American Caesar

  The General hurried home and went directly to the drawing room. He was wearing simple suntans, with no decorations or insignia of rank; his collar was open. It was a warm day, and he saw no reason to change. Presently lookouts at the Dai Ichi phoned that a motorcade of old-fashioned black Daimlers was emerging from the Sakurada Gate. Crossing the moat at 10:00 A.M., it passed the demolished naval ministry, the sandlot game, and the Okura Museum, and rolled up the embassy drive. Bonner Fellers, stationed by the embassy portico, spotted the emperor first. In addition to his silk topper Hirohito was wearing an ancient claw-hammer coat and striped pants. Facing him on the jump seats were the translator and the lord privy seal, the Marquis Koichi Kido, a small, compact man in his fifties whose habits were so precise that other members of the court called him “Kido the Clock.” Lesser officials—chamberlains, heads of protocol, the keeper of the treasures, and all manner of imperial household staff—trailed in the other cars.69

  Hirohito and Kido emerged, Fellers saluted, and another officer politely asked the marquis to step to one side. It was an awful moment for the emperor. Except when on his throne he had never spoken for himself. Always the privy seal or another nobleman had explained that “the Emperor feels that,” or “the Emperor has decided after great consideration,” or “it is the Emperor’s wish . . . .” Frantically Kido struggled to accompany his monarch into the building, but it was impossible; smiling, courteous U.S. colonels blocked him on every side. Hirohito, with his interpreter at his heels, advanced, trembling. On the threshold of the reception hall he suddenly confronted MacArthur, who murmured, “Your Majesty,” and gripped his hand warmly. Speaking through the translator, the General recalled having been received by the emperor’s father at the close of the Russo-Japanese War. He motioned him to a chair beside the fireplace and, as MacArthur later recalled, “offered him an American cigarette, which he took with thanks. I noticed how his hands shook as I lighted it for him. I tried to make it as easy for him as I could, but I knew how deep and dreadful must be his agony of humiliation.”70

  The General later told a visitor, “I came here with the idea of using the Emperor more sternly,” but soon discovered that Hirohito was “a sincere man and a genuine liberal.” Perhaps he also felt the compassion of one aristocrat for another: “I was born a democrat. I was reared as a liberal. But I tell you I find it painful to see a man once so high and mighty brought down so low. ” MacArthur did concede that he had had “an uneasy feeling” that the emperor “might plead his own cause against indictment as a war criminal.” Despite strenuous objections from the Russians and the British, the Supreme Commander had already struck his name from the list of defendants, but Hirohito didn’t know that, and a plea for clemency would have been understandable, if unseemly. Instead he said: “I come to you, General MacArthur, to offer myself to the judgment of the powers you represent as the one to bear sole responsibility for every political and military decision made and action taken by my people in the conduct of [the] war.” MacArthur felt “moved . . . to the very marrow of my bones. He was an Emperor by inherent birth, but in that instant I knew I faced the First Gentleman of Japan in his own right.” After thirty-eight minutes of mannered civility they rose, bowed, and parted. As Hirohito retraced his steps toward the frustrated, perspiring Kido, the General heard a faint, rippling laugh. It was his wife. Jean and Dr. Egeberg had been peering out from behind folds of red drapes.71

  The visitor’s impressions of his host were, in the Oriental way, elusive. The first inkling his subjects had of his postwar mood was in a poem he published in the Tokyo newspapers:

  The pine is brave

  That changes not its color,

  Bearing the snow.

  People, too,

  Like it should be.72

  The snow was the Allied army occupying his country; the people were the Japanese; he was telling them not to temper or alter their national character. In many ways they did not, but the abolition of absolute monarchy was bound to bring shifts in outlook, particularly in the monarch himself. After that first visit, the emperor called on the Supreme Commander twice a year. They developed a father-son relationship which would have been unthinkable before V-J Day. At first the people said of each precedent-shattering SCAP decision, “What will the emperor say?” They stopped because Hirohito endorsed all of them. “He played,” MacArthur wrote, “a major role in the spiritual regeneration of Japan.” Japanese politicians believed that the General was responsible for this. Yoshida, who was prime minister during most of MacArthur’s viceregal years in Tokyo, concluded that the Supreme Commander’s respectful bearing with the mikado—his order that “every honor due a sovereign is to be his” and his insistence that he not be tried and executed—“more than any other single factor made the occupation an historic success.”73

  It also made SCAP policy controversial. Dr. Egeberg’s observation that MacArthur had a poor press was true even during his proconsular years in the Dai Ichi, when his stature and achievements were at their peak. Much of this was his own fault. His approach toward reporters was much like his attitude toward Isabel Cooper, his Eurasian mistress in the early 1930s: they were there to be used as he saw fit and should remain mute and docile if he was busy elsewhere. He was indignant with them, and censored their dispatches sharply, when they reported the fact that other Asian nations, still fearing a strong Japan, regarded his policy as flabby and were disappointed when he didn’t punish the emperor. Once he scorned them as “illiterate police reporters.” Some, indeed, weren’t much more than that. “Before I had been in Tokyo a week,” John Gunther wrote, “I became convinced that the MacArthur story is one of the worst-reported stories in history.” It is startling to discover aspects of the General which were largely ignored by correspondents covering SCAP. We are informed, not by the big dailies, but by a magazine writer, that the Supreme Commander reddened with anger when he discovered “American Lend-Lease armor being used against the people of Indo-China, the little people we . . . promised to liberate under the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter.” There is little inkling in contemporary dispatches of MacArthur’s feelings, expressed to Robert Sherwood, that American influence and strength must be expressed “in terms of essential liberalism if we are to retain the friendship of the Asian peoples.” Even more striking, we find in one journalist’s observations, set down after a meeting with MacArthur, that “the General believes the press, right now, ought to quit making heroes of generals and admirals, as the first step in doing its job. The press of the world, too, ought to quit glorifying war in general. He feels that the business of making heroes of generals and admirals and glorifying war has a lot to do with influencing public opinion to accept war.” MacArthur felt that “to delionize the generals and admirals and to deglorify war is a job the press can tackle right now.”74

  SCAP’s difficulty was that he had created a vivid public image of himself and could no longer alter it. His paranoia is illustrative. Powerful forces in Washington opposed American commitments to the Far East on the ground that they would weaken the U.S. effort in Europe, and this was an issue which deserved debate, but when he accused them of lopsided policies, he was ignored. He had cried wolf too often. His overwhelming pride provides another example. “Millions throughout the world,” Frank Kelley and Cornelius Ryan wrote, “think of him as an ‘egotistical dictator.’ ” As astute an official as James Byrnes said in 1946: “He has done a marvelous job; nevertheless, he is a prima donna”—as though his prima donna qualities weren’t essential to his job as Supreme Commander. Except among Ambassador Sebald and other American diplomats on his staff, what Sebald called his “courteous and cooperative” treatment of U.S. foreign service officers went unnoted. Yet he made headlines when he threatened to “blast the State Department wide open. ”75

  His blunder here was grave, for it brought him the enmity of a man just as able and just as vindictive as himself: Dean Acheson. On September 17, 1945, Harry Truman writes in his memoirs, MacArthur “g
ave out word that the strength of the occupation forces could be pared to 200,000 men. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and I first learned of this announcement through the press.” It was certainly news—his earlier estimate had been 500,000, later cut to 400,000—and Acting Secretary of State Acheson was deeply offended. At a press conference in Washington the next day, Acheson said tartly that “I am surprised that anyone can foresee the number of forces that will be necessary in Japan. . . . The occupation forces are the instruments of policy and not the determinants of policy.” Here the acting secretary erred. He was citing the theory; the realities in Tokyo, as he should have known, were very different. Acheson’s remark stirred up a minor row at the time. His appointment as under secretary was up for confirmation. Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska voted against it, charging that the nominee had “blighted the name” of a great military hero. No one joined the Nebraskan; even Robert A. Taft approved the President’s choice; the roll call was sixty-nine ayes to the one nay. But later Wherry would have company. As Acheson notes in his memoirs: “If we could have seen into the future, we might have recognized this skirmish as the beginning of a struggle.”76

  It is unsurprising that SCAP’s critics should have included American liberals and intellectuals, though the grounds for their disapproval seem odd now. Like the Australians, of whom James Forrestal wrote in his diary that they wanted “a far harder policy than the Americans . . . a severe, even a punitive policy,” U.S. liberals believed that MacArthur was too generous a conqueror. I. F. Stone thought it wrong to retain Nippon’s structure of government: “It takes little reflection to realize that we can hardly hope to break the power of Japan’s ruling classes—the aristocracy, the plutocracy, the bureaucracy, and the military—if we confine ourselves to operating through a government which remains their instrument.” The New Republic regretted the General’s appointment as SCAP because it felt he would “appease . . . the conservative social and economic elements in Japan which were behind this war, and would be glad to get behind another one.” The Nation quoted Halsey as saying that he had wanted to “kick each Japanese delegate” who signed the instrument of surrender “in the face.” It commented: “Not elegant. Not polite. But very exact and satisfying—and somehow reassuring.”77

  MacArthur’s retention of the emperor, his decision to let the Japanese disarm themselves, his refusal to ban fraternization, and his threat to punish any GI who struck a Nipponese were ill received by the Filipinos, the French, and the Dutch, as well as the Australians and the British. Whitehall was also displeased because MacArthur had declared that he wanted Japan to rebuild its competitive position in world trade and had refused to ally it with the sterling bloc. George Kennan, attacking from another quarter, expressed “amazement and concern” over SCAP’s dismantling of both the kempei-tai and the country’s armed forces. He later wrote: “Japan’s central police establishment had been destroyed. She had no effective means of combatting the Communist penetration and political pressure that was already vigorously asserting itself under the occupation and could be depended upon to increase greatly if the occupation was withdrawn and American forces withdrawn. In the face of this situation the nature of the occupational policies pursued up to that time by General MacArthur’s headquarters seemed on cursory examination to be such that if they had been devised for the specific purpose of rendering Japanese society vulnerable to Communist political pressures and paving the way for a Communist takeover, they could scarcely have been other than what they were.”78

  Outside Japan, the opinions of the Communists themselves were divided. After lunching with Yuri Zhukov of Pravda, C. L. Sulzberger noted in his diary that Zhukov thought the Supreme Commander was doing “a good job in Japan,” but in New York a Daily Worker banner read: MACARTHUR LINKED TO FASCISTS. The non-Communist American Left, the progressives then rallying behind Henry Wallace, regarded SCAP as their natural enemy. A patrician, political five-star general, whose chief of staff thought America needed a reactionary dictatorship, was the kind of man Wallace followers loved to hate. Yet American right-wingers were by no means sure that he was in their camp. MacArthur was their once and future hero, but those who visited him returned troubled. They knew that the Pentagon wanted U.S. bases maintained in Japan in perpetuity, whether the Japanese liked it or not, and they approved. The Supreme Commander, however, rejected this as “colonization.” And his attitude toward businessmen, American and Japanese alike, alarmed them.79

  Because MacArthur wanted what one observer called “an absolutely immaculate occupation,” he sharply limited the profit foreign traders could take out of the country. This was one SCAP answer to Communist charges of exploitation. Another was his breakup of the old feudal oligarchy, the zaibatsu, by Draconian levies. Neither pleased the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and their spokesmen. Fortune attacked “Scapitalism.” The General, irate, sent its editors a six-thousand-word rebuttal, but Senator William F. Knowland of California demanded a congressional investigation of SCAP’s economic policies. Then Newsweek ran a story about James Lee Kauffman, an American with interests in Japan, who denounced MacArthur’s emancipation of labor, purge of militarists, and dissolution of Nipponese industrial combines; U.S. taxpayers were being saddled “with great unnecessary costs, ” he charged, while recovery was delayed and the economy “recklessly fractionalized.” Even Sebald wondered whether the assault on the zaibatsu wasn’t “vindictive, destructive, and futile.” Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune flew to Tokyo and protested SCAP’s “socialistic economic policies.” The General replied: “This is not socialism. Rut it would be better to have real socialism than the socialism of the monopolies.” Until then McCormick had supported MacArthur’s presidential hopes. Flying home, the colonel switched to Taft.80

  That should have stirred the curiosity of U.S. journalists writing about the policies being made in the Dai Ichi. Any conservative who incurred the wrath of Rertie McCormick was worth another look. Rut their lack of sympathy for the General persisted, and he continued to rub them the wrong way. Although his manner with them was distant, he remained extremely attentive to what they wrote about him, and easily wounded. Sebald comments that his “public quarrels with individual news correspondents became celebrated. . . . His reaction to press attacks was painful to watch.” His chief public-relations officer in Japan, Frayne Raker, testily told reporters: “From now on you will get your news of the occupation from PRO press releases.” Raker further affronted them by writing letters to their editors and publishers in the United States, complaining about specific stories, and, in one instance, charging that seven of them were “playing the communist game.” He abandoned this approach after Edward R. Murrow of the Columbia Broadcasting System, replying to a Raker grievance against William Costello, CRS’s man in Tokyo, wrote: “Your letter has greatly increased our confidence in Mr. Costello’s work.”81

  All this was unfortunate and unnecessary. Most Americans who followed developments in Nippon closely knew that the occupation was going remarkably well. The New York Times observed: “Japan is the one bright spot in Allied military government. General MacArthur’s administration is a model of government and a boon to peace in the Far East. He has swept away an autocratic regime by a warrior god and installed in its place a democratic government presided over by a very human emperor and based on the will of the people as expressed in free elections.” Returning to America after a tour of Japan, Ambassador Philip C. Jessup told the press that his visit had given him “a vivid impression of the extraordinary progress which the Japanese people have made since the end of the war. General MacArthur has rendered a service of extraordinary distinction and of great historical significance.” Roger Raldwin found in the General “qualities that a great military career had concealed—a profound commitment to democratic liberties, an instinct for the equality of peoples, and respect for the sensitivities of the defeated Japanese and a reformer’s zeal. . . . Ho
wever one judges his historic role, none would deny the impressive impact he made on all by powerful human qualities: his deep dedication to whatever he undertook, his sense of justice, his high principles and his firm ideals.” Edwin O. Reischauer wrote: “General MacArthur has been one of the great figures of the postwar world and may have accomplished more in Japan than any other man could have. Certainly none of the other leaders of occupation forces elsewhere in the world have accomplished proportionately as much. . . . His place among the great names of history is doubly secure.”82

  Reischauer added: “Some of his qualities are less admired by Americans than by Japanese.” That was perceptive. The Nipponese still believed in heroes; MacArthur’s countrymen had grown distrustful of them. Another root of the difficulty was his neglect of the Tokyo press corps. Justifying his exposure to enemy fire he had repeatedly said, “You can’t fight them if you can’t see them.” He couldn’t win the confidence of journalists unless he saw more of them than he did, and the fact that he didn’t is sad, because the few who did interview him left the Dai Ichi walking on air. Frank Kelley and Cornelius Ryan wrote: “He can be a very warm and human person . . . so much so that often the visitor wonders where he got the impression that MacArthur was aloof. . . . Those who meet him for the first time leave his office completely hypnotized, muttering such words as ‘genius,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘great.’ . . . Some of his most hardened critics have come out of his office completely converted. By his very brilliance in conversation one truly gets the impression of being in the presence of greatness.”