Harry Truman (65 page)

As a politician, my father had to consider his programs in Congress. To fire MacArthur immediately would have endangered appropriations for the Marshall Plan and NATO. While Dad bided his time, the General and his political admirers in Congress collaborated on a new and more flagrant act of insubordination. On March 20, the General responded to a letter from Joseph Martin, the Republican minority leader of the House, sending him a speech which was a savage attack on Dad’s foreign policy. Congressman Martin had asked for MacArthur’s comments, and he got them. After a few sentences which implied his views on Korea had been ignored by Washington, MacArthur wrote:

Congressman Martin read this letter to the House of Representatives on April 5. Headlines blossomed, and my father decided it was time to act. On his calendar, he made the following memorandum:

The following day Dad continued his terse narration:

General Marshall’s opinion was expressed in pungent terms. He had spent the night reading the Defense Department’s MacArthur file. “The S.O.B. should have been fired two years ago,” he said. On Sunday, Dad discussed the situation with Chief Justice Vinson, Sam Rayburn, and Vice President Barkley. He did not, however, tell them that he was thinking of firing General MacArthur.

On April 9 my father resumed his narration:

On April 10, he summed up the results in amazingly matter-of-fact terms:

As a courtesy to General MacArthur, Dad had ordered Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, who was on an inspection tour of Korea, to go to Tokyo and personally hand MacArthur the orders relieving him of his command. But this message failed to reach Secretary Pace because he was at the front with General Ridgway. The unfortunate leak created quite an emergency in the White House. It was, ironically, not a leak at all. Joe Short, who had taken Charlie Ross’s job as press secretary, panicked when a Chicago
Tribune
reporter began asking him bluntly if MacArthur was fired. The panic spread to the rest of the staff and to Dad’s top advisers. General Bradley told my father MacArthur would almost certainly try to outmaneuver him politically by resigning if he heard the news before he was officially notified.

“He’s going to be fired,” Dad grimly replied, and he ordered everyone to go to work on a crash program to notify MacArthur immediately. Joe Short, meanwhile, was frantically mimeographing Dad’s statement and the background documents. He made a second mistake and refused to call a press conference until these documents were ready, so it was not until 1:00 a.m. that the groggy White House reporters gathered to hear Dad’s official statement which began: “With deep regret, I have concluded that the General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States government and of the United Nations in matters pertaining to his official duties. In view of the specific responsibilities imposed upon me by the Constitution of the United States and the added responsibility which has been entrusted to me by the United Nations, I have decided that I must make a change of command in the Far East. I have, therefore, relieved General MacArthur of his commands and have designated Lt. General Matthew B. Ridgway as his successor.”

Many of my father’s decisions had made headlines before. But nothing compared to the uproar which now ensued. Joe McCarthy sneered that Truman “decided to remove MacArthur when drunk.” Richard Nixon demanded the General’s immediate reinstatement. Senator William E. Jenner of Indiana roared, “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.” Dad and Dean Acheson were burned in effigy in numerous towns and even on a few college campuses. Something very close to mass hysteria gripped the nation. A Gallup poll reported public opinion in favor of the General over the President, sixty-nine to twenty-nine. Joe Martin called General MacArthur, long distance, and invited him to return immediately to Washington to address a joint session of Congress.

General MacArthur, of course, accepted. He enjoyed a triumphant welcome, first in San Francisco, and then in Washington, D.C., where he addressed the Congress. After condemning the Truman Administration’s supposed appeasement of communism in Korea, he assured them he was now going to close his 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.” A distinguished senator told newspaperman William S. White, not long after the General spoke to Congress, “I honestly felt back there that if the General’s speech had gone on, there might have been a march on the White House.”

My father foresaw this public reaction. But he also knew from his study of American history that nothing dissipates faster than popular emotion, especially when it is based on lies or lack of information. General MacArthur began to fade away as a political issue soon after a special Senate committee, under the chairmanship of Richard Russell of Georgia, launched a careful investigation of his dismissal.

The General had claimed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with his policy and implied only the President’s threat of dismissal and disgrace kept them muzzled. But what the senators heard in their committee room was the Joint Chiefs condemning, without the slightest sign of a muzzle, almost every aspect of MacArthur’s strategy. General Bradley said MacArthur’s ideas on widening the conflict “would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy.” General Vandenberg, chief of the air force, said bombing Manchuria would be no more than “pecking at the periphery” and the losses we would take in planes and men would cripple the air force for years to come. General Collins said he thought General MacArthur had violated almost every basic rule of military strategy in deploying his troops for the final drive to the Yalu, knowing that the threat of Chinese intervention was very real. Admiral Sherman heaped scorn on MacArthur’s proposal of a naval blockade of China, unless the fleets of our allies joined us. Which was not very likely, when one of the ports that would have to be closed was the British crown colony of Hong Kong.

General MacArthur was fond of saying he had a policy, and President Truman had no policy. But when he testified before Senator Russell’s committee, it became quite clear the shoe was on the other foot. One senator asked him, “Assume we embrace your program, and suppose the Chinese were chased back across the Yalu River, and suppose they then refused to sign a treaty, and to enter into an agreement on what their future course will be, what course would you recommend at that stage?” General MacArthur had nothing to recommend. “I don’t think they could remain in a state of belligerency,” he replied grandly. He had no solution to the problem of maintaining an army across 420 miles of northern Korea, compared to the 110 miles of front we were required to defend along the 38th parallel. He admitted it would be madness to invade Manchuria and begin an all-out war with China’s 400 million people. Where did this leave the General’s much-quoted phrase, “There is no substitute for victory”?

It was Harry S. Truman who had a policy. General MacArthur had nothing more than a collection of disorganized ideas.

Perhaps the man who best summed up the real source of the clash between Dad and General MacArthur was Secretary of Defense George Marshall. It arose, he told the senators:

In his memoirs, General Ridgway concluded: “It was a boon to the country that the issue did arise and that it was decisively met by the elected head of the government, within the ample dimensions of his own high moral courage and without any pressure from political or military quarters. President Truman’s decision should act as a powerful safeguard against the time, in some great future crisis, when perhaps others may be similarily tempted to challenge the right of the President and his advisers to exercise the powers the Constitution grants to them in the formulation of foreign policy.”

The controversy over General MacArthur gave the worst elements in the Republican Party their chance to confuse the democratic process. Joe McCarthy spewed lies and innuendoes on dozens of reputations. He reached a kind of climax on June 14, 1951, when he delivered a 60,000-word speech in the Senate that attacked General George Marshall as a Communist conspirator. For Dad, this was the most loathsome of the senator’s many slanders. That a man who had devoted his entire life to the service of his country could be smeared as a traitor in the Senate of the United States was almost unbelievable to Dad. In his press conference a few days later, he treated the accusation with a contemptuous “No comment.” When it was echoed by other congressmen and some local politicians, Dad called it “one of the silliest things I ever heard. I don’t think that it helps the welfare of this nation to have people who are supposed to be responsible for its welfare making silly statements like that.”

Although bipartisan foreign policy was dead on the Republican side of the aisle in Congress, it was not dead in the White House. One of my father’s first thoughts, when the crisis over General MacArthur’s removal confronted him, was the Japanese peace treaty. Even today, with all the grief and turmoil we have endured because of our involvement with Asia, it is evident that Japan, not China, was the real prize in the Far East. Its immense industrial capacity returned it to the status of a world power - on our side - while China lumbered along in the ranks of the semi-developed nations. On the night that General MacArthur was fired, Secretary of State Acheson, on Dad’s orders, called John Foster Dulles at 11:00 p.m. and asked him to come to Acheson’s Georgetown home immediately. Dulles was told MacArthur was being fired, and the President wanted him to leave immediately for Japan to reassure Japanese leaders that the relief of MacArthur meant no fundamental change in American policy toward Japan.

Some Republican senators advised Dulles to quit and leave Dad in a hole. But Dulles had already invested several months in helping to negotiate the Japanese peace treaty and was intelligent enough to see its vital importance to the future security of the free world. To make sure he did not lose his Republican franchise, he wrote Dad a rather tart memorandum, declaring he would not be “a fall guy” for the Democrats, and demanding an assurance from the administration that there really was no major change in our Far Eastern policy. Once my father gave him this assurance, he was on his way to Japan. After the treaty was signed, Dulles was a key witness at the Senate hearings, even persuading such Republican irreconcilables as China-Firster William Knowland to vote for it.

Only nine days after Senator McCarthy flung his slander at General Marshall, the first fruits of Dad’s Korean policy became visible. Jacob Malik, the Soviet representative to the UN, announced that peace could be negotiated in Korea. Three days later, the Chinese government said the same thing. After cautiously considering various alternatives and sounding the seriousness of the Soviet offer through our Embassy in Moscow, my father ordered General Ridgway to broadcast to the Chinese high command a statement that the United Nations would be willing to send representatives to discuss an armistice. The Communists accepted, and truce teams from both sides began negotiating.