American Caesar

by William Manchester

  He insisted that he had found “the liberties of private life refreshing and exhilarating . . . . I have enjoyed to the full the relaxation of release from the arduous responsibilities of high national command.” One doubts that. MacArthur was a restive civilian, resentful of the egalitarian passions of postwar America. His mother, and then his first wife, had thought he might be challenged by the business world, and he sought engrossment in it now. After the collapse of his political hopes in 1952, he had finally consented to become board chairman of Remington Rand, later Sperry Rand. His salary was $45,533, then $68,000. Debonair in custom-tailored suits, he commuted by limousine two or three times a week to the firm’s offices in Stamford, Connecticut, which for tax purposes became his legal residence. Board meetings were held in his seventy-five-foot-long living room. He was as immune to abrasive encounters as any civilian can be. Nevertheless, he had to face a species of pest he had been spared in the army: a heckler.29

  The confrontation came during one of Rand’s annual stockholders’ meetings in Buffalo. Lewis D. Gilbert, a World War II army corporal in the Southwest Pacific and now the holder of thirty-eight hundred Rand shares, rose from his seat to express “serious concern” over the fact that the chairman of the board owned none of the company’s stock. MacArthur snapped: “Will you sit down?” Gilbert did, but the audience, sympathetic to him, began to buzz. The General said piously: “Such money as I am able to invest I have placed in defense bonds to help our beloved country.” The buzzing continued. MacArthur, realizing that he could issue no orders here, said weakly: “It constitutes democracy when we don’t agree on everything.” But the issue would not go away, and at the next annual meeting the former corporal was gratified to discover that MacArthur now held eight hundred Rand shares. The General accepted the congratulations of “a fellow veteran of mine in the Pacific,” but said, “I bought the stock because it was the best buy on the market. I bought it in spite of your arguments last year.” And in fact it had jumped from fifteen points to twenty-one, giving him a forty-eight-hundred-dollar paper profit on his twelve-thousand-dollar investment. But the contretemps had been humiliating. No one had dressed him down for so trivial a matter since Pershing in 1918.30

  His chief functions at Rand were to announce dividends and speak at banquets of organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers, delivering the kind of speeches NAM audiences like to hear—assaults on income taxes, swollen federal budgets, and the “small group of individuals” who were attempting to impose “a form of socialistic, totalitarian rule, a sort of big brother deity to run our lives for us.” Typically he said that the “fundamental and ultimate issue at stake is liberty, itself. . . . Freedom to live under the minimum of restraint! . . . The free enterprise system or the cult of conformity! The result will determine the future of civilization. It will be felt on every human life. It will be etched in blazing rainbow colors on the very arch of the sky.” Yet he wasn’t always that dreary. Like many economists on the other end of the political spectrum, he foresaw “poverty for the first time faced with possible extinction.” And in 1957, to the delight of liberal pacifists like Roger Baldwin, he lashed out at large Pentagon budgets. “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of grave national emergency,” he said. “Always there has been some terrible evil . . . to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.” The Nation commented: “For once, we like his oratory—we hope he will return.”31

  In those years Ridgway, Gavin, and Maxwell Taylor were developing the rationale of flexible response in small conflicts, theories which would be tested in Southeast Asia after MacArthur’s death. The General was unimpressed by them. Ever the absolutist, he continued to insist that the only humane way to end battles was by total effort. In the second year of the Eisenhower administration, in off-the-record interviews with Jim G. Lucas of Scripps-Howard and Hearst’s Bob Considine, he said he could have ended the Korean War in ten days if he had been given a free hand. “The enemy’s air would first have been taken out” by nuclear attacks on Manchurian air bases. Then he would have enveloped the enemy with “500,000 of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, sweetened by two United States Marine divisions” and landed behind the Chinese lines. These forces could have formed “a wall of manpower and firepower across the northern border of Korea. . . . Now, the Eighth Army, spread along the 38th Parallel, would have put pressure on the enemy from the south.” The marines and the Chinese Nationalists “would press down from the north.” In little more than a week, he said, the starving Chinese and North Koreans would have sued for peace. Sowing a belt of radioactive cobalt from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea, he would have prevented another land invasion of Korea from the north “for at least sixty years.”32

  A year later, however, he changed his mind. His revulsion against war had grown. He decided that Eisenhower and Dulles had been right in rejecting his proposed ultimatum to Stalin; atomic bombs, he felt, should never be used. On his seventy-fifth birthday, he squired his wife aboard United Airlines flight 709 to Los Angeles for a series of appearances in California where he intended to say just that. A reporter noted: “His famous stride had become a careful step, his hands looked transparent and his skin like parchment, but his back was West Point-straight, his manner commanding.” The stewardess had been told to refrain from telling him to fasten his seat belt (he never did it), even though Jean worried when they flew through unusual turbulence. The plane landed in dense smog; an American Legion color guard marched into a fence. The General paid Hollywood one of the hammiest—and, since he could scarcely see through the haze, one of the most inappropriate—of his tributes: “There are no lost horizons here except in the matchless imagery of your studios.” But then the fog lifted and the journey took on a more promising aspect. He attended the dedication of MacArthur Park, a memorial with a statue of him and, in a reflecting pool, replicas of the islands he had seized from 1942 to 1945. He told an Episcopal diocese luncheon that “although I am not trained in ecclesiastic methods nor am I skilled in theological lore,” none of his achievements in Japan had “left me with a greater sense of personal satisfaction than my spiritual stewardship. Although I am of Caesar, I did try to render unto God that which was His.” Then, addressing banqueting Legionnaires in the Ambassador Hotel that evening, he proposed that armed conflicts between nations be outlawed. 33

  He honored patriotism. The millions “whose faith and courage built the immortal way from which was fashioned the true greatness of our country” made him “revere the stars in our flag far more than any stars on my shoulders.” But calls to arms were obsolete. “At the turn of the century, when I entered the Army, the target was one enemy casualty at the end of a rifle or bayonet or sword. Then came the machine gun, designed to kill by the dozen. After that—the heavy artillery, raining death by the hundreds. Then the aerial bomb, to strike by the thousands, followed by the atom explosion to reach the hundreds of thousands. Now, electronics and other processes of science have raised the destructive potential to encompass millions. And with restless hands we work feverishly in dark laboratories to find the means to destroy all at one blow.” This “very triumph of scientific annihilation” had “destroyed the possibility of war being a medium of practical settlement of international differences.” War had become a Frankenstein’s monster to both sides. “No longer is it the weapon of adventure whereby a shortcut to international power and wealth—a place in the sun—can be gained. If you lose, you are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose. No longer does it possess the chance of the winner of a duel—it contains rather the germs of double suicide.” Abolishing war was “the one issue upon which both sides can agree, for it is the one issue upon which both sides will profit equally. It is the one issue—and the only decisive one—in which the interests a
re completely parallel. It is the one issue which, if settled, might settle all others.” After such a provision had been written into the Nipponese constitution, he recalled, Kijuro Shidehara had told him: “The world will laugh and mock us as impractical visionaries, but a hundred years from now we will be called prophets.”34

  MacArthur at West Point in 1957 beneath the lines he composed

  MacArthur at the Manila Hotel, on his sentimental journey to the Philippines, July 1961

  For once America’s liberal press treated MacArthur handsomely. The New York Herald Tribune believed he had “never seemed a grander figure.” The New Yorker thought that “this speech presents in quite brilliant form the opinions of a warrior, the dreams of a poet, the recommendations of a patriot.” The Reporter observed that the “extraordinary contradictions in this man” were “proportionate to his greatness, which is real.” The General was heartened; he began referring frequently to “elder statesmen,” and “while the references were not directly to himself,” a friend recalls, “it was evident that he was “thinking along those lines. “ Eisenhower and Kennedy invited him to lunch in the White House, and Lyndon Johnson visited him. He enjoyed the meeting with Ike least. His host wasn’t interested in his counsel, and MacArthur left looking gaunt and dour; all he told reporters was: “Responsibility goes with authority. I am no longer in a position of authority.” The President’s view of him may have been colored by a Joe Martin proposal, backed by Everett Dirksen, to make MacArthur a six-star General, which would have left Eisenhower one star behind. The measure was tabled, but it might have been good politics; the old soldier had regained a great deal of his popularity. Roger Baldwin regarded him as “a national monument.” Columbia University, with the encouragement of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, announced the establishment of a General Douglas MacArthur Chair in History. And in London the BBC, reporting that he was undergoing surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital to correct a prostate gland condition, observed that the operation “dominates the news of America here in Europe, especially in Britain. Throughout England, where memoir-writing Field Marshals tend to be heavily critical of American commanders in World War II, General MacArthur is a highly regarded and non-controversial figure. While even President Eisenhower’s command decisions in Europe are considered fair game for postwar critics, military men here have unreserved praise for General MacArthur’s conduct of the Pacific and Korean wars.”35

  John Kennedy admired MacArthur and probably understood him better than any other President. He was Kennedy’s kind of hero: valiant, a patrician, proud of his machismo, and a lover of glory. Eisenhower’s successor, unlike Ike, sought the General’s advice. In the fourth month of his presidency, the young chief executive flew to New York to consult him. According to Theodore C. Sorensen, “General Douglas MacArthur, in an April, 1961, meeting with the President, warned him against the commitment of American soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this advice. “ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., writes: “MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland should have his head examined.” Afterward Kennedy told Walt W. Rostow that he had decided not to risk sending American ground troops to Indochina—that the ten thousand U.S. Marines who were suited up on Okinawa could stand down.36

  A pleasanter contact between the old soldier and the young President came a few weeks later, when Carlos Romulo, then the Philippine envoy to Washington, called on Pierre Salinger to say that his government, now celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of its independence, wanted the General and Jean to attend the festivities as guests of the nation. Salinger led Romulo into the oval office, where the President, breaking into a broad smile, said he was placing a presidential plane at MacArthur’s disposal and wanted to see him on his return. Frail but erect at eighty-one, the General broke his trip with a layover at an American air base near Tokyo and landed at Clark Field to start what he called “a sentimental journey.” A great shout went up as he stepped from the Boeing 707 in his faded khaki and frayed cap. His hand shook as he saluted the crowd; he told them how moved he was to be back in “the land that I have known so well and amongst these people that I have loved so well,” and said: “My life has been interwoven with yours for nearly sixty years. Here I have lived my greatest moments. Here I have my greatest memories.”37

  A band broke into “Old Soldiers Never Die. ‘ A crawling Cadillac carried the MacArthur’ through two million cheering Filipinos to Manila. It was a national holiday; children fought to get the old man’s autograph. “Overwhelming,” he gasped on arriving at Malacañan Palace. As the throng outside sang hymns, Dato Plang, an elderly official to whom General Arthur MacArthur had presented a saber in 1900, presented it to General Douglas MacArthur. Speaking to a joint session of the Philippine congress, MacArthur recalled that during his last visit there “the crash of guns rattled windows, the sputter of musketry drowned voices, the acrid smell of smoke filled our nostrils, the stench of death was everywhere.” Carl Mydans of Life wondered: “Who else would have thought of burpguns and bazookas as ‘musketry’?”38

  MacArthur at the white House with President John F. Kennedy, 1961

  At Lingayen the General told Jean, “This is what I wanted you to see,” running his hand gently over a plaque commemorating his landing there sixteen years earlier. Luneta Park in central Manila was packed on July 4 when MacArthur told the crowd, in what everyone knew would be his last words to them: “Even as I hail you, I must say farewell. For such is the nature of my visit . . . . I must admit, with a sense of sadness, that the deepening shadows of life cast doubt upon my ability to pledge again, ‘I shall return.’ So, my dear friends, I close with a fervent prayer that a merciful God will protect and preserve each and every one of you and will bring this land peace and tranquillity always.” At the end of a luncheon in the rebuilt Manila Hotel the audience broke into an impromptu rendition of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and as their voices died down he turned to Jean and kissed her. A Filipino told Mydans: “General MacArthur kisses his wife only in the presence of his family, and we are his family.” Deeply stirred as he was then, he was moved even more—moved to tears—when he discovered that the government had kept a postwar vow that the name of Douglas MacArthur would never be permitted to die among the soldiers of the Republic of the Philippines, that it was heard every day when a roll was called, and that a sergeant always responded: “Present in spirit!”39

  On July 20 Kennedy received the General in Washington, questioned him about his trip, and sought his views of other Far East problems. Afterward MacArthur told the press that he and the President had “discussed the world situation and reminisced about our comradeship in the Pacific war,” where Kennedy had been a “brave and resourceful young naval officer. Judging from the luncheon he served me,” the General added with a twinkle, “he seems to be living somewhat higher on the hog these days.” The Treasury Department minted a gold medal in honor of the President’s guest, bearing the inscription: “Protector of Australia; Liberator of the Philippines; Conqueror of Japan; Defender of Korea.”40

  The following year Congress passed a resolution expressing gratitude to MacArthur. Accepting it from Speaker John W. McCormack on the Capitol steps, he said: “A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him. Mine were great!” He was again welcomed at the White House and asked what course he would recommend in Southeast Asia. Truman was urging an escalating U.S. commitment in Vietnam. The General disagreed. He said that he felt America should “hold firm to the periphery” but avoid commitments on the mainland. According to Blaik, in whom he confided, he had “advised Kennedy—as later, when he was dying at Walter Reed Hospital, he vainly advised President Johnson—that no American soldier should be made to fight on Asian soil. He stated his belief that the time might be dangerously near when many Americans might not have the will to fight for their country.”41

  Later that year, at Robert Kennedy’s request, MacArthu
r settled a dispute between two athletic associations over U. S. participation in the 1964 Olympics, but that was his last mission. He knew he was approaching the end now; he was putting his affairs in order, arranging for his burial and the deposit of his papers in Norfolk, his mother’s home. His last and most memorable good-bye was to West Point. Addressing the corps of cadets, he took as his text the academy’s motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.” Interestingly, he warned them never to dispute “controversial issues” with their civilian leaders: “These great national problems are not for your professional or military solution.” Then, speaking without a note, striding back and forth, he closed with a passage that no one who was on the plain that noon will ever forget: “The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint; they have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, I always come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes in my ears—Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps; and the Corps; and the Corps. I bid you farewell.”42