The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  During World War II, he and Roosevelt played the most complicated of games, supremely gifted politician dealing with supremely gifted but deeply antagonistic general. Roosevelt once told the general—it was something MacArthur was fond of quoting, as if to show that he had no political ambitions—“Douglas, I think you are our best general, but I believe you would be our worst politician.” Roosevelt, aristocratic and infinitely devious, watched MacArthur like a hawk. Roosevelt understood him (and his burning ambition for the presidency) far better than MacArthur understood Roosevelt. The president never thought the general a serious political threat—he had too little connection to ordinary voters—but just in case, he kept copies of a report MacArthur had submitted just before the outbreak of World War II in which he had insisted he could hold the Philippines and other key points in the Pacific because of “the inability of our enemy to launch his air attacks on our islands” and documentation about the puzzling way MacArthur’s command in the Philippines had been caught with its planes on the ground at Clark Field nine hours after his headquarters had learned of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, thus easy prey for the Japanese planes.

  Mutual trust was hardly at the core of the relationship. MacArthur, who always kept score, sensed that he had met his match and resented it bitterly. In April 1945, when Roosevelt died in office on the very eve of victory in Europe, much of the nation mourned, but Douglas MacArthur most demonstrably did not. Hearing the news, he turned to Bonnie Fellers, a staff officer, and said, “So Roosevelt is dead: a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well.” Outsiders being told what he said were shocked; it was hard to imagine any headquarters save this one where a commander would speak like that about a commander in chief who had just died.

  What MacArthur remembered about his dealings with Roosevelt was always negative: the grievances, not the successes, not the way Roosevelt had ordered his rescue when in early 1942 he seemed trapped in the Philippines as the Japanese took much of the rest of his command captive, or the fact that the president had come around to MacArthur’s side in a crucial dispute with the Navy over the way to conduct the war in the Pacific and approach the Japanese main islands. What was important was not what Roosevelt had done for him, but rather what he had not done for him. Yet nothing had added to his own myth so much as the escape from the Philippines. It was a public relations triumph both for him and for the nation. Arriving in Australia, he had issued his famous “I shall return” statement. Washington had wanted to change it to “We shall return,” but the general was having none of it: this was to be the most personal of pledges and missions, and so it went out as he directed. During that dark hour when a hero was needed, he had been lionized for his escape, with the administration an active participant in that lionization. His own significant miscalculations at the start of the war, mistakes that might have ended the career of a lesser general, were covered up, and instead the story became that he had heroically made it out, that MacArthur had lived to fight another day. No one had expressed that thought more clearly than William (Wild Bill) Donovan, a man of enormous influence in those days, a Wall Street lawyer with immense ambitions, who would in time head the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, and its successor, the CIA: “General MacArthur,” he said at the time, “a symbol of our nation—outnumbered, outgunned—with the seas around him and the skies above him controlled by the enemy—fighting for freedom.” The flattery got him nowhere; MacArthur allowed neither the OSS nor CIA into his command area in both World War II and Korea.

  In Europe during World War II, any number of talented younger officers had come into their own under Eisenhower, combat and staff officers alike; but that was not true in MacArthur’s command in the Pacific, where no other officer was allowed to make a name for himself and where there would be little turnover in his staff from the beginning of the war to his departure from Tokyo. “There should be newer blood around MacArthur,” John Gunther wrote in November 1950, “but he will not tolerate anybody near him being too big. I heard it said, ‘None of MacArthur’s men can risk being first rate.’”

  The Bataan Gang, they were called. The name itself reflected a kind of loyalty test. Were you there at the low point in his career—back in the Philippines with the Japanese closing in, at the moment when he had been forced to leave for Australia? Not many men—Ned Almond, chief of staff in his Tokyo days, was a rare exception—managed to become part of his inner circle if they did not go back to that earlier defining moment. At the start of the Korean War, a disproportionate number of his top men had been with him since the late 1930s. It was the most exclusionary of groups—anyone who was not an insider was suspect. Robert Sherwood, the distinguished author and playwright who represented Roosevelt in an unofficial way during the war, was appalled by the hostility he encountered in that headquarters, the rage against all other instruments of the war and against other theaters. Sherwood arrived there in 1944 and brought with him news of the Allied crossing of the Remagen bridge—a great moment in the drive against Germany. But when he told Charles Willoughby the news, Willoughby snapped at him, “We don’t give a damn out here about anything that happens in Europe.” There was, Sherwood wrote the president, “unmistakable evidence of an acute persecution complex at work. To hear some of the staff officers talk, one would think that the War Department, the State Department—and possibly the White House itself—are under the domination of ‘Communists and British imperialists.’”

  MacArthur, Roosevelt always believed, was completely out of touch with domestic American politics, a prisoner of his dreams rather than the country’s changing political and economic realities. MacArthur had believed, back in 1936, that Alf Landon was going to beat Roosevelt, and turned angrily on Eisenhower, his chief of staff, and a son of Kansas, who was sure that Landon, a Kansan, had no chance. Eisenhower showed MacArthur a letter from a friend of his in Abilene, suggesting that Landon might not even carry his own state. MacArthur categorized Eisenhower and another staff officer who also doubted Landon’s success as “fearful and small minded people who are afraid to express judgments that are obvious from the evidence at hand.” Landon carried two states, losing, among forty-six others, Kansas.

  By 1944, in the middle of the Pacific war, there was already talk of MacArthur running against Roosevelt. Some of the most passionate Roosevelt-haters on the Republican right were pushing for him to consider the race. One of them, a Republican congressman from Nebraska, A. L. Miller, saw a MacArthur candidacy as the only hope to save the country and wrote him: “I am convinced that unless the New Deal can be stopped this time out, our American way of life is forever doomed.” Much that was in Miller’s letters—there were several of them—would certainly have struck most political or military figures of the time as the work of a fringe ideologue, a man not to be encouraged. MacArthur, however, began an ongoing exchange with Miller. “I do unreservedly agree with the complete wisdom and statesmanship of your comments,” he wrote the congressman, referring darkly to the “sinister drama of our present chaos and confusion.” By chance that happened to be the moment when the country was doing exceptionally well for a nation at war, and when ordinary people in all stations of life took on wartime sacrifices with great goodwill and determination.

  That did not stop the Miller-MacArthur letters from flying back and forth. “This monarchy,” the congressman wrote, “which is being established in America will destroy the rights of common people.” Back came MacArthur: “Your description of conditions in the United States is a sobering one indeed, and it is calculated to arouse the thoughtful consideration of every true patriot.” What damaged him was the pull of flattery; the need to be revered was too great for him to resist. That was the chink in his armor, and because of it he was sucked in. Miller, thrilled by the fact that a great patriot seemed to see things exactly the way he did, eventually made the letters public, to MacArthur’s considerable embarrassment, in the midst of a war. The general then said the letters were pr
ivate, which was true, and under no condition were they intended to be critical of any political leader or any political philosophy, which, of course, was not. But they were damaging. Pressed by his friend and supporter, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then still in his isolationist incarnation, MacArthur announced that he did not want his name put into nomination at the Republican convention. Vandenberg sensed that if the general’s name were voted on, the results were going to be humiliating. But one delegate slipped through the net, and while Tom Dewey received 1,056 votes, MacArthur got 1 vote. Most assuredly, 1944 had not been a happy year for him politically; just as certainly, the desire to run had not gone away.

  IN MAY 1946, Eisenhower, then Army chief of staff, visited the general in Tokyo and they talked of presidential politics. MacArthur pushed Eisenhower to run, and Ike matched that move by suggesting that MacArthur run. At that point MacArthur professed himself too old for a presidential run; but Eisenhower, who understood MacArthur’s singular ambition and vanity far better than MacArthur himself, returned to Washington and mentioned to Truman that he might have to face a MacArthur run in 1948. Indeed, with the war over and the democratization of Japan going exceptionally well, the general sent out word to his admirers in 1947 that, though he would not seek the Republican nomination, he would accept a draft if offered. It would be nothing less than his duty, he assured them. The truth was that he had surprisingly high hopes for a run in 1948. But he was badly out of touch with his native land—he had been away for more than a decade, and he was the kind of man who would have been out of touch with his fellow citizens even if he had not left the continental shores.

  The journey so many millions of Americans were then making into the middle class would soon have important political consequences for both parties, as former Democratic voters, becoming more affluent, began to think of themselves as independents and to vote more conservatively; but for the moment the New Deal lines, based on elemental economic differences, still held in national elections. The people who were pushing MacArthur to run believed that the New Deal was merely the first step in what was a long and dangerous passage to Communism. His support was strongest in the Midwest, especially in the region served by Colonel Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the leading isolationist of the time. The general’s most passionate enthusiasts were isolationists—though MacArthur was not one himself, he was willing to dance with them—nativists, racists, anti-Semites, and labor haters. They were absolutely convinced that they were the truest representatives of what they called Americanism. MacArthur’s good friend Major General George Van Horn Moseley, who reflected their attitudes, wrote him on the eve of the 1948 campaign, “There are a great many enemies within our gates who…are afraid of you…members of the CIO, the Communists, and the Jews, and such skunks as Walter Winchell [a half gossip, half political columnist] and Drew Pearson [a liberal columnist who had tangled with MacArthur earlier on].” As a prominent essayist of the era John McCarten wrote in the American Mercury, “It may not be his fault, but it is surely his misfortune that the worst elements on the political Right, including its most blatant lunatic fringe, are whooping it up for MacArthur.” Pushed by them to run in 1948, he answered in typical MacArthur prose: “I would say, with all humility that I would be recreant [faithless] to all my concepts of good citizenship were I to shrink because of the hazards and responsibilities involved from any accepting any public duty to which I might be called by the American people.” Nobler than that, no man could be.

  The people propelling him into the 1948 race were rank political amateurs, filled with their own passion, sense of rectitude, and anger. Everyone they knew agreed with them politically; their worlds, both at the office and at their clubs, were places with few dissenting voices. They knew almost nothing about how to work the machinery of local politics. The test case for MacArthur’s run was to be Wisconsin, where he had spent some time as a boy and where his family, as much as any military family can, had roots. It was in the Midwest heartland, and safely within the reach of the Chicago Tribune. Robert Wood, an old friend and the dedicated head of the isolationist America First Committee, was his principal supporter and advocate. Wood was sure that MacArthur would win at least twenty of Wisconsin’s twenty-seven delegates. Since he was a candidate in absentia, they expected to sell the idea that their patriot-hero was too busy serving his country to run for the office he rightfully deserved. He would do well in Wisconsin, they believed, precisely because he was not able to campaign there. Wisconsin would then launch a larger campaign in absentia. But nothing went right—not even with former servicemen. MacArthur had never been known as a soldier’s general, and not even the veterans, polls showed, were for him. In fact, those who had served under him tended to favor by a handsome margin a man who now was one of his personal bête noirs, Dwight Eisenhower.

  Wisconsin was supposed to launch the campaign, but it effectively ended it. Harold Stassen, the former governor of neighboring Minnesota, won it handily with 40 percent of the vote and nineteen delegates; Thomas Dewey, who went on to win the nomination, got 24 percent and no delegates; MacArthur, on what was supposed to be fertile soil, won 36 percent and only eight delegates. The next day Ambassador William Sebald, the ranking American diplomat in Tokyo, arrived at the Dai Ichi building for a meeting. MacArthur’s chief of staff, Major General Paul Mueller, immediately held up a hand to warn Sebald off. “The general is as low as a rug and very disappointed,” he told Sebald, who decided to try his luck on another day. But even if the race for the nomination in 1948 had turned into a complete disaster, it had nonetheless proved one thing, which was that late in his career Douglas MacArthur still hoped for the presidency.

  THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the president and the general was doomed from the start. The general was disrespectful of the president, and the president, in turn, viscerally disliked and distrusted the general. “And what to do with Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MACARTHUR,” the new president wrote in his diary back in 1945. “He’s worse than the Cabots and the Lodges—they at least talked to one another before they told God what to do. Mac tells God right off. It is a very great pity that we have stuffed shirts like that in key positions. I don’t see why in Hell Roosevelt didn’t order Wainwright home [from Corregidor in 1942] and let MacArthur be a martyr…. We’d have a real General and a fighting man if we had Wainwright and not a play actor and a bunko man such as we have now. Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time can produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.”

  In MacArthur’s eyes, Truman’s credentials could not have been less imposing. He was a working politician, which was bad enough, but even worse a Democrat, a liberal Democrat, and he was the designated legatee of the hated Franklin Roosevelt. How could a man like that, a mere National Guard captain in World War I and then a politician of marginal abilities, and thus self-evidently a much, much smaller figure, who had accomplished so little in life, be above MacArthur in the chain of command? It was in his mind an unanswerable question. Each man was to the other almost an alien being, their backgrounds were so completely different, their concepts of loyalty and duty so totally at odds. Almost from the moment in April 1945 that Truman became president, there were problems between the two men. Senator Tom Connally of Texas, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had even warned Truman against letting MacArthur accept the Japanese surrender. Truman wrote in his diary: “[Connally] said Doug would run against me in ’48 if I built him up. I told Tom I didn’t want to run in ’48, and that Doug didn’t bother me that way.”

  The president and his senior military men believed that MacArthur had begun behaving badly almost as soon as the war in the Pacific ended. The first issue that divided them was that of troop levels. In those first months of peace the president and his top people were trying to slow down the immediate postwar rush to downsize the Army, fighting the natural urge of American families to get the boys home and o
ut of uniform. On the issue of troop levels, MacArthur, in their view, had grandstanded, announcing from Tokyo on September 17, 1945, that, because the occupation of Japan was going so well, he would need only two hundred thousand troops, not anywhere near the half million originally ticketed for the job. That had played into the hands of the administration’s domestic critics and had, the people in Washington believed, been done deliberately, at a time when they were besieged by ever escalating pressures for demobilization.

  In the eyes of Bradley and Eisenhower, this was an example of the general at his absolute worst, never checking in, showing off politically, and putting himself and his own political interests ahead of extremely serious national security concerns. Any other senior officer pulling something like that would have been instantly relieved of his command or at least severely reprimanded. But no one was allowed to move against him. He was always to be treated differently. Even during the war, finalized Pentagon plans were automatically sent out as orders to all headquarters; only to MacArthur were they sent out as a comment. No one even back then had wanted to incur his wrath. But Truman had been furious when he made the demobe harder, and had seriously considered relieving him. Eben Ayers, one of the president’s assistants, wrote in his diary at that time, “The president sounded off about Mac and said he was ‘going to do something about that fellow,’ who he said had been balling things up. He said he was tired of fooling around.” Even then, however, the consequences of a major confrontation were too serious. Still, it was an early sign of what would soon be a growing conflict between the two men. In the end, at Truman’s request, George Marshall had ever so lightly slapped MacArthur’s wrist, sending him a cable indicating that his announcement had made it harder to sustain the draft in peacetime and thus keep adequate American forces overseas. In the future, Marshall wrote, any such statement should be coordinated first with the War Department.