American Caesar

by William Manchester

  In torpedoing a diplomatic initiative of which he had been privately advised, the General clearly believed that, given the power to open a second front in China, he could win, reversing the recent course of history on the mainland. “Because the Communists feared he might be right they called him a warmonger,” the London Economist observed the following month; “because most Europeans and many Americans feared he might be wrong, they called him dangerous and irresponsible.” The Europeans distrusted his commitment to total victory and his dabbling in political issues which they felt were none of his business. The Observer reported “some doubt” in Whitehall over whether, given MacArthur’s strong support on Capitol Hill, the White House could continue to resist demands for a wider war. Paris’s Franc Tireur commented: “An Asiatic war is too serious to be left in the hands of a military man whose years exacerbate his turbulence.” A parade of NATO ambassadors called at the State Department to demand an explanation of what the Norwegian envoy called the General’s “pronunciamento.”15

  State hurriedly issued an assurance that the UN field commander had exceeded his responsibilities and that diplomatic initiatives were still being handled by the United States government in consultation with its allies. In fact the President’s cease-fire appeal was shelved. The General’s message, in Truman’s words, “was so entirely at cross-purposes with the one I was to have delivered that it would only have confused the world if my carefully prepared statement had been made.” Ridgway said MacArthur had “cut the ground from under the President, enraged our allies, and put the Chinese in the position of suffering a severe loss of face if they so much as accepted a bid to negotiate.”16

  News of MacArthur’s quit-or-else manifesto had first reached the capital on the evening of Friday, March 23 (March 24 in Tokyo). At 11:00 P.M. a group of senior government officials gathered in the living room of Acheson’s Georgetown house. All agreed that MacArthur must go. Their host quoted Euripides: “Whom the gods destroy they first make mad.” But when one of them suggested that they phone Truman at once, Acheson demurred; he suggested that they break up and sleep on it. Meanwhile the President had been reading and rereading the text of the General’s ultimatum, which had been rushed to his second-floor study from the White House newsroom. He was, he later recalled, “deeply shocked.” He had “never underestimated my difficulties with MacArthur,” but this “was an act totally disregarding all directives to abstain from any declarations on foreign policy . . . a challenge to the authority of the President under the Constitution. It also flouted the policy of the United Nations. By this act MacArthur left me no choice—I could no longer tolerate his insubordination.”17

  Truman remembered a story which Lincoln had told during his difficulties with McClellan; Lincoln said the situation reminded him of “the man whose horse kicked up and stuck his foot in the stirrup. He said to the horse: ‘If you are going to get on, I will get off.’ “ Afterward Truman said he decided during the next forty-eight hours to dismiss the General. That is doubtful. He had plenty to say about the Supreme Commander that weekend, much of it choice, but he never mentioned dismissal. In later years he probably preferred to think, or have it thought, that he had resolved the issue on the high ground of diplomacy, rather than in the political quagmire which lay dead ahead. That Saturday he did, however, lay the foundation for a possible court-martial. Conferring with Acheson, Rusk, and Robert Lovett at noon, he instructed the Joint Chiefs to dispatch a priority message to the Dai Ichi:

  FROM JCS PERSONAL FOR MACARTHUR

  24 Mar 51

  The President had directed that your attention be called to his order as transmitted 6 December 1950. In view of the information given you 20 March 1951 any further statements by you must be coordinated as prescribed in the order of 6 December.

  The President has also directed that in the event Communist military leaders request an armistice in the field, you will immediately report that fact to the JCS for instructions.

  BRADLEY 18

  Later MacArthur, as determined to reshape the past as Truman, vehemently denied during testimony on Capitol Hill that he had acted improperly. In a colloquy with Senator Wayne Morse, the maverick Republican, he said: “The notice I put out was merely that which every field commander at any time can put out; that he would confer with the opposing commander-in-chief in an endeavor to bring hostilities to an end.” Asked whether he knew of the presidential proposal which was being circulated among America’s allies, he replied: “Yes, I received such a message. It had nothing to do with my statement whatever, though. . . . There is nothing unusual or unorthodox or improper that I can possibly read into the statement that I made on March 24.” Years afterward he wrote that “twice before, I had called upon the enemy commander to surrender”—as he had, though under vastly different circumstances and at Acheson’s suggestion—and “in neither instance had there been the slightest whisper of remonstrance from any source—indeed, quite the contrary. . . . Actually, less than four months later the Russian initiation of a proposal for a conference to arrange an armistice was avidly accepted.”19

  This would be a telling point were it not a fact that MacArthur hadn’t merely asked for an armistice in place; he had demanded that the enemy commanders admit that they had been beaten. Willoughby’s explanation—that the General had seen his “offer” as “a smart stroke of psychological warfare” and “an effort to back up the peace campaign that was being waged in the United Nations”—is even less persuasive. His supporters denied that he was aware of the extent to which he had damaged that campaign. Clark Lee wrote: “Seen from the Washington viewpoint, MacArthur was clearly guilty of an improper act. Whether he himself realized this is at least debatable.” Indeed, he apparently thought it an admirable act, though for dubious reasons. Upon receipt of word that Truman was seeking a ceasefire in place, Frazier Hunt writes, “It was obvious to MacArthur that a big sellout was about to take place . . . . It must have seemed to him that this was his last chance to help check a political move that might well be disastrous to both Korea and America.” And MacArthur himself seemed to confirm this when he told the American Legion the following October 17 that he had uncovered one of the most “disgraceful plots” in U.S. history.20

  If the President’s hope to end the fighting by suggesting that both armies lay down their arms was a plot, then the General had certainly wrecked it. Goaded by his contempt for them, the Chinese swore they would fight to the end. But they could not remove the UN commander from the battlefield. Truman, who could, had to face the fact that his Supreme Commander had dealt his armistice hopes a stunning blow. Whether or not he then made up his mind that the General must be relieved, George Marshall appears to have made up his. Marshall later told the Senate committee why: “It created a very serious situation with our allies, along the line of their uncertainty as to just how we were proceeding; the President bringing something to their attention, and gauging their action to find agreement with him, and before that can be accomplished, the leader in the field comes forward with a proposition that terminates that endeavor of the Chief Executive to handle the matter. It created, I think specifically, a loss of confidence in the leadership of the government.” Afterward Truman echoed this: “Once again, General MacArthur had openly defied the policy of his Commander in Chief, the President of the United States.”21

  His defiance did not end there. All that month SCAP had been setting little time bombs ticking to let it be known that he would continue his fight in the court of public opinion, striving to forestall a UN settlement short of triumph on the Yalu. His efforts now seem to have been barren of hope, but that is because there is a law of inertia in history: whatever happened usually seems to have been inevitable. The later division of Korea, the consequence of the armistice talks at Panmunjom, now seems to have been the only possible outcome of the war for the peninsula. It wasn’t. Spanier writes that “it was by no means certain that he had been wrong in believing that Korea was the free world’s test whet
her it could deter future aggression by punishing the aggressor now,” and in October 1962 the British Intelligence Digest concluded: “Had the Korean War been taken to a decision there can be no reasonable doubt that the [enemy] would have collapsed.” The General was sure of it. His conviction was so strong that he was laying his career on the line in interviews and letters which amounted to a one-man revolt, as arrogant in its way as the gauntlet he had flung down to Peking. Later he would insist that he hadn’t “the faintest idea” of why he was relieved, but this is surely untrue. What he probably meant was that he could not grasp why a country’s leaders would cashier its greatest general for waging war to win.22

  On Thursday, April 5—the day upon which Bradley would conclude that SCAP must be fired—three MacArthur bombshells exploded in the world press. The Freeman, a conservative periodical, had noted that many unarmed South Koreans were eager to fight with UN troops and had asked the General why they were being denied guns. He replied that the explanation was to be found in “basic political decisions beyond my authority.” (In fact he himself had vetoed arming more ROKs on January 6, preferring to issue weapons to Japanese police recruits.) That morning the London Daily Telegraph published a Hong Kong dispatch which reported that a recent British visitor to the Dai Ichi had been told by MacArthur that “United Nations forces were circumscribed by a web of artificial conditions . . . in a war without a definite objective . . . . It was not the soldier who had encroached upon the realm of the political [but the other way around]. . . . The true object of a commander in war was to destroy the forces opposed to him. But this was not the case in Korea. The situation would be ludicrous if men’s lives were not involved.”23

  These lapses, sufficient in themselves to justify strong action in Washington, paled beside a thunderbolt unleashed shortly before noon by Joe Martin in the House of Representatives. On February 12 Martin had delivered an inflammatory speech in New York, charging that the President was preventing “800,000 [sic] trained men” on Formosa from opening “a second front in Asia,” declaring that there was “good reason to believe” that MacArthur and “people in the Pentagon” favored this as “the cheapest operation” which could be mounted in the Far East, and ending: “If we are not in Korea to win, then this Truman administration should be indicted for the murder of thousands of American boys.” On March 8 the congressman had sent MacArthur a copy of his remarks, accompanied by a note inviting comment “on a confidential basis or otherwise.”24

  The General’s answer, in which he omitted any reference to confidentiality, was dated March 20, the day he learned that Truman was prepared to settle for a deadlock in Korea. Defending his reply to Martin, he later said that he had “always felt duty-bound to reply frankly to every Congressional inquiry into matters connected with my official responsibility,” and that this one was “merely [a] routine communication [such] as I turn out by the hundreds.” When its contents were divulged, he told Sebald that he didn’t even remember writing it—that he had to search his files to refresh his memory. This is unbelievable. There was only one minority leader in the House. Even in those days of political passion, it was not every day that one of the most powerful leaders of the GOP publicly accused the President of homicide. And it is inconceivable that MacArthur could have forgotten his ringing endorsement of Martin’s charges. Thanking him for the copy of his address, he began, “The latter I have read with much interest, and find that with the passage of years you have certainly lost none of your old-time punch.” He then commented that the minority leader’s views on the “utilization” of Chinese Nationalists were in conflict neither with “logic” nor the “tradition” of invariably “meeting force with maximum counter-force.” Then, in what Truman later called “the real ‘clincher,’ “ he continued: “It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield; that here we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words; that if we lose the war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you point out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.”25

  When word reached the Pentagon that Martin had taken the floor to read this into the record, explaining that he felt he “owed it to the American people to tell them the information I had from a great and reliable source,” George Marshall called it the most recent of an “accumulation” of outrages which had “brought . . . to a head” the question of MacArthur’s continuing to serve as commander in the Far East. The rest of the non-Communist world felt that a resolution of the issue was long overdue. The General’s letter was front-page news on every continent. The Times of London called it the “most dangerous” of an “apparently unending series of indiscretions”; the Observer reported that the British government had taken “the strongest possible exception” to the General’s letter, which it described “as foreshadowing an extension of the war to the mainland of Asia.” Another British newspaper described SCAP’s position as “calculated to spread the war.” Attlee’s foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, formally objected to any use of Chiang’s troops. The Quai d’Orsay followed Whitehall, and once more a cavalcade of black limousines drew up in Foggy Bottom to discharge indignant allied envoys. The grand coalition forged at Lake Success the previous summer appeared to be in imminent danger of dissolution.26

  In Congress the reaction followed partisan lines. Oklahoma’s Robert Kerr said of MacArthur, “I think the prolonged performance of his one-man act is wearing the patience of the rest of the team mighty thin,” and Morse remarked that the United States had two foreign policies, “that of General MacArthur and that of the President.” On the other side, Taft observed: “It is ridiculous not to let Chiang Kai-shek’s troops loose. . . . It is utterly indefensible and perfectly idiotic.” Homer Ferguson proposed that a congressional committee fly to Tokyo and ask the General how the war should be conducted. The comments from Ferguson and Taft, as much as anything, decided Truman. To the chief executive, Clark Lee writes, “the exploitation of MacArthur’s letter by the Republican leadership was too much to take.” In addition, Truman doubtless felt, and with reason, that the office of the presidency was at stake. He was prepared to defend it. Most of the officials in Washington, like all of those in Tokyo, felt that the General was irrepressible—a Washington Post headline read: MACARTHUR RECALL RULED OUT BY PRESIDENT, HILL HEARS; REPRIMAND IS STILL SEEN POSSIBLE—but when the President notified Acheson that he wanted to confer with him and several others before next morning’s cabinet meeting, “I was, ‘ Acheson writes, “in little doubt what the subject of our discussion would be.” Douglas MacArthur had done what, given his character and his convictions, he had to do. It was Harry Truman’s turn to do what he must do.27

  Thursday afternoon Bradley had also been alerted to attend the Friday morning meeting—he cannot remember by whom—and he briefly convened the Joint Chiefs, warning them that they had better begin weighing “the military aspects” of MacArthur’s action. All of them promptly left town, pleading previous commitments. But there would be no refuge that week for any of the administration’s Korea policymakers. It was showdown time. Four men attended the President’s Friday kickoff conference: Harriman, Bradley, Marshall, and Acheson. The first two recommended instant dismissal of the General. Harriman thought it should have been done in 1949, when MacArthur had been reluctant to withhold approval for a bill, contrary to U.S. economic policy, which had been submitted to the Japanese Diet. Bradley doubted that the General had been “intentionally” insubordinate, then or now, but he said that, had he been MacArthur, and had his advice been similarly rejected, he would have turned in his uniform. At all events, he pointed out, the President had the right to fire any officer “at any time he sees fit,” even if he had merely lost confidence in the man’s judgment. Marshall and Acheson agreed,
though they were cautious. Marshall thought that if SCAP were relieved “it might be difficult to get the military appropriations”—for rearmament and NATO—“through Congress.” The secretary of state predicted that the dismissal would trigger “the biggest fight of your administration. ”28

  They pondered stratagems for an hour. Truman, in his own words, “was careful not to disclose that I had already reached a decision.” Acheson thought the problem was “not so much what should be done as how it should be done.” It was clear to all of them that Marshall and Bradley needed time to confer with the Chiefs; the President must avoid any appearance of having disregarded military advice. Therefore the meeting adjourned until 9:00 A.M. Saturday, with Truman instructing Marshall to review, in the meantime, the Department of the Army’s file of Tokyo messages to and from MacArthur. As it happened, all of them except the President gathered in Acheson’s office that same afternoon to discuss a possible compromise which had been suggested in the Pentagon—calling the General home for consultation. The secretary of state thought this “a road to disaster . . . . To get him back in Washington in the full panoply of his commands,” he said, with his “histrionic abilities,” would “not only gravely impair the President’s freedom of decision but might well imperil his own future.” The others agreed; the first attempt to save MacArthur’s face was abandoned.29

  Saturday’s meeting was brief. Marshall reported that he had studied the files and agreed with Harriman—the General should have been recalled two years earlier. They discussed a second compromise, giving Ridgway full responsibility for the prosecution of the war and keeping MacArthur in the Dai Ichi as proconsul of Japan. This was rejected as “impractical,” though apart from a suggestion that it might complicate Ridgway’s life there was no real explanation of why; one has the feeling that by now the group scented blood and had resolved individually to reduce MacArthur to impotence. The Chiefs were still away. Truman said he could wait. He asked Bradley to tell them to “search their consciences,” remaining in session all day Sunday, if necessary, until they could recommend a course of action. Sunday morning Truman told Acheson that he had sought the counsel of Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder in this matter, but he didn’t disclose what Snyder had said, and once more he refrained from tipping his own hand. The big struggle that Sabbath was in the Pentagon. The administration’s dislike and resentment of SCAP was not shared by all his fellow officers. According to Truman, “Bradley approached the question entirely from the point of view of military discipline. As he saw it, there was a clear case of insubordination and the General deserved to be relieved of command.” In fact, Bradley has always been careful to point out that the Chiefs never called MacArthur insubordinate. The President was closer to the truth when he said in 1959 that the General would never have been recalled had the Pentagon been directing events in Korea. Like him, the Chiefs believed in hot pursuit. One of them, Sherman, repeatedly said during their marathon meeting that he had been “very fond of MacArthur” since Inchon. Rather than mortify him, the admiral suggested, Marshall, as a fellow five-star general, should fly to Tokyo and warn him that he would be removed if he didn’t mend his ways. Having declined to make the Wake trip, Marshall coldly refused this one, too, and Collins concurred. Sherman reluctantly agreed that the General would have to go because he lacked sympathy with the administration. Thereupon the Chiefs voted unanimously to recommend that he be dismissed because “the military must be controlled by civilian authority in this country,” and the Far East commander should be “more responsive” to directives from Washington.30