American Caesar

by William Manchester

  The President didn’t propose to court-martial the General, but he did consider relieving him “then and there.” He didn’t, he later wrote, because he knew a general “couldn’t be a winner every day in the week,” and because he “did not wish to have it appear as if he were being relieved because the offensive failed. I have never believed in going back on people when luck is against them, and I did not intend to do so now. Nor did I want to reprimand the General, but he had to be told that the kinds of public statements which he had been making were out of order. ” Truman said he “could not permit such confusion to continue. ” Therefore, to shut MacArthur up, he instructed Acheson and George Marshall on December 6 to issue two directives to all field commands and embassies abroad. The first ordered that no speeches, press releases, or other statements should be distributed until they had been cleared by the State or Defense Department, “to insure that the information made public is accurate and fully in accord with the policies of the United States Government.” The second directive specified that “officials overseas, including military commanders and diplomatic representatives, should . . . exercise extreme caution in public statements, . . . clear all but routine statements with their departments, and . . . refrain from direct communication on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines or other publicity media in the United States.”154

  In a press conference Truman praised MacArthur’s “splendid leadership” and denied curbing his right to speak freely about the war, but everyone knew the General was the target of the new regulations. The first test of them came when MacArthur told the Pentagon that he wanted to reply to correct factual inaccuracies in a Herald Tribune editorial criticizing Willoughby. The Department of the Army turned him down, explaining that “it is felt that we should avoid entering any controversies in the press. The editorial represents the writer’s opinion. Your proposed refutation could be quoted out of context to the detriment of your own intentions. Therefore it is necessary to disapprove your statement.” Next a war correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor filed a wild story reporting that one UN division had been declared unfit for combat after bolting the field in disorder, that the Chinese were so short of ammunition they had to search the bodies of the fallen, and that MacArthur’s “mechanized army” was “fleeing in jeeps and trucks from an overwhelming horde of poorly equipped Chinese . . . following on mules, ponies and camels.” The General prepared a retort which he hoped “would restore the proper perspective to the over-all course of events in Korea and reassure the American people.” This, too, was sent to Washington for clearance and rejected by the Department of the Army on the ground that it did not conform with “the intent of the President.”155

  The intent of the President, Robert A. Taft told the Senate, was to gag Douglas MacArthur, and he was right. The White House, under heavy fire from Taft’s party, was trying to avoid a second front in Tokyo. Indeed, the tension between the chief executive and the apocalyptic figure in the Dai Ichi during the months ahead can only be grasped if it is seen in the context of American politics that year. On November 7, the day the General had asked for hot pursuit, U.S. voters had reduced the number of Democratic seats in the Senate by ten and cut the Democratic majority in the House by two-thirds. The chief issue in the campaign had been foreign policy. Disillusioned by casualty lists, the battlefield deadlock, and the eagerness of allied governments to conciliate China, the electorate had strengthened the Republicans, and they, scenting the public’s mood, were rallying around the General.156

  On Capitol Hill the two parties had begun what was being called the “great debate” over whether more GIs should be stationed in Europe and, if so, whether the administration could send them there without congressional approval. Taft, supported by Herbert Hoover, argued that pledging 20 percent of the gross national product to the military budget, together with the Joint Chiefs’ “tremendous emphasis on the conducting of a land war in Europe, might gut the American economy. Appealing to isolationist distrust of entangling alliances, Taft and Hoover proposed what was variously called the principle of Fortress America, or Continentalism. It wasn’t as lonely as it sounded. They proposed to hold the Atlantic and the Pacific, in Hoover’s words, “with one frontier on Britain and the other on Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines.” Because the United States was already committed in Korea, Taft was of two minds about the peninsula. GIs should either pull back to Nippon, he said, or wage all-out war and win. The one approach which he and the rest of the GOP leadership would never accept was the Truman-Acheson concept of a limited military action. Because MacArthur agreed with them, the President had muzzled him, hoping to decrease the pressure on the administration to adopt the opposition’s policy. Given the General’s temperament and his convictions, this was bound to fail. Sooner or later the administration would be confronted by the fearful spectacle of a popular General appealing over its heads to his countrymen, thereby launching a bitter, exhausting, greater debate.157

  In the Attic tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the hero is a figure of massive integrity and powerful will, a paradox of outer poise and inner passion who recognizes the inevitability of evil, despair, suffering, and loss. Choosing a perilous course of action despite the counsel of the Greek chorus, he struggles nobly but vainly against fate, enduring cruelty and, ultimately, defeat, his downfall being revealed as the consequence of a fatal defect in his character which, deepened by tumultuous events, eventually shatters him.

  So it was with Douglas MacArthur. Brave, brilliant, and majestic, he was a colossus bestriding Korea until the nemesis of his hubris overtook him. He simply could not bear to end his career in checkmate. It would, in his view, be a betrayal of his mission, an acknowledgment that MacArthur was imperfect. Politics had always been his Eve, a lure and a threat, fascinating but ill-boding. Now, as he saw it, his political enemies—and anyone who barred his way was an adversary—were thwarting his last crusade. Believing that Washington was denying him the tools to finish his job, that he had been relegated to what he called a “No-Man’s Land of indecision,” scornful of what he regarded as the Joint Chiefs’ loss of a will to win, he grappled through that winter holding the Chinese at bay while trying to persuade his superiors to see things his way.158

  They couldn’t do it. The telecon circuits between Tokyo and Washington chattered around the clock, and the National Security Council met almost every day, but there was no way that the leaders of the administration could accept his goals without abandoning their own. There simply were not enough young men in the United States, and not enough ardor in America’s allies, to conquer China and still man NATO’s defenses. Six months earlier the United Nations had been quick to condemn the In Min Gun, but now world opinion was reversing itself. The hazards of following MacArthur’s road were too forbidding: the resumption of the struggle between Chiang and Mao, the intervention of Peking’s Soviet ally, an atomic holocaust. Thus the General faced a blurry future. The Joint Chiefs could tell him neither to win nor to quit; they could only order him to hold, vaguely explaining that if necessary he should defend himself in successive lines, that successful resistance at “some position in Korea” would be “highly desirable,” but that Asia was “not the place to fight a major war.”

  Inevitably, Trumbull Higgins notes, “United States government policy was less acquiescent to MacArthur in defeat than it had been during the General’s brief honeymoon with victory.” The glow of Inchon had gone glimmering. Truman was fighting a two-front war, too; the General had the Chinese, and the President had the Republicans. With Alger Hiss in prison, the GOP was demanding the resignation of Dean Acheson, who had told a press conference that he wouldn’t turn his back on Hiss. Truman wrote: “General MacArthur had given these Acheson-haters an argument behind which they could gather their forces for the attack. In other words, they wanted Acheson’s scalp because he stood for my policy.” The President felt that “MacArthur had, as he had in previous wars, displayed splendid leader
ship. But I wanted him to accept, as a soldier should, the political decisions which the civil authorities of the government had determined upon.” Because the General’s convictions prevented that, the Tokyo-Washington axis was wobbly. As differences between the White House and the Dai Ichi grew, the polls testified to the public’s disenchantment with the administration. George Gallup found that Truman was trailing Taft, and Leviero observed in the Times that his “prestige happens to be on one of those down-curves.” Leviero added: “Yet there is no question that his essential confidence remains intact.” The President, in short, had no intention of surrendering to the General.159

  Nevertheless he was embattled. He wrote that attacks on him had “become vitriolic. . . . Most of the criticism came from those members of the Senate who have sometimes been called the ‘China First’ block. These men kept repeating the completely baseless charge that somehow Acheson had brought about the Communist victory in China, and they now charged that it was Acheson who was depriving General MacArthur of the chance of gaining victory.” A siege mentality was reflected in government leaders’ waspish, sometimes even malicious views of the General. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett complained that MacArthur was preparing “posterity papers”—alibis for failing to win the war. Acheson went further, writing that the General was “near panic” and “in a blue funk.” The “effort to stabilize the Korean War,” Acheson said, “involved nearly simultaneous efforts on three fronts: the front in Korea, the front in the United Nations, and the front in Tokyo. The most intractable was the last.”160

  On the whole, historians have sympathized with the administration. Walter Millis concludes that the General “would not play unless both the policy and the strategy were transformed in accordance with his liking”; John W. Spanier infers that “what he seemed to be saying was that he would cooperate with the administration only on his terms.” That is true, but it is equally true that his instructions from the Pentagon were murky. Clark Lee notes that “a state of paralysis gripped Washington; for weeks MacArthur continued to fight under his first, now meaningless orders, and the only positive action taken thereafter was to attempt to silence MacArthur.” To Gavin Long “the leaders in Washington seemed to have been spellbound. Already MacArthur had disobeyed one order—to employ only Korean troops in the frontier provinces. What would he do next?”161

  Actually that order had been less than pellucid. When the General had cited Marshall’s alteration of it (“feel unhampered tactically and strategically . . . north of the 38th Parallel”) the Pentagon had dropped the matter. The fact is that America’s high command appears to have been afraid of the General. Acheson tells us that Bradley and Collins “defended MacArthur and said that a war could not be run by a committee. ‘ If that was true, the Joint Chiefs should have been disbanded. It was their job to supervise theater commanders, and the only explanation for their negligence in this instance is that SCAP’s fame had intimidated them. In his History of the United States Army, R. F. Weigley observes that “MacArthur long retained his very free hand. The Joint Chiefs deferred to his experience, rank, and reputation, to his intense emotional involvement in the Far East, an involvement they did not share, and to his unmeasured but possibly dangerous political potency as a man cultivated and admired by Republican party leaders.” Weigley continues: “So reluctant were they to interfere with MacArthur on a matter of military judgment that they urged Secretary of State Dean Acheson to intervene with the President, so that Truman might instruct MacArthur to consolidate his forces.” But Acheson—and Marshall—were equally wary. Ridg-way describes a Pentagon conference during which his suggestion that the General be bluntly told to toe the line was followed by “a frightened silence” on the part of the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the Chiefs. Leaving the meeting, Ridgway told Hoyt Vandenberg, a close friend, that he didn’t understand why they didn’t tell MacArthur exactly what to do. Vandenberg replied: “What good would that do? He wouldn’t obey the orders. What can we do?” Ridgway said: “You can relieve any commander that won’t obey orders, can’t you?” He recalls that Vandenberg looked “puzzled and amazed” and walked away.162

  Ridgway became a key figure in the growing controversy on December 23, 1950, when Walker was killed in a jeep accident on an icy Korean road. Relinquishing his role as Collins’s deputy, Ridgway flew out to assume command of all UN ground forces—the Eighth Army, with which X Corps had just been merged. MacArthur said wearily, “Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best. “ What Matt did was to demonstrate that the Supreme Commander was not indispensable to the fighting. Four days before Walker’s death MacArthur had radioed Washington that if his men were to stabilize a front, he would need four fresh divisions. Ridgway said that he believed he could handle Lin Piao’s 484,000 Chicom-PA troops with the 365,000 soldiers he already had. It turned out that in the head-on, positional struggles now being fought around the Parallel, the forthright Ridgway was at least as good as SCAP, who needed a larger arena to work his strategic miracles. The UN line was straightened out with no help from the Dai Ichi, and cautious, probing patrols were sent forth, backed by strong armored spearheads. Phillips writes: “The enemy was dug in securely and in depth, taking full advantage of the deep snows and murderous cold of the Korean winter. For weeks the two lines surged futilely against each other like conflicting sea currents, punching through for a gain of a few miles here, giving up a few bloody acres there. But little by little, almost mile by mile, Ridgway’s men moved forward, never giving up quite as much today as they gained yesterday.”163

  Meanwhile, as his new field commander battled the enemy, MacArthur continued to fight Washington. The cable traffic between Tokyo and the Pentagon in those months reveals the formation of painful patterns. The General requests permission to bomb a specific target—a Chicom road junction in Manchuria, or an important North Korean supply depot near the Russian border. The Chiefs turn him down. He asks for clarification. They explain that they want no wider war. That triggers a series of angry MacArthur arguments. Keeping hands off the foe’s bases makes no sense, he says; the Chinese are building up a million-man striking force; Peking has committed itself “fully and unequivocally,” and nothing the United States does now can further aggravate the situation. “This small command,” he says, “is facing the entire Chinese nation in an undeclared war.” Neither side is approaching a solution. Continuing this kind of fighting will mean a “savage slaughter,” and, because of Mao’s inexhaustible manpower, it will “militarily benefit the enemy more than it would ourselves.” He cannot save his army unless he is allowed to carry the war to China. Fear of Russian intervention is unjustified; nothing short of an invasion of Siberia will bring the Soviets into the war. So he goes, on and on, repeating himself endlessly. The Chiefs never say in so many words that they are prepared to leave the Chicoms in possession of the field—he isn’t the only one writing posterity papers—but that is implicit in their replies.164

  At year’s end the Chinese, as Willoughby puts it, “made one last convulsive, bloody effort to discredit him [MacArthur] in the field.” Temperatures along the Parallel fell below zero and stayed there. The Chicoms and the In Min Gun attacked every night. The UN lines bent and began to buckle, and on New Year’s Eve, at the very hour of Auld Lang Syne, a great onslaught came billowing down through the dense snow and sailed into CINCFE’s defenders. Seoul fell for the second time on January 4. Once more the enemy achieved a major breakthrough, cutting off a U.S. division at Wonju in the center and rupturing the entire UN front. In Washington Acheson was sickened by “the stench of spiritless defeat, of death of high hopes and broad purposes.”165

  SCAP’s spirits at this time are difficult to assess. Willoughby writes that the General had “made his own lucid appraisal . . . and accurately forecast the slow deterioration . . . of the Chinese hordes,” and MacArthur himself claimed that while “the press of Europe and much of that of the United States cried hysterically that the Unit
ed Nations forces ‘are going to be pushed into the sea,’ ” the “thought of defeat in Korea had never been entertained by me.” Nevertheless, he clearly warned that “unless some positive and immediate action is taken . . . steady attrition leading to final destruction [of his command] can reasonably be contemplated.” And Truman notes in his memoirs that it was the General’s opinion “that if we did not intend to expand the war the only other choice would be to contract our position in Korea gradually until we were reduced to the Pusan beachhead . . . despite the fact that this would have a poor effect on Asian morale.” Probably MacArthur was hoping to win support for a more aggressive policy by threatening the administration with the specter of GOP accusations that, having lost China, Truman and Acheson were now losing Korea as well. Certainly Washington felt threatened. Yet there was no possibility that the administration would cave in under this kind of pressure. The root of the matter was that the United Nations resolution calling for the unification of the peninsula by force had, by mutual consent of its members, been quietly abandoned. If Ridgway could hold on, the UN was ready to settle for the status quo ante helium: two Koreas, mutually distrustful—a denouement which MacArthur couldn’t accept.166