The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  Eighteen months earlier, weeks before the Korean War commenced, Truman had confided to his diary words he intended to publish in the spring of 1952. “I am not a candidate for nomination by the Democratic Convention,” he wrote. He cited history as his guide. “Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson as well as Calvin Coolidge stood by the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and F.D.R. made the attempt to break that precedent. F.D.R. succeeded. In my opinion eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.” By the end of his current term, Truman would have been president just two months shy of eight years. “There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do. This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want this country to continue as a Republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, all of whom could have had a continuation in the office, then we will start down the road to dictatorship and ruin. I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by F.D.R. It should not be done. That precedent should continue—not by a Constitutional amendment but by custom based on the honor of the man in the office. Therefore to reestablish that custom, although by a quibble I could say I’ve only had one term, I am not a candidate and will not accept the nomination for another term.”

  A year and a half later some things had changed. The Twenty-Second Amendment had been ratified, and its definition of a presidential term as one lasting more than two years precluded Truman’s quibble, though the amendment grandfathered him in. More important, the furor around the Korean War and the MacArthur firing had undercut the basis of Truman’s confidence that he could be elected again. Truman’s job approval rating had been declining since his reinauguration in January 1949. It blipped upward after his decisive response to the outbreak of fighting in Korea, but it had fallen by nearly half since then, heading toward a low of 22 percent. Truman’s firing of MacArthur sealed his demise; those roars in the Capitol had indeed been his requiem. He had become a liability for the Democrats, and he wouldn’t harm the party by trying for a reelection he could never win.

  And so in November 1951, Truman read his declaration of non-candidacy to a small group of his closest advisers. He swore them all to secrecy until the following spring; he wasn’t going to make himself a lame duck any sooner than necessary.

  PART FIVE

  FADE AWAY

  65

  DWIGHT EISENHOWER HAD a wonderfully expressive face. His grin could light up a room or an arena; his glower sent aides scurrying to remedy whatever had provoked his wrath. But the most wonderful thing about his face was that it was impossible to read the expressions with any specificity. Those who knew him well understood that he understood the power of his expressions; he could employ his face at will. His smile might beam brilliantly even as his blue eyes coolly calculated his next step. He didn’t lose his temper so much as use his temper to get the attention of those who needed to be frightened into better behavior.

  Eisenhower’s face was never more expressive than when he learned that Douglas MacArthur had been relieved. Eisenhower was stationed in Paris as the newly appointed commander of North Atlantic alliance forces in Europe; his job was to create the integrated military structure that would form the backbone of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Eisenhower watched the growing tension between Truman and MacArthur but left the commentary to others. A Midwesterner, Eisenhower knew about the Pendergast political machine, and he shared the view common among Midwesterners that little good came out of Kansas City politics. Truman’s actions bolstering Europe pleased Eisenhower without much changing Eisenhower’s view of their author. The general had still less respect for MacArthur, whom he considered brilliant but woefully deficient in everyday sense.

  Yet when Eisenhower got the news of the firing, his face spoke volumes his words didn’t. A journalist caught up with Eisenhower on the banks of the Rhine, where he was observing French troops in field exercises, and relayed the startling report. A photographer snapped a picture a split second later. The photo showed Eisenhower’s brows raised in surprise, his lips pursed as if to say he didn’t think Truman had the nerve, and his gaze turned aside lest he give away more than he intended.

  But he knew he had to say something. After a long moment, he offered, “When you put on a uniform there are certain inhibitions you accept.” He added, “I hope there will not be acrimony.”

  —

  HE HEARD FROM Truman a short while later. “I was sorry to have to reach a parting of the way with the big man in Asia, but he asked for it and I had to give it to him,” the president wrote.

  Eisenhower realized what he had to do. Or rather he figured it out with the help of others. Eisenhower watched the MacArthur political balloon rise and then sink as many of MacArthur’s supporters grew tepid. That left the field for 1952, as far as Eisenhower could tell, to Truman and Robert Taft. Truman wanted bigger government and tolerated deficit spending; Eisenhower distrusted the former and loathed the latter. Taft was sounder domestically but anathema in foreign policy; Eisenhower feared that a Taft presidency would unleash the isolationism that had nearly undone democracy in the 1930s.

  All the same, Eisenhower had to be convinced that he was the one to save America. He had consistently eschewed politics as corrosive of the soldier’s calling. He took as his negative example none other than Douglas MacArthur, his interwar superior. “Most of the senior officers I had known always drew a clean-cut line between the military and the political,” Eisenhower wrote later. “Off duty, among themselves and close civilian friends, they might explosively denounce everything they thought was wrong in Washington and the world, and propose their own cure for its evils. On duty, nothing could induce them to cross the line they, and old Army tradition, had established. But if General MacArthur ever recognized the existence of that line, he usually chose to ignore it.”

  MacArthur had crossed the line once again, and the transgression strengthened Eisenhower’s conviction that soldiers ought to stay out of politics. But he couldn’t make the conviction stick, not as it applied to himself. Republican admirers importuned him to consider a run. Truman was hopeless, they said, and unelectable besides, given his abysmal approval ratings. This meant that Eisenhower was the only person who could save America from Taft and from a disastrous retreat from responsibility for world order. Did Eisenhower really want to lose at the polls what had been won at such cost on the battlefields of Europe?

  The Ike fans staged a rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1952. Fifteen thousand turned out on a cold night to plead with the general, still in Europe, to come home and run for president. The organizers of the rally rushed a film of the event to Paris, where Eisenhower watched and listened. He was deeply moved. “I’ve not been so upset in years,” he wrote in his diary. “Clearly to be seen is the mass longing of America for some kind of reasonable solution for her nagging, persistent, and almost terrifying problems. It’s a real experience to realize that one could become a symbol for many thousands of the hope they have.”

  He let himself be persuaded. He returned home and tossed his general’s cap into the ring for the Republican nomination.

  66

  MACARTHUR HAD NEVER stopped campaigning, though he declined to say what he was campaigning for. He was patently campaigning against Truman and everything Truman represented. Numerous audiences were pleased to hear the message, which grew sharper and more alarmist with each iteration. His autumn of 1951 culminated in an address to the annual convention of the American Legion, meeting in Miami. He again alleged that Truman intended to betray Chiang Kai-shek and turn Formosa over to the Communist Chinese; he claimed that the fell deed would have happened already if not for his own timely protest, which, “with the overwhelming support it receiv
ed from the American people, unquestionably wrecked the secret plan.” He once more lambasted the administration for preventing American soldiers in Korea from defending themselves with the full power of America’s arsenal. “We have deprived them of supporting military power already on hand and available which would blunt the enemy’s blows against them, save countless American lives, fulfill our commitment to the tragic people of Korea and lead to the victorious end of a war which has already left so many thousands of American soldiers maimed or dead.” He didn’t quite call Truman a communist, but he declared that the thinking of some of America’s leaders was “more in line with Marxian philosophy than animated by a desire to preserve freedom.” This philosophy tolerated socialism among America’s allies in Europe, and its final result “would be to reduce our own standard of life to a level of universal mediocrity.”

  The legionnaires loved him, bouncing to their feet several times and interrupting him with applause at dozens of points. But not every audience was so enthusiastic. MacArthur mistook what had been planned as a nonpolitical celebration of Seattle’s centennial for an occasion to assail the Truman administration yet again; some in attendance were offended and walked out. The flap emboldened certain of Truman’s allies to come to the president’s defense, albeit obliquely. John McCormack, the Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives, declared, “It is about time General MacArthur took off his Army uniform when he is making Republican political speeches.”

  As the presidential primary season unfolded in the late winter and the spring of 1952, MacArthur kept speaking. He disavowed political ambitions, pleading only the welfare of the country. Yet he didn’t contradict a supporter, the head of a group called Fighters for MacArthur, who asserted that only MacArthur could rescue America from “the pro-Soviet forces behind Truman and Eisenhower.” Time was of the essence, this supporter declared. “He must become a candidate or he must be drafted. If not, America is lost and Soviet Russia will be dominating the world, including America, within ten years.”

  MacArthur declined to declare himself a candidate, but he left open the possibility of a draft at the convention. Eisenhower ran ahead of Taft in the primaries, yet the outcome was uncertain as the Republicans gathered in Chicago in July. Though MacArthur kept mum, his supporters hoped for a deadlock between Eisenhower and Taft that would cause the convention to turn to MacArthur. With this in mind, they floated the idea that MacArthur should deliver the convention’s keynote. Eisenhower’s handlers didn’t favor putting another general before the delegates, but they didn’t want to give the MacArthur camp a grievance and so acquiesced. The Taftites hoped MacArthur would steal votes from Eisenhower and thereby strengthen their own candidate.

  —

  MACARTHUR FLEW FROM New York to Chicago aboard a regular United Airlines flight, accompanied by Courtney Whitney and a New York police detective. The plane landed just past five in the afternoon at Midway Airport, where passengers awaiting other flights gazed out the windows and thought the man in the double-breasted blue suit descending into the crowd of reporters looked familiar. But many couldn’t place him, which wasn’t surprising, in that almost no one had ever seen MacArthur out of uniform. The reporters shouted questions. Would he be a compromise candidate? Would he accept the vice presidential nomination? MacArthur smiled but declined to comment.

  He was hustled toward his motorcade. Just before he got to his car, a man in shirtsleeves stepped from the curb and reached into a brown cloth bag. None of the police on the ground or on the motorcycles that were to escort MacArthur’s car seemed to notice the man; neither did MacArthur. Those who did notice didn’t move, from uncertainty or fear; none shouted or said anything audible at all. The man’s hand abruptly emerged from the bag—and threw confetti at the general. Most of it missed and fell harmlessly to the ground.

  MacArthur was whisked to the Stock Yard Inn, within sight of the convention hall. But he was kept behind closed doors and curtains, surrounded by police detectives in plain clothes who held onlookers and reporters at bay. He entered the arena just in time for his speech.

  His appearance stirred the delegates into a frenzy. They leaped to their feet as he took the podium and they stamped, clapped and howled for what seemed an eternity, defying efforts by the convention chairman to gavel them into silence. A “California for MacArthur” sign bobbed frantically up and down; other delegations made similar shows of support. MacArthur let the tumult swell and echo, occasionally waving but otherwise soaking up the adulation.

  Finally he was allowed to speak. And when he did, he demonstrated once and for all that he wasn’t cut out for elective politics. Unthinking observers had expected a reprise of his speech to Congress the previous year. He gave them much of that. But what neither they nor he appreciated was the difference between a joint session of Congress and a national nominating convention. He had spoken to Congress with the authority of a five-star general fresh from the fighting front, and he had framed his speech as a farewell address. The senators and representatives applauded the uniform and the past accomplishments of the man who wore it. Their applause committed them to nothing in the future. The Republican convention had a very different aim. The delegates cared about the past only for what it promised for the future. And what they saw, once the euphoria of the initial greeting faded, was an old man in mufti who couldn’t find the rhythm of his audience. MacArthur was seventy-two at the convention; he would be within a week of his seventy-third birthday on inauguration day. He would be nearly five years older than the oldest inauguree to date, William Henry Harrison, whose death just weeks after the oath-taking didn’t speak well for elderly executives. In his fifteen months of speech-giving, MacArthur had never been out of uniform; now, in the dress of every other man in the hall, he seemed diminished. His words, always ponderous, suddenly sounded leaden. The delegates wanted to like him, but they also wanted to be inspired. When they discovered that they weren’t inspired, they grew restive. Their response to his applause lines grew fainter; they began speaking among themselves. Amid the uproar that greeted his entrance, a commentator for NBC News had remarked, “It is a trick to stampede a convention like this without having said a word, but that’s what the general seems to be doing.” By the end of his speech, the only stampede that threatened was of the delegates to get on to the real business of the convention, to nominate a candidate who could lead them to victory.

  67

  THAT CANDIDATE WAS Eisenhower, who beat Taft on the first ballot and rolled into the autumn campaign against Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee. Stevenson suffered from the accumulation of two decades’ worth of grievances against Democrats, most strikingly manifested in the unpopularity of Truman. Stevenson would likely have lost anyway, but Eisenhower sealed the result by announcing that if elected, he would devote himself to achieving peace in Korea. “That job requires a personal trip to Korea,” Eisenhower said. “I shall make that trip….I shall go to Korea.”

  He was elected and he went to Korea. In the eighteen months since MacArthur’s relief, the fighting had continued inconclusively. Truce talks begun in July 1951 got nowhere, leaving the armies in the field to battle forward and back over this hill and that ridge, to little lasting effect. Casualties mounted and with them the frustration of stalemate from which, among Americans, Eisenhower’s journey to the front promised relief. The president-elect visited the troops and spoke with them and their officers. He conferred with South Korean president Rhee. His mere presence raised hopes of an end to the conflict, but he boarded his plane for America without giving away any secrets about a new strategy for bringing peace to the suffering and scarred peninsula.

  En route home he heard that MacArthur had been in the news again. MacArthur hadn’t exactly sulked in his tent after Eisenhower’s nomination, but he declined to campaign for his old protégé. He took a job as chairman of the board of Remington Rand, a corporation that made business machines, including new electronic computers, and
had manufactured weapons for the U.S. Army during World War II. The company valued MacArthur for the visibility he brought it; he appreciated the pay and perks of the chairmanship, which he collected on top of his lifetime salary as a five-star general. In his debut for Remington Rand, at a meeting at the Waldorf in New York, conveniently downstairs from the suite where he and Jean had taken residence, he announced that he had a plan to end the war in Korea. Perhaps he didn’t like Eisenhower getting credit for winning the war that he—MacArthur—still considered his own; perhaps he thought a Republican president, his former adjutant, would be more sympathetic to his opinions than Truman had been. MacArthur said he couldn’t make his plan public without spoiling its chance of success, but he would be happy to share it with those in position to put it into effect.

  —

  THE APPROACHING END of his presidency liberated Truman from his unspoken pledge not to mention MacArthur’s name in public. “Mr. President,” a reporter asked, following MacArthur’s announcement of his secret plan for Korea, “do you intend to invite General MacArthur to come to Washington?”

  “I do not,” Truman said. “General MacArthur is in the Army, and on active duty, and if he has anything that is of use to the Defense Department, he ought to tell them so they can make use of it.”

  “You feel that it is any Army man’s duty to come forward if he has—”