The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (19 page)

The scene around them quickly turned ugly. Some of the veterans’ pathetic little shacks were soon burning. Eisenhower, aware that there would be considerable press coverage of an event guaranteed to be filled with pathos, tried to get MacArthur out of there. This was, he believed, a civilian matter, ordered by civilians; let them take the responsibility and the heat. Eisenhower might as well have ordered a moth to stay away from a flame. It was as if MacArthur
needed
to be at the center of the coverage. He deliberately held a late evening press conference, where, having exceeded Hoover’s orders (and created a political crisis that would greatly help the Democratic candidate Franklin Roosevelt in the forthcoming election), he praised Hoover for being so steadfast: “Had he waited another week, I believe the institutions of our government would have been threatened.” In this way did MacArthur present Hoover with a fait accompli. The president could not dissent from what had seemingly been done under his orders. It was a devastating political moment for Hoover. No one understood that more clearly than Franklin Roosevelt, who believed that it would seal his election.

For millions of ordinary Americans, who in hard times sympathized with the marchers, it was a defining moment; MacArthur became forever in their minds the kind of military man who abused the rights of ordinary people, a man who was never to be trusted politically and was too militaristic. In some ways, however, he got just what he thought he wanted, for his actions that day helped connect him ever more tightly to those on the right wing who saw the Bonus Army as part of a larger threat to capitalism. He had made himself the favorite general of a formidable, increasingly frustrated political constituency that resented almost every initiative taken during the New Deal. He had politicized himself more than any general ever should, cut himself off from those
who politically were on the ascent, and connected himself to those who were momentarily in decline.

The byplay that day offered a fascinating insight into two Army officers who would play central roles in America’s future: Eisenhower with his supple sense of political consequences, his innate political deftness, and his empathy for the difficulties of ordinary people; and MacArthur with his statement that this was a radical moment threatening an entire economic order and, even more important, with his need to be center stage and to receive the full attention of the press, bedecked in full military uniform, medals and all.

MacArthur’s own sense of where the country was (and what it was) often seemed badly skewed, especially as he got older and the nation, driven by vast technological breakthroughs, changed at an accelerating rate. He was a distinctly nineteenth-century man, more comfortable with those from an era that was passing than those from an era being fashioned by new political forces, transformed and democratized by dramatic economic changes and changes in communications. That MacArthur dissented from many of the political changes taking place in Washington was not surprising. But with him everything was always more personal; it was as if the men who had arrived with the New Deal were not merely different from those who had preceded them but enemies, usurpers, in no small part because his influence with them was less than it had been with their predecessors. His views of the two Democratic presidents under whom he subsequently served were nothing less than toxic. This was especially true of Roosevelt, who, shrewd and cunning, managed to play the general with exceptional skill, much to the latter’s irritation—the irritation of a classic user who finally runs into someone who is even better at it. (Roosevelt’s view of MacArthur was almost uniquely cynical. He was to be used but not to be trusted. The president once told his aide Rexford Tugwell that Huey Long was one of the two most dangerous men in the country. Who was the other, asked Tugwell, Father Coughlin, then a fiery hate-spilling radio priest? “Oh, no,” Roosevelt answered, “the other is Douglas MacArthur.”)

During World War II, he and Roosevelt played the most complicated of games, supremely gifted politician dealing with supremely gifted but deeply antagonistic general. Roosevelt once told the general—it was something MacArthur was fond of quoting, as if to show that he had no political ambitions—“Douglas, I think you are our best general, but I believe you would be our worst politician.” Roosevelt, aristocratic and infinitely devious, watched MacArthur like a hawk. Roosevelt understood him (and his burning ambition for the presidency) far better than MacArthur understood Roosevelt. The president never thought the general a serious political threat—he had too little connection to ordinary voters—but just in case, he kept copies of a report MacArthur had submitted
just before the outbreak of World War II in which he had insisted he could hold the Philippines and other key points in the Pacific because of “the inability of our enemy to launch his air attacks on our islands” and documentation about the puzzling way MacArthur’s command in the Philippines had been caught with its planes on the ground at Clark Field nine hours after his headquarters had learned of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, thus easy prey for the Japanese planes.

Mutual trust was hardly at the core of the relationship. MacArthur, who
always
kept score, sensed that he had met his match and resented it bitterly. In April 1945, when Roosevelt died in office on the very eve of victory in Europe, much of the nation mourned, but Douglas MacArthur most demonstrably did not. Hearing the news, he turned to Bonnie Fellers, a staff officer, and said, “So Roosevelt is dead: a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well.” Outsiders being told what he said were shocked; it was hard to imagine any headquarters save this one where a commander would speak like that about a commander in chief who had just died.

What MacArthur remembered about his dealings with Roosevelt was always negative: the grievances, not the successes, not the way Roosevelt had ordered his rescue when in early 1942 he seemed trapped in the Philippines as the Japanese took much of the rest of his command captive, or the fact that the president had come around to MacArthur’s side in a crucial dispute with the Navy over the way to conduct the war in the Pacific and approach the Japanese main islands. What was important was not what Roosevelt had done for him, but rather what he had not done for him. Yet nothing had added to his own myth so much as the escape from the Philippines. It was a public relations triumph both for him and for the nation. Arriving in Australia, he had issued his famous “I shall return” statement. Washington had wanted to change it to “We shall return,” but the general was having none of it: this was to be the most personal of pledges and missions, and so it went out as he directed. During that dark hour when a hero was needed, he had been lionized for his escape, with the administration an active participant in that lionization. His own significant miscalculations at the start of the war, mistakes that might have ended the career of a lesser general, were covered up, and instead the story became that he had heroically made it out, that
MacArthur had lived to fight another day
. No one had expressed that thought more clearly than William (Wild Bill) Donovan, a man of enormous influence in those days, a Wall Street lawyer with immense ambitions, who would in time head the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, and its successor, the CIA: “General MacArthur,” he said at the time, “a symbol of our nation—outnumbered, outgunned—with the seas
around him and the skies above him controlled by the enemy—fighting for freedom.” The flattery got him nowhere; MacArthur allowed neither the OSS nor CIA into his command area in both World War II and Korea.

In Europe during World War II, any number of talented younger officers had come into their own under Eisenhower, combat and staff officers alike; but that was not true in MacArthur’s command in the Pacific, where no other officer was allowed to make a name for himself and where there would be little turnover in his staff from the beginning of the war to his departure from Tokyo. “There should be newer blood around MacArthur,” John Gunther wrote in November 1950, “but he will not tolerate anybody near him being too big. I heard it said, ‘None of MacArthur’s men can risk being first rate.’”

The Bataan Gang, they were called. The name itself reflected a kind of loyalty test. Were you there at the low point in his career—back in the Philippines with the Japanese closing in, at the moment when he had been forced to leave for Australia? Not many men—Ned Almond, chief of staff in his Tokyo days, was a rare exception—managed to become part of his inner circle if they did not go back to that earlier defining moment. At the start of the Korean War, a disproportionate number of his top men had been with him since the late 1930s. It was the most exclusionary of groups—anyone who was not an insider was suspect. Robert Sherwood, the distinguished author and playwright who represented Roosevelt in an unofficial way during the war, was appalled by the hostility he encountered in that headquarters, the rage against all other instruments of the war and against other theaters. Sherwood arrived there in 1944 and brought with him news of the Allied crossing of the Remagen bridge—a great moment in the drive against Germany. But when he told Charles Willoughby the news, Willoughby snapped at him, “We don’t give a damn out here about anything that happens in Europe.” There was, Sherwood wrote the president, “unmistakable evidence of an acute persecution complex at work. To hear some of the staff officers talk, one would think that the War Department, the State Department—and possibly the White House itself—are under the domination of ‘Communists and British imperialists.’”

MacArthur, Roosevelt always believed, was completely out of touch with domestic American politics, a prisoner of his dreams rather than the country’s changing political and economic realities. MacArthur had believed, back in 1936, that Alf Landon was going to beat Roosevelt, and turned angrily on Eisenhower, his chief of staff, and a son of Kansas, who was sure that Landon, a Kansan, had no chance. Eisenhower showed MacArthur a letter from a friend of his in Abilene, suggesting that Landon might not even carry his own state. MacArthur categorized Eisenhower and another staff officer who also
doubted Landon’s success as “fearful and small minded people who are afraid to express judgments that are obvious from the evidence at hand.” Landon carried two states, losing, among forty-six others, Kansas.

By 1944, in the middle of the Pacific war, there was already talk of MacArthur running against Roosevelt. Some of the most passionate Roosevelt-haters on the Republican right were pushing for him to consider the race. One of them, a Republican congressman from Nebraska, A. L. Miller, saw a MacArthur candidacy as the only hope to save the country and wrote him: “I am convinced that unless the New Deal can be stopped this time out, our American way of life is forever doomed.” Much that was in Miller’s letters—there were several of them—would certainly have struck most political or military figures of the time as the work of a fringe ideologue, a man not to be encouraged. MacArthur, however, began an ongoing exchange with Miller. “I do unreservedly agree with the complete wisdom and statesmanship of your comments,” he wrote the congressman, referring darkly to the “sinister drama of our present chaos and confusion.” By chance that happened to be the moment when the country was doing exceptionally well for a nation at war, and when ordinary people in all stations of life took on wartime sacrifices with great goodwill and determination.

That did not stop the Miller-MacArthur letters from flying back and forth. “This monarchy,” the congressman wrote, “which is being established in America will destroy the rights of common people.” Back came MacArthur: “Your description of conditions in the United States is a sobering one indeed, and it is calculated to arouse the thoughtful consideration of every true patriot.” What damaged him was the pull of flattery; the need to be revered was too great for him to resist. That was the chink in his armor, and because of it he was sucked in. Miller, thrilled by the fact that a great patriot seemed to see things exactly the way he did, eventually made the letters public, to MacArthur’s considerable embarrassment, in the midst of a war. The general then said the letters were private, which was true, and under no condition were they intended to be critical of any political leader or any political philosophy, which, of course, was not. But they were damaging. Pressed by his friend and supporter, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then still in his isolationist incarnation, MacArthur announced that he did not want his name put into nomination at the Republican convention. Vandenberg sensed that if the general’s name were voted on, the results were going to be humiliating. But one delegate slipped through the net, and while Tom Dewey received 1,056 votes, MacArthur got 1 vote. Most assuredly, 1944 had not been a happy year for him politically; just as certainly, the desire to run had not gone away.

IN MAY
1946, Eisenhower, then Army chief of staff, visited the general in Tokyo and they talked of presidential politics. MacArthur pushed Eisenhower to run, and Ike matched that move by suggesting that MacArthur run. At that point MacArthur professed himself too old for a presidential run; but Eisenhower, who understood MacArthur’s singular ambition and vanity far better than MacArthur himself, returned to Washington and mentioned to Truman that he might have to face a MacArthur run in 1948. Indeed, with the war over and the democratization of Japan going exceptionally well, the general sent out word to his admirers in 1947 that, though he would not seek the Republican nomination, he would accept a draft if offered. It would be nothing less than his duty, he assured them. The truth was that he had surprisingly high hopes for a run in 1948. But he was badly out of touch with his native land—he had been away for more than a decade, and he was the kind of man who would have been out of touch with his fellow citizens even if he had not left the continental shores.

The journey so many millions of Americans were then making into the middle class would soon have important political consequences for both parties, as former Democratic voters, becoming more affluent, began to think of themselves as independents and to vote more conservatively; but for the moment the New Deal lines, based on elemental economic differences, still held in national elections. The people who were pushing MacArthur to run believed that the New Deal was merely the first step in what was a long and dangerous passage to Communism. His support was strongest in the Midwest, especially in the region served by Colonel Robert McCormick, owner of the
Chicago Tribune
and the leading isolationist of the time. The general’s most passionate enthusiasts were isolationists—though MacArthur was not one himself, he was willing to dance with them—nativists, racists, anti-Semites, and labor haters. They were absolutely convinced that they were the truest representatives of what they called Americanism. MacArthur’s good friend Major General George Van Horn Moseley, who reflected their attitudes, wrote him on the eve of the 1948 campaign, “There are a great many enemies within our gates who…are afraid of you…members of the CIO, the Communists, and the Jews, and such skunks as Walter Winchell [a half gossip, half political columnist] and Drew Pearson [a liberal columnist who had tangled with MacArthur earlier on].” As a prominent essayist of the era John McCarten wrote in the
American Mercury,
“It may not be his fault, but it is surely his misfortune that the worst elements on the political Right, including its most blatant lunatic fringe, are whooping it up for MacArthur.” Pushed by them to run in 1948, he answered in typical MacArthur prose: “I would say, with all humility that I would be recreant [faithless] to all my concepts of good citizenship were I to
shrink because of the hazards and responsibilities involved from any accepting any public duty to which I might be called by the American people.” Nobler than that, no man could be.