The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Four votes on whether or not the hearings should be closed were brought by the Republicans, and four times Russell won, albeit narrowly. So on May 3, 1951, the hearings began, and as they did, so did the demythologizing of Douglas MacArthur. He could not, as he had so often done at the Dai Ichi in Tokyo, dominate this political situation and deliver his carefully rehearsed monologues without challenge. The Dai Ichi was not a democratic setting; this was. During the Senate hearings, he did indeed use phrases like “history teaches us” and “history shows,” as if there were just one simple lesson to be passed on and he was history’s designated voice. For the first time, though, great hero or not, he had to bow to democratic procedures, facing tough questions from men every bit as partisan and egocentric as he.

  As the first witness, he answered questions for three days, and it was in no way a virtuoso performance. He was forced to deal with a rather more complicated record than he might have wanted. These men felt they could challenge his thoughts and his facts. Nor were his answers necessarily what the Republican right wanted. Each day his case seemed a bit weaker, he himself a bit smaller, and his opponents, indeed his punching bags, like Acheson and Marshall, a bit more thoughtful and better grounded in the issues.

  One of the great problems with Douglas MacArthur, something that had bedeviled those who had dealt with him for years, was that he did not always tell the truth. He used the truth when it suited him and his cause, and readily departed from it when it got in his way. The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, he was mortal like everyone else, and was often wrong, on occasion very wrong. Because he was surrounded by so many sycophants and no one ever challenged him, his own distortions eventually became crystallized as truths. Challenges to his version quickly became seen as the distortions of sworn enemies. When he had spoken before the Congress upon his return, he had lied shamelessly about one critical point. He had claimed that the Joint Chiefs supported his positions. Perhaps he had convinced himself that they did; for there had been a brief moment after the Chinese came in and before Ridgway was just arriving that some of them had pondered some of his proposals. But when Ridgway turned the war around, he had lost them again. Perhaps, in his own mind, he who had gloried in mocking and belittling them now truly believed that they had indeed supported him. Perhaps he believed that the old codes were more powerful than the truth, that, in the end, if it came down to a collision between the military and civilian politicians, then like it or not, all military men would be bound by a kind of institutional loyalty to back him up. Though he had not necessarily been loyal to them in the past, they, men of less grandeur, would nonetheless be loyal to him now.

  He was wrong. He had treated the Chiefs with contempt from the beginning. He had made countless end runs around them, had been systematically disrespectful of their views, and had spoken of them privately with great contempt—and the Army being one of the world’s most gossipy places, they knew just what he had said about them in private. He had snookered them again and again. Placing Almond in charge of Tenth Corps had symbolized his contempt for them. To have claimed their support at this moment was a grievous political mistake.

  But it was more than just the Chiefs. He had very little support in the Pentagon itself, though some senior officers certainly remembered the greatness of the younger MacArthur. When he began his own testimony before the Russell committee, George Marshall spoke eloquently of how hard it was for him to challenge what MacArthur had said because of MacArthur’s distinguished career. But there were many younger officers with shorter memories, not nearly so conflicted, who were furious over his disregard of orders, his failure to accept responsibility when the Chinese came in, his systematic challenge to civilian control of the military. It was often their contemporaries and friends who had been killed or wounded at places like Kunuri and the Chosin, and the bitterness they felt was not softened by any memories of the earlier MacArthur. This then was the reckoning. He was disliked, on occasion hated, among many younger officers in much of the building. Far more knowledgeable on the record than young Senate staffers, these younger Pentagon officers now gleefully guided members of the Senate and their staffs toward the glitches in MacArthur’s case.

  Day by day he was diminished. When Senators like Brien McMahon, a Democrat from Connecticut, began to question him about larger command responsibilities—dealing with the Russians, for example—he quickly began to back down. This time he did not give a soaring lecture about stopping the Communists in Asia in order to save Europe (even if the ungrateful Europeans themselves did not understand the importance of being saved by fighting a larger war with the Chinese). Asked about the Russians in Europe, he answered only that it was not his responsibility, for he was merely a theater commander. But wasn’t that the crux of the problem? McMahon and others asked. Truman administration officials had always argued from the position of men dealing with global responsibilities, who had to be aware of potential challenges in places far beyond Korea, and adversaries more dangerous than the Chinese. MacArthur had made it very clear, McMahon pointed out, that if the administration followed his policies calling for a wider war against the Chinese, the Russians would not enter the war. He was surely entitled to those beliefs, the senator said, but what if he was wrong? Hadn’t MacArthur also believed, McMahon suggested, that Red China would not enter the war? Was that not right? “I doubted [their entry],” MacArthur admitted. It was a damaging admission that did not enhance his reputation as an expert on what the Soviets would do if the United States was entrapped in an ever larger war with the Chinese.

  Did the general, McMahon asked, think that American and Allied forces would be able to withstand a Russian attack in Western Europe? “Senator,” MacArthur answered, “I have asked you several times not to involve me in anything except my own area. My concepts on global defense are not what I am here to testify on. I don’t pretend to be the authority now on those things.” It went downhill from there. MacArthur soon found himself on the defensive, even when it came to his own suggestions about driving the Chinese from North Korea. Questioned closely on this by Senator Lyndon Johnson, the general, who had mocked Ridgway’s strategy as an accordion war, was unable to speak with any confidence about whether or not the Chinese might strike again if driven above the Yalu. Might they not wait there for another such moment, creating a vaster, more dangerous, perhaps even more permanent accordion war? He did not think, he testified, that they would then enter Korea again. It was not the most satisfying of answers. When his third day of testimony was over, though Russell had been extremely gracious—almost reverential with him—he had, in Joseph Goulden’s words, “labeled himself a commander with parochial interests and knowledge. No longer could he posture as the master world strategist whose view from the Dai Ichi sanctuary was superior to that of diplomats and other militarists.”

  He was followed by George Marshall, then the Joint Chiefs, and finally Acheson, all of whom made the administration’s case with considerable skill. Marshall was especially strong. He shared none of MacArthur’s confidence that a wider war against the Chinese would not bring in the Soviets. There were far too many places where they might easily strike back at the United States and where, because of the logistics, the Americans, rather than the Soviets, were vulnerable. In addition, what MacArthur wanted America to do would sever the United States from its most important allies, while shattering every alliance the Americans had built and upon which so much of U.S. security was now based. Marshall emphasized that the great division here between the general and Washington was not, as so many hoped, a deep ideological struggle, but instead something far more mundane, a split between a theater commander with limited responsibilities whose orders from men with broader responsibilities were “not those he would have written for himself.”

  That kind of disagreement was not so unusual, Marshall said. All theater commanders felt the same way and wanted an outsized share of available resources. What ma
de MacArthur’s disagreement exceptional was the public way he had expressed his displeasure and disagreement with the president’s policies. One after another the Joint Chiefs expressed the depth of their disagreement with MacArthur’s positions, and displayed for all to note that they were not his allies in this conflict. They detailed how the unwritten rules of the war, about which the American right wing and MacArthur himself were so critical—the use of sanctuaries was mutual—had actually favored the UN rather than the Chinese, because Japan was so vulnerable to attack and because the Russians had not attacked what they saw as our Japanese sanctuaries. Perhaps the key moment came when Bradley said that to follow MacArthur’s plan would involve the United States “in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

  Though the Republican right had fought against censoring the hearings, in the end they were lucky to get that decision, because the excised parts of the record included a devastating critique of one of their great beliefs—about the value of Chiang’s troops in this war. The critics of the administration were for a wider war, but not at the risk of using large numbers of American troops. That meant the question of whether to use Chiang’s army was critical. MacArthur claimed in the hearings that they represented “half a million first class fighting men.” They were, in terms of ability, “exactly the same as these Red troops I am fighting.” Not everyone agreed; if they had been as good, most Americans who had served as advisers in China believed, they would not have lost in the first place. His view of them, it turned out, was a judgment based on that brief ceremonial visit to Taiwan in August 1950. Almost no one in the Pentagon agreed professionally with that judgment. These troops were in fact regarded as a disaster waiting for another place to happen. A thirty-seven-man mission sent to Taiwan by the Pentagon at virtually the same time, which had spent a good deal of time on the ground, Marshall testified, had found that the “condition of training and equipment…was so low that they could not be depended upon to defend” the island, let alone invade the mainland. Instead of preventing them from recapturing their homeland, we were protecting them from being overrun in their island redoubt.

  As for giving them more equipment, their record for losing their equipment during the civil war was unparalleled and made the Joint Chiefs reluctant to give them any more. Bradley was particularly blunt. He said the Nationalist troops might defect to the Communists at the first opportunity. Moreover, he added, if a Communist force was actually able to land on Formosa, it might win the island over thanks to defections. Joe Collins added: “We were highly skeptical that we could get anything more out of these Chinese than we were getting out of the South Koreans, because these were the same people that were run off China in the first place.” The testimony about the Chinese Nationalist troops reflected what most military men felt in private. It just was not the sort of thing one said publicly about the soldiers of an ally. But because it was censored, the myth of Chiang’s troops, that extraordinary army of more than half a million men—America getting something for nothing—was allowed to continue.

  The hearings represented a great education for Americans about the complexity of the world they now inhabited. Many who had thought Washington did not have a larger policy for dealing with the Communist world began to understand the containment policy that had been put in place. None of this painful process of education was what the Republicans who had pushed for the hearings, smelling blood in the waters, wanted. After six days of Omar Bradley’s testimony, with the other Joint Chiefs still to follow, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, the conservative Iowa Republican, suggested to Russell that the hearings were taking too much time and that there was really no need to hear the other three chiefs testify. That was a sign that the great Republican hope—that they could use the hearings to reveal a vast gap between the Truman people and the uniformed military—was dying. Hickenlooper’s proposal was rejected fourteen to eleven. The hearings were going to run their course, and every day they lasted, MacArthur shrank further on the political landscape.

  FOR THE TRUMAN administration the MacArthur hearings were a significant victory. The historical record—if not the political center of the country—had been reclaimed. A longtime adversary had been partially defanged, albeit a little late. Given the political damage already done by the fall of China, by the entrance of Chinese forces into the war, and the firing of MacArthur, Truman might be the winner in the long run but not in the short term, given the emotions triggered by the conflict. He might have title to the Constitution, and that would help him one day with historians, but the Republicans still had title to the flag, and that was more important in the political equation.

  If some of its policies had been exonerated, the administration itself had ended up being severely, perhaps terminally, wounded by all these events, most particularly the entrance of the Chinese into the war. The defeat along the Yalu, Dean Acheson wrote to Harry Truman five years later, “destroyed the Truman Administration.” There was not a lot for the administration to celebrate when the hearings were over. Not all of the damage came from the war, the fall of Chiang, and MacArthur’s frontal challenge, but it was the most visible part. It was time for the Democrats to go. They had been in power too long, twenty years; they had made too many enemies, and the body politic, inevitably, had changed and shifted during that period and had different needs than it had had back in the hard and painful days of 1932.

  Part Eleven

  The Consequences

  51

  EVEN THE SHREWDEST of men do not always know when their most dramatic moment is over and it is time to leave the stage; for the self-absorbed that is far more likely to be true. So it was for Douglas MacArthur. “If he had retired the day after Inchon, every town in America would have had a school named after him,” said Bill McCaffrey, then a mid-level officer on the Tokyo staff, “but the longer he stayed, and the more he said, the more he damaged himself.” In the end, he simply did not grasp the politics of it all—what the cheering had been about (and perhaps more important, what it had not been about) when he first returned home. He thought it had all been about him, not understanding that he was merely a trigger device for something larger. For a time he still chased his dream, giving speeches all over the country. The crowds dwindled, and as they did, his voice inevitably became more strident. Many of his most passionate followers drifted elsewhere in search of another candidate. The game plan for the conservative right had never really centered around him. His real job had been to damage their enemies. If the lightning struck, they would have gone with him, but their real candidate had always been Bob Taft, whose father had taken down MacArthur’s father some fifty years earlier in the Philippines, and with whom MacArthur had the most uneasy of political alliances.

  That was still true as 1952 approached. Taft, infinitely more isolationist than MacArthur, was the candidate of the conservative Republicans. At their convention that year, MacArthur gave the keynote speech, but the handsome and charismatic old soldier, the man who had stood so confidently before the Congress a little more than a year earlier, had disappeared. In his place was a civilian—indeed a politician—who seemed not only more partisan, but much older, appearing in what was one of the most alien and uncomfortable roles of his life, that is, speaking on behalf of another man. He was not, it became clear early on in his speech, very comfortable with his own words. The delegates in the arena soon became restless and began to abandon their seats. Millions of other Americans, sitting in their homes, watched as he emptied the floor. He knew that he had somehow failed, and the next day did not take calls.

  If there was a deeper irony embedded in this final chapter of his life, it lay in the effect his actions had on two of his adversaries. The first was Truman. If the president was momentarily wounded, he nonetheless won his larger bet, for he had believed in the restorative quality of history and he was proven right. The polls might have shown him at a political nadir when he left office, but his stock constantly rose in the years to
come, until he was viewed as one of the most admirable of all American presidents, as well as a figure seriously underestimated in his time. No small part of that growing respect came from his willingness to stand up to MacArthur. In an odd way, MacArthur, who so looked down on Truman as a little man, had enhanced Truman’s reputation for courage and integrity, and made him a bigger man.

  So much of that painful confrontation, Truman believed, was easy because it was about a basic belief in the Constitution and civilian control of the military. Years later, Vernon Walters, the translator for several presidents, who had witnessed the moment at Wake Island when MacArthur had failed to salute, visited Truman in Independence, Missouri, and asked the former president if he could raise an indiscreet question. So Walters began to ask about that moment. Before he could finish, Truman interrupted: “Did I notice that MacArthur did not salute the President of the United States? You’re goddamned right I noticed.” Then, noted Walters, Truman’s voice softened a bit. “I was sorry because I knew it meant that I was going to have trouble with him, and I did. I fired him and I should have done it long before I did. Right or wrong, he just did not understand how the United States is run.”

  The other unlikely beneficiary of the MacArthur challenge was Dwight Eisenhower. If there was going to be a general called to political office in 1952, it would be Eisenhower, not MacArthur. Eisenhower’s political ascent seemed to underscore the degree to which MacArthur had been overtaken by the political and social changes of the previous forty years. Eisenhower was very much a man of the twentieth century; while MacArthur always seemed a man of the previous one, and his rhetoric—he wrote and spoke, Eisenhower once said, “in purple splendor”—was that of a time when there were still moral absolutes. Eisenhower was by far the more egalitarian man, a better listener and a far better compromiser. He was a general, but unlike MacArthur he never looked or sounded like a man on horseback; he seemed as natural in civvies as in uniform. The least strident of men, Eisenhower was, the country decided, the right man to lead them into a gray, uncertain nuclear age, one in which there were not going to be total victories: he was thoughtful, strong, but not too militaristic, fair-minded and pragmatic, a man who could deal with the Russians either way, hard or soft. Moreover, Eisenhower himself was worried by the assault upon the administration from forces that were in his view essentially isolationist. The increasing likelihood that, under a Taft presidency, the country might turn away from its international responsibilities ensured that the general, rather grudgingly, made himself available for the nomination.