The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (20 page)

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 out 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.

But that incident had helped trigger the back-to-back invitations Truman proffered to MacArthur in September and again October 1945 to come home, consult with the president, be honored by a grateful nation, perhaps be given one more Distinguished Service Cross, and then address a joint session of Congress. A request by a commander in chief, a man newly elevated to the presidency under tragic circumstances in wartime, was never actually a request, though it was masked as one; it was essentially an order. MacArthur nonetheless did not treat it as such and declined, twice. Four-star general he might be, senior American officer he might be, but that was not something any officer should do: if the president summoned, you came. Thus he had been disrespectful to Truman from the start, acting as if they were equals (at best) and there were no chain of command. He was too busy in Tokyo, the general had said, and the dangers of leaving were too great, because of “the extraordinarily dangerous and inherently inflammable situation, which exists here.” Truman was livid—this was coming from a man who had only recently said he needed only half the allotted number of troops because things were going so well. MacArthur was very aware of what he was doing. He told one aide, “And I intend to be the first man in our history to refuse to [return home at a presidential request]. I am going to tell them I have work to do and cannot spare the time.” What MacArthur told his people privately was even more grandiose.
If he left Japan right now, he insisted, tremors would run through that country as well as other parts of Asia, which would believe themselves abandoned. He also told some of his aides that he would return home on his own terms and when it best suited his own needs. It would perhaps be an emotional return tied to a Republican convention. When one friend suggested to MacArthur that now might be the right time to go, all the anger and paranoia flared: “Don’t think for a minute I will go now. At one point I might have done so, but the president, the State Department and Marshall have all been attacking me. They might have won out, but the Reds came out against me and the Communists booed me and that raised me to a pinnacle without which they might have licked me. Thanks to the Soviets I am on top. I would like to pin a medal on their a——.”

The two men, president and general, could not have had more contrasting career curves. MacArthur was already a great national hero in those hard pre–World War II years when Truman was still going from failure to failure; in the early 1930s, when MacArthur had exceeded orders and crushed the Bonus Army, it would not have taken a great stretch of the imagination to envision Harry Truman, then at the low point in his own career, as one of its members. The high-water mark of his career at that point, his service in the American Expeditionary Force in France in World War I, as a captain in the Missouri National Guard, seemed hardly a footnote compared to MacArthur’s extraordinary exploits in that same war. And yet none of that should have mattered starting in 1945: one was president and the other was a general.

From the beginning, Truman was uneasy with the idea of a commander outside his reach. There was no doubt that he thought frequently of relieving MacArthur. But when someone suggested to Truman, after MacArthur had claimed he didn’t need the allotted troops, that perhaps it was time to relieve him, the president answered, “Wait a minute, W-a-i-t a minute.” That was MacArthur’s great ace in the hole, the fact that the political consequences of removing him were so great because he had a formidable political constituency, one quite deliberately fashioned.

When John Foster Dulles returned to Washington from his meetings with MacArthur in those first grim days of the Korean War and conferred with Truman, he recommended a change of commanders. MacArthur, he said, seemed too old, and he was bothered by the way his attention span seemed to waver. But Truman already felt himself locked in. His hands were tied, he told Dulles, because MacArthur had been so active politically in the country for so long and had even been mentioned, the president noted, as a possible Republican presidential candidate. He could not be recalled, Truman added, “without causing a tremendous reaction in the country,” where MacArthur “had been
built up to heroic stature.” It was a remarkable admission: the president of the United States was about to go to war in a distant land, his armed forces commanded by a general he not only disliked but, more important, distrusted, but whom he feared replacing for political reasons.

MacArthur saw himself as a great surviving link to a magnificent American past; only Washington and Lincoln were his peers. (“My major advisers, now, one founded the United States, the other saved it. If you go back into their lives you can find all the answers,” he once said.) When he took over as the supreme commander in the Pacific, one of the first things he did was hang a portrait of Washington behind his desk, and then when the war was done, according to Sidney Mashbir, an intelligence officer, he saluted the portrait of Washington, saying, “Sir, they weren’t wearing red coats, but we whipped them just the same.” His hatred of the capitol and the men who presided there in those years was palpable. Faubion Bowers, his military secretary in Tokyo and a man privy to his private thoughts as they came pouring out during monologues on rides in his car, thought MacArthur hated
all
presidents. Roosevelt to him was Rosenfeld, and Truman he would refer to as “that Jew in the White House.” “Which Jew in the White House?” the puzzled Bowers once asked. “Truman,” MacArthur answered. “You can tell by his name. Look at his face.” Then one day MacArthur disabused Bowers of the idea that he disliked every president. “Hoover,” he said, “wasn’t so bad.”

MacArthur was given to paranoia anyway, and like most paranoiacs, he quickly made more than his share of enemies. By the spring of 1949, both the State Department and Defense were working on a plan that would effectively diminish a good deal of his power in Japan. Dean Acheson was probably the driving force behind the plans. The idea was to split up the political and military jobs in Tokyo. MacArthur would eventually be brought home to great acclaim, and prominent nonideological replacements would thereupon take up the two jobs, with Maxwell Taylor, a rising star of the Army in World War II, slated to take over the military half. MacArthur, however, got wind of these developments, contacted his own powerful allies in Washington, and brought the plans to the attention of Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in what the latter called “a scathing diatribe, the like of which I have seldom read.” The tone of it surprised Bradley, who noted that he had never realized “the deep distrust with which General MacArthur viewed our State Department in general and Dean Acheson in particular.” Indeed, noted Bradley, MacArthur must have viewed him as a traitor as well for selling out to State on this issue.

Things never really got any better. Truman and MacArthur were almost never on the same track, with the same aims. They saw the war that they were about to fight in different contexts; they had, it would turn out, quite different
ideas of what would constitute an acceptable victory and how much of the nation’s resources ought to be committed to attaining it. Yet, starting on June 25, 1950, their lives would be twined together as that of a general and a president rarely had been in American history. Truman would find his presidency severely damaged by his inability to control MacArthur, while the general would find his place in history severely damaged by his failure to respect and to take the full measure of the president.