The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (88 page)

The second part of their meeting proved far more interesting. MacArthur knew that the invasion planning was at a serious stage, and as the putative commander, he wanted to get his own feelings in: “I will not consider going into any part of the Japanese islands unless the Japanese armies in Manchuria are contained by the Russians.” That would be strong stuff for them back in Washington, Freeman knew, a general with MacArthur’s rather considerable political following insisting that it would be a no-go in Japan unless the Russians entered the war. When the meeting was over, MacArthur’s aide Bonnie Fellers immediately had MacArthur’s views typed up and cleared so that Freeman could bring them back to Washington.

There was nothing unusual about what he wanted. Most senior military men believed that, based on their experiences fighting the Japanese on various Pacific islands, the mainland battle would be a cruel struggle, house by house, cave by cave, with terrible casualties borne by both sides. That Douglas MacArthur, even in 1944 the American commander with the closest ties to the American right wing, wanted the Russians in was important. But what made these views even more important was the fact that, twelve years later, in 1956, when MacArthur had more than ever become the darling of the right wing, those views had become an embarrassment. He was, after all, a man who had always believed that the truth was whatever he said it was at that moment, and in the early 1950s he had started giving interviews claiming that, had he been in charge of the decision-making in those final days of World War II, he would never have brought the Russians into the war.

That was the MacArthur that all too many other high officials in the Pentagon had dealt with too often in the past, the MacArthur who redid history to suit his immediate needs. Now the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower decided to strike back. When that happened, Paul Freeman got a private tip from friends in Washington warning him that the original papers
he had brought back from the Pacific were about to be released and that he should keep his head down because it was going to get very ugly for a few days. The exchange was a reflection of the internal struggle between the two Douglas MacArthurs: the pragmatic military man who wanted all the help he could get before a difficult invasion, and the general who had become a politician and who needed to bend old facts to fit them into a new political reality in which he had never been wrong.

But in the first months of 1951, more frustrated than ever, MacArthur moved toward a historic showdown with the president of the United States. At first it was quite a one-sided affair—the general nicked Washington and then nicked it again, and only when administration officials refused to respond did his challenges become more serious and frontal. In a way, the people in Washington had been setting themselves up for something like this for almost a decade. In their minds, dealing with MacArthur had always been like making a deal with the devil. They had few illusions about him, or how little loyalty he was likely to show to their policies at critical moments. But Washington had usually gotten what it wanted when it needed it, not just the talent, but the myth of the talent, especially vital back early in World War II. But the longer the men in Washington had delayed confronting MacArthur because the price seemed so large, the more the price had gone up because the myth, which Washington had helped create, kept growing, fed quite consciously by the general himself.

For more than a decade, two presidents and their top advisers had allowed MacArthur to lionize himself at their expense. When, in the years following World War II, they had less need for his talent, they nonetheless delayed any confrontation out of fear of him—exactly because he had already attained too much stature. (Although Truman had often complained about Roosevelt’s deification of the general, and spoke privately of how Roosevelt should have let the Japanese capture MacArthur at Bataan, he too had feared taking him on and let the cult continue.) Each year not only had the price gone up, but the timing had become less favorable for them, as the political forces aligned with the general became more powerful. Now, very late in the game, when they indeed had no choice but to pay that price, it had become exorbitant. For an elaborate process of self-deification had been taking place for a very long time, mostly at government expense. Now the piper had to be paid.

But whatever chance MacArthur might have had of bringing some of the Joint Chiefs with him had disappeared with Ridgway’s successes. Admiral Forrest Sherman, the naval chief and probably the most hawkish figure of the Chiefs, who had momentarily seemed like an ally when there was so much talk of being driven off the peninsula, was now slipping away. As that happened, MacArthur turned his fire ever more precisely on administration officials and
the president himself. They were the ones blocking his will, stealing his final victory from him, the men, in William Manchester’s words, “thwarting his last crusade.”

What began now was, if not a deliberate campaign to force the president to fire him, then surely the next closest thing. If he could not have his way in Korea, he was going to do all he could to bring down those who stood in his way. Specifically, he now set about systematically violating Truman’s December 6 directive. The gag rule was a joke, he said. He was, he told one luncheon guest, “an old man of seventy-one” and therefore had nothing to lose by ignoring it. If they fired him, so be it. Clay Blair, who wrote more meticulously than any other historian about this stage of the war, put the number of violations of the gag order at six, some major, some minor. “To MacArthur watchers,” he wrote, “a pattern seemed to be emerging. MacArthur would fly to Korea, visit the battlefront, then issue a communiqué containing criticism of the Administration’s war policies. But again, no one in Washington felt inclined to rebut or reprimand him. Officially MacArthur was ignored.” Among other things he had taken a quick slap at Truman in speaking of the war as a “theoretical military stalemate.” Reporters quickly turned that into a more down-to-earth phrase, “die for a tie”: in other words, good men were still going to have to die for a stalemate in Korea.

The last thing the people in Washington wanted, now that they seemed able to contain the Chinese armies, was an additional war with their own theater commander. But a war it would be. On March 7, for instance, MacArthur started out a press conference in Korea by tweaking President Truman, with references to what he called the serious, indeed abnormal inhibitions placed on him, the lack of additional forces given him and other restraints imposed from Washington. Then, at a moment when Washington was just beginning to contemplate trying to move Beijing to the peace table, he mocked the Chinese for their failures and their own limitations—virtually taunting a proud enemy that had just defeated him. That in itself greatly angered the president because MacArthur had just made it a great deal harder to negotiate with China.

In a military sense, MacArthur was also becoming increasingly critical of Ridgway’s strategy. All that Ridgway had gained, he now said publicly and with contempt, was “an accordion war”—a war where the UN forces might move up twenty or thirty miles during an offensive, only to move back when the Chinese attacked again in force. If no one in Washington thought such a war was ideal, they were convinced that it was punishing the Chinese infinitely more than their own forces, perhaps on a casualty ratio of ten or fifteen to one, and that the alternatives were much worse. Yet it was an insulting phrase, and Ridgway smoldered when he heard it. Here was his superior speaking so
condescendingly about what he and, perhaps even more important, the men fighting under him had seen as a considerable success. It was an assault on their morale, if nothing else, from someone who was supposed to be on their side. Five days after the MacArthur press conference, Ridgway held his own. For UN troops to reach the thirty-eighth parallel, he said, would be a “tremendous victory.” Then he added—as clear a dissent from the views of MacArthur as he had yet uttered—“We didn’t set out to conquer China. We set out to stop Communism: we have demonstrated the superiority on the battlefield of our men. If China fails to throw us into the sea, that is a defeat for her of incalculable proportions. If China fails to drive us from Korea, she will have failed monumentally.” Years later, MacArthur paid Ridgway back. Although he had been MacArthur’s own choice to succeed Walker, in an interview with Jim Lucas, a star writer for the Scripps Howard chain, which was always favorable to him, he ranked Ridgway “at the bottom of the list” of his field commanders.

There was, of course, more to come. MacArthur wrote Hugh Baillie, the head of United Press International, and one of his chief journalistic admirers, that with a force of the size needed to hold the line at the thirty-eighth parallel, as Washington now wanted to limit the war, he could also drive the Chinese back across the Yalu. Most assuredly Matt Ridgway did not agree. That was his fourth violation of the gag rule. Two far more important assaults on the administration were still ahead. On March 20, MacArthur received a top secret cable from Washington notifying him that the administration felt it was the right time for a major peace initiative. With the new successes that Ridgway had enjoyed on the battlefield, there was a chance of talking, and eventually stabilizing the lines at the thirty-eighth parallel and ending this grim, mutually hopeless war. It was an embryonic feeler at best, and there was an awareness that Mao might not yet be ready to move forward, but at least it was a beginning.

The important thing was that Washington was ready to talk. Truman intended to make a major speech in the near future suggesting that both sides go to the negotiating table and end up somewhere back near where the war started. To MacArthur that kind of stalemate was nothing less than a defeat. Informed of what Washington intended to do, he set out quite deliberately to sabotage it. On March 24, as he was paying another of his visits to Korea, his office released a communiqué again taunting the Chinese military leadership.

“Of even greater significance than our tactical success,” his communiqué said, “has been the clear revelation that this new enemy, Red China, of such exaggerated and vaunted military power, lacks the industrial capacity to provide adequately many critical items essential to the conduct of modern war.” He then enumerated some of what he saw as China’s weaknesses: the Chinese enemy
“lacks manufacturing bases and those raw materials needed to produce, maintain and operate even moderate air and sea power, and he cannot provide the essentials for successful ground operations, such as tanks, heavy artillery and other refinements science has introduced into the conduct of military campaigns.” He then mentioned China’s inability to control the sea and air. When these limitations were “coupled with the inferiority of ground fire power, as in the enemy’s case, the resulting disparity is such that it cannot be overcome by bravery, however fanatical, or the most gross indifference to human loss.”

It was a remarkable, singularly insulting document, a simultaneous assault on two capitols, Beijing
and
Washington. With its publication, whatever chance there was of a first step toward a peace process was lost for the time being. It was, in Blair’s words, “the most flagrant and challenging” violation of the Truman directive yet. His communiqué reached Washington about ten o’clock on the night of March 23. Dean Acheson, Bob Lovett (by then the number two man at Defense), and Dean Rusk were together at Acheson’s house and they were all livid. “A major act of sabotage,” Acheson called it. Truman gave no inkling of his own personal decision on what the next step should be, but Acheson, probably the counselor best attuned to him, later wrote that his state of mind “combined disbelief with controlled fury.” His daughter, Margaret, later quoted him as saying, “I couldn’t send a message to the Chinese after that. He [MacArthur] prevented a cease fire proposition right there. I wanted to kick him into the North China Sea right there.”

The communiqué had taken the struggle between the president and the general to a new level. It went to the question of who the commander in chief was. The next day, Truman met with his top people, and the idea of a peace proposal was dropped. With that, the central issue became not so much whether to fire MacArthur, but when. Lovett, usually so low-key, wanted to do it then and there. Marshall fretted about the anger such an act might create on the Hill, and its effect on the defense appropriations bill. Acheson was nervous about its broader political ramifications. There was also the question of the Joint Chiefs—would they come along without a dissenting voice? Getting senior military men to turn on one of their own was always a sensitive business. If just one chief failed to go along with them, MacArthur’s position would be greatly enhanced. But there was also no doubt that Truman had made his decision and was merely waiting for the right moment.

That came soon enough. MacArthur had received, at roughly the same time, a letter from the Republican leader in the House, Joe Martin, a passionate backer of Chiang and a China Lobby member, soliciting his views about Asia, and in particular the use of Chiang’s troops in opening a second front against the Chinese. This was something Martin greatly favored. “Your admirers are legion and
the respect you command is enormous,” Martin wrote. MacArthur, he added, could answer confidentially or publicly. To most military men this might seem like a trap set by a tricky politician to catch an innocent, unworldly general: to MacArthur it was nothing less than a golden opportunity.

When MacArthur answered Martin on March 20, he set no restrictions on how Martin could use his words. His views, he said, were “to meet force with maximum counterforce, as we have never failed to do in the past. Your view with respect to the utilization of the Chinese forces on Formosa is in conflict with neither logic, nor this tradition.” Then he added, a now familiar litany of explanation and complaint: “that we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there fight it with words; that if we lose the war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe would most probably avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.”