The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  Harriman was a cogent and compelling explainer in most circumstances, which was why Roosevelt and Truman entrusted him with sensitive missions. But he didn’t think he got through to MacArthur. “In all, I cannot say that he recognizes fully the difficulties, both within the world and within the East, of whatever moves we make within China in our position with the Generalissimo in Formosa. He believes that our policies undermine the Generalissimo. He has confidence that he can get the Generalissimo to do whatever he is asked to undertake.”

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  MACARTHUR WAS LESS evasive about Chiang and Formosa when speaking to those he considered his friends and allies. William Sebald was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, an international lawyer, a diplomat and the chief political adviser to MacArthur in Japan. Sebald met with MacArthur regularly, and though he reported to the State Department, his sympathies were with the general. MacArthur reciprocated by speaking candidly to Sebald about Chiang—and about the State Department. The general dismissed as strategically immaterial all criticism of Chiang as less than the perfect democrat. “If he has horns and a tail, so long as he is anti-Communist, we should help him,” MacArthur told Sebald, per Sebald’s diary. “It is time that the State Department forgets its vendetta against Chiang and assists him in the fight against the communists. We can try to reform him later.”

  17

  MACARTHUR’S SELF-CONGRATULATION upon the deployment of the Eighth Army was premature; for another two weeks the American troops continued to retreat. The general countenanced the withdrawal as unavoidable, but he balked when the Eighth Army commander, Walton Walker, proposed to relocate his headquarters to Pusan, the port city on the southeast tip of the Korean peninsula. Whether or not Walker intended this as a prelude to evacuation, MacArthur knew many observers would draw that conclusion. He flew to Korea at once. “Walker,” he said, “you can make all the reconnaissance you want. You can put your engineers to work if you like preparing intermediate trenches. But I will give the order to retire from this position. There will be no Dunkirk in this command. To retire to Pusan is unacceptable.”

  Walton “Johnnie” Walker—who liked his whiskey—had fought under George Patton in Europe during World War II, and he exhibited Patton’s stubbornness without the melodrama. Yet he seemed almost melodramatic as he relayed to his subordinates what MacArthur had told him. “General MacArthur was over here two days ago,” Walker said. “He is thoroughly conversant with the situation. He knows where we are and what we have to fight with. He knows our needs and where the enemy is hitting the hardest. General MacArthur is doing everything possible to send reinforcements. A Marine unit and two regiments are expected in the next few days to reinforce us. Additional units are being sent over as quickly as possible. We are fighting a battle against time. There will be no more retreating, withdrawal, or readjustment of the lines, or any other term you choose. There is no line behind us to which we can retreat. Every unit must counterattack to keep the enemy in a state of confusion and off balance. There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan. A retreat to Pusan would be one of the great butcheries in history. We must fight until the end. Capture by these people is worse than death itself. We will fight as a team. If some of us must die, we will die fighting together. Any man who gives ground may be personally responsible for the death of thousands of his comrades. I want you to put this out to all the men in the division. I want everybody to understand that we are going to hold this line. We are going to win.”

  Headline writers soon shortened Walker’s message to “Stand or die.” And stand was what the Eighth Army did. At the Naktong River they dug in and held on. Maggie Higgins witnessed the change of fortunes and the transformation in morale it effected. Walker was sufficiently traditional to think women had no place in a war zone; he ordered Higgins out of Korea. She retreated to Japan, where she appealed her expulsion to MacArthur. She pointed out that she expected no special treatment as a woman; she endured the same hardships as the male reporters. She added that singling her out injured her paper, the Herald Tribune, which was left without a correspondent. She started a backfire against the order, appealing to GIs and junior officers who had witnessed her courage and perseverance in the worst of the retreat south. “We hope you can talk the general out of this,” more than one soldier told her. Her bosses appealed to the Defense Department. The efforts paid off. MacArthur valued good press more than most generals, and he decided he’d rather have Higgins and the Herald Tribune happy than angry. “Ban on women in Korea being lifted,” his headquarters telegraphed to Walker and the other field commanders. “Marguerite Higgins held in highest professional esteem by everyone.”

  She arrived in time for one of the first major battles after Walker’s stand-or-die order. The Twenty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, called the Wolfhound Regiment, was commanded by John Michaelis, a former aide to Dwight Eisenhower. Michaelis’s professionalism and fighting spirit inspired his men, and he accepted with aplomb the challenge Walker had given them. Higgins overheard a midnight message from a forward battalion that had been contending with North Korean tanks all day. The message conveyed the current situation and the attitude of the battalion: “Five tanks within our position. Situation vague. No sweat. We are holding.”

  Higgins heard another account from a different regiment. “Antitank guns caught us on a curve several miles short of our objective,” an infantry officer told her. “Troops riding on the tanks yelled when they saw the flash, but they were too late. The tanks caught partially afire and the crews were wounded. But three of the tanks were still operable. I was damned if I was going to let several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of American equipment sit back there on the road. I yelled, ‘Who around here thinks he can drive a tank?’ A couple of ex-bulldozer operators and an ex-mason volunteered. They got about three minutes’ checking out and off they went.” The new men guided the tanks to safety, carrying wounded troops on their decks. Higgins found one of the drivers, who had operated bulldozers. “It’s really easier to drive than a bulldozer,” he said dismissively. “You just feel sort of funny lookin’ in that darn periscope all the time.” Later the driver sought her out. “Ma’am,” he said, “if you happen to think of it, you might tell the colonel that we’re hoping he won’t take that tank away from us. We’re plannin’ to git ordnance to help us fix it up in the mornin’.” The officer who told Higgins the story concluded that it had been a good day. They had lost thirty men but killed nearly three hundred. “We counted them when we fought our way up to the high ground where they had been dug in. And earlier we caught a whole platoon napping by the roadside. We killed them all.”

  Higgins met Colonel Michaelis after the battle. He seemed pleased. She asked him if he had any message for his division commander. He said he did. “Tell him that we will damn well hold.”

  18

  THEY DID HOLD, and the stabilization of the Pusan perimeter allowed MacArthur to begin planning a counteroffensive that would reverse the gains the North Koreans had achieved. In Washington, Truman hoped for just such a reversal, and he looked to the general as the one person with sufficient experience, acumen and self-confidence to make it happen. Yet looking to MacArthur required the president to look past the trouble MacArthur was causing for American diplomacy.

  MacArthur, meanwhile, thought he was the one beset. “General burst into a long tirade about a State Department clique attempting to undermine his position,” William Sebald wrote in his diary after a session with MacArthur. “He said that John Allison”—another foreign service officer—“was sneaking around behind his back to get information.” Sebald defended Allison, causing MacArthur to modify his charge. “The General said he didn’t mean to imply that John A. was not acting in good faith.” But Allison, like the other diplomats, knew nothing about the Asian mind, MacArthur said. Discussion moved to matters of protocol. “He turned down my suggestion that he meet with various Chiefs of Mission,” Sebald recorded, “on the ground that they had no responsibility for
Korea, and besides, as a ‘sovereign,’ why should he?—President Truman didn’t do so, nor does the King of England or any other head of a state!” (The exclamation point was one of Sebald’s occasional comments on MacArthur’s elevated sense of self. Similar eye rolling had followed word from MacArthur’s headquarters that the general didn’t take kindly to the fact that addresses on letters to him from the United Nations habitually included his middle initial. “The General feels that his name should be well enough known by now,” Sebald was told.) MacArthur revisited the ignorance, if not perfidy, of the diplomats. “He pilloried the State Department and said that one of these days he intends to ‘blast them wide open,’ ” Sebald wrote. “Apparently someone is feeding him stuff from Washington which makes him very suspicious.” Sebald added, “With me personally, the General is always friendly—I refuse to allow him to make me angry, despite some of his rather extravagant charges against ‘Washington interference headed by the State Department crowd.’ ”

  Occasionally, MacArthur went public with his accusations. A week after his return from Formosa, and about the time Averell Harriman got back to America from Japan, MacArthur issued a statement denying any difference between himself and the president regarding Formosa or anything else, yet alleging malign influence and motives to unnamed people who sought to create such a difference. “This visit has been maliciously misrepresented to the public by those who in the past have propagandized a policy of defeatism and appeasement in the Pacific,” MacArthur said of his Formosa trip. “I hope the American people will not be misled by sly insinuations, brash speculations and bold misstatements, invariably attributed to anonymous sources, so insidiously fed them both nationally and internationally by persons 10,000 miles away from the actual events which tend, if they are not indeed designed, to promote disunity and destroy faith and confidence in American purposes and institutions and American representatives at this time of great world peril.”

  Truman couldn’t tell what game MacArthur was playing, but he refused to take part. A reporter probed him at a news conference. “General MacArthur says there are defeatists and appeasers who are working against him,” the reporter said. “Is anybody trying to set you against General MacArthur?”

  “I haven’t met anybody yet,” Truman replied.

  Another reporter couldn’t hear the answer and said so.

  “I haven’t met anybody of that sort yet,” Truman repeated. “General MacArthur and I are in perfect agreement, and have been ever since he has been in the job he is now. I put him there, and I also appointed him Commander in Chief of American and Allied Forces, at the suggestion of the United Nations. I am satisfied with what he is doing.”

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  SO, PRESUMABLY, WERE readers of much of the reporting on MacArthur and the Korean fighting. Lindesay Parrott had covered MacArthur during World War II and recounted his rebuilding of Japan afterward. Parrott was happy to follow the general into a war zone once again. “Look at him now,” he quoted a MacArthur aide from aboard the Bataan on an August trip to the front. “Just look at him. He’ll walk half the way there before we set down.” The aide was referring to MacArthur’s habit of pacing while he thought, even ten thousand feet above the Yellow Sea. “The General paced up and down the aisle, hands behind his back,” Parrott wrote in his own voice. “His gold-laced hat had been set aside for the moment, and he wore the faded, almost white suntans he affected in the Southwest Pacific. MacArthur was crackling with energy—as he has been from the moment that hostilities began in Korea—fuller than ever of ideas, ready to drive himself and his subordinates to the utmost limits of their abilities even if he has to ‘walk halfway there’ in person.” Parrott added, “The outcome in Asia may well depend on the result of General MacArthur’s nervous walks and the ideas he coins while making them.”

  Parrott observed that the fighting in Korea had changed MacArthur’s daily routine only modestly. “His long, black sedan with its constellation of five silver stars on red plates at the front and rear draws up as usual about 11 o’clock in the morning in front of the white-columned former insurance company building, which the Supreme Commander has used as headquarters almost since the Japanese surrender. He leaves about 2:30 for lunch at his home in the American Embassy building and returns about 4 o’clock to work until 10 or 11, rather than to 8, as he formerly did. Just why the General keeps these particular hours has never been successfully explained. Someone asked him once, so the story goes, and he replied, ‘I like them.’ ”

  Out of sight, however, MacArthur carried a much greater burden than before, Parrott explained. The blue flag of the United Nations, flying beside the Stars and Stripes at MacArthur’s headquarters, betokened his obligation to the world community. Powerful and important visitors came and went, the latest being Averell Harriman. MacArthur traveled repeatedly to Korea, where he assessed the fighting and plotted the shift from defense to counterattack, and he had gone to Formosa. Yet the general was undaunted. “MacArthur has been meeting his difficulties with the same confidence which characterized his attitude even during the worst days of the South Pacific war. In his mind ultimate victory was never in doubt then—and isn’t today. The Supreme Commander has an optimism which has sometimes caused even his closest staff members to cock questioning eyebrows.”

  Parrott described how MacArthur had drafted his first report to the joint chiefs from the front. “Routine communiqués noting the day’s fighting usually are composed by various members of the staff,” Parrott wrote. “Important messages, however, are scrawled by MacArthur himself on a yellow scratchpad in soft pencil, then sent to stenographers to type and mimeograph. This was one of these.” Parrott was referring to the report in which MacArthur predicted ultimate victory. “There have been advances and retreats since then,” Parrott continued, “but General MacArthur’s assessment is that we will win. Nobody thinks the process will be a fast one. The United Nations troops have a long way to go before they battle back to the Thirty-eighth Parallel—let alone the Yalu River, the frontier between Korea and Manchuria, which may be the ultimate objective.”

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  PERHAPS PARROTT, WHO knew MacArthur as well as any reporter, was repeating something the general had told him about ultimate objectives. MacArthur tested the bounds of policy by various means, including unattributed statements to reporters. His official brief was to repel the North Korean invasion; no one in Washington in a position of authority was saying anything about driving to the Yalu. MacArthur thought they should be thinking about it, even if they weren’t talking about it, and he hoped to stimulate the thought processes.

  He employed other methods as well. The Veterans of Foreign Wars asked him to address their national meeting, by written statement since he couldn’t be spared from the theater of the war. He responded with a message that he sent to the veterans’ group and to American news organizations—but not to the administration in Washington. The general thanked the veterans for their support and praised their successors, the Americans fighting in Korea, for their continued sacrifice. “From senior commanders through all ranks, their tactical skill, their invincible determination and their fighting qualities against a fanatical foe, well trained, expertly directed and heavily armed, have upheld our country’s finest traditions,” he said.

  This was patriotic standard and doubtless the sum of what the veterans expected. But MacArthur surprised them by going much further. “In view of misconceptions currently being voiced concerning the relationship of Formosa to our strategic potential in the Pacific, I believe it in the public interest to avail myself of this opportunity to state my views thereon to you, all of whom having fought overseas understand broad strategic concepts.” MacArthur proceeded to sketch a breathtaking vision of American hegemony over the world’s greatest ocean. Prior to World War II, the Pacific had been an avenue of weakness for the United States, he said, as evidenced by the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. The American victory changed this. “Our strategic frontier th
en shifted to embrace the entire Pacific Ocean, which has become a vast moat to protect us as long as we hold it. Indeed, it acts as a protective shield to all of the Americas and all free lands of the Pacific Ocean area we control to the shores of Asia, by a chain of islands extending in an arc from the Aleutians to the Marianas, held by us and our free allies. From this island chain we can dominate with air power every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore and prevent any hostile movement into the Pacific. Any predatory attack from Asia must be an amphibious one. No amphibious force can be successful with our control of the sea lanes and the air over these lanes in its avenue of advance. With naval and air supremacy and modern ground elements to defend bases, any major attack from continental Asia toward us or our friends of the Pacific would come to failure. Under such conditions the Pacific no longer represents menacing avenues of approach for a prospective invader; it assumes instead the friendly aspect of a peaceful lake.” All that was required was for America to take measures to keep it thus. “Our line of defense is a natural one and can be maintained with a minimum of military effort and expense. It envisions no attack against anyone nor does it provide the bastions essential for offensive operations, but properly maintained would be an invincible defense against aggression. If we hold this line we may have peace; lose it and war is inevitable.”