American Caesar

by William Manchester

  On Saturday, September 30, the day after the Seoul ceremony, Chou had broadcast a warning that the Peking regime would not “supinely tolerate” a crossing of the Parallel, that Mao’s troops “would not stand aside” if MacArthur swept into North Korea. The next day the General—at Acheson’s suggestion—demanded the surrender of the PA foe: “The early and total defeat and complete destruction of your armed forces and war-making potential is now inevitable . . . . I . . . call upon you and the forces under your command, in whatever part of Korea situated, forthwith to lay down your arms.” Wednesday night Sebald was routed out of bed by an urgent telegram from Washington. Chou had summoned K. M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador to Peking, and told him, somewhat enigmatically, that should the UN commander cross the Parallel, China “would send troops to the Korean frontier to defend North Korea,” though this step “would not be taken if only South Korean troops” moved north. This word was relayed to Washington through New Delhi. In those intolerant years the American government regarded Indian neutralism with suspicion; Truman, remarking that Panikkar had in the past “played the game of the Chinese Communists fairly regularly,” concluded that Chou’s message was probably “a bald attempt to blackmail the United Nations by threats of intervention in Korea. “ Accordingly, it was dismissed as a bluff.95

  Five days later, after the UN General Assembly had directed him to unify all Korea, MacArthur again appealed to Kim II Sung to capitulate: “Unless immediate response is made by you . . . I shall at once proceed to take such military action as may be necessary to enforce the decrees of the United Nations.” Kim didn’t respond, but Chou did, in a broadcast that same day. The UN resolution was illegal, he said; American soldiers were menacing Chinese security, and “we cannot stand idly by. . . . The Chinese people love peace, but, in order to defend peace, they will never be afraid to oppose aggressive war.” That afternoon Mao’s divisions began to slip over the Yalu to prepare a counterattack. Meanwhile MacArthur’s men, unaware of the Chinese buildup, continued to roll forward over the disintegrating units of Kim’s army. On the morning after Chou’s second broadcast, the first ROK corps entered Wonsan—X Corps would be water-lifted to reinforce them—and the Eighth Army was marching on Pyongyang. MacArthur radioed the Joint Chiefs that although he saw no indications of “present entry into North Korea by major Soviet or Chinese Communist forces,” he proposed to use only ROKs north of the line running through Chungjo, Yong-won, and Hungnam, about fifty miles north of Pyongyang and Wonsan and some sixty miles southeast of the Yalu’s mouth. Thus far he had obeyed every instruction from the Chiefs. Millis notes: “In no way did he exceed orders drafted in Washington and endorsed in Lake Success; and the widespread idea that the General, by appealing to ‘military necessity,’ had forced a reluctant administration into a dubious political adventure was without foundation.”96

  By mid-October MacArthur was approaching the line beyond which only ROKs were to be used. There were signs, for those who could read them, of trouble ahead. Jawaharlal Nehru was convinced that Peking meant business; he reported that Chinese troops were massing on the Manchurian border. Lindesay Parrott wrote in the New York Times that the ROKs were “thrusting . . . toward the Yalu River’s great Supung Dam that provides electric power not only for North Korea but for Mukden and Dairen—a matter of considerable importance to both Manchurian and Soviet industry,” adding that the fighting “centered along the west coast of North Korea about sixty miles from the Yalu River crossing on the international frontier. The area for centuries has been a traditional route of invasion and counter-invasion of Korea and Manchuria from the days of Genghis Khan.” Chou was expressing his concern through every channel open to him. So was Vyache-slav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign secretary. Molotov had been provoked; on October 9, in a sortie which has never been explained, two UN F-80 Shooting Stars had attacked a Soviet air base near Vladivostok, sixty-two miles inside Russian territory.97

  Three days later, George Marshall cabled the General that President Truman would like to confer with him somewhere in the Pacific on October 15. Truman preferred Oahu, the secretary of defense said, but “if the situation in Korea is such that you feel you should not absent yourself for the time involved in such a long trip, I am sure the President would be glad to go on and meet you at Wake Island.” MacArthur was reluctant to leave his command. X Corps’ Wonsan operation was coming up, and because of the possibility that Russian mines had been sown in the mouth of the harbor, he wanted to supervise the landing personally. John Gunther wrote: “Anything except adhesive day-to-day prosecution of the war seemed an irrelevance, even if the irrelevance was the President of the United States.” Hawaii seemed too far to go, so SCAP replied: “I would be delighted to meet the President on the morning of the 15th at Wake Island.”98

  Harry Truman was a forthright man, but his motive in flying two-thirds of the way around the world for less than two hours with MacArthur was mysterious then and is still puzzling. The UN cause was approaching a crisis, but neither he nor his Supreme Commander saw it at the time. In his memoirs the President would write: “I wanted to have a personal talk with the General.” That is inadequate. Sophisticated postwar communications in the White House, the Pentagon, and the Dai Ichi had superannuated personal confrontations unless the purpose was to dramatize a summit in the press. SCAP’s staff was convinced that the explanation for the Wake meeting lay there, that he was heading into what one of them called “a sly political ambush. “ They felt confirmed when they learned that although the presidential party would include White House correspondents, the General would not be permitted to bring any newsmen from Tokyo. Truman’s popularity in the United States was plummeting and the U.S. congressional elections were less than three weeks away. The Supreme Commander’s officers suggested to him that Truman, like FDR in 1944, wanted to bask in the reflected glow of the triumphant General.”99

  MacArthur affected to reject that interpretation. He would write in his Reminiscences: “Such reasoning, I am sure, does Mr. Truman an injustice. I believe nothing of the sort animated him, and that the sole purpose was to create good will and beneficial results to the country. “ But that is five-star hypocrisy. Privately he agreed with his officers—he told Sebald that he regarded the trip as “a political junket”—and in the light of subsequent events he was probably right. The press thought so. U.S. News and World Report called it “a good political move,” and even Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Truman’s ablest defenders, would write that it was “in all respects an odd affair.” If the President wasn’t looking for improved standings in the public-opinion polls, the likeliest alternative is that he was distressed by the Vladivostok incident. Russia, not China, was regarded as North Korea’s closest ally, and the U.S. government feared Stalin far more than Mao. The rub here is that by all accounts no one mentioned Vladivostok on Wake Island.100

  MacArthur took off from Haneda at 7:00 A.M. on Saturday, October 14, accompanied by Muccio, Bunker, Whitney, and Admiral Radford. The presidential party, facing a twenty-four-hour DC-3 flight after a stop in Missouri, was already in the air; its key members were Bradley, Secretary of the Army Pace, Harriman, Rusk, Philip Jessup, Charles S. Murphy, and press secretary Charles G. Ross. Two cabinet members were conspicuous by their absence: the secretaries of state and defense. Marshall may have felt that he should be in the Pentagon while MacArthur was out of touch with the Dai Ichi, but Acheson had no such alibi, and in his memoirs he acknowledges it: “When the President told me of his intended pilgrimage and invited me to join him, I begged to be excused. While General MacArthur had many of the attributes of a foreign sovereign, I said, and was quite as difficult as any, it did not seem wise to recognize him as one. . . . The whole idea was distasteful to me. I wanted no part in it, and saw no good coming from it.”101

  Time agreed that “Truman and MacArthur seemed, at the moment, like the sovereign rulers of separate states, approaching a neutral field with panoplied retainers to make talk a
nd watch each other’s eyes.” The President even bore gifts. A young army officer recently transferred from Tokyo to Washington had told the White House that Jean MacArthur liked Blum’s candy, which wasn’t available in Japan; Murphy had bought five one-pound boxes of it, and Harriman, during their stop in Honolulu, had picked up another five-pound box, to be sure the General’s wife got enough of it. There seems to have been little awareness among officers or civilians that either principal might misunderstand a casual word from the other, but the risk was real and grave. In The Edge of the Sword Charles de Gaulle described the approach to such a conference: “A drama is about to begin which will be played by Statesman and soldier in concert . . . . So closely woven is their dialogue that nothing said by either has any relevance, point or effect except with reference to the other. If one of them misses his cue, then disaster overwhelms them both.”102

  MacArthur arrived several hours before Truman, slept, bathed, shaved, dressed, breakfasted, and was on the field at 6.00 A.M., ready to greet the President thirty minutes before the Independence landed.* The General bore himself with his usual bwana manner, his battered cap cocked rakishly and his khaki shirt open at the neck. Truman later told Merle Miller that he was offended by his Supreme Commander’s casual uniform: “If he’d been a lieutenant in my outfit going around dressed like that, I’d have busted him so fast he wouldn’t have known what happened to him. ‘ In his memoirs he simply says: “His shirt was unbuttoned and he was wearing a cap that had evidently seen a good deal of use.” Reporters noticed that the General didn’t salute his commander in chief, but he did give him his number-one handshake, beaming as he pumped his hand and saying warmly, “Mr. President!” Truman smiled and said, “How are you, General? I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been a long time meeting you, General.” MacArthur replied, “I hope it won’t be so long next time, Mr. President.” Truman nodded vigorously. An observer recalls that the chief executive seemed to be “putting his best foot forward in his attempt to establish an entente cordiale between Washington and Tokyo.”103

  While their aides readied a conference room in Wake’s squat cinder-block Civil Aeronautics outpost, the two principals entered a battered 1948 Chevrolet—climbing over the front seat because the rear doors were stuck—and rattled off to a Quonset hut which a Pan American foreman had surrendered for the occasion. The President sat on a wicker chair, the General on a rattan settee. They were alone for half an hour. Since neither took notes, and no one else could overhear their colloquy, it is impossible to determine exactly what passed between them. During Senate hearings the following year, MacArthur said: “I would not feel at liberty to reveal what was discussed.” He had told his staff that he and the chief executive had held a “relatively unimportant conversation” about—incredibly—the fiscal and economic problems of the Philippines. In his memoirs Truman was more specific. According to him, the General expressed regret over his VFW letter and the President said that he considered the incident closed. Then, in Truman’s account, MacArthur said he had allowed the Republicans to make “a chump of me” in the last election and he wouldn’t let them do it again. The President told him of administration plans to strengthen NATO, and the General assured him that in January he would be able to release one division, the 2nd, from Korea for European duty.104

  Riding to the main meeting in their dusty automotive ruin, the chief executive thought that his Supreme Commander “seemed genuinely pleased at this opportunity to talk with me, and I found him a stimulating and interesting person. Our conversation was very friendly—I might say much more so than I had expected.” In the cinder-block shack, the two men sat side by side at an elongated table, with MacArthur’s staff to Truman’s right and the presidential advisers to MacArthur’s left. There was also an eavesdropper in the building, and her presence will always be inexplicable. She was Vernice Anderson, Jessup’s secretary. Afterward the White House would tell reporters that Miss Anderson found herself sitting in a tiny anteroom, the door to which had inadvertently been left ajar. Instead of closing it, she told newsmen several months later, she “automatically” started writing. “I was under no one’s instruction,” she said. “I hadn’t even gone there with a regular notebook. I just happened to have a pad of lined paper and I just began notes. It seemed the thing to do.” In effect the room was bugged. When the administration subsequently distributed her transcript to the press, MacArthur was deeply offended. Acheson dismissed his protests as “a proverbial tempest in a teapot.” To this day Rusk insists that her taking notes was “an entirely proper thing for her to do,” that to suggest otherwise is “grossly unfair.” Somehow one is unconvinced. When the President of the United States sits down with his most illustrious General, there are no chance witnesses. And her role becomes even less excusable in light of the fact that when Bunker picked up a pencil, Ross asked him to put it away because, he said, no notes were to be taken on either side. “In retrospect,” Gavin Long says of the concealed stenographer, “this seemed to be playing politics at about its lowest level.”105

  MacArthur greets President Harry S. Truman on Wake, October 1950

  Truman and MacArthur chat on Wake

  Fresh pineapple had been placed before each conferee, and as they consumed it, the President led the discussion. There seems to have been no agenda; topics were chosen at random. There was, surprisingly, no attempt to resolve the Chiang Kai-shek dilemma. Truman wondered about how much aid Rhee’s people would need for postwar rehabilitation, the attitude of PA prisoners (they were happy to have been caught, MacArthur said), and what progress was being made on the Japanese peace treaty. The General said he had polished and repolished the treaty draft until it shone “like a diamond.” All present felt that the occupation of North Korea would probably be accomplished by Thanksgiving. The General said he hoped to have the Eighth Army back in Nippon before the end of the year. “Near the end of the conference,” in MacArthur’s words, “the possibility of [Russian or] Chinese intervention was brought up almost casually.” The General said he understood that Soviet troop strength in southern Kamchatka was slight; there was no way the Red Army could mass men along the Tumen River before the onset of winter. In theory it was possible for Russian planes to support Chinese infantry, but according to Miss Anderson’s account—it is the only one we have—he said that “it just wouldn’t work with Chinese Communist ground and Russian air.” Of course, he added, the Chinese could come in without tactical air support. Truman asked him what he thought the odds were ihere. According to Miss Anderson, the General said: “Very little. Had they intervened in the first or second months it would have been decisive. We are no longer fearful. . . . We no longer stand hat in hand.” Of Mao’s troops in Manchuria the transcript quotes him as saying that “only 50,000 or 60,000 could be gotten across the Yalu River. They have no air force. Now that we have bases for our Air Force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang, there would be the greatest slaughter. ”106

  Murphy recalls: “He was the most persuasive fellow I ever heard. I believed every word of it.” Later Truman would charge that MacArthur had misled him on this crucial point. He had; Willoughby’s analysis was flawed. But so were those of the CIA and the State Department—sources whose responsibility for measuring the intentions of an uncommitted foreign power was far greater than that of a field commander. The President should have looked to them, not MacArthur, for guidance in what was, after all, a political issue. The Americans had been unwilling to let the Communists grasp the hilt of the Korean dagger. It never occurred to them—any of them—that the Chinese would not permit an alien army to seize it. They should have provided for that possibility. But measuring Peking’s intentions required talents very different from those which had wrought the victory at Inchon. It was a tenuous, complex business, all the more so because the United States did not recognize Red China and therefore had no embassy in Peking. Truman was asking the right question of the wrong man. Nehru in New Delhi, for example, could have prov
ided better answers than MacArthur on Wake.

  The chief problem at Wake was the very concept of the conference. It was absurd. Here were two exhausted, elderly men meeting briefly on a remote island in the middle of the world’s largest ocean. Neither was in shape to deal with momentous issues. The General was three time zones away from the Dai Ichi; the President, seven time zones away from the White House. They had never met before, and in their fatigue their social antennae were understandably blunted. Probably they would have had difficulty communicating in the best of circumstances. Truman was by nature plainspoken; MacArthur, subtle and circuitous. Remembering the Joint Chiefs timidity when he had proposed Chromite, SCAP probably did not want to subject the chief executive to any more doubts about the war. Asked for a prediction about Communist intentions, he apparently made one because he was always ready to offer an opinion, even when he lacked adequate information, and once he had committed himself, he would stubbornly refuse to concede that he might be wrong. Finally, both the commander in chief of the United States and the UN commander were about to stumble around, reeling from each other and sometimes colliding, in the purgatory of limited war, the first large-scale conventional conflict to break out since the invention of nuclear weapons. It never crossed MacArthur’s mind, for example, that the President might respond differently to Chinese Communist aggression than he had to North Korean Communist aggression. A Dai Ichi aide says that raising the question with Washington would have been “like asking if we intended to fight the enemy with bows and arrows. Had someone suggested to MacArthur at that stage that we might suffer the Chinese Reds to strike us in full force and retaliate only by warding off the blow as it fell, without striking back on our own, he would not have believed any such preposterous notion.”107