by H. W. Brands
Truman adjourned the meeting without revealing his own thoughts. He asked Marshall to review the Pentagon’s communications with MacArthur during the previous two years. Marshall did so that evening, and when the president reconvened the group on Saturday morning, April 7, the defense secretary—according to Truman’s version—delivered his verdict. “General Marshall stated that he had read the messages and that he had now concluded that MacArthur should have been fired two years ago,” Truman wrote.
“That is not true either,” Bradley retrospectively rejoined. Bradley had argued that any recommendation should await a full meeting of the joint chiefs, which couldn’t take place until Joe Collins returned Saturday night from a trip. Marshall had agreed, Bradley said. “As planned, we merely advised the President to postpone any action until Monday, giving us all another two full days to cogitate and me time to meet with the full JCS.” Truman accepted the delay.
Bradley wanted all the time he and Marshall could get. Truman seemed to be leaning toward dismissal of MacArthur, even if the president hadn’t said so directly. Acheson wasn’t merely leaning. “Acheson clearly favored firing MacArthur,” Bradley recalled. “He did not attempt to disguise his position.” Yet Acheson understood that the decision would be filled with peril. “If you relieve MacArthur, you will have the biggest fight of your administration,” the secretary told the president.
Marshall and Bradley didn’t want the military to be in the middle of that fight. They sought an alternative to dismissal. “Marshall and I were not certain that it was the wisest course, for a number of reasons—certainly not on a charge of military insubordination, as defined in Army Regulations,” Bradley recalled. “That could lead to myriad legal entanglements, perhaps even—God forbid!—a Billy Mitchell–type court-martial.” Bradley suggested to Marshall that they send a letter “in effect telling MacArthur to shut up.” They began drafting it. “But this grew too complicated and we tore it up.”
Bradley and Marshall had personal reasons for avoiding an uproar. Marshall’s health remained uncertain, and he had agreed to fill the position of defense secretary for a year only. He had five months left. “Firing MacArthur was certain to cause an unprecedented furor and provoke yet another savage right-wing political attack on Marshall personally, hardly a pleasant way to wind up his long and distinguished public career,” Bradley wrote. “Moreover, although untrue, there was a widespread belief in military circles (and some media) that Marshall had long had it in for MacArthur, and a recommendation to fire him might be construed as an act of revenge.”
Bradley felt something similar for himself. His term as chairman of the joint chiefs would end in four months, and he expected to retire from the army soon thereafter. He had managed to avoid becoming a political target so far. Firing MacArthur would change that. “It might provoke the primitives and subject me to the kind of savage mauling they were giving Acheson and Marshall.”
This might have larger ramifications, Bradley said. “If the JCS endorsed Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur and if the firing was construed as mainly political, this could have the effect of ‘politicizing’ the JCS. This, in turn, could lead to a drastic erosion in the standing of the JCS as objective advisers to any and all presidents, whatever the party.”
“That night I thought long and hard,” Bradley wrote of the hours from Saturday to Sunday. He finally reached a conclusion he could support. “Truman, as President and Commander in Chief, had established our policy for the conduct of the Korean War. MacArthur was clearly opposed to that policy and had openly and defiantly challenged it to the point where there was serious question that he could carry out that policy. It was not a question of who was right or wrong. As the ultimate in civilian control over the military, Commander in Chief Truman had every right to replace a general who defied his policy and in whom he had lost confidence.”
Bradley summoned the chiefs the next day. He said the president wanted their views on MacArthur from a military standpoint. “We discussed every conceivable aspect,” Bradley recalled. “We even considered proposing that MacArthur be left in his Tokyo post with no direct control over Ridgway and the Eighth Army.” But given the connections between the defense of Korea and the defense of Japan, this seemed likely to produce impossible headaches. “In the end the JCS agreed unanimously that MacArthur should be relieved.”
Yet they stopped short of asserting insubordination. “Because of the legal complexities that could arise, we avoided the term ‘insubordination’ as a reason. In point of fact, MacArthur had stretched but not legally violated any JCS directives. He had violated the President’s December 6 directive, relayed to him by the JCS, but this did not constitute violation of a direct JCS order.” In other words, MacArthur had disobeyed the president but not the joint chiefs.
This was hairsplitting, even from a narrowly military perspective. The president was, after all, commander-in-chief. Bradley implicitly acknowledged as much in a memo he wrote a short while later summarizing the reasons MacArthur should be relieved. First: “By his public statements and by his official communications to us, he had indicated that he was not in sympathy with the decision to try to limit the conflict to Korea. This would make it difficult for him to carry out Joint Chiefs of Staff directives. Since we had decided to try to confine the conflict to Korea and avoid a third world war, it was necessary to have a commander more responsive to control from Washington.” Second: “General MacArthur had failed to comply with the Presidential directive to clear statements on policy before making such statements public. He had also taken independent action in proposing to negotiate directly with the enemy field commander and had made that statement public, despite the fact that he knew the President had such a proposal under consideration from a governmental level.” Third: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff have felt, and feel now, that the military must be controlled by civilian authority in this country. (The Congress itself was very careful to emphasize this point in the National Security Act of 1947 and in its amendment in 1949.) They have always adhered to this principle and they felt that General MacArthur’s actions were continuing to jeopardize the civilian control over the military authorities.”
Bradley and the chiefs took their decision to Marshall on Sunday afternoon. “It was a sad and sober group,” Joe Collins remarked later. “It was not easy to be a party to the dismissal of a distinguished soldier.” Marshall withheld his own view but asked Bradley to relate the chiefs’ verdict to the president the next day.
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ON SUNDAY TRUMAN met with Acheson again and separately with John Snyder, the secretary of the treasury. Snyder had no formal link to the MacArthur question, but he and Truman had served together in World War I and Truman valued his political opinion. The president also met with Chief Justice Fred Vinson, another old friend, and with Sam Rayburn. Vice President Barkley was in the hospital, but Truman spoke to him by phone. “The situation in Far East is discussed but I do not disclose my intentions,” Truman wrote in his diary.
Acheson endorsed the president’s discretion. “Whatever his action,” Acheson explained later, “all of us would be examined and questioned. On one matter we should all be clear and under no necessity to plead privilege: the President had never intimated to any of us his opinion and intended action until, having heard the recommendations of all the responsible civilian and military officers, he announced his decision.”
The critical meeting occurred on Monday morning, April 9. Truman asked for recommendations. Bradley reported that the joint chiefs had concluded unanimously that MacArthur should be relieved of all his commands. Marshall said he concurred in the recommendation. Acheson and Averell Harriman likewise concurred.
Truman listened silently. He nodded. Then he finally delivered his own verdict, the only one that truly mattered. MacArthur had to go. Truman added, according to his own account, that he had come to this conclusion two weeks earlier, after MacArthur’s preemption of the UN truce negotiations.
Truman ask
ed Bradley whom the chiefs recommended as MacArthur’s replacement. Bradley replied that Matthew Ridgway was their first choice. Truman nodded again.
Truman dismissed the group with instructions to draw up the necessary orders. It went without saying that no one should discuss the decision until the president made it public.
50
LIKELY NO ONE did discuss the decision—no one of the principals, that is. But the Martin-MacArthur exchange had every reporter in Washington on high alert, and the flurry of meetings of the president with his most senior military and diplomatic advisers suggested that this manifestation of the long-running tension between Truman and MacArthur might not blow over.
Truman appreciated the desirability of treating MacArthur with all the dignity possible, given the circumstances of his being fired. MacArthur’s many supporters would be outraged by his dismissal, and there was no reason to add avoidable disrespect to their list of indictments against the administration.
A plan was laid to have Frank Pace, who happened to be in Korea, travel to Tokyo and personally deliver a letter from Truman to MacArthur. The general deserved to hear the news from the president, via the secretary of the army. But the logistics of the plan were daunting. Pace had to be alerted without any of the reporters who were accompanying him catching on. And the content of the president’s letter had to be transmitted without any of those involved in the transmission being tempted beyond resistance to share what they had sent.
Moreover, reporters weren’t above manufacturing rumors and asking for an official response. Under the present circumstances, a “no comment” rather than a ringing endorsement of MacArthur would be tantamount to confirmation of his firing.
In the event, the chain of secrecy didn’t hold. A Chicago Tribune radio reporter covering MacArthur heard something that caused him to tell the home office that the general might be fired soon. The Tribune put its Washington men on the trail. One of them, Walter Trohan, cornered Joe Short, Truman’s new press secretary. “I got a double talk,” Trohan recalled later, “so I knew there must be something to it.” Another Tribune man, Lloyd Norman, buttonholed Omar Bradley’s press aide, Ted Clifton, and, as Norman said afterward, “could not get a denial.”
Ironically, the Tribune’s radio man called back to say that he had concluded that his hunch was wrong. He couldn’t find corroborating evidence. The Tribune’s managing editor decided to pull the story. Trohan complained, to no avail. “It was a stupid decision,” he said later. “Although Norman and I did not have a solid confirmation, by that time we thought we had enough to go with a speculative story.”
Joe Short and Ted Clifton didn’t know that the story had been killed. They took Trohan’s and Norman’s queries as evidence that the Tribune was going to publish. “This fear—groundless, as it developed—led to a tremendous flap,” Omar Bradley recalled. Tribune owner Robert McCormick loathed Truman and loved MacArthur. He would certainly play the story to the benefit of the latter and the detriment of the former. He might even pass the word along to MacArthur, thereby prompting MacArthur to resign before he could be fired.
Bradley called Truman. “Said there had been a leak,” Truman wrote in his diary. The president immediately met with Bradley and the other advisers he could find on a moment’s notice. “Discussed the situation and I ordered messages sent at once and directly to MacArthur.”
Theodore Tannenwald remembered the train of events from the perspective of the White House staff. Tannenwald worked for Averell Harriman, who came back from the Monday meeting with the president’s decision. “He got hold of me and said, ‘Go over to Charlie Murphy’s office this afternoon,’ ” Tannenwald recounted. “ ‘The president is going to fire MacArthur and he wants to start working on a speech.’ ” Murphy was special counsel to the president, and he, Tannenwald and others spent the next several hours working on what Truman should say. “About 5 o’clock, the president called Murphy in,” Tannenwald continued. “Murphy came back and said, ‘The speech is off for the time being. We’re going to write a press release. The president is going to fire MacArthur tonight.’ ” Tannenwald heard secondhand about the story the Chicago Tribune was investigating. He wasn’t surprised at Truman’s reaction. “The president inferred that MacArthur had gotten wind of what was going on and was going to try and beat him to the punch by making a statement in advance of the president’s statement and the president was damned if he was going to let MacArthur beat him to the punch.”
Tannenwald and the others redoubled their efforts. “We worked on a press statement from about five in the afternoon until about ten at night,” Tannenwald recounted. “I remember this so vividly, because I had a great argument with Charlie Murphy throughout the period, because I wanted the press statement to include the fact that the president was doing this on the unanimous advice of the principal civilian and military advisers. And Murphy wouldn’t put it in, and never convinced me that he was right in not putting it in. So at ten o’clock we assembled in the Cabinet Room, the president, Harriman, Acheson, Marshall was away and Lovett was there, Bradley was there, as chairman of the joint chiefs, and what I will call us ‘Indians’ who had worked on this statement, and Joe Short, the press secretary. And just like in every other major speech, the president went through this line by line, and various comments and suggestions were made. And when he finished, also as part of the regular pattern, before he handed it to Joe Short, he turned to the assembled group and said, ‘Does anybody have anything to say?’ And the rule of the house was that you could be the lowest man on the totem pole, and if you thought there was something that ought to be said, you could do it. And Truman was the kind of guy you could do this with. I said, ‘Yes, Mr. President, I think there’s something missing. I think this statement ought to say that you’re doing this on the unanimous advice of your principal civilian and military advisers.’ ”
Truman listened politely before rejecting Tannenwald’s advice. “I will never forget this night as long as I live,” Tannenwald related. “He turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and he said, ‘Not tonight, son. Tonight I am taking this decision on my own responsibility as president of the United States, and I want nobody to think that I am trying to share it with anybody else. This will come out in forty-eight or seventy-two hours, but as of tonight, this is my decision, and my decision alone.’ ”
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JOE SHORT ABRUPTLY announced a press conference, to begin at the unusual hour of 1:00 a.m. The presidential statement and a presidential order were released to the sleepy correspondents. “With deep regret I have concluded that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States Government and of the United Nations in matters pertaining to his official duties,” the president’s statement read. “In view of the specific responsibilities imposed upon me by the Constitution of the United States and the added responsibility which has been entrusted to me by the United Nations, I have decided that I must make a change of command in the Far East. I have, therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his commands and have designated Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway as his successor. Full and vigorous debate on matters of national policy is a vital element in the constitutional system of our free democracy. It is fundamental, however, that military commanders must be governed by the policies and directives issued to them in the manner provided by our laws and Constitution. In time of crisis, this consideration is particularly compelling. General MacArthur’s place in history as one of our greatest commanders is fully established. The Nation owes him a debt of gratitude for the distinguished and exceptional service which he has rendered his country in posts of great responsibility. For that reason I repeat my regret at the necessity for the action I feel compelled to take in his case.”
The separate presidential order was addressed to MacArthur. “I deeply regret that it becomes my duty as President and Commander in Chief of the United States military forces to replace you as Supreme Commander, Allied
Powers; Commander in Chief, United Nations Command; Commander in Chief, Far East; and Commanding General, U.S. Army, Far East,” the president said. “You will turn over your commands, effective at once, to Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway. You are authorized to have issued such orders as are necessary to complete desired travel to such place as you select. My reasons for your replacement will be made public concurrently with the delivery to you of the foregoing order, and are contained in the next following message.” The referenced message was the presidential statement just issued.
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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 1951, dawned in New Japan with the breath of early spring in the air,” Courtney Whitney remembered. “The sun rose, as it had since time immemorial, upon this land of the chrysanthemum with its deep shadows and brilliant hues, with its majestic peaks and low-lying valleys, its winding streams and inland seas, its cities and towns and rolling plateaus, all with their natural beauty enhanced by man-made lacquer-red bridges and with customary calm and industry.”
But then things changed. “Suddenly this atmosphere of calm and serenity and progress was rent as though by a thunderclap,” Whitney wrote. “The radios all over Japan brought upon the land a hushed silence as a special bulletin from Washington broke through all programs.” MacArthur was having lunch with Jean and two visitors: Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington and William Stern of Northwest Airlines. MacArthur’s aide Colonel Sidney Huff got the attention of Jean without alerting MacArthur. She rose from the table and went out of the room, where Huff told her what the radios were saying. She returned quietly. “The General was laughing heartily at a remark made by one of his guests when she walked into the room behind him and touched his shoulder,” Whitney wrote. “He turned and she bent down and told him the news in a voice so low that it was not heard across the table….MacArthur’s face froze. Not a flicker of emotion crossed it. For a moment, while his luncheon guests puzzled on what was happening, he was stonily silent. Then he looked up at his wife, who still stood with her hand on his shoulder. In a gentle voice, audible to all present, he said: ‘Jeannie, we’re going home at last.’ ”