The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  MacArthur was delighted with the turnout, but many Japanese traditionalists, and even some comparative liberals, were troubled by particular results. One legislator, educated at Harvard Law School, called MacArthur shortly after the winners were tallied. “I regret to say that something terrible has happened,” the man said. “A prostitute, Your Excellency, has been elected to the House of Representatives.”

  MacArthur considered the matter. “How many votes did she receive?” he queried.

  The lawmaker answered, “256,000.”

  MacArthur suppressed a smile. “Then I should say there must have been more than her dubious occupation involved,” he said.

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  THE WHIRLWIND OF reform continued. MacArthur encouraged the formation of labor unions by Japanese workers, although he drew the line when leftists attempted to organize a general strike. “The persons involved in the threatened general strike are but a small minority of the Japanese people,” he said in warning. “Yet this minority might well plunge the great masses into a disaster not unlike that produced in the immediate past by the minority which led Japan into the destruction of war.” The masses heeded MacArthur’s words, and the general strike never took place.

  He refashioned the Japanese educational system and reorganized public health. When famine threatened the devastated country, he commandeered three million tons of food from U.S. Army stores. Congress conducted an inquiry, which MacArthur brushed aside. “Give me bread or give me bullets,” he told the inquisitors. He curtailed the power of the zaibatsu, the industrial oligopolies that had underpinned the Japanese military before the war.

  He jolted Japanese sensibilities by insisting on religious freedom and dismayed certain Westerners by his explanation. “Although I was brought up as a Christian and adhere entirely to its teachings, I have always had a sincere admiration for many of the basic principles underlying the Oriental faiths,” he said. “Christianity does not differ from them as much as one would think.”

  He oversaw the trial of Japanese war criminals. The emperor was conspicuously exempted from prosecution, but other leading figures, including former prime minister Hideki Tojo, were convicted and sentenced to death. Western reporters asked to witness the executions, but MacArthur refused. Pressure was placed on his superiors, including the secretary of the army, who tried to change the general’s mind. MacArthur again refused, deeming himself above such meddling. The executions went forward unobserved.

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  HE BECAME A Japanese institution. A hastily written biography published in Japanese sold hundreds of thousands of copies—in a country where disposable income was meager. Japanese women wrote to him imploring that he sire their children. Anecdotes of MacArthur circulated instantly. One day he was entering the elevator in the Dai Ichi. A Japanese man already inside the car, seeing the great general, bowed and started to step out. MacArthur insisted that he remain and they rode together. He afterward received a letter from the man. “I am the humble Japanese carpenter who last week you not only permitted but insisted ride with you in the same elevator,” the man said. “I have reflected on this act of courtesy for a whole week, and I realize that no Japanese general would have done as you did.” Japanese newspapers learned of the story and gave it full coverage. A play was written and performed about the incident, which became, as well, the subject for a painting that was reproduced and displayed in households around the country.

  The general’s abstemious lifestyle became part of the MacArthur legend. He ate the same thing every day: fruit, cereal, eggs and toast for breakfast, taken with coffee; soup, salad and coffee for each of lunch and dinner. The Japanese knew he worked every day, Christmas included, and that he never took vacations. He allowed himself movies in the evenings; he watched them in his rocking chair while smoking a cigar. Newsreels showing the annual Army-Navy football game would bring him to the edge of his rocker cheering for the Black Knights of West Point.

  His energy seemed boundless. A reporter asked MacArthur’s doctor if the general was a good patient. “I don’t know,” the doctor replied. “He’s never sick.” Another reporter, familiar with MacArthur for decades, wrote, “I first met him in 1917 when he was a young major. He oozed energy, ability and ambition from every pore. Meeting him here in Tokyo 31 years later, it amazed me to see how few changes had been wrought by time. Still arrow straight and with the same flash of eye and aquilinity of features….Few members of his staff, even though many years his junior, can match his physical endurance.”

  Within a few years of his arrival, many Japanese couldn’t imagine their country without him. He had spared them disgrace and retribution; he was guiding them to genuine self-government; he had brought them into the light of modernity. When they considered what they had suffered under his predecessors, they hoped he would never leave.

  2

  HARRY TRUMAN SHARED their hope. Truman was delighted with MacArthur’s achievements in Japan, which freed the president to focus on parts of the world that were more troublesome and, to Truman’s way of thinking, more important. The Cold War had grown out of the failure of the victors of World War II in Europe to agree on the future of Germany, which remained under the occupation of the armies that had defeated Hitler’s Reich in 1945. The United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union each held zones of Germany, and each controlled a sector of Berlin, an island within the Soviet zone. The Americans, British and French found themselves increasingly at odds with the Soviets, with the two sides gradually remaking their zones in their own images: the former democratic and more or less capitalist, the latter authoritarian and strictly socialist. Growing cooperation among the three Western powers evoked Soviet fears of a revived Germany, and Moscow registered various complaints. Failing to receive satisfaction, the Russians in June 1948 imposed a blockade of Berlin, barring access to the city from the Western zones by rail, highway, river and canal.

  The Berlin blockade was the most serious crisis of the Cold War to date, and the sternest test of Harry Truman’s leadership. Truman had responded to previous challenges with words and money. In 1947, when an anticommunist regime in Greece struggled to beat back a communist insurgency, Truman proclaimed a policy of American support for such regimes. The Truman Doctrine, as the policy was called, was accompanied by $400 million in aid to Greece and neighboring Turkey, and its success there caused it to be extrapolated, at least implicitly, to other countries and regions. Later that same year Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, announced a plan for reconstruction aid for Europe. The economies of the continent had never recovered from the war; the physical destruction wreaked by bombs, artillery shells, tank treads and fire had been matched by institutional destruction inflicted on governments, banks, markets and laws; and both calamities had been aggravated by emotional destruction to souls and psyches caused by the worst cataclysm to befall any civilization in history. The Marshall Plan would rebuild Europe physically, and at the same time it would reconstruct institutions and help restore morale. This last was crucial, in that a restoration of morale was considered essential to keeping voters in France, Italy and other struggling countries from following the siren song of communism into the Russian embrace.

  Yet, vital as they were, the words and money of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan weren’t blood and steel. And when Soviet troops closed access to Berlin, threatening to strangle and starve the free half of the city into submission, Harry Truman had to decide whether he was willing to match military force with military force.

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  “DEAR MARGIE,” THE president wrote as the Berlin crisis was building. Margaret Truman was the sole child of Harry and Bess Truman, and to Margaret the president often confided opinions and sentiments he shared with no one else. The letters he sent her were usually short and topical; this one was long and biographical. “I’m going to give you a record for yourself regarding these times,” he explained. “You know of course what a terrible campaign the one of 1940 was. No one though
t I could win, including the President.” But he had won, holding his Senate seat and shortly afterward sponsoring legislation that established the Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. The Truman Committee, as it was labeled, uncovered corruption in war spending and earned its chairman a national reputation. “Then came 1944 and that terrible Chicago Convention,” Truman wrote to Margaret, referring to the national convention that nominated Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term. The only drama involved who would be Roosevelt’s vice president. “I went there to nominate Byrnes. He’d told me that Roosevelt wanted him for Vice-President, and I thought he did.” But Roosevelt kept silent, and various bigwigs were skeptical about James Byrnes, currently director of war mobilization. Several said they wanted to retain Henry Wallace, the incumbent vice president, but if Wallace was unacceptable to the party—as he quickly proved to be, with Southern conservatives muttering seditiously against his unrelenting liberalism—then they backed Truman. “I said to all and sundry that I was not a candidate, would not be and that I was perfectly happy in the Senate,” Truman told Margaret.

  But Roosevelt decided on Truman. “On Tuesday evening Bob Hannegan came to see me at the Stephens Hotel and told me that Roosevelt wanted me to be the V.P. candidate. I said ‘no’ point blank, and went on working for Byrnes.” For a time it seemed that Truman’s wishes would be honored. But after forty-eight hours things changed. “Roosevelt was nominated on Thursday and then the real pressure began hammering me to say yes. Finally Hannegan asked me to come over to the Blackstone and listen to a conversation he was to have with Roosevelt in San Diego.” Truman obliged. “Roosevelt’s first question of Hannegan was ‘well have you got that fellow from Missouri lined up?’ Bob said no he’s very contrary. Then the President said, ‘Well, you tell him if he wants to take the responsibility of breaking up the Party in the middle of the war to go ahead and do it.’ Well, that put a new face on things.”

  Truman acceded, and Roosevelt was reelected. “As you know, I was Vice-President from Jan. 20 to April 12, 1945,” Truman continued. “I was at Cabinet meetings and saw Roosevelt once or twice in those months. But he never did talk to me confidentially about the war, or about foreign affairs or what he had in mind for the peace after the war.” Truman remembered in detail the day everything changed. “The catastrophe we all dreaded came on April 12 at 4:35 P.M. At 7:09 I was the President.” Roosevelt’s sudden death left Truman with a great deal of catching up to do. “I had to start reading memorandums, briefs, and volumes of correspondence on the world situation. Too bad I hadn’t been on the Foreign Affairs Committee or that F.D.R. hadn’t informed me on the situation. I had to find out about the Atlantic Charter, which by the way does not exist on paper, the Casablanca meeting, the Montreal meeting, Tehran meeting, Yalta, Hull’s trip to Moscow, Bretton Woods, and numerous other things too numerous to mention.”

  Truman also had to learn about the atom bomb project, of which he had known nothing. He received conflicting forecasts. “Adm. Leahy told me that he was an explosives expert and Roosevelt had just thrown $2,600,000,000 away for nothing. He was wrong. But his guess was as good as any.” Truman learned that the bomb worked when it was successfully tested in New Mexico in July 1945. He was at Potsdam trying to get the Soviets to enter the war against Japan. “All of us wanted Russia in the Japanese War. Had we known what the atomic bomb would do, we’d have never wanted the Bear in the picture.”

  In the aftermath of Potsdam, Truman discovered what the Soviets were really like. “We entered into agreements for the government of Germany—not one of which Russia has kept,” he wrote to Margaret. “We made agreements on China, Korea and other places, none of which Russia has kept. So that now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938/39 with Hitler. A totalitarian state is no different whether you call it Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Franco’s Spain.”

  The tension over Germany, centering on Berlin, was greater than ever, Truman told his daughter. “Things look black.” The moment of crisis was coming. “A decision will have to be made. I am going to make it.” He assured Margaret he would do so with a clear conscience. “I just wanted you to know your dad as President asked for no territory, no reparations, no slave laborers—only peace in the world. We may have to fight for it. The oligarchy in Russia is no different from the Czars, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Charles I and Cromwell. It is a Frankenstein dictatorship worse than any of the others, Hitler included.”

  “Be a nice girl and don’t worry about your dad’s worries,” he told Margaret in concluding. “But you’ll hear all sorts of lies about the things I’ve told you. These are the facts. I went to Potsdam with the kindliest feeling toward Russia. In a year and a half they cured me of it.”

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  SOME OF THE lies Truman warned his daughter about would come from the communists, but the more insidious ones—as he interpreted affairs in the summer of 1948—originated with Republicans and Democrats. Even while war loomed in Germany, Truman faced the fight of his political life in America. He hadn’t wanted to be vice president, but Roosevelt had prevailed on him; he really hadn’t wanted to be president, but Roosevelt died on him. “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now,” he told reporters the day after Roosevelt’s death. “I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.” One of the reporters replied, “Good luck, Mr. President.” Truman groaned, “I wish you didn’t have to call me that.”

  For a long time after inheriting the presidency, he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep the job. He thought others were more qualified. Dwight Eisenhower was his first choice. Truman met Eisenhower during the Potsdam conference and was tremendously impressed. “General,” he told Eisenhower, “there is nothing you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.” Eisenhower was startled. “Mr. President,” he said, “I don’t know who will be your opponent for the presidency, but it will not be I.”

  Truman continued to deem Eisenhower the man for the job, despite the general’s giving little indication where he stood on most matters of public policy or even which party he favored. In early 1947 Truman approached Eisenhower again; again Eisenhower disavowed interest in politics.

  Only after that did Truman decide to run. There was much he disliked about the presidency; in his diary he called the White House the “Great White Jail,” and he bristled at the “lies” he regularly attributed to his opponents and the critical press. His first two years were a trying time for anyone to be president, in domestic affairs no less than foreign. The war had created strains in the economy but prevented their release; after the war’s end the strains threatened to rupture the fabric of American life. Workers sought wage increases to catch up with price increases and staged hundreds of strikes to get them. Consumers, who had been hoping that the conversion from war production to peace production would end the wartime rationing and replenish car showrooms, appliance stores and even grocery shelves, grew angry when the strikes effectively extended the rationing. A coal strike raised the specter of a shivering winter, and a strike on the railroads portended continent-wide paralysis. Truman jawboned the union leaders, to little effect; he threatened to draft railroad workers so he could order them back to work. He brought a lawsuit against the coal miners.

  His actions produced mixed results in the marketplace of business and labor and cost him dearly in the political square. Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats had nursed grievances against the New Deal for more than a decade; unable to rescind its obnoxious measures while Roosevelt lived, they saw in Truman a much weaker defender of the emerging welfare state. Truman’s anti-union measures alienated many of those who should have been his stoutest supporters. The country as a whole showed weariness and exasperation with Democrats in Washington.

  The dissatisfaction dragged Truma
n’s approval ratings to depths plumbed only by Herbert Hoover amid the Great Depression, and it propelled the Republicans to victories in the 1946 elections, when they seized control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1920s. The Republicans assaulted what remained of the labor front of the Democrats by passing the Taft-Hartley bill, a measure that restricted the organizing rights of unions. Truman vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode the veto, making the president’s weakness even more obvious. The Republicans, looking toward the 1948 presidential election, saw nothing but promise in Truman’s woes.

  Truman added to the ranks of his enemies, especially in the South, by endorsing civil rights reform. He considered it high time the South entered the twentieth century. “The main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the times and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and themselves,” he wrote to an old Missouri friend who had urged him to soft-pedal the race question. “I’m not asking for social equality, because no such thing exists, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings and, as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight.” He noted recent violence. “When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from a law enforcement standpoint. When a Mayor and a City Marshal can take a negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by State Authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.” He remarked how racist violence perversely adapted to changing circumstances. “On the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway when coal burning locomotives were used, the negro firemen were the thing because it was a back-breaking job and a dirty one. As soon as they turned to oil as a fuel it became customary for people to take shots at the negro firemen and a number were murdered because it was thought that this was now a white-collar job and should go to a white man.” Crimes like this couldn’t be tolerated. “I can’t approve of such goings on and I shall never approve it, as long as I am here,” he told his friend. “I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, the failure will be in a good cause.”