Truman’s personal rage at this sudden barrage of MacArthur “shooting off his mouth,” as the president put it, was real and understandable. “This looks like the last straw,” he wrote in his diary. “Rank insubordination.” Acheson called it “a declaration of war.” Truman called Acheson, Marshall, and Averell Harriman, as well as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Omar Bradley. Ironically, the previous day the Joint Chiefs had issued MacArthur approval to attack air bases in Manchuria and the Shantung peninsula if Communist planes tried a large attack on his force—just the loosening of the rules of engagement that MacArthur had been begging for.53 But that order was quickly shelved as Bradley huddled with the others to decide what to do about the president’s insubordinate subordinate.
What followed was either a tragedy or a triumph of administrative finesse, depending on one’s perspective. Acheson’s view, and Harriman’s, was that MacArthur should be given the shove at once. Marshall and Bradley were more circumspect; they worried that MacArthur’s dismissal would draw the ire of the Republican Congress, and make getting military appropriations that much harder. Acheson had to agree. It would “produce the biggest fight of your administration” to fire the general who was not only the Republicans’ hero in Korea but the hero of Bataan and the war in the Pacific—a war that many Americans imagined MacArthur had won single-handedly (MacArthur would not have disagreed). But it had to be done; and it was necessary to get the unanimous agreement of the Joint Chiefs before doing it, to provide as much political cover as possible.54
And so the discussion ran on, through the afternoon and into April 7 and the weekend. The question was no longer whether MacArthur had to go, but how to deliver the coup de grâce. Truman wrote in his diary on the 7th, “It is the unanimous opinion of all that MacArthur be relieved. All four so advise.”
Someone suggested relieving MacArthur of the Korean command only, and leaving him in charge of the occupation of Japan. This idea went nowhere when General Collins pointed out, correctly, that the two commands were so intermingled administratively that it wouldn’t be possible to separate them out. Besides, it wouldn’t remove the real source of friction, MacArthur himself.
On Saturday Marshall and Bradley wrote a personal confidential letter to MacArthur pointing out that he had put the president in an untenable position.
Perhaps they hoped it might prompt MacArthur to apologize, but it was never sent. Instead, the Joint Chiefs met on Sunday and after two hours of deliberation Bradley told Lovett that “if it should be the President’s decision to relieve MacArthur, the JCS concurred.”55
That night the president and Acheson attended a dinner sponsored by Latin American foreign ministers and a reception at the Pan American Union that dragged on late into the night. Neither man said a word to anyone about what was about to take place—certainly nothing to anyone who could possibly leak the word back to Tokyo.56
On Monday morning the Big Four conclave gathered again, this time with General Bradley and JCS’s formal endorsement of the relief of MacArthur in hand. Everyone’s views were now the same: MacArthur must be relieved of all his posts and a successor appointed. Bradley proposed Matt Ridgway; Truman happily agreed. The group would return the next day, April 10, to draw up the final orders for dispatch to Korea and Tokyo.
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On April 11 MacArthur was just finishing lunch at the American embassy in Tokyo. The guests were Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, a Democrat, and William Stern, the executive vice president of Northwest Airlines. MacArthur was in a relaxed but thoughtful mood. He was planning to fly to Korea that afternoon, to meet again with Ridgway on the growing threat of another Chinese attack.
It was the overall impression in Washington that General Ridgway was on the same page as Truman and the rest on the need for a cease-fire, and for stabilizing the front line at the 38th parallel “as the first step in ending the aggression and the war.”57 Nothing could have been further from the truth. Ridgway was as impatient as MacArthur in wanting to push the war forward into the north, to finish off their vicious, hated enemy once and for all—even to the border of Communist China again, if it came to that. A MacArthur-Ridgway conference that evening would no doubt have drawn up fresh plans for extending the war, not winding it down.
As the three men talked and joked, the phone rang in the outer office. Jean got up and went to answer it.
Someone who knew her would have said she looked wan and emaciated. People had noticed the physical change that had come over her during the war in Korea, especially since the crisis in December. She ate little and lost weight; she had trouble sleeping at night. Sid Huff advised her to take sedatives; she refused. When the general’s plane took off for Korea she would pace for hours, watching and waiting until he returned. Then she would turn up at the airport, where MacArthur would deplane, and his first words were “Where’s Jean?”
They would drive back in the dark to the embassy, holding hands in the backseat. Jean would then tuck him into bed and insist on staying up until she knew he was asleep. She would head for her bedroom, draw the shades, and lie in bed. But sleep would rarely come.58
Then in February the worst of the crisis had passed, and Jean MacArthur began to regain her old spirit. With guests and visitors she was again the same charming, ebullient person as she was that afternoon when she went to the study and picked up the receiver.
It was Sid Huff, and he sounded shaken. He had just heard on the radio a news bulletin. It said: “President Truman has just removed General MacArthur from his Far Eastern and Korean Commands and from the direction of the occupation of Japan.”
Jean couldn’t believe it. There had been no word, nothing, from Washington. Yet, Sid Huff said, there was no doubt it was true.59
MacArthur looked up as his wife came back to the table, her face ashen. She bent down to whisper the news. MacArthur listened without expression, and sat silent for a moment or two. Then he turned to Jean and said in a loud but gentle tone, “Jeannie, we’re going home at last.”
The now somber luncheon finished without rushing; MacArthur wouldn’t be going to the airport after all. Instead, when the guests left, he quietly phoned Courtney Whitney and asked him to meet him at the Dai-ichi building.
They had a lot to talk about.60
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MacArthur, of course, had sensed something was coming.
On April 9 General Almond, who had been in Tokyo for a week of family leave, stopped by his office on his way back to Korea. MacArthur seemed unusually quiet, almost disconsolate.
He told his favorite field commander, “I may not see you anymore, so good-bye, Ned.”
Almond was startled. He pointed out that MacArthur frequently came over to visit the commanders and troops in Korea. Surely he wasn’t going to stop now.
“That isn’t the question,” MacArthur then said. “I have become politically involved and may be relieved by the President.”
Almond dismissed the idea. “Well, General, I consider that absurd and I don’t believe the President has the intention of taking such a drastic action. We’ll expect to see you in X Corps headquarters very soon.”
“Well, perhaps so” was all MacArthur said, and then they parted ways.61
It was also possible that MacArthur had gotten word of what was brewing when he spoke to a team of army brass arriving that day from Washington for a conference, headed by Secretary of the Army General Frank Pace. We know Pace briefed him in private for more than two hours, very likely over the trouble that was brewing over his letter to Speaker Martin, and how it wasn’t going away.62
Or perhaps MacArthur simply knew that if he had been Bradley or Lawton Collins and one of his generals had behaved as MacArthur had done, he would have ordered him dismissed. It wasn’t a question of if but when—and how.
Certainly what seemed to bother him most then and later was not the firing, but the manner of it. The fact that he first learned about it from someone who had heard it on the radio deeply rankled, unde
rstandably so. “No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Why this had happened is not clear. In reconstructing what went wrong, Dean Acheson insisted that an official order had been sent as Truman instructed, via cable to Ambassador Muccio in Seoul, who was to pass it along to General Pace, who then would head back to Tokyo with the order in hand to present to MacArthur. If that seemed unnecessarily roundabout, Acheson wrote, they thought this would spare CINCFE the embarrassment of having the news leak through normal army communications. That seems less than convincing, since it was exactly what happened. When the cable company failed to deliver the message to Muccio on time, Pace only got the orders the next day while in Ridgway’s command tent. Hail was streaming down on the canvas so hard he could barely hear the message.
But by then it was too late. The orders had been resent by normal army channels, the word leaked out to the press, and so MacArthur was, if not exactly the last to know, certainly the last major principal to get word of the president’s decision.63 Was it a deliberate snub? Almost certainly not. Was Truman disappointed that MacArthur found out about his dismissal by third hand? Probably not.
In any case, most observers that day and the next agree that MacArthur took the news very well. “MacArthur wanted only to discuss the problems that would confront me after his departure,” Whitney remembered with amazement.64 Matt Ridgway, when he learned that he was to be not only the new UN commander but CINCFE and lead the occupation forces in Japan, flew the next day to Tokyo to meet with his predecessor.
He was naturally curious to learn how MacArthur was handling the blow. But “he was entirely himself,” Ridgway remembered, “composed, quiet, temperate, friendly, and helpful.” MacArthur made some remarks about Truman’s health, about how “he wouldn’t live six months” because he had malignant hypertension, some doctor had told MacArthur: it was an allusion to the possibility that when Truman had fired him the president may not have been in his right mind. In any case, MacArthur had “no trace of bitterness or anger in his tone” and seemed to have accepted calmly “what must have been a devastating blow to a professional soldier at the peak of his career.”65
But perhaps it was not so strange. Perhaps underlying his stoic calm was a sense of profound relief. For almost ten years—since December 8, 1941—he had been in a state of constant alert and tension, shouldering one major burden after another with bigger and bigger consequences for any misstep, including now calculating the possibility of triggering a nuclear World War Three in Korea. It had been a decade of a steady war of nerves and constant physical strain for a man in his sixties, together with a constant seesaw of emotions, from utter defeat and humiliation to triumphant return and final victory in 1945.
Instead of returning to the States to a well-deserved retirement, however, he had found himself sole ruler of eighty million Japanese, charged with the mammoth task of rebuilding his broken foe. Then suddenly in the last week of June 1950 came a surprise attack all too reminiscent of the one in December 1941, followed by the exhilaration of victory at Inchon that gave way to crushing defeat yet again. Finally, just as he managed to reverse the course of the war again, Washington had cut him off at the knees—and all in less than ten months.
It would have demanded a heavy price from anyone, let alone from a seventy-one-year-old. It already had. Of all America’s leaders at the start of World War Two, he was the only one except George Marshall still standing. All the rest had retired or died. After fifty years of active service MacArthur was more than ready to take on more. But perhaps he was also willing to walk away. Perhaps his exclamation to Jean when he heard the news—“we’re going home”—was less the expression of stoic calm or resignation to the inevitable than a heartfelt expression of relief.
Because he was going home—but not before the Japanese people had their say.
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The day the announcement of MacArthur’s dismissal was made public, the liberal Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun published “Lament for General MacArthur”:
We have lived with General MacArthur from the end of the war until today…When the Japanese people faced the unprecedented situation of defeat, and fell into the kyodatsu condition of exhaustion and despair, it was General MacArthur who taught us the merits of democracy and pacifism and guided us with kindness along this bright path. As if pleased with his own children growing up, he took pleasure in the Japanese people, yesterday’s enemy, walking step by step toward democracy, and kept encouraging us.66
Over the next four days until MacArthur’s scheduled departure on April 16, similar tributes poured in from all across Japan, including from Japan’s other major newspaper, Mainichi Shimbun. The Japanese Diet passed a unanimous resolution praising MacArthur for his accomplishments; so did the Korean National Assembly. Japan’s prime minister, Yoshida, sent a personal message to MacArthur expressing regret at his departure and thanking him for all he had done for Japan; Syngman Rhee sent a similar note, thanking him for saving South Korea.
On the Sunday before, April 15, a regular procession of GHQ staff and wives came to the embassy to say their farewells to Jean MacArthur. Some were emotional; Marshall and Willoughby and Sid Huff had been with her every step since the outbreak of war in 1941. The MacArthur home was now bare; the furniture had been all but packed up in preparation for shipping to the States. Jean and the general received them all with grace and friendliness “as usual,” as William Sebald remembered, “without the slightest hint of bitterness and resentment.”67
Sebald’s last interview with MacArthur at the Dai-ichi building was more difficult. “I was so keyed up that I was unable to speak,” Sebald recalled. “A tear rolled down my cheek.” They had been constant intimates for more than five years; they had negotiated their way through a seemingly endless series of hurdles, from the war crimes trials and the Soviets on the Far Eastern Commission, to the outbreak of war in Korea—not to mention the hurdles thrown up by the policymakers in Washington.
It was hard saying goodbye.
Finally Sebald said, “The present state of Japan is a monument to you and I would hope that everything possible could be done to preserve it.” MacArthur offered Sebald a cigarette as they sat down. They were discussing whether MacArthur should issue a statement urging the Japanese people to support and cooperate with the new head of SCAP, General Ridgway. MacArthur shook his head. He knew the statement was unnecessary; the Japanese would continue on the constructive path they were already on and needed no encouragement.
He was more somber about the war in Korea. He had no doubt that a cabal had engineered his dismissal, perhaps one inspired by Communist agents; he feared it “would result in the eventual crumbling of the entire United States position in the Far East.” He also warned Sebald as they parted: “Bill, the weakness of your position is that you have been too loyal to me. You may have to pay for that loyalty.”68
But without a doubt the visit that mattered most to MacArthur was the one by the emperor himself—“the first time in history,” a Japanese historian noted, “that a Japanese monarch had called upon a foreigner who held no official capacity.”69
Hirohito’s staff had advised him against it. It was MacArthur’s duty, they said, to visit the emperor. But Hirohito went anyway, and the two men spoke for more than an hour. It was the eleventh time they had met and this time, for the first time, MacArthur accompanied the emperor back to his limousine and watched it drive away.70
The biggest surprise of all, however, came as dawn broke on April 16, 1951. Douglas, Jean, and little Arthur had risen shortly before 5:00 A.M. in order to get ready. Now, as their limousine hurtled down the road to Haneda airport, they were jammed on all sides between half a million and a million Japanese who had been standing there in the predawn darkness for a final glimpse of the man they still called Makassa Gensui, or Field Marshal MacArthur.71 With them were also tens of thousan
ds of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, waiting to see off the man who had been their supreme commander.
At the airport MacArthur’s honor guard was drawn up, standing stiffly at present arms, as flags snapped in the brisk early-morning breeze. At precisely 7:00 A.M. the familiar green Cadillac limousine pulled up and the MacArthurs stepped out.
Waiting for them were Sebald, Ridgway, Vice Admiral Turner Joy, the senior American naval officer; commander of the British Commonwealth forces Sir Horace Robertson; MacArthur’s old friend General Stratemeyer; and a large party of other American officers and officials.
MacArthur reviewed the guard of honor with his usual impassive scrutinizing gaze and then, as usual, shook hands with the guard’s commander.
Then he walked up to shake hands with the senior officers, smiling and thanking them for their service. Some of their wives were sobbing openly; men like Stratemeyer found their eyes had suddenly gone misty.
MacArthur stepped up to the Japanese officials in attendance. Naotake Sato, president of the Japanese Upper House, held back tears as he and MacArthur shook hands for the last time. Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida’s voice choked as he said final words of farewell.72
After fifteen minutes Jean and Douglas MacArthur turned and headed for the airplane. Lining the airport fence they could see thousands upon thousands of Japanese, some waving, some in tears, all of them wondering what would happen now that the man on whom they had come to rely for everything for six years was leaving their lives.
There was a quick nineteen-gun salute that briskly reverberated through the chilly morning air, and an honor flight of jet fighters and B-29 bombers passed overhead. As the sound of the engines faded, the honor band struck up “Auld Lang Syne.” Then MacArthur took his wife’s arm and guided her onto the plane ramp. They were not going alone: the ever-loyal Sid Huff, Courtney Whitney, Colonel Bunker, and of course Arthur and Ah Cheu were flying with them back to the country that thirteen-year-old Arthur had never seen—and that MacArthur himself had not seen in nearly a decade and a half.
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