The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  And yet there was still another day of testimony. MacArthur flew back the next morning and resumed his seat. For several hours more he answered the same questions put by different senators. He added new chapters to the growing tome of verbiage. The senators could come and go, claiming business on the Senate floor; MacArthur recessed only for a brief lunch. His voice occasionally rose to make a point, but his patience never failed.

  Finally the end came. Richard Russell conveyed the thanks of the committees. “General MacArthur, I wish to state to you that the three days you have been here with us are without parallel in my legislative experience,” the chairman said. “I have never seen a man subjected to such a barrage of questions in so many fields and on so many varied topics. I marvel at your physical endurance. More than that, I have been profoundly impressed by the vastness of your patience and the thoroughness and the frankness with which you have answered all of the questions that have been propounded.”

  MacArthur accepted the thanks and prepared to leave. As he did, Russell casually reminded the members that the general would not have the final word. “We have only commenced the hearings,” Russell said. “We will have next week other great and distinguished military leaders, as well as civilian witnesses.”

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  THE HEARINGS RIVETED the attention of America, but in an oddly time-lagged manner. The major papers devoted several entire pages each day to the testimony, and the volume of the testimony challenged even the most assiduous readers to keep up. More significantly, because the committee refused to allow reporters into the room, what pundits and the public learned of the testimony was always a day behind the testimony itself. Opinionators paused, knowing that their commentary might already have been overtaken by subsequent testimony. Perhaps better to hold the strong reactions until all was said.

  George Marshall followed MacArthur to the witness chair. He began with a personal comment. “It is a very distressing necessity, a very distressing occasion, that compels me to appear here this morning and in effect in almost direct opposition to a great many of the views and actions of General MacArthur. He is a brother Army officer, a man for whom I have tremendous respect as to his military capabilities and military performances and, from all I can learn, as to his administration of Japan.”

  Marshall proceeded to the substance of the matter. He corrected an impression given by MacArthur. “From the very beginning of the Korean conflict down to the present moment, there has been no disagreement between the president, the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that I am aware of,” Marshall said. He continued, “There have been, however, and continued to be basic differences of judgment between General MacArthur, on the one hand, and the president, the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the other. In his testimony last week, General MacArthur indicated that, in his understanding, there had been at least two instances in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been overruled by the secretary of defense or by higher authority.”

  One of these instances involved the status of Formosa and of China in the United Nations. “General MacArthur suggested that I, as secretary of defense, had overruled the Joint Chiefs of Staff in their opposition to turning Formosa over to Communist China and to seating Communist China in the United Nations.” This was flatly wrong, Marshall said. “At the time I became Secretary of Defense last September, the established policy of the United States was to deny Formosa to Communist China and to oppose the seating of the Communist Chinese in the United Nations. There has been no deviation from that policy whatsoever. At no time have I entertained the opinion that there should be any deviation.”

  The second instance related to the January 12 memorandum MacArthur had cited as evidence that the joint chiefs agreed with him on the need for stronger measures against China. Marshall read back MacArthur’s testimony, which identified four measures in particular. Marshall then said that MacArthur had selectively quoted from the document and omitted crucial context. “At the time this memorandum was prepared, we were faced with the very real possibility of having to evacuate our forces from Korea. The proposals advanced by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which I have just quoted, were put forward as tentative courses of action to be pursued if and when this possibility came closer to reality.” The possibility never got closer to reality; within a very short while the Eighth Army found its footing and turned the tide. The tentative recommendations were rendered moot. Marshall emphasized, “None of these proposed courses of action were vetoed or disapproved by me or by any higher authority. Action with respect to most of them was considered inadvisable in view of the radical change in the situation which originally had given rise to them.”

  He addressed the broader issue of MacArthur’s differences with the joint chiefs, himself and the president. “Our objective in Korea continues to be the defeat of the aggression and the restoration of peace,” Marshall said of the joint chiefs and the Truman administration. “We have persistently sought to confine the conflict to Korea and to prevent its spreading into a third world war. In this effort, we stand allied with the great majority of our fellow members of the United Nations. Our efforts have succeeded in thwarting the aggressions in Korea, and in stemming the tide of aggression in Southeast Asia and elsewhere throughout the world. Our efforts in Korea have given us some sorely needed time and impetus to accelerate the building of our defenses and those of our allies against the threatened onslaught of Soviet imperialism.”

  Marshall paused, then went on. “General MacArthur, on the other hand, would have us, on our own initiative, carry the conflict beyond Korea against the mainland of Communist China, both from the sea and from the air. He would have us accept the risk of involvement not only in an extension of the war with Red China but in an all-out war with the Soviet Union. He would have us do this even at the expense of losing our allies and wrecking the coalition of free peoples throughout the world. He would have us do this even though the effect of such action might expose Western Europe to attack by the millions of Soviet troops poised in Middle and Eastern Europe.”

  Marshall had encountered comparable differences of opinion—with MacArthur among others—during World War II, and he appreciated their origins. “This divergence arises from the difference between the position of a field commander, whose mission is limited to a particular area and a particular antagonist, and the position of the joint chiefs of staff, the secretary of defense and the president, who are responsible for the total security of the United States, and who, to achieve and maintain this security, must weigh our interests and objectives in one part of the globe with those in other areas of the world so as to obtain the best over-all balance.” The difference in perspectives was wholly unsurprising. “There is nothing new about this sort of thing in our military history.”

  “What is new,” Marshall continued, “and what has brought about the necessity for General MacArthur’s removal, is the wholly unprecedented situation of a local theater commander publicly expressing his displeasure at and his disagreement with the foreign and military policy of the United States. It became apparent that General MacArthur had grown so far out of sympathy with the established policies of the United States that there was grave doubt as to whether he could any longer be permitted to exercise the authority in making decisions that normal command functions would assign to a theater commander. In this situation, there was no other recourse but to relieve him.”

  —

  THE MEMBERS OF the committee put numerous questions to Marshall. Richard Russell’s were friendly, affording Marshall the chance to augment the case against MacArthur. Russell asked about particular instances in which MacArthur’s outspokenness had undermined American policy. Marshall cited MacArthur’s proclamation of March 24, the one that preempted efforts by the White House and the State Department to arrange peace talks. “At the time the foregoing statement”—MacArthur’s of March 24—“was issued, the clearance of the proposed presidential declaration with the thirteen other nations h
aving forces in Korea had very nearly been completed,” Marshall said. “In view of the serious impact of General MacArthur’s statement on the negotiations with these nations, it became necessary to abandon the effort, thus losing whatever chance there may have been at that time to negotiate a settlement of the Korean conflict.”

  Russell sought Marshall’s judgment on the threat of Russian intervention in a widened war.

  “I think it is a very real possibility,” Marshall responded. “And like all other matters pertaining to the Soviet government, the decision is that of a few men and can be an instant decision whenever they choose to make it.”

  What might Soviet intervention entail?

  “It would be a very serious matter,” Marshall said, “because they have, according to estimates that I have seen, a considerable force—I have forgotten exactly how many thousands—in the vicinity of Vladivostok, Dairen, Port Arthur, Harbin. I don’t know whether there are any plane concentrations in relation to Sakhalin, but there have been reports of troop concentrations.”

  Styles Bridges commenced the cross-examination. The Republican senator chided Marshall for the ungracious manner of MacArthur’s relief, then chastised the Truman administration for its overall Far Eastern policy. “Do we have anyone in political life who has a wider knowledge and experience in the Far East than General MacArthur?” he asked.

  “In political life?” Marshall rejoined.

  “Yes, in public life.”

  “When you say Far East, you mean the whole Far East?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there might be some difference about that. I don’t think of them at the moment.”

  “Do you know of any military man on the side of the Free World that has a greater experience in the Far East than General MacArthur?”

  “Any military man?” Marshall countered.

  “In the service of the free nations, our allies in other words.”

  “Offhand, I do not know of any.”

  Bridges sallied backward into the Chinese civil war, blaming the Truman administration for failing to assist Chiang Kai-shek at the pivotal moment. He returned to the topic at hand—Korea—by suggesting Soviet deviousness in the outbreak of the fighting there. “Do you think, General Marshall, that there was any ulterior motive, or was there any planned procedure by the Soviet in having the Korean attack take place when they were absent from the Security Council?” Did the Soviets sucker the United States into Korea via the UN?

  Marshall thought not. “The general reaction at the moment was that it was rather fortunate they were not present on the Security Council at that time,” he said. As soon as the Soviets returned, they sabotaged the UN effort in Korea. “They did everything in the world to obstruct what we were doing.”

  Bridges jumped to MacArthur’s letter to Joseph Martin. “Don’t you think that if a United States senator or a congressman of the United States writes a letter to a military policy-making man in authority, whether it is here or in some area of the world, that he is entitled to get a frank reply?”

  “No, sir, I don’t think from the senior commander when he knows he is advocating something to the leader of the opposition party to the administration that he, as the commander, is in total disagreement with his own people.”

  What was the rule, then, for a military commander answering a letter from a member of Congress?

  “He has to exercise considerable discretion,” Marshall said. “I have had to write a good many thousand, and it depends on the back and forth, but I don’t think I would ever be involved myself in a criticism of the commander in chief to any congressman of either party.”

  Alexander Wiley grilled Marshall on just where MacArthur had sinned. “I want to know what policies he can’t support wholeheartedly and didn’t support,” the Republican senator demanded.

  “The policies involved here related to the conduct of the operations in Korea, our relations with the United Nations in the responsibility of the chief executive of this country as the commander of those units, the resolution of the United Nations in relation to the matters in Korea, over which General MacArthur was the United Nations commander.”

  Wiley grew snide. “Do you mean to say that a man in General MacArthur’s position, who was the chief of staff when you were a colonel, had no right to discuss or advise or recommend to you leaders in Washington? Is that what you mean in violation of policy?”

  “There was no limit whatever on his representations of his views to the officials in Washington. There is a great difference between that and public announcements.”

  Wiley pressed on. “Now, someone said ‘no’ to his suggestions. How did he violate that ‘no’?”

  “By his public statements, or statements that were made public in the ordinary press, he set up a very serious reaction among our allies, which threatened our collective action with them, and which threatened our position in the world in relation to this great crisis, and which threatened to leave us in a situation of going it alone.”

  Wiley didn’t like Marshall’s answer and supplied his own. “The answer is that MacArthur, on the ground, 10,000 miles away, had a very different idea as to how the battle should be carried on, that when he gave those different ideas to his superiors here in Washington, and they must have given them to the allies, that they disagreed with MacArthur’s ideas, and you people came to the conclusion that he was violating a directive of some kind, which justified his removal.”

  “I’ll say this, Senator,” Marshall replied. “He was creating a feeling of uncertainty with our allies as to who was directing these affairs—our chief executive, as the executive agent for those allies, or otherwise. When he proposed the utilization of the Chinese Nationalist troops from Formosa he was setting up a very serious consideration.”

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  DEAN ACHESON GOT less respect than Marshall, and infinitely less than MacArthur. Richard Russell inquired, “Do you have a prepared statement, Mr. Secretary?” But before Acheson could answer, the Republicans and the Democrats on the committee got into a four-hour wrangle whether to admit into the record a 1949 State Department policy paper on the future of Formosa.

  Civility diminished from there. MacArthur was forgotten in Republican recriminations at the Truman administration for having lost China to the communists. Acheson’s National Press Club speech of January 1950 was thrown back at him for inviting the aggression in Korea. Chairman Russell let the Republicans largely have their say, feeling little affection himself for Acheson and acknowledging the secretary’s status as the administration’s most polarizing figure. The highlight of the day came after the session ended when Acheson bumped into Joseph McCarthy in the elevator of the Senate Office Building. Evidently the two hadn’t actually met before, and they introduced themselves and shook hands. When the elevator door opened, photographers snapped McCarthy looking quite pleased with himself, beside Acheson, who was visibly pained at his proximity to the most Neanderthal of the Republican primitives.

  Acheson spent thirty-eight hours with the committee, spread over eight days. The ordeal produced a silver lining for himself and the administration, in that it gave the Republicans ample opportunity to vent their accumulated spleen; afterward the calls for Acheson’s impeachment declined substantially.

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  OMAR BRADLEY PROVED to be the most important witness for the administration. Marshall and Acheson were known quantities, having been in Republican crosshairs for years, while Bradley was comparatively unfamiliar. As chairman of the joint chiefs, he had testified to Congress before, but never in such fraught circumstances. His words carried the weight of a military reputation only slightly inferior to that of MacArthur, for his field command of the American army that invaded Germany in World War II had made him a hero of the first rank, and his fifth star, awarded in 1950, put him in the highest constellation of military luminaries.

  Bradley began with a prepared statement. “At the very outset I want to make it clear that I would not say anyt
hing to discredit the long and illustrious career of General Douglas MacArthur,” he said. “We may have different views on certain aspects of our government’s military policy, but that is not unusual. Certainly there have been no personal considerations in our differences of opinion. In matters of such great scope and of such importance many people have different ideas and might consequently recommend different courses of action.” Bradley reminded the members of the committee what the Joint Chiefs of Staff did: they advised the president on matters of national security, from a military point of view. They understood that the military view was not the only perspective. Sometimes it was decisive, but at other times it might take second place to political or diplomatic judgments. “When all of these aspects are considered, the government’s policy is determined,” Bradley said. “As military men we then abide by the decision.”

  Segueing from procedure to substance, Bradley posed a question to the committee members: “What is the great issue at stake in this hearing?” He supplied his own answer: “Principally I would say that you are trying to determine the course we should follow as the best road to peace.” It was crucial to hold this objective in mind, though it wasn’t always easy. “At present the issue is obscured by many details which do not relate to the task of keeping the peace and making America secure.” Getting down to specifics, Bradley continued, “The fundamental military issue that has arisen is whether to increase the risk of a global war by taking additional measures that are open to the United States and its allies. We now have a localized conflict in Korea. Some of the military measures under discussion might well place the United States in the position of responsibility for broadening the war and at the same time losing most if not all of our allies.”