”

  To the knowledgeable this was apparent, but the U.S. public was bewildered. All this talk of KMT ineptitude was a switch. The China it knew—Pearl Buck’s peasants, rejoicing in the good earth—had been dependable, warm, and, above all, pro-American. Throughout World War II the United Nations Big Four had been Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin’s later treachery, though lamentable, had been unsurprising. But the disintegration of Chiangs forces was shocking. Acheson’s strategy to contain Red aggression seemed to have burst wide open. His own White Paper admitted that Mao’s regime might “lend itself to the aims of Soviet Russian imperialism.” Everything American diplomats had achieved in Europe—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO—seemed momentarily annulled by this disaster in Asia. A benign China, grateful for American generosity and reciprocating its friendship, had been replaced by a titanic Red monster which appeared to be intent upon devouring everything in sight.

  Nations which have suffered severe setbacks look for whipping boys. “Nous sommes trahis!” cried the retreating French in 1870, 1914, and 1940. Americans at the turn of the half-century were not immune to this impulse. Indeed, they were particularly susceptible to it, for having won a great war they had assumed that they would spend the future in tranquillity. Then Stalin had gobbled up Eastern Europe, the native lands of millions of Americans. Next, strands in the Reds’ espionage net had been uncovered. And now China was gone. Thus an earthshaking event on the Asian mainland became the most highly charged U.S. political issue since the Depression. Its force was multiplied by the anger of conservative Republicans, the very men who had stumped for MacArthur in the primaries of 1944 and 1948, and who were now keeping him abreast of political developments in Washington.

  Acheson called them “primitives,” and their behavior was certainly inelegant—as graceless, in fact, as the General’s paranoia which fed it and fed upon it. But their frustration was understandable. Roosevelt had whipped them in election after election. Then Truman, whom they had ridiculed as a political valetudinarian, had added Fair Deal insult to New Deal injury, using tactics in his 1948 campaign which can only be described as regrettable. Later, when America’s image of Truman had mellowed, his uphill campaign came to be regarded as an inspiring folktale. By the 1970s even GOP leaders like Nixon and Ford openly admired it. But at the time it had been less than admirable. “The Republicans, ” he had said, were trying “to nail the American consumer to the wall with spikes of greed. ” He had called them “gluttons of privilege,” described Dewey as a “fascist” and compared him to Hitler, and charged that Dewey’s party had “stuck a pitchfork in the farmer’s back.” Bitter after their rout that November, GOP senators and congressmen were determined to flay Truman’s administration with any weapon that came to hand, and the Asian situation provided them with the handiest. Increasingly one heard from the Republican leadership on the Hill that the administration had deliberately “lost” China—that the responsibility for Chiang’s defeat lay in Washington, among traitors who had cunningly worked with other Communists abroad to bring Mao to power. It was all a conspiracy, the litany ran, and it had all begun when Alger Hiss accompanied Roosevelt to Yalta. Robert A. Taft said, “The greatest Kremlin asset in our history has been the pro-Communist group in the State Department who promoted at every opportunity the Communist cause in China.” And Taft was a gentleman. William E. Jenner called George Marshall “a front man for traitors,” a “living lie” who had joined hands “with this criminal crowd of traitors and Communist appeasers who, under the continuing influence of Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson, are still selling America down the river.” Joe Martin declared that Acheson was “an appeaser” responsible for Mao’s takeover of China and added that he considered Truman’s plan to aid emerging nations an extension of the plot which had destroyed Chiang. Joe McCarthy denounced the administration as one of “egg-sucking phony liberals” whose “pitiful squealing” would “hold sacrosanct those
Communists and queers” who had “sold China into atheistic slavery.” All this would sound fantastic later, but at the time it was powerful political medicine. Gallup found that only 29 percent of the American people disapproved of McCarthy. Even Democratic Congressman John F. Kennedy, after reading his mail from Massachusetts, charged that the State Department had squandered U.S. wartime gains by listening to such advisers as Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University. “This, ” Kennedy concluded, “is the tragic story of China, whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away.”157

  Far from the storm but fascinated by it, MacArthur remained silent. He believed his own record on the Chinese issue would bear scrutiny, and by and large he was right. In February 1945 he had predicted that Manchuria, Korea, and, perhaps, North China would be lost to the Communists—it was, he said then, “inevitable.” That, however, had been merely a military appraisal. At the time of the surrender on the Missouri General Albert C. Wedemeyer had asked him for seven divisions to strengthen Chiang’s position, and MacArthur, as Wedemeyer later testified before a Senate committee, had “refused to make them available to me.” But this was normal prudence for a commander who was about to occupy Japan, then still armed to the teeth, and needed every GI he could muster. Most Americans of both parties had welcomed the presence of their Russian ally on the mainland that summer. On July 25 Senator Alexander Wiley, later one of Acheson’s most savage primitives, had said: “In millions of American homes, mothers, fathers, and sweethearts are waiting anxiously for news of Russia’s intentions. . . . Countless American lives are at stake in Russia’s decisions. . . . Why should we follow the lead of the ‘Nice Nellies’ of our State Department who have been more concerned with diplomatic niceties than with the preservation of American interests and lives? Let no one say that we are meddling in Russia’s business when we tell them that we want them to carry their load in the Far East. . . . We will not easily forget Russia’s contribution in the Far East if she pitches in with us and will not easily forgive her shirking of her responsibility if she remains on the sidelines.”158