The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  People in the city saw the plane first, its white and red running lights winking against the blue-black of the late evening sky. The rumble of the aircraft’s four engines sent a frisson through the growing throng. An amplified voice boomed across the runway and aprons at the airport: “The Bataan is making her final approach.” The crowd roared.

  The plane’s landing lights suddenly came on, like kliegs in a theater. The crowd roared again. The official greeters inched closer to the spot where the plane would taxi to a halt. The unofficial throng pressed harder against the fence that ringed the airfield; police warned them back lest the barrier crumple and they be crushed.

  At 8:29 the wheels of the plane scuffed the asphalt. “He’s down! He’s down!” a hundred voices shouted to the thousands around them.

  From the airport tower a searchlight panned the field before locking onto the slowing plane. The silver hull gleamed back the light. The cheering rose to a new level and remained there for minutes. A bystander might have wondered when the cheerers took a breath. A cacophony of other sounds—car horns, kitchenware, whistles—intensified the pandemonium.

  The plane trundled to a stop. The engines shut off, allowing the propellers to spin down. Airport workers hustled rolling stairs to the side of the plane. The door opened inward. Now the cheerers did catch their breath, preparing a greater yell.

  But they had to hold themselves a moment longer. The first face to appear in the door was that of Jean MacArthur. Almost no one knew what she looked like, so carefully had she kept in the background of her famous husband. But it had to be her, as no other woman was thought to be on the plane. And she looked the part of the hero’s wife: composed, neatly elegant, able to bear good news and bad without a flutter. Her jacket was navy or black; the searchlight’s brilliance erased the distinction. An orchid corsage lent freshness after the long flight from Hawaii, where the general’s party had stopped and spent a night.

  Close behind her came the great man himself. He had said he didn’t want a fuss. He could see at once that his words had been ignored; the city had never greeted anyone more effusively. He wasn’t sure what to do. He had never dealt with an audience as large as this. Generals in ancient times had spoken to entire armies on the eve of battle; this general addressed much smaller groups. Nor had he often spoken to civilian audiences. He knew the mind of soldiers; of civilians he was less sure.

  He preferred not to speak on this occasion. He would save his words for Washington. He stepped through the airplane door and was blinded by the flash of camera bulbs and the glare of television floodlights.

  The mayor of San Francisco and the governor of California greeted him on behalf of the city and the state. A battery of guns thundered its welcome. A company of red-scarved troops from an engineer battalion presented arms. An army band rolled ruffles and flourishes and pitched into “The General’s March.” The engineers’ captain invited him to review the troops; he did so with practiced efficiency.

  A podium draped in bunting and bristling with microphones loomed before him. He had to say something. “I can’t tell you how good it is to be home,” he obliged. Observers close to the podium thought they saw a tremble in the famous jaw; emotion briefly roughened his voice. “Mrs. MacArthur and I have thought long about this moment. Now that the moment has come, the wonderful hospitality of this city has made it all the more enjoyable. Thank you so much. We won’t forget it.”

  He said no more. He looked for the car assigned to take him and Jean and Arthur to the hotel. But before he could reach the vehicle he was swarmed by cameramen who wanted the perfect photo and well-wishers who sought to shake his hand or simply touch the sleeve of his trench coat. Lesser army brass crowded to be in the frame with the most decorated senior officer of the age. Military and civilian police pushed back against the crowd, to partial avail. Jean MacArthur’s mouth kept smiling, but fear flitted into her eyes as the crowd closed in. The general’s jaw muscles clenched. Arthur thought the excitement marvelous.

  The special five-star flag of his rank was carried to the head of the motorcade, and the MacArthurs found their car. The army band struck up “California, Here I Come” as the vehicles pulled away. The crowd scarcely thinned along the road from the airport toward the city. Fathers and mothers lofted their small children, many in pajamas, to see the hero and share the stirring moment. Hand-lettered signs said, “Welcome home, Doug!” and “Mac is back.” Many without signs waved American flags.

  Bayshore Boulevard took the motorcade through South San Francisco and Daly City; north of the Mission District the column turned onto Market Street. A tide of cheering and applause surged forward with the motorcade: swelling, climaxing and gradually falling as the general’s vehicle passed. But the general remained in the wave’s crest, all but overwhelmed by sound the entire way.

  Management had cleared the furniture from the first floor of the St. Francis Hotel lest the shorter members of the anticipated mob stand on the sofas and tables. Another five-star flag adorned the entrance. The Presidential Suite had been renamed Apartment M for the general’s visit. The St. Francis professed no politics in the name change, but more than a few of the visitors, reflecting on the cause of the general’s homecoming, smiled approval. With difficulty the police parted the crowd at the curb and in the lobby, and the MacArthurs reached the elevator, which took them to their rooms. Patrolmen secured the hallway outside the apartment door, keeping the bedlam at a distance. Yet they were helpless against the general’s supporters outside the hotel, who continued to shout for their hero. A friendly reporter noted approvingly MacArthur’s request to hold the formalities to a minimum. “But he could not control the hearts of Americans who surrendered unconditionally to him here,” the reporter said.

  —

  SAN FRANCISCO SET the tone for the general’s triumphal progress east. Church bells pealed beneath the Bataan as the aircraft crossed the country. Cities and towns voted resolutions of gratitude and congratulations. Parents named sons for the general. Truman, Texas, debated whether to rechristen itself MacArthur, Texas.

  Washington turned out in greater force than for any figure in the history of the nation’s capital. Half a million men, women and children swarmed the slopes around the Washington Monument and spilled out across the National Mall. An army band provided music. Every veterans’ group in America showed up: the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Disabled American Veterans, the Catholic War Veterans, the Jewish War Veterans, the Irish War Veterans and several more. Each brought its auxiliary of wives and mothers. The secretaries of defense and of the separate services were there, with the joint chiefs. Another seventeen guns saluted, their concussion giving way to fighter jets streaking overhead. Longtime Washington residents remarked that the only previous celebration that approached MacArthur’s in size and intensity was Dwight Eisenhower’s after V-E Day. “But there was one thing noted yesterday that was absent in the case of Ike: a look of awe,” said a local who had seen them both. “Some men and women just stood there and stared, a little pop-eyed, and neither yelled nor clapped their hands.”

  —

  THE CELEBRATIONS THAT greeted MacArthur on his return from Asia were unlike anything ever seen in America, and unlike anything ever imagined almost anywhere. Rome had lavished public triumphs on its victorious generals, and America had done the same after the Civil War and the two world wars, but to save the greatest celebration for a general who had just been fired, amid a war that was far from won, suggested that something larger was afoot. The parades for MacArthur were celebrations, but they were also protests: against the president who fired him, against the ambiguous policies the president pursued, against the constraining circumstances that kept America from smiting its enemies as decisively as it had done in those earlier, more satisfying wars. The millions of Americans cheering and shouting for MacArthur wanted the general to lead them, like a modern Moses, out of the wilderness of uncertainty that seemed to be Americans’ lot in the contempo
rary struggle against communism. MacArthur was the last general to return home from World War II; if anyone could restore the certainty—the moral certainty, the civic certainty, the political certainty—that had characterized American life during that earlier struggle, against fascism, MacArthur could.

  All ears and many eyes turned to MacArthur as he mounted the biggest stage in American politics. The majority Democrats and minority Republicans wrangled on nearly everything else, but the two parties agreed that MacArthur must speak to a joint session of Congress. The invitation was proffered and accepted, and the preparations were made. The national radio networks wired the chamber of the House of Representatives for what promised to be the most listened-to speech in history; the still emerging medium of television broadcast the event on a more limited basis.

  MacArthur gave his congressional hosts and the media companies all they desired. No one had ever heard anything like the speech MacArthur delivered that day. It combined pathos with passion, experience with erudition, strategy with philosophy. MacArthur was not a practiced public speaker; many lawmakers in the room had delivered more public speeches in a single election campaign than MacArthur had delivered in his entire career. But he was an intuitive performer, and he understood how to play on the emotions of his audience.

  He began with a suitable compliment to his hosts. “I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride: humility in the wake of those great architects who have stood here before me, pride in the reflection that this home of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised,” he said.

  One sentence into his speech, he was interrupted by rousing bipartisan applause.

  “I do not stand here as advocate for any partisan cause,” he continued when the tumult diminished, “for the issues are fundamental and reach quite beyond the realm of partisan considerations. They must be resolved on the highest plane of national interest if our course is to prove sound and our future protected. I trust, therefore, that you will do me the justice of receiving that which I have to say as solely expressing the considered viewpoint of a fellow American.”

  More applause, louder and longer than before, at this touch of self-deprecation, which by its implausibility reminded the listeners that this was no ordinary American but one of the most distinguished military officers of his generation. Those present and the people watching on television took note of MacArthur’s posture: almost as straight and tall as when he had donned the uniform of a cadet at West Point more than half a century earlier. Radio listeners had only his voice to go by. His diction was clear; his phrasing slow and deliberate. Few Americans had ever heard MacArthur’s voice, even on radio; those who didn’t know his biography might have wondered where he got his accent, in which the Virginia drawl of his mother slightly softened the Wisconsin twang of his father. There was, in addition, a care with enunciation that could sound a little affected, as though the army brat wanted to mingle with Ivy Leaguers and those to the manner born.

  His hair was thinner than at the last time he had been in Washington, and slickly combed over to conceal a receding hairline. It was surprisingly dark for a seventy-one-year-old, though no one could tell, and none had the effrontery to ask, if he colored it. His features were sharper as age thinned the face; his aquiline nose looked in profile more hawk-like than ever.

  “I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life,” he said in his closest approach to the cause of his appearing there that day. He professed but one purpose: “to serve my country.”

  He turned to strategy and to the dangers that confronted America. “The issues are global, and so interlocked that to consider the problems of one sector oblivious to those of another is to court disaster for the whole. While Asia is commonly referred to as the gateway to Europe, it is no less true that Europe is the gateway to Asia, and the broad influence of the one cannot fail to have its impact upon the other. There are those who claim our strength is inadequate to protect on both fronts, that we cannot divide our effort.” A dramatic pause. “I can think of no greater expression of defeatism.”

  Louder applause still, but chiefly from the Republican side of the chamber. These remarks were what the Asia advocates had wanted to hear, and they responded enthusiastically.

  “The Communist threat is a global one. Its successful advance in one sector threatens the destruction of every other sector. You cannot appease or otherwise surrender to communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.”

  More applause, with nearly all the Republicans and many conservative Democrats nodding hearty approval.

  MacArthur launched into a detailed, nuanced and surprisingly pragmatic interpretation of the last half century of Asian history. Revolutions in Asia had almost nothing to do with the ideologies that had roiled the rest of the globe, he said. “World ideologies play little part in Asian thinking and are little understood. What the people strive for is the opportunity for a little more food in their stomach, a little better clothing on their backs, a little firmer roof over their heads, and the realization of the normal nationalist urge for political freedom.” The Chinese in particular were largely immune to the appeals of either communism or democracy. “There is little of the ideological concept either one way or another in the Chinese make-up. The standard of living is so low and the capital accumulation has been so thoroughly dissipated by war that the masses are desperate and eager to follow any leadership which seems to promise the alleviation of woeful stringencies.”

  This was abstruse stuff for most of the lawmakers; even MacArthur’s enthusiasts sat on their hands, wondering where he was headed. Fortunately for them, he turned to the firmer ground of military strategy. He defined America’s western military perimeter as Dean Acheson had done fifteen months earlier, with one important difference. MacArthur’s perimeter ran along the Pacific island chain from the Aleutians to the Philippines. It did not include Korea, as Acheson’s version had not. But it most definitely included Formosa. “Under no circumstances must Formosa fall under Communist control,” the general said.

  The Republicans and the conservative Democrats erupted in their loudest ovation so far. MacArthur let the applause roll around the chamber.

  “Such an eventuality would at once threaten the freedom of the Philippines and the loss of Japan and might well force our western frontier back to the coast of California, Oregon and Washington.”

  More applause, tempered shortly by the realization that MacArthur had just described what would be a grave reversal for the United States.

  MacArthur got to the heart of his argument, and the crux of his difference with Truman. The general asserted that the North Korean invasion of South Korea had been the work of the Chinese rather than the Russians. “I have from the beginning believed that the Chinese Communists’ support of the North Koreans was the dominant one.” China’s interests paralleled those of Russia for the moment, but China had its own agenda and its own expansionist urge, one that owed next to nothing to the teachings of Marx and Lenin. “The aggressiveness recently displayed not only in Korea but also in Indo-China and Tibet and pointing potentially toward the south reflects predominantly the same lust for the expansion of power which has animated every would-be conqueror since the beginning of time.”

  This was why China had to be confronted and stopped, MacArthur said. He offered a capsule history of the Korean fighting. “While I was not consulted prior to the President’s decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea, that decision, from a military standpoint, proved a sound one, as we hurled back the invader and decimated his forces. Our victory was complete, and our objectives within reach, when Red China intervened with numerically superior ground forces.” MacArthur declined to mention that the action of the Chinese contradicted his prediction that they would not enter the war. “This created a new war and an entirely new situation, a situation not contemplated when our forces were commi
tted against the North Korean invaders; a situation which called for new decisions in the diplomatic sphere to permit the realistic adjustment of military strategy.” MacArthur paused, before adding ominously, “Such decisions have not been forthcoming.”

  Loud agreement from the lawmakers with MacArthur’s criticism.

  “While no man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China, and such was never given a thought, the new situation did urgently demand a drastic revision of strategic planning if our political aim was to defeat this new enemy as we had defeated the old.”

  MacArthur’s admirers knew where he was going; even as they applauded, many edged forward in their seats.

  “Apart from the military need, as I saw it, to neutralize the sanctuary protection given the enemy north of the Yalu, I felt that military necessity in the conduct of the war made necessary, first, the intensification of our economic blockade of China; two, the imposition of a naval blockade against the China coast; three, removal of restrictions on air reconnaissance of China’s coastal area and of Manchuria; four, removal of restrictions on the forces of the Republic of China on Formosa, with logistical support to contribute to their effective operations against the common enemy.”

  The cheering began after item three and rose through item four. If the volume was an indicator of how a voice vote taken at that moment would have gone, Congress was eager to unleash both MacArthur against the Chinese across the Yalu and Chiang Kai-shek against the Chinese across the Formosa Strait.

  MacArthur interrupted the clamor. His voice darkened further. “For entertaining these views, all professionally designed to support our forces committed to Korea and to bring hostilities to an end with the least possible delay and at a saving of countless American and Allied lives, I have been severely criticized in lay circles, principally abroad, despite my understanding that from a military standpoint the above views have been fully shared in the past by practically every military concerned with the Korean campaign, including our own Joint Chiefs of Staff.”