A Treasury of Great American Scandals (13 page)

General Dissatisfaction

 

 

 

 

Almost a century after Abraham Lincoln was forced to fire George McClellan, another president was confronted with another troublesome general. Harry Truman's problems with Douglas MacArthur were of a much different sort, however. While McClellan had been a newly promoted general afraid to make a move, MacArthur, the “American Caesar,” was an old warrior with an aggressive agenda of his own. Unfortunately, it was in direct conflict with President Truman's. MacArthur never seemed to become reconciled to the fact that the president, a mere civilian, was his commander in chief; he treated him more like a pesky private. Truman, who had been subjected to the general's insulting behavior since taking office at the end of World War II, described him as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat,” a “play actor and bunco man.” MacArthur, he said, was a “supreme egotist” who thought himself “something of a god.” Such was the state of the relationship when, in the summer of 1950, Communist forces from North Korea stormed into South Korea in an act of naked aggression.

President Truman responded with a commitment of U.S. forces, which was followed by United Nations forces. MacArthur was appointed chief of the U.N. Command, but he would not be an autonomous leader. Truman ordered full reports from him every day. “I practically had to telephone General MacArthur to get information from him [during World War II],” the president grumbled. Things would be different now, he insisted. Truman's direct involvement meant inevitable delays as MacArthur's messages were filtered through various channels before reaching the president, irking the general no end. “This is an outrage,” he snapped. “When I was Chief of Staff I would get [President] Herbert Hoover off the can to talk to me. But here, not just the Chief of Staff of the Army delays, but the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense. They've got so much lead in there it's inexcusable.”

If MacArthur resented having to wait to get to the president, he was even more annoyed by the orders coming from the White House—especially the one to “stay clear” of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Communist forces under Mao Tse-tung had taken over China the year before South Korea was invaded, chasing Chiang's Nationalist forces off the Chinese mainland to the island of Formosa (now Taiwan). President Truman's one overriding concern in Korea was to avoid involving Red China and the Soviet Union in the conflict. Courting Chiang, he felt, might prompt such an intervention—and possibly lead to World War III. MacArthur, on the other hand, believed Chiang could be a valuable ally, if not an ideal one.

“If he has horns and a tail, so long as Chiang is anti-Communist, we should help him,” MacArthur declared. “Rather than make things difficult, the State Department should assist him in his fight against the Communists—we can try to reform him later!” For Truman, it was bad enough that MacArthur had visited Formosa under his own initiative shortly after the invasion of South Korea, and was photographed kissing the hand of Madame Chiang. After that embarrassing episode, Truman sent Ambassador Averell Harriman to meet the general and set him straight. MacArthur gave assurances that he understood the president's policy, but less than a month later he publicly slammed it in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Nothing could be more fallacious,” he pronounced, “than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.”

Truman was livid when he heard of MacArthur's meddling. This was rank insubordination worthy of dismissal, the president's advisors argued. Angry as he was, though, Truman was not prepared to relieve the general—yet. “It would have been difficult to avoid the appearance of demotion,” he said later, “and I had no desire to hurt General MacArthur personally.” Nevertheless, a fateful clash was coming.

In the meantime, things had not been going well in Korea. The North Korean invaders had penetrated deep into the South, with American casualties mounting in what
Time
magazine correspondent John Osborne called “an especially terrible war.” MacArthur had a bold plan, though, one he declared would “crush and destroy the army of North Korea.” He proposed making a surprise amphibious landing on the western coast of Korea at the port of Inchon, 200 miles north of where the enemy had pushed American and South Korean forces. The North Koreans, he promised, would be trapped in a deadly pincer. The plan was fraught with danger, and the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to it only reluctantly. On September 15, 1950, the assault began. It was a stunning success that turned the tide of the war completely. Within two weeks the North Koreans were pushed back beyond the thirty-eighth parallel, which divided the two countries, and South Korea was reclaimed. If only MacArthur had stopped there.

Basking in the glow of victory, and perhaps intent on scoring a few political points, Truman flew to Wake Island in the Pacific to meet MacArthur for the first (and, as it turned out, last) time. By most accounts it was a cordial encounter, although the general was decidedly rude at times, refusing to salute his commander-in-chief, for example, and rebuffing his invitation to stay for lunch. While little of substance was discussed during the meeting, Truman did ask about the chances of Chinese or Soviet intervention in the war now that MacArthur's military objective was the destruction of the North Korean forces in their own territory.

MacArthur had in fact been given permission to cross the thirty-eighth parallel into North Korea after the success at Inchon, so long as Chinese or Soviet forces did not become involved and their borders with North Korea were kept off-limits to MacArthur's forces. In assuring the president that there was little chance of intervention, MacArthur, as historian Geoffrey Perret writes, “delivered up one of the fattest hostages to fortune ever seen in a century that has been filled with calamitous bad guesses.” Sure enough, the Chinese did get involved.

MacArthur had practically invited them, ignoring the administration's restrictions against sending troops anywhere near the Chinese border. With only tepid resistance coming from Washington, he pushed far into North Korea, launching what he called one powerful “end-of-war” offensive that he said might get the troops “home in time for Christmas.” Instead, it got thousands of them slaughtered. The Chinese responded to MacArthur's far northern push with a ferocious counterattack, sending down a horde of nearly 30,000 men who pushed MacArthur's forces back below the thirty-eighth parallel and well beyond.

Of those not killed in the retreat south, many died of hypothermia and pneumonia in the harsh Korean winter. President Truman was devastated. “His mouth drew tight,” witnessed author John Hersey, “his cheeks flushed. For a moment, it almost seemed as if he would sob. Then in a voice that was incredibly calm and quiet, considering what could be read on his face—a voice of absolute courage—he said, ‘This is the worst situation we have had yet. We'll just have to meet it as we've met all the rest.' ” MacArthur, too, was reeling. “This command . . . ,” he said, “is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength.” But in their views on how to deal with the terrible setback, the general and the commander-in-chief were utterly opposed.

Truman was more determined than ever to avoid a greater conflagration. “There was no doubt in my mind,” he later wrote, “that we should not allow the action in Korea to extend to a general war. All-out military action against China had to be avoided, if for no other reason than because it was a gigantic booby trap.” MacArthur disagreed, of course, advocating a widening of the war by, among other things, bombing China. In addition, he warned that if another 200,000 troops were not immediately sent to Korea, either the U.N. Command would be annihilated or it would have to be evacuated. The administration's restrictions in dealing with China amounted to “an enormous handicap without precedent in military history,” he told
U. S. News & World Report
in one of a series of face-saving public pronouncements.

The general's indiscretion enraged Truman. “I should have relieved General MacArthur then and there,” he later wrote. Though the administration quickly issued a gag order on all military commanders and senior civil servants, it was clearly aimed at one man—Douglas MacArthur. But it would take a lot more than an order from Washington to shut this general up, especially as events in Korea started to improve again.

MacArthur had requested that Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway be appointed to serve under him as commander of the Eighth Army after the death of General Walton Walker. Ridgway, one of the finest combat commanders of World War II, was a brilliant choice on MacArthur's part, although his great success in Korea would come to make MacArthur's gloomy forecasts of imminent disaster look ridiculous. Ridgway quickly rallied the battered and demoralized Eighth Army and led it to a succession of crushing victories over the Chinese, decimating their forces and pushing them back to the thirty-eighth parallel. MacArthur later tried to claim credit for Ridgway's outstanding performance, but “the mantle of military genius draped around him since Inchon was trailing in the mud,” writes Geoffrey Perret. Ridgway was now
the
man in Korea, while MacArthur, as General Omar Bradley put it, had become “mainly a prima donna figurehead who had to be tolerated.” Truman's tolerance, however, was rapidly eroding.

It didn't matter to MacArthur how successful Ridgway had been in hammering the Chinese. He still wanted to widen the war and reunite Korea. At one point he even made the almost insane suggestion that the Korean peninsula be severed from China's border by creating a radioactive desert of nuclear debris between them. The general was stunned, therefore, when the Truman administration took the great gains made by Ridgway as an opportunity to open peace talks with China. He was convinced that the president's nerves were at the breaking point, as he later wrote, “not only his nerves, but what was far more menacing in the Chief Executive of a country at war—his nerve.” Settling with China now would be an outrage, he felt, keeping the situation in Korea more or less the same as it was before the North Korean invasion. This would be not a victory but a stinging insult to the thousands of men who had died fighting.

Rather than allow what he saw as a shameful capitulation to Communism, MacArthur determined to short-circuit the administration's peace feelers by issuing a direct threat to the Chinese on his own initiative. He called on them to admit defeat or face the risk of “a decision by the United Nations to depart from its tolerant efforts to contain the war to the area of Korea” by expanding military operations to China's coastal areas and interior bases, which “would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.” In one subversive stroke, MacArthur had sabotaged Truman's peace efforts.

“I couldn't send a message to the Chinese after that,” the president later said of MacArthur's brazen threat. “I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea. . . . I was never so put out in my life. . . . MacArthur thought he was the proconsul for the government of the United States and could do as he damned pleased.” And yet Truman felt powerless to act. The country was firmly behind the famous general, and it would take another major misstep for the president to move against MacArthur. He wouldn't have to wait long.

House Minority Leader Joe Martin had given a speech early in 1951 calling for the use of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops in Korea and accusing Truman of a defeatist policy. “What are we in Korea for,” he demanded, “to win or lose? . . . If we are not in Korea to win, then this administration should be indicted for the murder of American boys.” Martin then sent a copy of his speech to MacArthur, who candidly responded in a letter that he heartily endorsed the speech. With no pretense of confidentiality, the general criticized, among other things, the Eurocentricism of American foreign policy, which was at the expense of the Far East. “If we lose this war to Communism,” he wrote to Martin, “the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it, and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom.” In the end, though, what galled MacArthur most was the prospect of how the Korean War was going to end. “There is no substitute for victory,” he exclaimed. On April 5, Joe Martin read the text of MacArthur's letter on the House floor, claiming that the administration's misguided policy in Korea compelled him to do it.

That same evening Truman wrote in his diary: “This looks like the last straw. Rank insubordination.” MacArthur had to go. The general seemed to know it, too. After meeting with one of his field officers, Edward Almond, he said, “I may not see you anymore, so goodbye, Ned.” Confused, Almond asked him why. “I have become politically involved,” MacArthur responded, “and may be relieved by the President.”

The end came after several days of high level discussions within the Truman administration. The president knew he was in for “a great furor,” but was willing to endure it. He signed the order relieving MacArthur of all his commands on April 10, 1951. Word leaked out, though, and the president was warned that if MacArthur heard about the order before it reached him, he might preempt it by resigning first. “The son of a bitch isn't going to resign on me,” Truman fumed. “I want him fired!” The dismissal was announced in a hastily arranged press conference that night. MacArthur, who didn't find out until the next day, was almost the last to know.

“Publicly humiliated after fifty-two years in the Army,” he reflected bitterly. Years later he wrote, “No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies.” While MacArthur's dismissal perhaps could have been handled with more decency, Truman made no apologies for the deed itself: “The American people will come to understand that what I did had to be done.”