The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  The record was plain to the chiefs, Lovett told Acheson, even if the conclusion was not. “It would be perfectly obvious if it were anybody else who had made the statement which MacArthur made yesterday, he would be relieved of his command at once. However, the JCS recognized that the consequences of relieving MacArthur are startling. It would have its effect at once in the field and it would probably prejudice the success of the Japanese treaty negotiations.” All the same, the chiefs had to act. “They do not feel they can just let this slide by.” Yet they were willing to go only so far. “Their thinking at the present moment is that they will try to work out a reprimand rather than a relief.”

  Lovett had said he thought this a good solution. He pointed out that the situation was complicated by the fact that MacArthur held four separate commands: supreme commander for the Allied powers in Japan, commander-in-chief of UN forces, U.S. commander-in-chief in the Far East, and commanding general of U.S. Army forces in the Far East. Recalling MacArthur could cause serious administrative problems.

  The politics were even trickier. The press had carried MacArthur’s statement, and it was playing quite well. “It is very clever,” Lovett said. “It offers peace and holds out the hope of getting out of Korea. If the President challenged it, he would be in the position at once of being on the side of sin. MacArthur has gotten us in Washington in a tight box from which there seems to be no escape.”

  Lovett recommended that the president not respond. “The best thing would be to have as much silence about it as possible.” Behind the scenes the State Department could assure other governments that MacArthur’s words did not represent U.S. government policy—“that this was another statement made by the field commander and that it is really not very important.” Lovett understood that this approach would not be easy; he acknowledged the “really great difficulties” it entailed.

  Acheson replied that the State Department had analyzed the MacArthur problem similarly. He was willing to leave the disciplining of the general to the Defense Department; for him the important question was how to keep the problem from recurring. “If this statement can be straightened out, that will not do much good if the same thing is apt to happen next week.” As for the line the State Department should take with other governments, Acheson proposed to bring in the thirteen ambassadors and tell them “that the MacArthur statement was unauthorized, unexpected, and that steps had been taken to deal with it.”

  Acheson and Lovett—the latter sitting in for George Marshall, again ailing—met with Truman later that morning. “The President, although perfectly calm, appeared to be in a state of mind that combined disbelief with controlled fury,” Acheson recalled. Truman asked Acheson and Lovett if his directive of the previous December 6, the one requiring statements to be approved by the White House, was clear. They assured him it was. Truman nodded. Still calm but not less angry, the president turned to his secretary. “He dictated a message to MacArthur which laid so plainly the foundation for a court-martial as to give pause even to General MacArthur,” Acheson recalled. Speaking in the third person, Truman said, “The President has directed that your attention be called to his order as transmitted 6 December 1950. In view of the information given you 20 March 1951”—about the president’s imminent ceasefire offer—“any further statements by you must be coordinated as prescribed in the order of 6 December.” Referring specifically to MacArthur’s unauthorized offer, Truman continued, “The President has also directed that in the event the Communist military leaders request an armistice in the field, you immediately report that fact to the JCS for instructions.” Truman ordered the message sent to Tokyo at once.

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  MACARTHUR LATER PROFESSED to have been taken aback when he read Truman’s message. He gathered that his truce offer was what had provoked the president’s response. “The argument was made that I had disrupted some magic formula for peace on which the United States had already secured international agreement and which it was about to announce,” he recalled sarcastically. “This was utter nonsense. No such plan was even in draft form. And what I said would entirely support any peace effort that might be made. Under any interpretation, it was only the local voice of a theater commander.” MacArthur noted that he had twice before called on the enemy to surrender and halt further bloodshed—once after Inchon and again after the capture of Pyongyang. “In neither instance had there been the slightest whisper of remonstrance from any source—indeed, quite the contrary.” His offer had been entirely in keeping with military tradition. “From the beginning of warfare, it has not only been a right, but a duty for a field commander to take any steps within his power to minimize bloodshed of the soldiers committed to his command.” As to his aspersions on China’s military prowess, this was a psychological ploy. “My statement was not only factual, but intended to present to the enemy the basic reason why he should agree to stop the war.”

  Courtney Whitney perceived a deeper meaning in Washington’s response—a perception MacArthur certainly shared, since Whitney never diverged from his chief in such matters, though MacArthur commonly hewed to a higher road in public. “Far from MacArthur’s ken, a sinister element in the last act of the tragedy had been taking place,” Whitney wrote a few years later, in typically dark tones. “It seems reasonable to assume that in some parts of the U.N. and the U.S. State Department, and in some very high places elsewhere in Washington”—the White House was the only place that qualified as “very high” compared with the State Department—“men were scheming to change the status of Formosa and the Nationalists’ seat in the United Nations.” Whitney cited no evidence of such scheming on Truman’s part, for there was none. Yet he credited the general with spiking such a conspiracy all the same. “What had happened was that by sheer accident, in his statement and in its reference to settling the war without reference to Formosa or the United Nations seat, MacArthur had cut right across one of the most disgraceful plots in American history. Or was it not accident, but intuition? This I do know: had MacArthur fully realized the hornets’ nest he would stir up, he still would not have been deterred.”

  49

  OMAR BRADLEY REMEMBERED the first week of April 1951 as the time when the administration felt more fearful than ever about the possibility of the outbreak of World War III. “We had recently received alarming intelligence information (from a classified source) that the Soviet Union was preparing for a major military move; where, we did not know,” Bradley wrote. “One suggestion, taken with utmost seriousness, was that they would intervene in Korea. Another was that they might attempt to overrun Western Europe.”

  This was the nightmare scenario of the administration: that the Soviets would exploit America’s involvement in Korea by launching a general war. Bradley and the chiefs huddled with their intelligence officers and produced a plan for responding to a Soviet thrust. “If the USSR precipitates a general war, United Nations forces should be withdrawn from Korea as rapidly as possible and deployed for service elsewhere,” the plan declared. Korea, in other words, was expendable. But MacArthur might yet get what he wanted, for if things escalated, the United States had to be ready to hit the communists where they would feel it. “Preparations should be made immediately for action by naval and air forces against the mainland of China,” the chiefs said.

  Bradley and the chiefs followed up with a proposal for new orders to MacArthur. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that you obtain Presidential approval now for them to send the following message to General MacArthur if and when the enemy launches from outside Korea a major air attack against our forces in the Korean area,” the chiefs wrote to George Marshall: “ ‘You are authorized with the U.S. forces assigned to the Far East Command to attack enemy air bases and aircraft in Manchuria and the Shantung peninsula in the immediate vicinity of Weihaiwei.’ ”

  It was a measure of Truman’s alarm at the possibility of general war that he approved the proposed order. But it was a measure of Bradley’s distrust of MacArthur that
the joint chiefs chairman declined to send the order. “Ordinarily we would have sent this letter to MacArthur for contingency planning,” Bradley explained later. “However, I was now so wary of MacArthur that I deliberately withheld the message and all knowledge of its existence from him.” Bradley didn’t want MacArthur to see anything that even prospectively authorized the escalation he had been agitating for. MacArthur had interpreted orders expansively in the past. With World War III apparently closer than ever, Bradley wasn’t going to give him a chance to do so again.

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  REPORTERS SENSED THE rising tension in the administration. A reporter at the president’s regular news conference on April 5 asked him about a recent comment by Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House of Representatives. The administration had shared some recent intelligence with Rayburn, who, out of the best intentions toward the administration’s defense bill, had told his House colleagues that large numbers of troops were massing in Manchuria. The reporter sought Truman’s reaction.

  “I have no comment on Speaker Rayburn’s statement,” Truman said. “But the Speaker is a truthful man.”

  The reporter went on to say that Rayburn had offered the opinion that World War III might be beginning.

  “I have no further comment to make on Speaker Rayburn’s comment,” Truman said.

  “I wonder if your statement covered the whole of the—”

  “No further comment.”

  Another reporter took a slightly different tack. “Mr. President, aside from your statement, do you think there is a danger of a major world war greater today than at any time, say, since the end of World War II?”

  “It is just as great as it ever has been,” Truman said. “We were faced with that in the Berlin airlift. We were faced with it in Greece and Turkey. We were faced with it in Iran, when the troops of the Allies and Russia moved out of Iran. We were faced with it in Korea as an actual fact on June 25th. That situation has been a dangerous one for the last five years—last four years, I will say.”

  A reporter offered Truman a chance to reassure the American people. “Mr. President, do you agree with Senator Connally’s belief that there won’t be a third world war this year?”

  “I hope there never will be a third world war. That is what we are trying to prevent. That is the reason for all this preparation.”

  The questioning moved to other topics before a reporter drew the discussion back. “Mr. President, this massing of troops in Manchuria, are you—”

  “I can’t comment on that, and I don’t intend to answer any further questions on it at all.”

  Yet the reporters persisted. The question of one of them suggested he might have sources in the upper echelons of the Pentagon. Or perhaps it was a lucky guess, for at just the moment when the joint chiefs were writing the order that would have given MacArthur provisional authority to bomb China, the reporter asked, “Mr. President, has General MacArthur been authorized to bomb bases in Manchuria?”

  Truman hadn’t yet seen the chiefs’ recommendation, so his refusal to comment likely came more easily than some of his other deflections. “That is a question that cannot be answered because it is a military strategy question, and it is not a question that I can answer.”

  Another reporter either hadn’t heard the question or hoped to lure Truman into a fuller answer. “I wonder if we could have that question—”

  “He asked me if General MacArthur had been authorized to bomb bases in Manchuria,” Truman said. “And I said that is a military strategy question that I cannot answer.”

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  JOSEPH MARTIN CHOSE just this moment to read MacArthur’s letter to him into the public record. MacArthur had not said that his remarks were confidential, though Martin had invited him to do so if he thought appropriate. Martin concluded that MacArthur wanted the letter aired. Almost certainly MacArthur did. And he must have realized how it would provoke Truman further. The friendly tone of MacArthur’s letter seemed to endorse Martin’s bitterly partisan attack on the administration. MacArthur’s assertion that Martin’s demand that the administration unleash Chiang and the Chinese Nationalists was in conflict with neither logic nor tradition placed the general again at odds with Truman on this crucial issue. His dismissal of the administration’s global strategy—“It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield; that here we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words”—was not simply provocative but insulting. And his stirring summation—“There is no substitute for victory”—could only complicate the president’s desire to limit the war in Korea.

  Doubtless MacArthur sought to increase the pressure on Truman to shift American policy in the direction MacArthur thought it should go. Possibly he thought the pressure would produce the desired policy change in the near term; conceivably he thought it wouldn’t but would thereby position him for the 1952 presidential race, after which he might effect the change himself, as commander-in-chief.

  Joseph Martin might have reckoned things similarly. Or perhaps he merely wanted to vex the administration. The Republicans had made no secret, since their come-from-ahead defeat in 1948, of their determination to reclaim the White House in 1952 by almost any means necessary. Another MacArthur salvo against Truman would certainly benefit the campaign.

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  “RANK INSUBORDINATION,” A furious Truman wrote in his diary. “This looks like the last straw.” The president’s pen gouged the paper as he recounted MacArthur’s most recent offenses, and several earlier ones. “The situation with regard to the Far Eastern General has become a political one. MacArthur has made himself a center of controversy, publicly and privately. He has always been a controversial figure. He has had two wives—one a social light he married at 42, the other a Tennessee girl he married in his middle fifties after No. 1 had divorced him. He was chief of staff in the Hoover regime, made the front pages in the bonus affair….Last summer he sent a long statement to the Vets of Foreign Wars—not through the high command back home, but directly! He sent copies to newspapers and magazines particularly hostile to me. I was furnished a copy from the press room of the White House which had been accidentally sent there. I ordered the release suppressed and then sent him a very carefully prepared directive dated Dec. 5 1950 setting out Far Eastern policy after I’d flown 14404 miles to Wake Island to see him and reach an understanding face to face. He told me the war in Korea was over, that we could transfer a regular division to Germany Jan 1st. He was positive Red China would not come in. He expected to support our Far Eastern policy.”

  From the past Truman switched to the present. “MacArthur shoots another political bomb through Joe Martin, leader of the Republican minority in the House.” This final affront left the president no recourse. “I call in Gen. Marshall, Dean Acheson, Mr. Harriman and Gen. Bradley. I’ve come to the conclusion that our Big General in the Far East must be recalled.” But the president kept this conclusion to himself. “I don’t express any opinion or make known my decision.”

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  DEAN ACHESON CAUGHT a whiff of coup d’état in MacArthur’s collaboration with Joseph Martin. At the meeting with Truman, George Marshall suggested bringing MacArthur home for a talk. Acheson thought this a terrible idea. The Republicans he called primitives had been gunning for Truman, with Joseph McCarthy and others branding him unfit to be president. Acheson distrusted them deeply. “Their attachment to constitutional procedures was a veneer at best,” he wrote afterward. Bringing MacArthur home would play into their unprincipled hands and invite the worst kind of adventurism. “The effect of MacArthur’s histrionic abilities on civilians and of his prestige upon the military had been often enough demonstrated. To get him back in Washington in the full panoply of his commands and with his future the issue of the day would not only gravely impair the President’s freedom of decis
ion but might well imperil his own future.” Marshall accepted the criticism and withdrew his suggestion.

  No notes were taken at this meeting. Truman didn’t want anything in writing until he was prepared to announce his decision. Recollections of what was said at the meeting differed. Truman said that Averell Harriman remarked that MacArthur should have been fired two years earlier when the general had refused to return to Washington for consultation on Japan. Harriman later denied this, saying instead that he had merely remarked that MacArthur had been trouble since the summer of 1950. Truman also remembered that Marshall had counseled caution, with the defense secretary asserting that a row over MacArthur would complicate passage of the defense bill then before Congress.

  Truman recollected that Omar Bradley considered the MacArthur question from the perspective of military discipline. “As he saw it, there was a clear case of insubordination and the general deserved to be relieved of command.” Bradley later said the president remembered things inaccurately. Bradley said he hadn’t said what Truman claimed he said, because he didn’t believe what Truman said he believed. “There was considerable doubt in my mind that MacArthur had committed a clear-cut case of military insubordination as defined in Army Regulations,” Bradley wrote. Bradley was painfully aware that the joint chiefs had been sufficiently vague with MacArthur that an insubordination charge—of willful violation of a direct order—might be impossible to prove. Bradley, like Marshall, wanted time to think things over.