The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (89 page)

J
UST AS MACARTHUR
wanted, Joe Martin took the bait and read the MacArthur letter on the floor of the House on April 5. Nothing could have been more political or more potentially injurious to so embattled a government (or, for that matter, more terrifying to its allies).

There was one additional thing that strongly affected Truman and the men immediately around him in those days that was not part of the public record, but helped generate the feeling that MacArthur was a rogue general. As Joseph Goulden wrote in his authoritative book on the Korean War, the National Security Administration, the supersecret institution that was in charge of listening covertly to the rest of the world when it thought it was communicating privately, was picking up intercepts from its listening station at Atsugi Air Base near Tokyo. Mostly that station was used for listening in on the Chinese, but sometimes it listened in on friendly countries as well. In the late winter of 1950–51, the people there picked up a series of intercepts from both the Spanish and Portuguese embassies in Tokyo. Those were embassies with which MacArthur had closer ties than Washington because of Charles Willoughby’s affinity for their respective dictators, Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar. In these messages the Spanish and Portuguese diplomats told their home offices that MacArthur had assured them he could turn Korea into a larger war with the Chinese. Paul Nitze of Policy Planning and his deputy Charles Burton Marshall eventually saw the messages, as did the president. According to Goulden, when Truman read them he slapped his desk in anger. “This is outright
treachery,
” he exclaimed.

The day after Martin revealed the general’s letter, Truman wrote in his diary: “MacArthur shoots another political bomb through Joe Martin, leader of the Republican minority in the House. This looks like the last straw. Rank insubordination.” Then he listed for his own purposes some of MacArthur’s previous actions. He ended the diary note, “I’ve come to the conclusion that our Big General in the Far East must be recalled.” He was still careful at the meetings with his own top people, however, to withhold word on his own decision.
He and the men around him were, they knew all too well, in a lose-lose situation. There was no upside now. A president who dismissed a famed and honored general in the middle of a highly unpopular war could not but suffer in the short term. The immediate political impact would undoubtedly favor the general. History was another thing. Truman was confident that the historians would come along and rescue him, perhaps after he left office, although they might take their own sweet time getting there. He was a shrewd enough politician to know that he would pay dearly in the coin of his administration’s present value. That said, he did not waver. MacArthur’s behavior, he believed, cut to the very core of a democratic society, to civilian control of the military. As for the general’s vision of the war, he later wrote, once again summoning history, it reminded him of Napoleon saying, after he had advanced all the way to Moscow in his ill-fated invasion of Russia, “I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere.”

All of that made the choice surprisingly easy. Truman also believed that there was a curious historical precedent for what was happening. If MacArthur saw himself as someone descended lineally from Washington and Lincoln, Harry Truman saw him less flatteringly, as the modern reincarnation of George McClellan. McClellan was the general who, in Truman’s view, not only served Lincoln poorly in the field, but had treated him with open contempt, often deliberately keeping him waiting before their scheduled meetings. McClellan openly referred to Lincoln as “the original gorilla.”

McClellan’s ego was enormous, greatly exceeding his talents. He had seen himself as nothing less than the savior of the country. If, he said, “the people call upon me to save the country—I
must
save it & cannot respect anything that is in the way.” There were countless letters to him from ordinary citizens, he liked to claim, urging him to run for the presidency or to become the dictator of America. He greatly preferred the idea of dictator, and he was willing, he sometimes added, to make that sacrifice. He hungered to run against Lincoln, which he finally did, unsuccessfully, in 1864, gaining 21 electoral votes to Lincoln’s 212. “A great egoist,” Truman later said of McClellan. “A glorified Napoleon. He even had his picture taken with his hand in his overcoat, like Napoleon.”

In the winter of 1950–51, Truman assigned Ken Hechler, a thirty-six-year old White House staffer, to research the Lincoln-McClellan relationship in the Library of Congress stacks. The parallels, he discovered, were startling, though McClellan, in contrast to MacArthur, was an overly cautious general. He was, Hechler wrote, “so supremely self confident that he could not take orders well; he dabbled in politics; he thought his commander-in-chief Lincoln was crude, ignorant, and uncouth; and he expressed too freely his opposition to emancipating the slaves.”

McClellan’s constant statements on politics, in effect unsolicited political advice—not unlike those of MacArthur—became a steady irritant to Lincoln. Hechler’s memo detailed the lengthy correspondence between the president and the general, culminating, after a year of increasingly contentious messages, in Lincoln’s decision to relieve him of command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862. Hechler handed his research in to the president, only to discover, to his surprise, that Truman knew almost all of it anyway and already took some comfort from it. After all, nearly ninety years later, Lincoln was the most honored of presidential names and McClellan among the least valued of military ones. The president understood that history in this case was going to be his ally, that he was not the first president to have trouble with a general with a superiority complex.

Nonetheless, Truman moved cautiously. Martin spoke on a Thursday. That Friday, April 6, Truman met with Marshall, Acheson, Bradley, and Harriman and, without giving away his own inclinations, asked them what he should do. Marshall was still cautious. Acheson wanted to fire him, but warned, “You will have the biggest fight of your Administration.” Harriman pointed out that Truman had been struggling with the MacArthur conundrum since August 1950. Truman then asked them all to meet again later the same day. He asked Marshall to review all the messages that had gone back and forth from Washington to MacArthur, to check out whether he had actually been insubordinate. Bradley was assigned to check out the feelings of the Joint Chiefs, so critical in any forthcoming political battle. When they met later that day, Marshall suggested not firing MacArthur but bringing him home for consultations. Acheson and Harriman were strongly opposed to that—they envisioned the political circus that would take place. Because Joe Collins was out of reach, it was decided to wait until Bradley could talk to him. They all met again on Saturday, slowly, surely focusing on the inevitable.

When that meeting was over, Marshall and Bradley went back to Marshall’s office. Both were soon to retire. Marshall had already taken a great deal of abuse from the right wing, while Bradley, who had not been in the China line of fire, was still unscathed as a grand figure of World War II. If they relieved MacArthur, Bradley knew, he and a military career of sterling quality would no longer be immune to the ugly virus of the ongoing political struggle. In addition, both men feared that firing MacArthur might politicize the Joint Chiefs. They tried drafting a letter that would, in effect, tell MacArthur to shut up, but it was a little late in the game for that. There were no half measures left. The general had forced their hand.

That Sunday, Bradley met with the Joint Chiefs. They were still trying to figure out some way to avoid a vote on MacArthur’s relief, so odious a decision
for senior military men dealing with the most senior military man of all. There was some talk about separating MacArthur from the Korean command, leaving him only with the defense of Japan, but they knew he would never accept such a solution. In the end they all signed on to relieving him. With that the Chiefs met with Marshall. It was a grim and sobering meeting. Firing MacArthur was like tearing pages out of your most prized history book. Marshall went to each of them and asked if he would concur in the decision should Truman fire MacArthur. Each did, as did Bradley, though he was not a voting chief.

On Monday, April 9, Truman met with his senior people again and for the first time revealed his own position—that MacArthur had to go. Ridgway would replace him and Jim Van Fleet, who had risen to prominence during the Greek civil war, would take command of the Eighth Army in Korea. This, he told them, was about elemental constitutional processes, not about politics. Nothing revealed his attitude as clearly as a mild rebuke he gave to one of his speechwriters working on a statement just before he announced the decision. There had been an argument between Charlie Murphy, a senior White House figure, and Ted Tannenwald, a junior member of the staff and a Harriman man, over the announcement. Tannenwald wanted to include the fact that the decision had been made with the unanimous agreement of the Joint Chiefs and the president’s most senior civilian cabinet members, especially Marshall, whose name still held real authority for many Americans.

At their final meeting on the statement, the president went around the room in what was a speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-tongue moment. Tannenwald again suggested that the president add the fact that he was doing this at the unanimous suggestion of the Joint Chiefs and his senior officials. But Truman quickly cut him off. It might have been as fine a moment as he enjoyed as president, a reflection of his rare ability to understand what the office truly was about and to rise to its needs. “Not tonight, son,” he told Tannenwald. “There’ll be plenty of time for that later. But tonight I’m taking this decision on my own responsibility as President of the United States and I want no one to think I’m trying to share it with anyone else. That will [all] come out in 48 or 72 hours, but as of tonight this is my decision and my decision alone.”

So it was done and the president prepared to address the nation. At the last moment, Averell Harriman noticed that the statement did not mention that Ridgway was replacing MacArthur, so they wrote it in by hand, ushering in, in addition, a more modern era. (The first thing Ridgway did when he took MacArthur’s job was to move a telephone into MacArthur’s old office, thus connecting the commander with the outside world.) The reason he had made
the decision, the president said, was irreconcilable differences over policy. Then he added: “General MacArthur’s place in history as one of our greatest commanders is fully reestablished. The Nation owes him a debt of gratitude for the distinguished and exceptional service which he has rendered his country in posts of great responsibility. For that reason I repeat my regret at the necessity for the action I feel compelled to take in his case.” He was sure, he told staffers, that MacArthur had wanted this confrontation: “I can show just how the dirty so and so double crossed us. I’m sure MacArthur wanted to be fired. He’s going to be regarded as a worse double crosser than McClellan.” Everyone, he added, “seems to think I don’t have courage enough to do it. We’ll let them think so and then we’ll announce it.” Later, privately, he spoke of MacArthur in much blunter terms: “The difficulty was that he wanted to be the Pro-consul, the Emperor of the Far East. He forgot that he was just a general in the army under his commander in chief, the President of the United States.”

MacArthur knew the firing was coming. The day before he had seen Ned Almond. “I may not see you anymore, so good-bye, Ned,” he had said. Almond was puzzled and asked what MacArthur meant. He answered: “I have become politically involved and may be relieved by the president.” That was absurd, Almond insisted.

The firing itself, despite Truman’s largely generous words, was badly botched. Frank Pace, the secretary of the Army, was supposed to tell MacArthur personally, but in Washington, the
Chicago Tribune,
ever hostile to the president, was on to the story, and the White House feared that MacArthur might resign before he could be fired, attacking Truman in the process and placing the White House on the defensive. Because of that, the White House decided to rush the announcement. The news was given out at a rare 1
A.M.
briefing on April 11, Washington time, and it reached Tokyo by radio before the general had been officially notified, making the White House look infinitely more callous and MacArthur far more the victim. Even as he was being fired, his aides suggested, he remained the great MacArthur. Though the general himself did not meet with the press at first, Major General Courtney Whitney, one of his top aides, did. “I have just left him,” Whitney told reporters at the time. “He received the word of the president’s dismissal from command magnificently. He never turned a hair. His soldierly qualities were never more pronounced—this has been his finest hour.”

T
HE ASSAULT ON
Truman was immediate. “Seldom has a more unpopular man fired a more popular one,” wrote
Time
magazine, whose publisher, not unlike the general himself, was not that hostile to the idea of a larger war with China. MacArthur,
Time
added, was “the personification of the big man with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership…. Truman was almost a professional little man.” The immediate reaction in the country was similarly partisan and exceptionally violent. Richard Nixon, who was a considerable political beneficiary of Chiang’s collapse in China and the tensions generated with the Chinese during the Korean War, called for MacArthur’s immediate reinstatement. Senator William Jenner of Indiana, who had already accused George Marshall of treason, now said, “I charge that this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman.” MacArthur was quickly cast (much as he intended) as both hero and martyr; and the president who stood for civilian control over the military in firing him, as the villain. After a long and often distinguished career, MacArthur’s lesser side had finally caught up with him; he had become, in the end, too much like his father. He was, as Max Hastings summed up, “too remote, too old, too inflexible, too deeply imprisoned by a world view that was obsolete to be a fit commander in such a war as Korea.”

Truman and his advisers had expected a serious explosion, but it was much worse than any of them had imagined. Huge crowds turned out for MacArthur everywhere. It began in Tokyo, where, as he departed, some 250,000 Japanese, many of them weeping, most of them waving small Japanese and American flags, lined the streets. Giant crowds gathered in Hawaii, where he landed after midnight, and an even larger one met him in San Francisco, again after midnight—a crowd so immense and so emotional that the security people could not hold them back. When he eventually came to New York for a ticker-tape parade, it was said that 7 million people turned out, twice as many as Dwight Eisenhower had drawn on returning victorious from World War II.
The reaction continued to be deeply emotional. “It is doubtful that there has ever been in this country so violent and spontaneous a discharge of political passion as that provoked by the president’s dismissal of the general,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Rovere in their book on the confrontation. “Certainly there has been nothing to match it since the Civil War.”

It was a political and geopolitical confrontation of the utmost gravity and presented the country with the ultimate kind of constitutional crisis. George Reedy, later a press officer for an enterprising young senator from Texas named Lyndon Johnson, but then a young reporter for United Press, later recalled that it was the only time in his life when he thought the government of the United States was truly in danger. He had felt, he said, watching MacArthur go up Pennsylvania Avenue on his triumphal arrival in Washington, that if the general had said, “‘Come on, let’s take it,’ the adoring crowd that thronged the streets would have gone with him.” It was as if the country were about to explode with long suppressed rage from all the frustrations of this new, unsatisfying postwar incarnation. The struggle seemed to cut across every fault line in the country. There were fights in bars between strangers and fights on commuter trains between old friends. When Dean Acheson got into a taxi in Washington right after the firing, the cabdriver looked at him and asked, “Aren’t you Dean Acheson?” “Yes, I am,” the secretary of state answered. “Would you like me to get out?”

In a way that few understood at the time, it was a kind of giant antiwar rally, not just anti–Korean War, but probably anti–Cold War as well, a reflection of a kind of national frustration with a conflict that was so unsatisfying and distant and gray and brought so little in the way of victories and seemed so strangely beyond the reach of our absolute weapons. It was about the frustration of living side by side with an unwanted enemy who was real and powerful in an age that, because of the sheer terror of weaponry, seemed to preclude any concept of total victory. It bridged eras in a way. It was the last hurrah for a great hero of World War II, combined with a powerful, visceral protest by a nation that did not enjoy its new superpower status. It was produced by almost equal parts of love and anger. It was very powerful stuff.

It was also very political—not the acclaim of the crowds, the millions of Americans who rallied to MacArthur’s cause, which they saw as something simpler than it was, but the challenge of the Republican right. Herbert Hoover, filled with distaste for the country’s political direction after his own unfortunate presidency, his own political wounds still uncommonly raw, spoke for the forces long beaten down who now felt they were on the ascent. After meeting with MacArthur upon his return from Tokyo, Hoover talked of “the reincarnation of St. Paul into the persona of a great General of the Army who had come out of the East.”

At first, the general had it all his way. He was in complete control of this drama, and his villains were, for the moment, compelled to play their roles much as he scripted them. It all culminated in a single powerful, if somewhat overly sentimental speech he gave before a joint session of Congress. There, he had made his case, and seemingly made it effectively. There was, he said, as he had said in letters to so many of his admirers,
no substitute for victory
.
In this entire matter, he claimed, the Joint Chiefs were in agreement with him, as were almost all military leaders he knew. Those who did not see what he saw, those who did not want to use all of America’s force in Korea, were guilty of appeasement. The A-word was in play several times, and there was no doubt who his target was. The people who would “appease Red China” were, he said, “blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war.” Those who thought we lacked the forces to hold the Communists in both Europe and Asia were wrong. Considering that particular view, he swore he “could think of no greater expression of defeatism.” He had wanted reinforcements, but could not get them from Washington. He had wanted to use the six hundred thousand Nationalist soldiers on Taiwan, but was not granted them. “Why, my own soldiers asked me,” he said, suggesting endless nonexistent conversations with ordinary soldiers in their foxholes, “surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” He could not, he insisted, answer them. That day, even before his final summation, the applause was tumultuous; the Democrats, already on the defensive, sat silently in their seats.

Then came the great peroration, rich and powerful, full of nostalgia and bathos, but virtually irresistible and perfect for the emotions of the occasion: “I am closing my fifty-two years of military service. When I joined the Army even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plains of West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day, which proclaimed most profoundly that—‘Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.’ And like the old soldier of that ballad I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.” These were the seemingly modest words of one of the nation’s most immodest men, who had absolutely no intention of fading away. The spontaneous response was overwhelming. “We saw a great hunk of God in the flesh and we heard the voice of God,” said Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri. Truman was, predictably, blunter: “It was nothing but a damn bunch of bullshit.” Acheson thought that there was a certain relief to having it all over. It reminded him, he said, of the
father who lived just outside an Army post with his very beautiful daughter and spent all his time worrying about her virginity. Finally, one day she showed up pregnant. “Thank God that’s over,” he had said.

For so many Americans, rarely had their nation’s policies seemed so errant, and rarely had one figure—a famed, bemedaled
general—
spoken so confidently of what seemed like an easier course, one that would quickly settle a war with so much less American bloodshed. All of this set the stage for an epic moment in a democracy, though not many people saw it that way at the time. To them the epic moment was MacArthur’s speech with its high-octane emotions; what followed, the analysis of the choices at stake, and the consequences of those choices, debated as they were in Senate hearings, lacked the same glamour but were far more important. At first it did not seem like an entirely fair fight: one side had title to all of those passions; the other side was forced to make an unpopular case for an unpopular war that, in effect, no one wanted to hear—that it was a victory merely to limit a localized war, that victory now was simple human survival.

For any serious student of what was soon to come, there were important warnings that MacArthur’s next appearance in Washington would not be so pleasant or heroic. When Truman and MacArthur had met on Wake Island six months earlier, Vernice Anderson had by chance (or not, as later claimed by the general’s angry partisans) sat outside the open door to the main meeting and kept that stenographic record of the talks, including MacArthur’s cavalier assurance that the Chinese would not enter the war. That she had kept a record was not exactly a secret. When the Truman team returned to Washington, her notes were typed up and sent to various participants, including MacArthur, for approval. On November 13, 1950, just before the main Chinese attack but after the Unsan and Sudong ones, Stewart Alsop had mentioned in one of his regular columns for the
New York Herald Tribune
MacArthur’s assurances that the Chinese would not enter the war.

None of this had created much of a stir. After the main Chinese entry, a conservative magazine had asked MacArthur directly whether or not he had said that the Chinese would not enter the war, and he had denied it—it was, he insisted, “entirely without foundation.” There were a few stories printed, based on limited leaks by an irritated administration, that indicated that MacArthur had indeed given those assurances. But when, after his firing, the assault on Truman grew ever more violent, the White House decided to answer back by releasing the transcript. Tony Leviero, the
New York Times
White House correspondent, was already sniffing around the story. When he spoke with George Elsey, a senior White House aide, about the Wake meeting, Elsey immediately went to Truman. Leviero was considered straight and reasonably friendly by the White House.

If there was to be a leak, Elsey suggested, then here was the right man with the right paper for the job. “Okay—you can give it to Tony,” the president said, and with that Leviero and the
Times
got the full transcript. The paper published it on April 21, and the next year Leviero won the Pulitzer Prize. The MacArthur people were furious; it was a smear, General Courtney Whitney said. If it was not nearly enough to cripple the growing assault on the White House, then anyone knowledgeable about how things like this played in Washington now had reason to wonder just how well the general and his record would fare in Senate hearings scheduled to begin on the Hill.

The showdown finally came in the Senate hearings. The Republican right was sure the momentum was going its way. Its leaders in the Senate had no doubt that MacArthur, forceful and charismatic as ever, had all the answers (which were their answers) and spoke for real Americans. What was it MacArthur had said at San Francisco’s City Hall in front of half a million adoring citizens? “I have just been asked if I intended to enter politics. My reply was ‘No.’ I have no political aspirations whatever. I do not intend to run for any political office. I hope my name will never be used in a political way. The only politics I have is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—‘God Bless America.’” That, as Joseph Goulden noted, was the general’s own coy way of signaling that he might indeed be available for a political run, for one last try.

Given the power of the emotions now in play, none of the top Democrats was eager to lead the hearings and get in the way of so powerful a force. So it fell to Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat and senior senator on the Armed Services Committee—a truly conservative man in the old-fashioned sense of the word, with unparalleled respect among his peers in the Senate and, because of the nature of the one-party South, completely immune to the political pressures of the moment—to head the committee. He was a towering figure of the Senate, probably closer personally and ideologically to conservative Republican senators than to liberal Democratic ones, though he could never run successfully for national office because of the issue of race; he was an all-out segregationist. In other circumstances, a figure holding such a gavel in such crucial hearings, as Robert Caro noted in his book
Master of the Senate,
might have had a chance to become an instant national figure and a household name. But to take the gavel now was a dubious honor. It was not a role Russell sought, but it was a role, however odious, he felt obliged to accept. The MacArthur committee would be a joint one, combining the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. The Democrats would technically have an advantage because they were the majority party and because some of the Republicans, like Leverett Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, were Eastern internationalists, but the
emotions of the moment, to which all senators were finely attuned, greatly favored MacArthur.

WHAT THE REPUBLICANS
hoped for was a great national platform for the general. He would be the great patriot who had been wronged and betrayed by wimpy politicians, and here in the national spotlight he could slay his—and, more important,
their
—opponents with that great voice and that all-encompassing knowledge of the world. He would dismantle on their behalf not just Truman, Acheson, and Marshall, but their policies over the previous decade. What the Republican right wanted was nothing less than for these Senate hearings to launch the 1952 presidential election campaign. There was, however, a serious problem for MacArthur. The passions his return had triggered had not actually represented an endorsement of his policies, most especially not of a wider war in Asia. Instead, the emotional welcome for him and support for his policies were two very different things—especially as those policies were placed under increasingly serious scrutiny, and the consequences of following them became clearer.