The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  He received his punishment a short while later. Or so he interpreted a summons from Roosevelt to meet him in Hawaii. The stated purpose of the meeting was to decide on American strategy during the final phase of the war against Japan, but MacArthur felt he was being displayed to the press and the public like a conquered foe, a prop in Roosevelt’s reelection campaign. “The humiliation of forcing me to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a political picture-taking junket!” he expostulated aboard the Bataan, his personal plane, en route to Hawaii.

  He did his best to resist the part. Samuel Rosenman, a Roosevelt aide and speechwriter, described Roosevelt’s arrival aboard the cruiser Baltimore. The gangway was lowered, and Admiral Chester Nimitz and many other officers came aboard. “One officer was conspicuously absent,” Rosenman recalled. “It was General Douglas MacArthur. When Roosevelt asked Nimitz where the general was, there was an embarrassed silence. We learned later that the general had arrived about an hour earlier, but instead of joining the other officers to greet the Commander-in-Chief, he had gone by himself to Fort Shafter.” Roosevelt and the others waited to see if MacArthur would appear. Eventually they tired and determined to go ashore without him. A sudden commotion halted them halfway. “A terrific automobile siren was heard,” Rosenman related, “and there raced onto the dock and screeched to a stop a motorcycle escort and the longest open car I have ever seen. In the front was a chauffeur in khaki, and in the back one lone figure—MacArthur.”

  Everyone watched Roosevelt to see his reaction. The president declined to be provoked. “Hello, Doug,” he said when MacArthur arrived on deck. Noting the general’s nonregulation attire, he asked, “What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It’s darn hot today.”

  “I’ve just landed from Australia,” MacArthur said pointedly. He looked to the sky. “It’s pretty cold up there.”

  MacArthur joined Roosevelt and the other brass on a tour of Oahu. They returned to Honolulu and gathered in a house on Waikiki. A large map displayed the Pacific theater. Roosevelt got down to business. “Where do we go from here?” he asked MacArthur.

  “Leyte, Mr. President,” he said, indicating the western Philippines. “And then Luzon.”

  MacArthur spent the next several hours telling Roosevelt why the attack on Japan must proceed through the Philippines. He was articulate and forceful. He wore Roosevelt out. “Give me an aspirin before I go to bed,” the president moaned to his doctor that evening. “In fact, give me another aspirin to take in the morning. In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.”

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  IF MACARTHUR WAS chastened by his first attempt at presidential politics, the experience didn’t prevent him from trying again in 1948. Indeed, it seemed to have whetted his ambition. And the circumstances in 1948 were much more promising for a challenge to a sitting president. The war was over, eliminating the awkwardness of a wartime run by a general. MacArthur was more famous than ever, being hailed as the hero of the Pacific war and the remarkable administrator of Japan. And Truman was far more vulnerable than Roosevelt had been.

  MacArthur had reason to believe he could win. His staff made sure he saw the results of a 1945 Gallup poll in which Americans were asked to name the greatest figure in world history. Franklin Roosevelt came first, followed by Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ, George Washington and Douglas MacArthur. Another poll, by the American Institute of Public Opinion, in 1946 asked Americans to name the greatest person then living. MacArthur received the top listing, followed by Eisenhower and Truman.

  Various Republicans read the same polls and launched a MacArthur-for-president campaign. The general encouraged them. “The need is not in the concentration of greater power in the hands of the state, but in the reservation of much more power in the people,” he declared, by way of deriding the New Deal and the Democrats who had supported it, including Harry Truman. William Randolph Hearst, the media baron who despised the New Deal as much as anyone did, declared at once for MacArthur. “We must DRAFT General MacArthur for the Presidency,” the Hearst press blared. “Beyond any rivalry and any partisanship…Douglas MacArthur is the MAN OF THE HOUR.” Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, wrote to MacArthur personally, saying, “Your career has not paralleled Washington’s or Lincoln’s, but in its own particular sphere is as great as either of theirs.”

  MacArthur responded eagerly. “No man could fail to be profoundly stirred by such a public movement,” he said of the efforts on his behalf. “I can say, and with due humility, that I would be recreant to all my concepts of good citizenship were I to shrink because of the hazards and responsibilities involved from accepting any public duty to which I might be called by the American people.”

  MacArthur’s name was entered in early Republican primaries. “MacArthur sentiment is rising in Wisconsin and Illinois,” asserted U.S. News & World Report. Yet many of MacArthur’s supporters wished he would come home and campaign. As it was, the general was still playing loose with a Pentagon prohibition on active-duty officers getting involved in politics. MacArthur seemed to want to have it both ways: to keep his current job while working to win a higher one.

  He couldn’t pull it off. He lost the Republican primary in Wisconsin, the nearest approximation to a home state for him, to Harold Stassen, a former governor of Minnesota who wasn’t at all shy about campaigning. He finished fifth in the Nebraska primary. His backers implored him to return to America and campaign. He decided Japan couldn’t spare him, and he asked that his name be withdrawn from future primaries.

  Yet he had won a handful of delegates, and they carried the MacArthur banner to the Republican convention in Philadelphia. His name was placed in nomination but not until the roll call of states got to Wisconsin, just before dawn on the day after the serious candidates had been put forward. The delegates had nearly all gone home, and the janitors formed the largest delegation. On the first ballot MacArthur received 8 votes, to subsequent nominee Dewey’s 434.

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  CHASTENED A SECOND time, he turned his attention back to Japan. The occupation had accomplished much of what he hoped for it; he began to think of how it would end. There would be a peace treaty, and full sovereignty would be restored to the Japanese people. Most of the U.S. troops would go home. And their commander would retire from the army. To try politics again? Who knew? The next election was a long way off.

  Yet the path to a Japanese peace treaty turned crooked almost at once. As smooth as the postwar evolution of Japan was under MacArthur’s tutelage, the affairs of China, Japan’s historic rival, could not have been more turbulent. A civil war had been raging in China for decades; the war against Japan nominally brought the Chinese antagonists together, but few students of Chinese affairs and next to none of the participants were surprised that the civil war flared anew as soon as the Japanese war ceased. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist party controlled the government and the army and enjoyed the support of the United States, but Mao Zedong’s Communists gained ground rapidly in the countryside. By the beginning of 1949 Chiang and the Nationalists were reeling. Harry Truman, after much thought and discussion, concluded that the Nationalists, demoralized by battlefield defeat and by corruption among their commanders, were a lost cause. The president declined to throw good money after bad and washed his hands of the Nationalists’ fate. They were driven from the Chinese mainland to Formosa, as Taiwan was still often called, and in the autumn of 1949 the Communists proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Chiang Kai-shek impotently shook his fist from Formosa.

  MacArthur watched with dismay from Japan. His peaceable kingdom, with the no-war clause of its constitution, was suddenly threatened by hordes of Chinese just across the Sea of Japan. They were technically deficient, lacking the arms and transport to project military power across the water, but their numbers were daunting. And they might well get modern arms from their co-ideologists in Russia, who would be more than happy to cause trouble for the United States in Japan. The Russians
had been angling for a role in the Japanese occupation, but MacArthur until now had kept them out. Allied with China, they might force their way in.

  MacArthur reflected that the communist victory in China changed the terms of the discussion about Japan’s future. It complicated the security negotiations designed to ensure that Japan remain safely within the American sphere after the restoration of Japanese sovereignty. It compelled closer scrutiny of events in the region around China, lest the red virus spread. Quite possibly it would delay the signing of the peace treaty. The old soldier might not be going home as soon as he thought.

  4

  HARRY TRUMAN HAD noted MacArthur’s inept run for president with the scorn of the professional politician for the rank amateur—a scorn quite comparable to that which MacArthur felt toward politicians meddling in military affairs. The president was annoyed at the insubordination implicit in an electoral challenge to the commander-in-chief by an active-duty officer, but he considered MacArthur an insufficient political threat to warrant sanction at the time. Truman simply filed the matter in his mental dossier on the general.

  The victory over Dewey delighted Truman; he had proved the naysayers wrong. But the thrill didn’t last, and his second term wasn’t six months old before he began to wonder why he had re-upped. The collapse of the anticommunist front in China was the big story of the summer of 1949, and the Republicans and no small number of Democrats laid the blame directly at Truman’s feet. The end of the summer brought an even greater shock when American spy planes patrolling the Siberian coast sniffed radioactive fallout of the kind produced by an atomic explosion. Truman’s scientific advisers quickly concluded that the dreaded day had come: the United States had lost its nuclear monopoly. The president weighed how to break the news to the American people; he opted for a terse written statement. “I believe the American people, to the fullest extent consistent with national security, are entitled to be informed of all developments in the field of atomic energy,” the statement said. “That is my reason for making public the following information. We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.” Truman asserted that there was nothing surprising about this development. “Ever since atomic energy was first released by man, the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected. This probability has always been taken into account by us.” Now that the probability had become a reality, the world had to get serious about arms control. “This recent development emphasizes once again, if indeed such emphasis were needed, the necessity for that truly effective enforceable international control of atomic energy.”

  Truman’s conclusion seemed a howling non sequitur to many in the United States. More arms, not fewer, was the necessary response to the Russian bomb, the critics said. Truman was a fool or worse not to see this. The administration had been asleep, letting the Russians acquire the bomb, if it hadn’t colluded in the communists’ acquisition of the monster weapon.

  The collusion charge might have seemed preposterous if not for further flabbergasting news that broke a short while later. Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, had been accused of spying for the Soviets. Hiss vigorously denied the charge and was supported in his denial by members of the Truman administration, conspicuously Dean Acheson, successor to George Marshall as secretary of state. Congress investigated, and Hiss repeated his denial, yet new evidence strongly suggested he was lying. The statute of limitations prevented prosecution for espionage, but Hiss was charged with perjury for his denial. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. At almost the same time, American and British intelligence services belatedly uncovered the presence of Soviet spies in the wartime atom-bomb project; one of the spies, Klaus Fuchs, was indicted, prosecuted and convicted in Britain. The Truman administration didn’t announce what information Fuchs had delivered to his Soviet handlers, but Truman’s critics assumed the worst and again lambasted the president for a shocking lapse in this most sensitive area of security.

  Though he didn’t say so in public, Truman knew that the information Fuchs had given the Russians probably included material relating to a far bigger bomb than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The “super”—or thermonuclear, or hydrogen—bomb was thought to be feasible but had seemed to American planners unnecessary as long as America’s monopoly on atom bombs held. The loss of the monopoly, combined with the unsettling knowledge that the Russians knew about the hydrogen bomb, prompted frantic discussions at the highest levels of the American national security apparatus. Some officials argued for greater arms-control efforts to keep the world from crossing the thermonuclear threshold. Others contended that such a course was too risky; the Russians simply couldn’t be trusted.

  Truman sided with the skeptics and in January 1950 announced that the United States would build the big bomb. “It is part of my responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor,” the president said in a written statement. The United States wasn’t abandoning arms control, but until such control became real and reliable, America had to look to its own security. “Accordingly, I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.”

  Truman understood the implications of his decision. He was launching the world, or at least the world’s greatest powers, on an arms race into territory unimagined only a few years before. The race might have apocalyptic consequences for humanity. “The atom’s power in the wrong hands can spell disaster,” he declared. But this was precisely why the United States must maintain an atomic advantage. “It can be used as an overriding influence against aggression and reckless war, and for that reason I have always insisted that, within the resources of a balanced security system and a balanced economy, we stay ahead of all the world in atomic affairs.”

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  TEN DAYS LATER Joseph McCarthy seized the national spotlight. The junior senator from Wisconsin, a Republican whom most Americans had never heard of, had pondered various issues by which he might draw attention to himself. But none seemed sufficiently galvanizing until the quadruple whammy of the communist victory in China, the Soviet atom bomb, the discovery of the Soviet spies and the race for the hydrogen bomb caused even the most phlegmatic Americans to fear that their country was in grave danger. McCarthy decided to test the fear for its political possibilities. In February 1950 he traveled to Wheeling, West Virginia, to give a speech that promised, ahead of the event, to be like scores of speeches McCarthy had given during the previous few years. The venue was undistinguished: the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club. West Virginia had voted Democratic since the 1930s, and Republicans in the state weren’t exactly a force to be reckoned with. Neither was McCarthy, as far as anyone could tell, which was why he was speaking to the group this Thursday afternoon.

  His remarks made headlines in the local paper, the Wheeling Intelligencer. “M’Carthy Charges Reds Hold U.S. Jobs,” the paper declared. But what he said beyond this was hard to discern. The paper buried excerpts from McCarthy’s speech on page 12, and the reporter who filed the story confessed that he worked from a text McCarthy gave him rather than from notes of what the senator actually said.

  The gist of the charge was that the federal government was infested with communists. McCarthy was quoted as saying he had a list of 205 communists in the State Department alone. The figure caught the attention of other papers and was quickly repeated. The allegation was almost as quickly denied. “We know of no Communist members in the department and if we find any they will be summarily discharged,” a State Department spokesman said.

  The attention inspired McCarthy to amend and elaborate. He telegraphed Truman to say, “In a Lincoln Day speech at Wheeling Thursday night I stated that the State Department harbors a nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers who are helping to shape our foreign policy. I further stated that I have i
n my possession the names of 57 Communists who are in the State Department at present.” McCarthy brushed aside the State Department’s denial. “You can convince yourself of the falsity of the State Department’s claim very easily,” he told the president. “You will recall that you personally appointed a board to screen State Department employees for the purpose of weeding out fellow-travelers. Your board did a painstaking job and named hundreds which it listed as ‘dangerous to the security of the nation’ because of Communistic connections.” McCarthy praised the probe, which had its roots in a 1947 order by Truman to investigate potential disloyalty in government. But the president had failed to follow up, McCarthy said. He acknowledged that he had not seen the records of the board, but he asserted that he had been told on good authority that the board had identified 300 persons who should be discharged. Yet Secretary of State Acheson had fired only around 80. McCarthy did not say that the 205 figure he had adduced in Wheeling was roughly the difference between 300 and 80, but Truman could draw the inference, as could the millions who read McCarthy’s telegram when he released it to the press.

  McCarthy continued, regarding the retention of most of the allegedly disloyal individuals, “I understand that this was done after lengthy consultation with Alger Hiss.” McCarthy didn’t say where his new count of 57 came from. But the number, which would continue to change in further McCarthy allegations, was less important than the principle of obstruction he imputed to the administration. Acheson and the State Department were criminally culpable, yet the obstructionist-in-chief was Truman himself. “You signed an order forbidding the State Department’s giving to the Congress any information in regard to the disloyalty or the Communistic connections of anyone in that department.” McCarthy demanded that the president rescind the order and deliver the names of the disloyal to the appropriate congressional committees. “Failure on your part will label the Democratic party of being the bedfellow of international communism,” he concluded.