The General vs. the President
Page 43
“Certainly it is. Certainly it is. He is on active duty and will be the rest of his life. The law provides for that.”
“Mr. President, General MacArthur said that nobody has listened to his counsels since he came back. It seems to me the MacArthur investigating committee went over his war plans pretty thoroughly.”
“They went over them completely and thoroughly,” Truman said. “And I read every word of the testimony up there. And the committee did not come up with any suggestions or any advice to me or to the Defense Department.”
“Mr. President, have you talked to General MacArthur since Wake Island?”
“No.”
“Have you seen him since then?”
“I made a 14,400-mile trip to get a lot of misinformation. He didn’t even do the courtesy, which he should have done, of reporting to the President when he came back here. I have never seen him, and I don’t want to see him.”
“Mr. President, if it is General MacArthur’s duty to report any plan he may have to you, and if he does not fulfill his duty by reporting, what follows then? What steps do you take?”
“I wouldn’t take any, now. It’s a little late.”
—
EISENHOWER AGREED TO meet MacArthur. John Foster Dulles, who had worked with MacArthur on the Japanese peace treaty and who would become Eisenhower’s secretary of state, hosted the generals at his New York apartment. After minimal pleasantries, MacArthur handed Eisenhower a document titled “Memorandum on Ending the Korean War.” In it MacArthur briefly recapitulated the history of the Korean fighting, then offered a detailed several-part policy recommendation that went far beyond Korea. Eisenhower should invite Stalin to a parley, at which Eisenhower should insist on the reunification of Korea and Germany under popularly elected governments. Subsequently the United States and the Soviet Union should guarantee the neutrality of Korea and Germany, as well as of Japan and Austria, with the removal of all foreign troops from those countries. Eisenhower should urge Stalin to agree that the United States and the Soviet Union ought to incorporate into their constitutions provisions outlawing war as an instrument of public policy.
Then came MacArthur’s concluding recommendations: “That at such conference, the Soviet be informed that should an agreement not be reached, it would be our intention to clear North Korea of enemy forces. (This could be accomplished through the atomic bombing of enemy military concentrations and installations in North Korea and the sowing of fields of suitable radio-active materials, the by-product of atomic manufacture, to close major lines of enemy supply and communication leading south from the Yalu, with simultaneous amphibious landings on both coasts of North Korea.)”
Followed by: “That the Soviet should be further informed that, in such eventuality, it would probably become necessary to neutralize Red China’s capability to wage modern war. (This could be accomplished by the destruction of Red China’s limited airfields and industrial and supply bases, the cutting of her tenuous supply lines from the Soviet and the landing of China’s Nationalist forces in Manchuria near the mouth of the Yalu, with limited continuing logistical support until such time as the communist government of China has fallen.)”
MacArthur had made sure the media knew of the meeting, and reporters were ready when he and Eisenhower emerged from Dulles’s apartment. Eisenhower had replied noncommittally to MacArthur indoors; outside he was equally evasive. “We had a very enjoyable lunch and a very fine conversation on the general subject of peace, not only in Korea but throughout the world, with particular reference to the world situation in which, of course, such a Korean peace would have to be determined.” Eisenhower turned to MacArthur. “I hope my old commander will have a word to say.”
MacArthur understood that he mustn’t put Eisenhower on the spot if his grand scheme were to have a chance of adoption. So he reciprocated the banalities. “I had a very pleasant reunion with the president-elect,” he said. “It was a resumption of an old friendship and comradeship of thirty-five years’ standing. The subject was peace in Korea and the world in general.”
The two men posed for photographs; the newsreel and television cameras whirred. Then Eisenhower got in his car and prepared to be driven off. A reporter asked him if he intended to speak with MacArthur again soon. “I certainly hope it isn’t another six years before we meet again,” Eisenhower said, alluding to a Tokyo meeting in 1946. “Surely we’ll see each other.”
—
MACARTHUR WAITED FOR Eisenhower to call. But Eisenhower never did. Neither did Omar Bradley, who knew about the meeting and the memo. “From that day to this,” MacArthur wrote in his memoirs more than a decade later, “I have never been further approached on the matter from any source.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised. Eisenhower understood the implications of MacArthur’s plan. At the very least it would shatter the alliance system America had been building since 1945; at worst it would trigger World War III. Eisenhower knew how stubbornly the Soviets insisted on their rights in Germany; Stalin would never abide a popularly elected all-Germany government, which would certainly be anti-Soviet. Nor would the Kremlin stand idle while the United States used nuclear weapons against Chinese forces in Korea and probably against China itself. Like the United States, Russia had a reputation to uphold, and its alliance with China obligated it to defend that country. MacArthur’s recommendation for laying radioactive materials in North Korea was lunacy; how would the Koreans live there, even after a victory? In any case, Eisenhower could never allow himself, at the outset of his presidency, at the moment when he was clearly and definitively stepping out of MacArthur’s shadow, to be seen as adopting the MacArthur program for dealing with the communists.
Yet if MacArthur shouldn’t have been surprised, he nonetheless was galled at being ignored by his former subordinate. “The trouble with Eisenhower,” MacArthur muttered to some close supporters after his meeting with the president-elect, “is that he doesn’t have the guts to make a policy decision. He never did have the guts and he never will.”
The Korean fighting ended without further assistance from MacArthur. The apparently interminable truce talks and the accompanying bloodletting continued into early 1953, when Stalin’s death caused a change in leadership in the Kremlin. The new men reconsidered their backing for a conflict that aggravated tension with the West to no observable Russian advantage. Meanwhile Eisenhower, in an effort to balance the federal budget, sought to diminish the drain Korea had become on American resources. Syngman Rhee required persuasion; the South Korean president still dreamed of ruling a unified country. But finally, in the summer of 1953, the two sides consented to an armistice. No peace treaty followed, yet the cessation of shooting allowed all parties to begin to move on.
A decade later Eisenhower asserted in his memoir that he had broken the deadlock in the peace negotiations by quietly threatening to use nuclear weapons against the Chinese. “We dropped the word, discreetly,” he wrote. “We felt quite sure it would reach Soviet and Chinese Communist ears.” Whether the threat was decisive was impossible to know. No one on the communist side said it was—not that they would. Anyway, the last big obstacle to an armistice was Rhee, not the communists.
Such risk as Eisenhower was taking in threatening to escalate in 1953 was less than that MacArthur had courted in 1951, for the bolstering of NATO begun by Truman had proceeded sufficiently that a Soviet countermove against Western Europe appeared unlikely. All the same, if things did transpire as Eisenhower said in his memoir, MacArthur could have felt a certain vindication at the disclosure. Perhaps his aggressive advice to his erstwhile adjutant hadn’t been entirely without effect.
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YET MACARTHUR HAD little time left for vindication, or for anything else. The old soldier had retired to his aerie in the Waldorf; he ventured out occasionally to give speeches and receive the plaudits of those who remembered his role in World War II. The Korean chapter of his career slowly faded into the background of American memory as the
Korean War itself receded from view, overshadowed by the great victorious war that preceded it and the vexingly protracted conflict in Vietnam that followed. MacArthur wrote a memoir that was excerpted in Life magazine, whose publisher, Henry Luce, wished that the nation had followed MacArthur’s counsel regarding Korea and China. MacArthur treated Truman more politely in the memoir than he had on the campaign trail, but the general was as convinced as ever of the wisdom of the course he had recommended. And as the war in Vietnam labored on, he pronounced himself as certain as ever that America should have had things out with the Asian communists more than a decade before.
MacArthur’s death in 1964 elicited respect but little warmth. He and Eisenhower were the remaining giants from World War II, George Marshall having died in 1959. Eisenhower was almost as popular as he had been when he vaulted past MacArthur into the White House, and MacArthur still suffered by comparison. Ike had the common touch MacArthur lacked, and postwar America demanded the common touch. At almost the two-thirds mark of the twentieth century, MacArthur seemed a figure from the nineteenth century, ever more the son of the hero of Missionary Ridge.
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HARRY TRUMAN LIKEWISE suffered by comparison with Eisenhower. Truman was annoyed that Eisenhower, on the campaign trail in 1952, had lent his prestige and sometimes his voice to the Republican assaults on Truman’s foreign policy. Truman responded by lashing back, albeit in private. He told friends Eisenhower would be lost in politics. “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike! It won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” Yet Eisenhower proved adept at politics, navigating between the Democrats on his left and the McCarthyists on his right, ending the war in Korea and avoiding other conflicts. Truman looked small and clumsy by comparison.
But if Truman’s presidency seemed nothing to boast about, Truman’s personality caught the American imagination. While MacArthur retired to the Waldorf, Truman returned to his roots in Independence. He walked each day to the library that housed his presidential records, and he engaged the neighbors and visitors in conversation. He was as unassuming as always and more plainspoken than the presidency had allowed. His candor appealed to screenwriter and novelist Merle Miller, who in the early 1960s proposed a television series recounting Truman’s life and career. Miller conducted numerous interviews with Truman, giving Truman opportunity to display his characteristic pungency of expression. The television series never materialized, as the networks decided Truman wasn’t sufficiently popular to draw viewers. But after Truman’s 1972 death, Miller published transcripts of the interviews as a book, Plain Speaking. The volume delighted readers, who kept it on the best-seller lists for months, and sparked a renewal of interest in Truman. In the wake of the Pentagon Papers and amid the Watergate scandal, as Americans discovered how often they had been lied to by presidents, straight-talking Harry Truman provided a bracing antidote.
The book was not without controversy. Truman scholars alleged that Miller embellished, if not fabricated, some of the stories and phrases he ascribed to Truman. Miller asked Truman why he fired MacArthur, and gave as Truman’s response: “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.” Perhaps Truman had spoken these words; perhaps not. Yet they sounded like what he would say. And with generals in low repute after a decade in Vietnam, such words were what Americans were ready to hear. Moreover, the stalemate of the Korean War, which had evoked such dissatisfaction in the 1950s, when the American measure of war was the unqualified victory of World War II, began to look good as the American misadventure in Vietnam spiraled to defeat. Truman had held the line against communism in Korea; by the early 1970s most Americans would have been thrilled at a similar outcome in Vietnam.
Yet it was the American victory in the Cold War that made Truman a genuine folk hero. Americans concluded, after all, that the everyman-president, in crafting the policy of containment, had known better than his critics what defeating communism required: firmness and patience, in balanced measure. Truman hadn’t yielded to communist aggression in Korea, but neither had he panicked and let himself be stampeded into World War III, by Douglas MacArthur or others. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Chinese abandonment of communism in all but name confirmed Truman’s belief that democracy would endure if Americans kept their faith and their heads. A clutch of respectful academic studies lifted Truman to the rank of presidents just below the triumvirate of Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, while such celebratory popular works as David McCullough’s hugely successful biography secured Truman’s place in the hearts of ordinary Americans.
Six decades after the general and the president, standing at the brink of nuclear war, wrestled over Korea and China; six decades after their contest brought to a head the issue of whether the president or a general determines American policy; six decades after MacArthur received a hero’s reception from Congress and ticker-tape parades from an adoring public while Truman was castigated as an appeaser and howled into retirement, it was hard to find any knowledgeable person who didn’t feel relief that the president, and not the general, had been the one with the final say in their fateful struggle. Truman’s bold stroke in firing MacArthur ended his own career as surely as it terminated MacArthur’s, but it sustained hope that humanity might survive the nuclear age. The courage of Truman’s decision had never been in question; six decades later, its wisdom was apparent as well.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the staffs of the Harry S. Truman Library and the MacArthur Memorial Archives and Library, as well as those of the National Archives, the United States Naval Academy, and the library of the University of Texas at Austin. He additionally thanks Kristine Puopolo, William Thomas and Daniel Meyer at Doubleday, and his students and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin.
PHOTO CREDITS
1 Douglas MacArthur: Department of the Army, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
2 The surrender ceremony aboard the U.S.S. Missouri: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
3 MacArthur’s Tokyo headquarters: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
4 The U.S. embassy in Tokyo: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
5 MacArthur and Hirohito: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
6 Harry Truman, Henry Wallace, FDR: National Park Service, Abbie Rowe, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
7 Truman, Bess, Margaret: Leo Hessler Studio of Washington, D.C., courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
8 The Berlin airlift: Henry Ries/The New York Times/Redux
9 Dean Acheson, George Marshall, Truman: National Park Service, Abbie Rowe, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
10 Omar Bradley, Louis Johnson, Truman: National Park Service, Abbie Rowe, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
11 Truman press conference: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
12 Refugees fleeing Seoul: U.S. Army, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
13 Troops bearing a stretcher: U.S. Army, Ray Turnbull, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
14 Troops dug in at the Naktong River: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
15 Maggie Higgins: Syracuse University Libraries
16 MacArthur with binoculars: U.S. Army, Robert W. Porter, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
17 MacArthur at a briefing: U.S. Army, Robert W. Porter, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
18 MacArthur with North Korean prisoners: U.S. Army, Robert W. Porter, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
19 Eighth Army forces on village road: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
20 Crossing the Han River: U.S. Army, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
21 Reinstallation of Syngman Rhee: Courtesy of Harry S. T
ruman Library
22 MacArthur and Walton “Johnnie” Walker: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
23 MacArthur and Omar Bradley: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
24 Truman and MacArthur in a car: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
25 Wake Island conference building: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
26 Vernice Anderson: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
27 Truman and MacArthur at airport: U.S. Army Signal Corps, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
28 Troops with fallen power lines: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
29 U.S. troops retreat in snow: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
30 Tanks: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
31 Frank Pace with MacArthur in Tokyo: U.S. Army, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
32 Matthew Ridgway and Frank Pace: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
33 MacArthur and family: U.S. Army Signal Corps, Art Marasco, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
34 MacArthur heading into Senate hearings: AP Photo
35 Truman holding his hat: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library
SOURCES
The events related here took place in the public view, but not entirely in the public view. The actions and words of Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur were reported in the major newspapers of the day, of which the New York Times and the Washington Post have been the most useful in preparing the present account. Truman’s public statements and news conferences are readily available in the Public Papers of the Presidents, a database compiled and maintained by the American Presidency Project (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu).
What the public did not see and read were the confidential deliberations and communications within the Truman administration, the comparable conversations and correspondence of MacArthur and his aides and interlocutors, and the communications between the two camps. The papers of Truman are at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Many were originally classified for reasons of national security; nearly all are now available to researchers. Selections from the papers have been published on the Internet and in various edited collections. The Truman Library also houses papers of Dean Acheson, George Elsey and others close to the president, as well as oral histories of those who worked with him. The papers of MacArthur are at the MacArthur Memorial Archives and Library in Norfolk, Virginia. Many of these papers are available on microfilm.