The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  But the co-chairmen of the committee, Russell of Georgia and Connally of Texas, guided the process in a different direction. Though Democrats, they felt no obligation to make a hero of Truman, and so they reckoned that a report by the majority Democrats was unnecessary. This calculation simultaneously spiked the efforts of the minority Republicans to issue a formal condemnation of Truman. Meanwhile in Korea, the Eighth Army, which had retaken Seoul and established a defensible line that crisscrossed the 38th parallel, turned back a new communist offensive, with heavy losses to the Chinese. The Chinese failure prompted a suggestion from Moscow, during the last days of the hearings, that an armistice in Korea would contribute to world peace. This raised hopes of an end to the fighting and complemented the chairmen’s desire to put the controversy over the war’s conduct behind them.

  The result was an anodyne assertion of national unity. “For the past seven weeks the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations have assiduously examined into the facts and circumstances bearing on the relief of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and on American policy in the Far East,” the committee statement declared. Significantly, this was the sole mention of MacArthur’s name, and the statement said nothing more about his firing. It acknowledged differences of opinion among the witnesses and among the examiners, yet it hailed these differences as a sign of strength rather than weakness. It assured America’s allies that the country’s commitment to freedom hadn’t wavered. And it warned enemies not to misunderstand the workings of democracy. “The issues which might divide our people are far transcended by the things which unite them. If threatened danger becomes war, the aggressor would find at one stroke arrayed against him the united energies, the united resources, and the united devotion of all the American people.”

  The statement was silent, of course, on the secret testimony of Marshall, Bradley, Vandenberg and Collins. MacArthur thereby escaped the public injury the testimony would have done his reputation, but he nonetheless suffered grievous harm, for the secrets badly eroded his support among those who should have been loudest on his behalf. Alexander Wiley, Styles Bridges and the other Republicans were compelled by the revelations about America’s vulnerability to rethink their endorsement of MacArthur and the belligerent course he favored. They didn’t recant in public; they wouldn’t give Truman that satisfaction. But they no longer looked to MacArthur as a credible alternative to Truman on military strategy or in politics. They eased away from the general, and because the testimony was sealed, they never said why.

  And MacArthur never found out.

  62

  FRANK PACE HAD a theory about the MacArthur firing. The by-then-former army secretary admitted it was only conjecture—“purely a Pace thought,” he called it. But he advanced it anyway, in an interview some years after the fact. “I believe that General MacArthur really created the basis for his firing. I felt that the crowds around the Dai Ichi Building were getting to be very small; I felt that his period of glory there had passed; he was a great student of history; I felt he felt Mr. Truman would be easily defeated and that if he could be fired under dramatic circumstances he could return and get the Republican nomination for president and run for president against Mr. Truman. I felt he engineered his own dismissal. The kind of letters that he wrote, a man steeped in military and national tradition knew very well was out of order. I can’t believe that he would undertake such an action without realizing what the consequences would have to be.”

  “Conscious acts on his part?” the interviewer paraphrased.

  “That was my feeling,” Pace answered. “I never heard anyone else advance that theory, but I always felt that way.”

  In fact Harry Truman advanced the same argument, according to his press aide Roger Tubby. Tubby remembered Truman saying MacArthur had “double-crossed” him by going behind his back to Joseph Martin. MacArthur was being deliberately provocative, Truman judged. “I’m sure MacArthur wanted to be fired,” he said.

  If these were really Truman’s words, they at least partly contradicted an earlier remark Tubby attributed to the president. “Everybody seems to think I don’t have courage enough to do it,” Truman said of firing the general. Presumably Truman included MacArthur among those who doubted his courage. “Well, let ’em think so,” Truman continued. “Then we’ll announce it.”

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  WHETHER OR NOT MacArthur intended his own dismissal, he certainly seemed to have his eye on the presidency. The Senate committee was still hearing testimony when MacArthur embarked on a campaign of appearances and speeches that closely resembled what could be expected of a Republican presidential candidate looking toward 1952. He attended a New York Giants baseball game at the Polo Grounds, where he threw the ceremonial opening pitch and pronounced himself “happy to witness the great American game of baseball that has done so much to build the American character.” He was guest of honor at a celebration of the 122nd anniversary of the founding of the Brooklyn Sunday School Union. He reviewed the event’s parade and heard the New York Police Department Band play “Old Soldiers Never Die.” He hailed America’s Sunday schools for their contribution to American foreign policy, asserting, “One of the greatest influences in the Far East is the Christian religion.”

  He journeyed with Jean and Arthur to her hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He laid a wreath at a monument to the dead of World War II and reaffirmed his own Southern roots. “I am no stranger to the South,” he said. “Indeed, I may be called part of it. I was born in Arkansas of a Virginia mother. I grew up with the sound of ‘Dixie’ and the Rebel yell ringing in my ears. Dad was on the other side, but he had the good sense to surrender to my mother.” The crowd laughed and applauded. “Therefore it brings a warm feeling to my heart to be once again in this atmosphere of friendliness in this land I have known so long and these people I have loved so well. And I shall return!” More laughs, applause and admiration for the hero.

  He traveled to Texas to revisit scenes of his own youth. His speeches grew more overtly political. A parade in Dallas drew hundreds of thousands of supporters, showers of confetti and even whole telephone books tossed out of office windows. At the Cotton Bowl he pronounced a parting of the ways: “Some, with me, would achieve peace through a prompt and decisive victory at a saving of human life, others through appeasement and compromise of moral principle, with less regard for human life.” He didn’t have to mention Truman and the administration by name for his audience to know his referent when he said, “How fantastically unrealistic it is for them to refuse to accept the factuality that we are already at war—a bitter, savage and costly war. If all other evidence were ignored, our mounting dead would alone stand as mute evidence that it is war in which we are now actually engaged. Yet, despite this, they seek to avoid the grave responsibility inherent in the fact of war—seek to divert public thought from the basic issue which war creates: how may victory be achieved with a minimum of human sacrifice.”

  In San Antonio he stood in front of the Alamo and blasted the State Department for a 1949 policy paper declaring Formosa to be of little military significance. “Propaganda of this type closely parallels the Soviet system which we so bitterly condemn,” he said. Summoning the “spirit of the Alamo,” he decried the “counsels of timidity and fear” that currently guided American policy.

  In Houston he proclaimed that America was strong but its leaders were weak. “It is not from threat of external attack that we have reason for fear. It is from those insidious forces working from within. It is they that create the basis for fear by spreading false propaganda designed to destroy those moral precepts to which we have clung for direction since the immutable Declaration of Independence became the great charter of our liberty.”

  In Austin he stood on the steps of the Texas state capitol and compared communism to a cancer. “Like a cancer, the only cure is by major operation,” he said. “Failure to take such decisive action, as in cancer, is but to invite infection of the entire blood stream.” Yet the presi
dent entirely failed to see this, as his policy in Korea—“the existing policy of appeasement”—revealed. “The present plan of passive defense envisages the indefinite continuance of the indecisive stalemate with its compounding losses, in the vain hope that the enemy will ultimately tire and end his aggression.” Such thinking was the epitome of dangerous folly. “Could anything be more naïve, more unrealistic, more callous of our mounting dead?”

  MacArthur’s Texas tour was funded by a small group of conservatives from the Lone Star State who dreamed that he might become president one day soon. Their Democratic heritage didn’t prevent them from despising Truman, who was far too liberal for their taste, and from working for his ouster. MacArthur appeared a promising vehicle.

  MacArthur obliged them and other followers by becoming shriller each time he spoke. From Texas he ventured to the Northeast, arriving in Boston in late July. He cast himself as tribune of received American values. “I shall raise my voice as loud and as often as I believe it to be in the interest of the American people,” he said. “I shall dedicate all of my energies to restoring to American life those immutable principles and ideals which your forebears and mine handed down to us in sacred trust.” Sounding more than ever like a Republican candidate, he condemned the New Deal and the high taxes he charged to its account. “More and more we work not for ourselves but for the state,” he said. “In time, if permitted to continue, this trend cannot fail to be destructive. For no nation may survive in freedom once its people become the servants of the state, a condition to which we are now pointed with dreadful certainty.”

  Then, in obvious reference to his own case, he uttered a statement that flummoxed even his strongest supporters. Portraying himself once more as the courageous speaker of hard but necessary truths, he declared, “Men of significant stature in national affairs appear to cower before the threat of reprisal if the truth be expressed in criticism of those in higher public authority. For example, I find in existence a new and heretofore unknown and dangerous concept that the members of our armed forces owe primary allegiance and loyalty to those who temporarily exercise the authority of the executive branch of government, rather than to the country and its Constitution which they are sworn to defend. No proposition could be more dangerous. None could cast greater doubt upon the integrity of the armed services. For its application would at once convert them from their traditional and constitutional role as the instrument for the defense of the republic into something partaking of the nature of a praetorian guard, owing sole allegiance to the political master of the hour.”

  Sympathetic listeners understood MacArthur’s point: that the armed forces defended the country rather than an administration. But his ill-concealed condescension toward those who “temporarily” exercised the authority of the executive made him sound dismissive of democracy. He appeared to be saying that generals were more legitimate judges of the national interest than presidents. Not many Americans knew that Franklin Roosevelt had once called MacArthur the most dangerous man in America. But more than a few began wondering if there wasn’t some Caesarism lurking behind those five stars.

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  HARRY TRUMAN KNEW what Marshall and the chiefs had told the Senate committee, for he had heard it from them—and from the intelligence briefers on whom they relied—during the previous several months. He wasn’t surprised that MacArthur’s campaign gained little traction, though he couldn’t tell how much the slippage owed to the distancing of the Republican stalwarts and how much to MacArthur’s lack of anything like a common touch. The shriller the general’s message grew, the less attractive he seemed, and the more pleasure the president took.

  Truman held a press conference in the wake of the committee statement and the Russian peace feelers. “Mr. President,” he was asked, “do you think that the Russian overtures are a sign that the stand taken by your administration in the MacArthur controversy was justified?”

  “Yes,” Truman replied.

  “Didn’t hear that,” a reporter shouted.

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t hear the question,” the reporter clarified.

  “He wanted to know if I thought that the stand taken in the MacArthur controversy by the administration was the right one,” Truman said. “I said yes. I thought so when I took it, and I think so now.”

  “Mr. President,” another reporter volunteered, “if I may raise this question, I didn’t understand it that way. I thought the question was: Do you think the Russian overtures are a sign that the stand taken by the administration is the right one?”

  “Yes to that too,” Truman said.

  During the ensuing months the president said very little about MacArthur. A reporter at a news conference in July mentioned the general’s vitriolic Boston speech against the president. Before the reporter could ask his question, Truman declared, “No comment.” A short while later the same reporter observed that MacArthur, in the Boston speech, had hinted that the administration was preparing a reprisal against him. “Still no comment,” Truman interrupted, again ahead of the question.

  “May I finish the question, sir?” the reporter pleaded.

  “I know what you are going to say,” Truman said, before adding, “Go ahead and finish it so it will be for the record.”

  “Has any additional disciplinary action against General MacArthur been considered?”

  “No. No. I will say no to that.”

  Truman named MacArthur in a speech in San Francisco opening a conference called to draft the final Japanese peace treaty; the president paired MacArthur and Matthew Ridgway as the occupation leaders who had brought Japan to the point where a treaty was possible and desirable. And he responded, in the autumn of 1951, to an assertion by MacArthur that the general had foiled an administration plot to turn Formosa over to the Red Chinese. “Not based on fact,” Truman said tersely. “The general knew it.”

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  THAT WAS HIS last public word on MacArthur for a long time. He didn’t ignore the general; members of his administration closely monitored the response to MacArthur’s continued campaigning. The State Department surveyed the published opinions of influential newspapers and columnists. The Chicago Tribune and the Scripps-Howard chain of papers were strongly pro-MacArthur, expressing a willingness to widen the Korean war in the interests of defeating communism definitively, but the New York Times and the Washington Post favored the more cautious policy of the president. On balance the president appeared to be winning the battle for the nation’s editorial pages. The White House staff tallied incoming correspondence—letters, cards, telegrams—and reported a substantial shift in the balance of criticism and commendation. In the week following MacArthur’s firing, the messages had run two to one against the president. Since then support for the general had weakened and that for the president grown stronger. Of late the president ran ahead of MacArthur by a margin of three to one, albeit on much smaller volume.

  Yet the White House refused to grow complacent. “I don’t like to be a kill-joy, but I wonder if we aren’t a little too optimistic about the way things are going on the MacArthur row,” George Elsey wrote to Averell Harriman and Charles Murphy. “I think we may be over-optimistic about the extent to which the public understands the President’s position and sympathizes with the Administration in the firing of MacArthur.” Elsey cited a recent survey showing that approval of the president’s action was directly correlated with formal education. Put otherwise, the educated elite agreed with the president, but the masses did not. In this poll two-thirds of the general public thought the president was wrong. The administration needed to keep making its case, Elsey said. “We cannot afford to slack off in our constant emphasis and reiteration that MacArthur stood for war and the President stands for peace. This and this alone will sink in with the general public, while technical arguments about ‘civilian control’ won’t mean a thing to the people at large.”

  All the same, Elsey and the others in the White House took comfort from anecdotal e
vidence that the president was gaining ground. A Texas attorney wrote to Truman from Fort Worth describing sentiment among his associates. “Thirteen men gather bi-weekly for luncheon and discussion,” he said. “None of these men are in any way connected with politics of any kind. Their meeting is informal and frequently informative.” Right after MacArthur’s address to Congress, the group had strongly favored MacArthur, with several predicting happily that he would be the next president. But the general’s subsequent speeches had raised doubts among the group, as a recent gathering revealed. One declared, “Even if MacArthur is correct in everything he says, he is doing the country a disservice by spreading such seeds of discord.” Others were equally critical. “If this change is any index,” Truman’s correspondent concluded, “it would appear that the General will talk himself into disrepute.”

  Letters like this might be straws in the wind, but Truman judged that time was on his side. For all the homage he paid to straight talk, he understood the value of silence. And he concluded that the less he said about MacArthur, the better.

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  TRUMAN HAD AN additional reason for reticence on MacArthur. He had decided not to seek another term as president. He was old enough and sufficiently historically minded to appreciate the cyclical nature of reform and reaction in American politics. The generation of reform that had started with Theodore Roosevelt and culminated in Woodrow Wilson had been followed by the conservative reaction of the 1920s. The generation of reform that began with Franklin Roosevelt and included himself seemed similarly to have run its course; Americans again appeared poised for a turn to the right.

  Further, Truman understood the meaning of the Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified just weeks before the MacArthur controversy blew up. The amendment’s ban on third terms exempted him, as the current officeholder, but the nation had clearly indicated its belief that eight years in the White House sufficed for anyone. Truman didn’t lack self-confidence—his handling of the MacArthur affair being the most recent illustration—but he wasn’t so egotistical as to think himself above the spirit of the new ban.