Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  As it happened, the head of the Policy Planning Staff was George F. Kennan.14

  Kennan was a Russia expert, not an Asia expert. He epitomized the State Department viewpoint that MacArthur had always criticized, of seeing everything through Eurocentric eyes—indeed, racist eyes (as the release of Kennan’s white supremacist diary entries after his death makes obvious). But his criticism of MacArthur’s policies had not gone unnoticed in the Dai-ichi building. MacArthur had already delivered a fierce counterattack in January against critics who said he was moving against the zaibatsu too quickly and with too many radical reforms (critics on the left, and later revisionist historians, would argue that he wasn’t radical enough). He had already told the British head of mission that the reason “America’s tycoons” attacked his anti-zaibatsu legislation was that they were afraid it would damage their own business interests.15

  Now as Kennan arrived early that March morning, MacArthur was determined to set him straight.16

  Things kicked off with a luncheon at MacArthur’s residence. Kennan and Schuyler, who had not slept in forty-eight hours, were surprised to see that Jean and a MacArthur aide were the only other guests. MacArthur spoke one of his usual monologues, occasionally thumping the luncheon table for emphasis, stressing that the Japanese were “thirsty for guidance and inspiration, it was his aim to bring them both democracy and Christianity.” He thundered that there was no danger of Japan going over to Communism; they were tired of slavery and wanted only freedom. Kennan sat immobilized by lack of sleep, wishing he could take notes but mostly struggling to stay awake.17

  The next day a refreshed Kennan faced a barrage of briefings by MacArthur’s staff. The only one he found at all interesting and informative was Willoughby’s (largely because Kennan did most of the talking). The main event—a one-on-one interview with MacArthur himself—did not come until a day or two later. Somewhat to Kennan’s surprise, it went very well. “He gave his views freely and encouraged me to do likewise,” Kennan recalled later. They covered almost every aspect of the occupation policy, and found that they agreed on many points. MacArthur’s biggest worry was that the multinational Far East Commission, including the Soviets, might try to meddle in his reforms. Kennan assured him this would not happen; the commission’s duties had to do with the Japanese surrender and implementation of the broad framework agreed to at Potsdam. Apart from that, Kennan saw no reason MacArthur should have to consult with the Far East Commission at all.

  This pleased MacArthur greatly. He even slapped his thigh in approval, and “we parted with a common feeling, I believe, of having reached a general meeting of the minds.” Once again, it seemed that MacArthur’s ability to disarm a critic with a personal meeting had prevailed; for one brief moment it seemed that SCAP and State were on the same page regarding Japan.18

  It didn’t last long. Immediately after returning to Washington, Kennan penned a forty-two-page diatribe against SCAP and all its works. He insisted that MacArthur’s reforms had generated “a high degree of instability in Japanese life generally” and that the general’s trust-busting approach to the zaibatsu was imperiling the country’s economic recovery, especially its ability to conduct foreign trade. To the suspicious Kennan, MacArthur’s policy even smacked of Soviet views about the evils of “capitalist monopoly.” Kennan was also worried that SCAP’s sweeping away of Japan’s old guard had gone too far. It was hampering Japanese society’s functioning by imposing a system of “dogmatic impersonal vindictiveness” and “wholly unfathomable complexity,” Kennan wrote. Yet “I doubt in fact whether many persons in SCAP could explain [SCAP’s] history, scope, procedures, and purpose.”19

  Above all, Kennan believed MacArthur’s policies had left the island nation largely defenseless. The occupation forces now numbered fewer than 87,000, far too small in the event of a major conflict and far too many not to be a financial burden (Kennan noted that the Japanese government had had to pay for more than 17,000 housing units for American personnel and their families). The Japanese themselves had been totally disarmed, thanks to MacArthur, and Kennan hinted that it was time to revisit that policy as well.

  Kennan, in short, recommended that the reforms that had been implemented since 1945 be cut back, if not halted. It was time for a new policy of economic and political revival, he concluded, directed from Washington, not from the Dai-ichi building—which would necessarily involve reining in MacArthur’s personal power.

  The hammer fell in October, when the National Security Council issued a new directive, NSC 13/2, ordering MacArthur to institute no new reforms, and to ease current measures that affected the economy. The reform phase of the occupation of Japan was officially over; now the country would be treated as an important ally, one on the glide path to a final peace treaty.

  MacArthur was deeply chagrined when the NSC order arrived on his desk. He realized that Kennan (who personally drafted a large portion of NSC 13/2) had done a classic bait and switch in their interview. Kennan had assured him he would no longer be accountable to the dictates of the Far East Commission. Now he was locking him into the dictates of Washington instead. Indeed, he was being double-teamed. While Kennan was overthrowing his reform policies from the State Department, General Kenneth Draper was arguing from the newly minted Defense Department that it was high time to start arming the Japanese again in order to provide for their own defense—and to serve as bulwark in what was being called a “great crescent” of anti-Communist containment extending from Japan across Southeast Asia to India.20

  MacArthur hit back hard. When he received the NSC draft of Kennan’s report, he wrote a furious reply on June 12, arguing that any effort at rearming Japan—even the limited step of establishing a maritime safety board or a Japanese coast guard—would face the immediate opposition of the Far Eastern Commission: in effect trying to play one of his nemeses off against the other. Later, he wrote another memorandum saying that he did not understand the thinking behind NSC 13/2 and arguing that, if implemented, it would contradict certain directives of the commission—as well as his mandate as “sole executive authority in the occupation of Japan.”21

  It did no good. Washington had made up its mind: Japan would now be guided to becoming a steadfast ally in containing Communism, not in spreading the gospel of democracy in Asia by example. The final document was approved on October 7, 1948, and Truman signed it on October 9. Plans were soon under way to develop Japan’s fledgling new police force into a kind of civil militia—an important step toward creating a Japanese army. MacArthur pointed out that this plan was not only politically undesirable but militarily absurd—again, in vain.

  Although few besides MacArthur realized it, the days of his virtually unlimited authority as American shogun were over. So were his hopes that he could, by sheer force of will and law, transform Japan into a society embodying his own rather utopian hopes for mankind, including renouncing the use of military force forever.

  In fact, although no one knew it yet, the shift in the American policy toward Japan was coming just in time.

  —

  MacArthur made only two trips outside Japan in his first four years as head of SCAP. The first was to the Philippines, for Quezon’s reinternment. The other was in the midst of his titanic battle over the final version of NSC 13/2, in September 1948, when he journeyed to Seoul, South Korea, for the inauguration of the country’s first postwar president, Syngman Rhee.

  He arrived on September 9, a bright clear day. Photographs show a relaxed MacArthur wearing a lei as he stood beside the two men of the hour, President Rhee and General Hodge. If Rhee looked tense but triumphant, Hodge was troubled and defeated. It had not been a happy three years since he had arrived as head of United States Forces in Korea (USFIK).

  It was back in 1943 in Cairo when President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek had pledged that once Japan was defeated, “in due course Korea shall become free and independent.” The instruments for the liberation of Korea we
re to be the American and Red Armies.

  Six days after Stalin declared war on Japan, Russian troops had poured across the border from Siberia into northern Korea. Three weeks after that, General Hodge and advance elements of his XXIV Corps had landed in the south.22 Once Japan surrendered, both sides had agreed to disband Japanese forces in Korea according to the boundary drawn up by Captain Dean Rusk and his colleagues, with the Soviets accepting surrender of Japanese forces north of the 38th parallel and the Americans doing the same south of the line.

  Then in the midst of this chaotic situation there arrived in Seoul Korea’s elder statesman, Dr. Syngman Rhee.

  Rhee was a lot like Douglas MacArthur: a man driven by a strong ego and a strong sense of destiny mixed with an imperious manner that some found admirable and others found overbearing. Five years older than MacArthur, he had been active in Korean nationalist movements for four decades. He had been present in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when Teddy Roosevelt brought the Russian and Japanese ambassadors together to sign the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War. Rhee had tried to persuade Roosevelt to guarantee Korea’s independence in the treaty even as Japan was closing in on the peninsula, but failed.

  For the next forty years Rhee lived as a wandering exile, first in the United States, then in China as head of the anti-Japanese provisional government of Korea. The war over, he returned to Korea in October on MacArthur’s Bataan II, poised in his own mind and those of his supporters, to become the natural first president of the new Korean republic.

  That required some doing. In December 1945, Russia, the United States, and Great Britain tried to set up a joint commission that would establish a trusteeship over Korea for a period of up to five years, as the first step to forming a provisional government and granting independence—Rhee’s great dream.23 The dream became a nightmare five months later, as the Communists closed the border between the two halves of Korea and the issue of Korean independence became caught up in the early rumblings of the Cold War.

  For the next two and a half years there was frantic activity on either side of the 38th parallel, but in two very different directions. The Soviets on their side began building up a Communist-led Korean army and eliminating any anti-Communist opposition, while Hodges and the Americans in the south struggled to repatriate Japanese soldiers and civilians to their homeland and restore some semblance of law and order.

  Everything that MacArthur excelled at totally eluded Hodge, including juggling different administrative tasks such as establishing law courts, a working police force, and bus and sanitary services, while also securing the trust and cooperation of leading political groups. Unlike MacArthur, who had won Japanese hearts with his obvious respect for Japanese culture and people, Hodge did not get along with Koreans. He had been overheard saying that Koreans were a “similar breed of cat” to the Japanese—not a remark geared to endear him to Koreans who had suffered from thirty-five years of brutal Japanese colonial rule.24

  Hodge made things worse by having to rely on Koreans who had cooperated with Japanese occupiers in the civil administration of Korea, especially the hated police. In the minds of many, Hodge ruled Korea using a cabinet of quislings of widely differing political stripes (the Soviets, of course, installed only trustworthy, obedient Communists and dealt with political differences via a firing squad). Above all, he had a hard time negotiating with the tense, brittle Syngman Rhee. By that fateful August day, the pair were barely speaking to each other.

  The result was an increasingly Soviet-style totalitarian state in the north, led by Stalin’s willing puppet Kim Il Sung, whom Stalin supplied with a Communist army of 187,000 men complete with Russian-built artillery and tanks and planes. Violence and disaffection reigned in the south, however, much of it engineered and encouraged by Kim’s Communist agents sneaking across the border. The first real trouble broke out in the autumn of 1946, when a Communist-led railway strike in Busan in South Korea spread to Daegu, and then to other southern towns. The strike turned violent, and General Hodge and USFIK had to establish an armed Korean constabulary—the ancestor of the Republic of Korea army, or ROK army—to put it down.

  In the meantime, both the United Nations and the State Department, which oversaw the American part of the Korean Trusteeship Commission, maintained the fiction that the granting of independence to a united Korea was still possible. In 1947 the General Assembly even passed a resolution setting the stage for elections of a national Korean government, and withdrawal of all occupying forces, American and Soviet.

  MacArthur was firmly in favor of the idea. He confessed to William Sebald that he thought the peninsula was militarily indefensible, and would be a distraction in the event of any future conflict with the Soviet Union or with Communist China’s Mao Zedong. “I wouldn’t put my foot in Korea,” MacArthur allegedly said after a meeting with General Hodge. “It belongs to the State Department,” which was technically true, since the administration of American occupation forces there fell to Foggy Bottom’s jurisdiction, not MacArthur’s SCAP. “They wanted it and they got it. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”25

  The problem was that while the Americans were eager to leave Korea, the Soviets were not. They were still consolidating the power of their puppet, Kim Il Sung, who by the start of 1948 had purged or assassinated the last of his Communist rivals and was now undisputed ruler of northern Korea from his capital at Pyongyang. When the UN-appointed commission requested permission to send representatives to supervise elections in the north, the Soviets and Kim refused. The elections in the south proceeded anyway, in May 1948. Syngman Rhee emerged as the clear winner, although the regime in the north refused to recognize the result.

  The Communists’ goal was becoming clear: to turn Korea into a Soviet satellite by imposing military rule in the north and fomenting revolution in the south. In response, the State Department did little or nothing. Its attention was diverted by the deteriorating situation in China, where Chiang’s forces were retreating to a small remaining enclave along the coast. When Congress passed a $10 million military assistance package for Rhee’s new government of South Korea, Foggy Bottom dithered over the export permits so that barely a trickle ever reached Seoul.26

  But if Washington had lost interest in what was happening to Korea, MacArthur and Bill Sebald had not. Sebald traveled to Korea six times between 1947 and 1948, paying visits to Syngman Rhee’s American advisors and to President Truman’s special advisor on Korea, John Muccio, who stopped in Tokyo for a week in August 1948 to brief MacArthur on what was going on.

  As theater commander of American forces in East Asia, MacArthur knew he would be involved if something truly awful happened on the peninsula. But the American Army mission in South Korea, the Korean Military Advisory Group or KMAG, and its commander, Brigadier General William Roberts, assured him the fledgling Republic of Korea army he was building would be able to handle any threat from North Korea. One night at dinner, Roberts spoke boastfully of “my army” and “my forces,” and assured both Sebald and MacArthur, “I can handle the Commies.”27

  So it was with a reassured and calm mind that MacArthur landed in Seoul, and spoke to the assembled crowd at the ceremony inaugurating the new president of the new Republic of Korea, Syngman Rhee.

  “I am profoundly moved to stand on the soil of Korea in this historic hour,” he began, “to see liberty reborn, the cause of right and justice. For forty years I have observed with admiration the efforts of your patriots to cast off the oppressive bonds of foreign power.” He went on to describe how the growing ideological conflict between East and West, between Communism and democracy, “may well determine the issue of a world at war or a world at peace.” But none of this should influence the future of Korea as a free and independent country: “[Y]our national rebirth today is living proof that the concept of human freedom is far too deeply rooted in human society to ever perish.”28

  But MacArthur was wrong, at least in part. On September 9, 1948, the spirit of freedo
m was finally extinguished above the 38th parallel, as Kim Il Sung declared his People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, headquartered at Pyongyang, while claiming sovereignty over the entire peninsula. The question now was whether freedom could survive in South Korea without American help.

  Events soon made the answer an urgent one. Guerrilla fighting had already broken out along the border between North and South in April. In October the Fourteenth Regiment of the ROK army broke out in mutiny and seized the cities of Yosu and Sunchon. No one doubted who had inspired the revolt, and what the objective was. With Hodge gone, along with virtually every American soldier, it took the South Korean constabulary three days to retake Yosun, and almost as long to reclaim Sunchon. Altogether, some 30,000 Koreans were killed, both soldiers and civilians. American advisors like Lieutenant Robert Shackleton were sickened by the sight of Communist atrocities, including cold-blooded mass killings. “Henceforth the terms Communist and butcher were to me synonymous,” he remembered afterward. Yet Shackleton estimated his own Korean troops killed at least 300 Korean civilians through indiscriminate machine-gun fire.29

  It was a grim foretaste of the slaughter to come. Yet only days before, on September 20, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had released a study that concluded, “[T]he best interests of the Korean people would be served by the withdrawal of all occupying forces from Korea at the earliest practicable date.”30 The Soviets agreed; in December they announced that their troops would be leaving after the New Year. There was no reason for them to stay. By now Kim Il Sung had a well-equipped army of nearly a quarter million men, and a 200-plane air force.31 He was poised to take South Korea anytime he chose. Once his master, Josef Stalin, gave the go-ahead, the unification of Korea by military force would be a reality.