American Caesar

by William Manchester

  But the senators knew that if the Soviet Union was militarily unprepared for a final confrontation (as it was—the Russians did not even begin to develop a long-range bomber fleet until 1954), the United States was psychologically unprepared to risk provocation of the world’s other superpower. Among themselves the committee members agreed that MacArthur’s bold proposals were therefore unrealistic. They also recalled that he had been fallible in the past; until the very eve of the Japanese attack in 1941, he had insisted that they wouldn’t attack the Philippines until the following spring. Furthermore, they noted certain inconsistencies in his testimony. Only a madman, he said, would land American infantrymen in China—“Anyone who advocates that should have his head examined”—yet that was inherent in the policies he was urging upon them. In explaining why he had not anticipated Peking’s intervention in Korea, he rightly said that that had been the job of “political intelligence,” but he wrongly refused to accept the warning of the State Department intelligence teams that the Russians might come in, too. And although he proposed a global strategy to resist what was then called the “Communist conspiracy,” he refused to be drawn into discussions of that strategy’s implications:

  MCMAHON: General, where is the source and brains of this conspiracy?

  MACARTHUR: How would I know?

  MCMAHON: Would you think that the Kremlin was the place that might be the loci?

  MACARTHUR: I might say that is one of the loci.84

  The Senator pressed him: “If we go into all-out war, I want to find out how you propose in your own mind to defend the American nation against that war.” The General replied: “That doesn’t happen to be my responsibility, Senator. My responsibilities were in the Pacific.” Worldwide military policy, he said, was the task for the Joint Chiefs. Did he know, he was asked, how many nuclear bombs the United States had? He did not. How many the Russians had? No. McMahon asked: “Do you think that we are ready to withstand the Russian attack in Western Europe today?” MacArthur answered: “Senator, I have asked you several times not to involve me in anything except my own area.” He said he was “not familiar” with the Chiefs’ European studies, that he had been “desperately occupied on the other side of the world.” That, McMahon said, was the nub of the issue: “The Joint Chiefs and the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, has [sic] to look at this thing on a global basis and a global defense. You as a theater commander by your own statement have not made that kind of study, and yet you advise to push forward with a course of action that may involve us in that global conflict.”85

  MacArthur, the senator was saying, couldn’t have it both ways. If he persisted in looking at the Far East in the context of the international situation, fitting the Korean piece into the larger puzzle, then he was obliged to recognize the ramifications of that Olympian view. His description of George Marshall’s China policy as “the greatest political mistake we made in a hundred years,” one “we will pay for . . . for a century” was a rapier thrust, but unacceptable unless he was prepared to couple his own Asian proposals with others for Europe. Marshall’s own inconsistencies—he accused MacArthur of sabotaging GI morale and trying to “wreck” administration plans for Asia, yet he himself did not fly to Tokyo for a firsthand look at the Korean situation until MacArthur was settled in the Waldorf— do not vindicate MacArthur here. Nevertheless, the senators were stunned and mute when he asked them: “What are you going to do to stop the slaughter in Korea? Are you going to let it go on? Does your global plan for defending these United States against war consist of permitting war indefinitely to go on in the Pacific?”86

  Truman, who knew that his cause had been hurt, privately called the General “a common coward” for leaving Corregidor in 1942. He later told Merle Miller: “Marshall gave me a rundown on MacArthur that was the best I ever did hear. He said he never was any damn good, and he said he was a four-flusher and no two ways about it.” Probably that paraphrase of Marshall was accurate; something deep in each five-star general raged at something deep in the other. They represented two conflicting streams of American thought. One looked across the Atlantic, the other to the Pacific; one counseled prudence, the other daring; one, like Wellington, believed in coalition warfare, the other, like Napoleon, thought that reliance on allies, though sometimes necessary, was dangerous—“Give me allies as an enemy,” Bonaparte had said, “so I can defeat them one by one.” An observer of the Russell hearings compared the secretary of defense to “a busy schoolmaster attempting to educate his refractory pupils,” while the former SCAP “resembled a visiting lecturer determined to convince his audience by an appeal to sentiment. . . . MacArthur had hoped to breach the walls with dynamite; Marshall, with greater cunning . . . breached the walls with the slow prodding of a battering ram.”

  Administration witnesses took seven weeks to rebut MacArthur. It was a major effort for both the Pentagon and the State Department. “What is challenged,” said Acheson, “is the very bedrock purpose of our foreign policy.” In his first public counterattack on the General’s testimony, Truman said; “We are right now in the midst of a big debate on foreign policy. A lot of people are looking at this debate as if it were just a political fight. But . . . the thing that is at stake in this debate may be atomic war. . . . It is a matter of life or death.” At one point Acheson testified: “If anything is important, if anything is true about the situation in Korea, it is the overwhelming importance of not forcing a showdown on our side in Korea and not permitting our opponents to force a showdown.” This was “the whole heart and essence of the policy which the administration has been following.”87

  To MacArthur, limited war—the acceptance of prolonged, indecisive conflicts on the peripheries of the Sino-Russian sphere of influence—was like limited pregnancy, but it was the keystone of containment to its architect, George Kennan, who defined it as “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy.” Kennan wrote: “The dimness of our vision gives us the right neither to a total optimism nor to a total pessimism. . . . Our duty to ourselves and to the hopes of mankind lies in avoiding, like the soul of evil itself, that final bit of impatience which tells us to yield the last positions of hope before we have been pressed from them by unanswerable force.” Bradley echoed Kennan when he testified that Korea was “just one engagement, just one phase” in an endless fight and not, as MacArthur saw it, the culmination of the struggle between East and West.

  At another point Bradley said: “I would not be a proponent of a policy which would ignore the military facts and rush us headlong into a showdown before we are ready.” Those military facts, the Chiefs told the committee, had been misrepresented by MacArthur. They said the Russians had been building up their munitions industries in Siberia, and the enemy now had “many thousands of planes” in the vicinity of Vladivostok, Port Arthur, Harbin, and Sakhalin. Chiang’s troops were described as having “very limited capabilities, particularly for offensive action”; in any wider war with China, the JCS chairman said, GIs would have to bear the brunt of the fighting. Bradley believed a decision could not be reached without subjugating the entire Chinese mainland. And that, he said, MacArthur to the contrary, might bring the Russians in. Acheson said he could not “accept the assumption that the Soviet Union will go its way regardless of what we do. I do not think that Russian policy is formed that way any more than our policy is formed that way.” Moscow and Peking were bound by treaty, he pointed out, “But even if this treaty did not exist, China is the Soviet Union’s largest and most important satellite. Russian self-interest in the Far East and the necessity of maintaining prestige in the Communist sphere make it difficult to see how the Soviet Union could ignore a direct attack upon the Chinese mainland.”88

  The secretary of state noted that America’s UN allies were “understandably reluctant to be drawn into a general war in the Far East—one which ho
lds the possibilities of becoming a world war—particularly if it developed out of an American impatience with the progress of the effort to repel aggression.” There was, he said, no chance of allied cooperation in a blockade of the mainland. McMahon asked Marshall whether he thought these allies essential to the defense of the United States, and the secretary of defense replied: “I would think so absolutely, sir, and that is the principle of collective security, which is the only principle we think can carry us to peace.”

  One by one, officers who admired MacArthur seated themselves before the senators and sadly rejected his program for victory. Sherman said: “Definitely, in the short term, time is on our side.” Without allied cooperation, the admiral said, a blockade would be ineffective, and he met the Atlantic-versus-Pacific issue head-on: “I believe that if we lose Western Europe . . . we would have an increasingly difficult time in holding our own, whereas if we lost all of the Asiatic mainland, we could still survive and build up and possibly get it back again.” Wedemeyer saw Korea as the enemy’s “third team opposing our first team,” with the first team absorbing 80 percent of America’s military might. Hoyt Vandenberg described MacArthur’s bombing proposals as “pecking at the periphery. ” He explained that the air force could “lay waste [to] Manchuria and [the] principal cities of China, but . . . the attrition that would inevitably be brought about upon us would leave us, in my opinion, as a nation, naked for several years to come.” In addition, he said, abandoning allies would mean abandonment of invaluable U.S. air bases in Europe and North Africa. Collins, MacArthur’s most vehement critic in the Pentagon, thought his Thanksgiving deployment of his forces had threatened their survival, and that taking his hard line now would require “considerably” more U.S. troops, a prospect which lengthened senatorial faces.89

  Against this array of fact and expertise, the General’s Republican defenders had little to offer but a welter of party loyalty and conservative intuition. “I have long approved of General MacArthur’s program,” Taft said in April, and a GOP congressman said: “Some day we will have to fight Red China on her terms at a time of her choosing. She will have atomic power backed by the entire Eurasian land mass. This issue could have been resolved forever in our favor . . . had those . . . in Washington had the foresight to give MacArthur the green light in Asia.” Wherry, Bridges, Knowland, Nixon, Bourke Hickenlooper, Eugene Milliken, Homer Ferguson, Homer Capehart, Everett Dirksen, John Marshall Butler, and Alexander Wiley similarly fell into line. (At one point in the hearings Wiley humbly asked MacArthur, “Do you know of any man in America that has had the vast experience that you have had in the Orient? . . . Do you know of any other man that has lived there so long, or known the various factors and various backgrounds of the people, and their philosophy, as yourself?” The General reflected a moment and then said he didn’t.) Their press agents—Hearst, McCormick, Luce, and the others—echoed them, Life, for example, scorning the “pernicious fallacy . . . the pap of ‘co-existence’ with Soviet Communism.”90

  Winston Churchill, recognizing the partisan nature of the split on Capitol Hill and sympathizing with American resentment of what Taft called “this foreign mess,” counseled Europeans to pay their respects to a “great soldier and great statesman” and abstain from further comment on the MacArthur uproar. They balked, however, and rightly so, for what seemed to be a U.S. domestic squabble had grave implications for them and, indeed, for the next generation. Whether that generation was well served is, at best, moot. At the time it seemed that the views of Truman, Acheson, and Marshall had prevailed. But the price they paid was exorbitant. Even before the dismissal of MacArthur, the administration’s fear of being called “soft on Communism” had straitjacketed it in the Far East. Almost certainly, we now know, it was the UN’s decision to cross the 38th Parallel, not MacArthur’s end-the-war offensive, which brought the Chinese into the war. Truman and Acheson had urged Lake Success to take this step because they knew how vulnerable they were, as Walter Lippmann put it, “to attack from the whole right wing of the Republican party.” They didn’t dare negotiate with Peking, or even modify their stance. To demonstrate their anti-Communist zeal, they baited Mao, sent mountains of military equipment to Formosa, praised Chiang as Asia’s hope, and, in the end, even encouraged uprisings on the mainland—insurgent attacks which the State Department knew would never be mounted, and could not have succeeded anyway. This lamentable response to the GOP indictment did not satisfy their critics, and the Senate hearings justifying the sack of MacArthur robbed the administration of one of its most valuable blue chips: the Joint Chiefs’ reputation for impartiality. Eisenhower cheerfully told C. L. Sulzberger that the Senate’s investigation “has served one very useful purpose: it has certainly proved to the Russians that we are not arming with aggressive intentions.” But it also proved that the Pentagon was willing to use its clout against Republican critics. While testimony was still being taken, Taft said bluntly that he had lost all confidence in Bradley’s military judgment. Lippmann noted “the beginning of an almost intolerable thing in a republic: namely a schism within the armed forces between the generals of the Democratic party and the generals of the Republican party.” The result, he wrote, “will considerably weaken civilian control and presidential direction of foreign policy.”91

  The Russell committee’s report was for the most part an exercise in pusillanimity. On a motion by Saltonstall, the members voted 20 to 3 to “transmit” the records of their hearings to the full Senate without comment. Eight Republican members filed a report describing U.S. foreign policy in the Far East as “catastrophic.” Saltonstall said he didn’t share MacArthur’s views but disapproved the way he had been dismissed. Henry Cabot Lodge also opposed a wider war but thought the General should have been kept in Tokyo until the signing of the U.S.-Japanese peace treaty. Only Wayne Morse commended the administration’s handling of MacArthur. Truman’s supporters in the Washington press corps, where he retained his popularity, agreed with Morse. Rovere and Schlesinger probably spoke for most liberal journalists when they wrote: “The MacArthur challenge did not overthrow the Far Eastern policy nor did it even deepen the discredit into which it had already fallen. It did demonstrate beyond any doubt that the situation was so uncertain and confused that there was no sure footing, nor obvious path out of the morass. . . . The administration path seemed no more hopeless or idiotic or wicked than any of the others; it made more sense, perhaps, than most.” They recommended “selective containment,” which, they felt, “seems well within the limits of our capabilities.”92

  But asking men to die for uncertainty and confusion is not good enough, and Bradley, aware of it, had tried to come up with a better answer to the terrible questions MacArthur was raising. American lives in the peninsular struggle had not, he argued, been sacrificed in vain. In his testimony the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had declared: “The operation in Korea has been a success.” The enemy’s goal, “to drive the United Nations forces out of Korea,” had been thwarted. GIs and their allies had “checked the Communist advance and turned it into a retreat. . . . Their victory has dealt Communist imperialism a severe setback.” Nor were the accomplishments simply negative: “Instead of weakening the rest of the world, they have solidified it. They have given a more powerful impetus to . . . the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” The Pentagon had “doubled the number of men under arms” for future wars. Most important: “The idea of collective security has been put to the test, and has been sustained. The nations who believe in collective security have shown that they can stick together and fight together.” If the United States entered another such struggle, he said, its men would not stand alone.93

  Later, when a truce had been signed in Korea, Dulles said with satisfaction: “For the first time in history, an international organization has stood against an aggressor. . . . All free nations, large or small, are safer today because the ideal of collective security has been implemented.” That was also the opinion of the intellectual communit
y. Rovere wrote: “In Korea, the United States proved that its word was as good as its bond—and even better, since no bond had been given. History will cite Korea as the proving ground of collective security, up to this time no more than a plausible theory. It will cite it as a turning point in the world struggle against Communism.” Passing the buck to history is a risky business, however, and one vigorous dissenter from the majority view was Lippmann. He didn’t believe the United States could count on its allies in small wars, he doubted that the American people would stomach wars for limited objectives, and he had already examined Kennan’s containment policy and found it flawed. Kennan had written in Foreign Affairs that containment required “unalterable counterforce” to the Communists “at every point where they show signs of encroaching.” This, to Lippmann, meant the endless hemorrhages of guerrilla warfare. “The Eurasian continent is a big place,” he had wryly observed, “and the military power of the United States has certain limitations.” Under containment, Lippmann reasoned, the outcome would depend upon draftees or satellite troops. Despair lay either way. America would have to “disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face,” or it would have to support them at an incalculable cost “on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue.” Repeatedly he returned to Asia and its traps for containment-minded diplomats. To accept a challenge there, Lippmann said, would permit the Communists to choose the battlefields, the weapons, and even the nationalities of the Red battalions. He could not understand how Kennan “could have recommended such a strategic monstrosity.”94