It was an excellent opportunity to remain silent. U.S. policy in his theater was changing so swiftly that even those close to the oval office had trouble keeping up with it, and a General halfway around the globe, anxious to see in it what he wanted to see, had no business interpreting it for veterans or anybody else. But MacArthur plunged ahead. He wrote Lewis that “in view of misconceptions being voiced concerning the relationship of Formosa to our strategic potential in the Pacific,” he deemed it wise to set forth his own opinions on it. “Nothing,” he said, “could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument” that “if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.” Those who spoke thus “do not understand the Orient. They do not grasp that it is in the pattern of Oriental psychology to respect and follow aggressive, resolute, and dynamic leadership—to turn quickly from a leadership characterized by timidity or vacillation—and they underestimate the Oriental mentality. Nothing in the last five years has so inspired the Far East as the American determination to preserve the bulwarks of our Pacific Ocean strategic position.” Chief among these was Formosa, which he described as an “unsinkable carrier-tender.” He said: “The geographic location of Formosa is such that in the hands of a power unfriendly to the United States it constitutes an enemy salient in the very center” of America’s strategic dispositions in the Pacific, and he noted that “historically, Formosa has been a springboard” for aggressive powers, “the most recent example” of this being “the utilization of it by the Japanese in World War II,” when, at the outbreak of hostilities, “it played an important part as the staging area and supporting base for the various Japanese invasion convoys.” It was essential, he continued, to counter “the lustful thrusts of those who stand for slavery as against liberty, for atheism against God.” He concluded that the President’s decision to stand fast against North Korean aggression had “lighted into flame a lamp of hope throughout Asia that was burning dimly towards extinction. It marked for the Far East the focal and turning point in this area’s struggle for freedom. It swept aside in one stroke all the hypocrisy and the sophistry which has confused and deluded so many people distant from the actual scene.”54
According to Whitney—and no one ever contradicted him—a duplicate of this remarkable epistle was sent to the Department of the Army on August 18, ten days before it was to be read to the VFW delegates. There it languished, filed or unread, until advance copies were distributed, as a routine courtesy, to correspondents covering SCAP. The first high official in Washington to learn of it was the man who, in the opinion of the GOP, was the government’s chief hypocrite and sophist. An Associated Press man called Dean Acheson on the evening of Friday, August 25, and read it to him over the telephone. The secretary consulted his colleagues, all of whom, he writes, “were outraged at the effrontery and damaging effect at home and abroad of MacArthur’s message” and “agreed that this insubordination could not be tolerated.” By then the White House press room had brought a copy of the statement to the oval office. Truman interpreted it as a call “for a military policy of aggression, based on Formosa’s position. The whole tenor of the message was critical of the very policy which he had so recently told Harriman he would support. There was no doubt in my mind that the world would read it that way and that it must have been intended that way.”55
The veterans’ convention was still three days away, but it was too late to suppress the General’s message. Life, which was running it as its editorial that week, was already on the presses; U.S. News and World Report, carrying the full text, was in the mails. In England, the Observer, the Manchester Guardian, and The Times of London were preparing to condemn it. As Wayne Morse later pointed out, its impact could not have been greater had it already been delivered in person. And the timing, from the President’s point of view, could hardly have been worse. He had just proposed that the UN investigate the Formosa situation in the hope of reducing the areas of conflict in the Far East. He felt that “General MacArthur’s message—which the world might mistake as an expression of American policy—contradicted this.” Nor was that all of it. The day before, Secretary of the Navy Francis Matthews had delivered a speech in Boston openly advocating a “preventive war” with Russia, and Louis Johnson had confided to reporters that he agreed. It looked as though Truman might be losing control of his administration. 56
The President “gave serious thought,” he wrote, “to relieving General MacArthur as our military field commander in the Far East and replacing him with General Bradley. I could keep MacArthur in command of the Japanese occupation, taking Korea and Formosa out of his hands. But after weighing it carefully I decided against such a step. It would have been difficult to avoid the appearance of a demotion, and I had no desire to hurt General MacArthur personally. My only concern was to let the world know that his statement was not official policy.” He had at least two other concerns. Even then, he knew that curbing MacArthur’s authority would set off a major political firestorm in the United States. And he could not have done it without dismissing Matthews and Johnson, who were friends and good Democrats. Still, he felt he had to do something about the General. He summoned Acheson, Johnson, Harriman, the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder, and Steve Early, Johnson’s deputy, to a Saturday morning council of war.57
His “lips white and compressed,” in Acheson’s phrase, the President dispensed with the usual greetings and polled them, asking each man whether he had known of the VFW letter in advance. None had; it had come, Truman later wrote, as “a surprise and a shock to all.” He said he wanted a public retraction from MacArthur and then, still in a cold anger, he stalked from the meeting. His instructions had seemed concise, but after his departure there was no unanimity among the others over what the next step should be, and how it should be taken. MacArthur was a fearsome figure to the Chiefs. Early was uneasy; he felt that a public retraction would violate MacArthur’s right to free speech, and suggested that the President and the General confer on telecon screens. Johnson, who as secretary of defense would have the thankless task of dealing directly with MacArthur, proposed that they let the letter be read to the veterans and then announce that it was “only one man’s opinion and not the official policy of the government.” The secretary of state disagreed, commenting caustically that the issue seemed to him to be who was President. Johnson, still unhappy, persisted: “Do we dare send a message that the President directs him to withdraw his statement?” Since those were Truman’s orders, Acheson replied, there was no alternative. That afternoon the reluctant Johnson cabled the Dai Ichi: “The President of the United States directs that you withdraw your message for National Encampment of Veterans of Foreign Wars, because various features with respect to Formosa are in conflict with the policy of the United States and its position in the United Nations.”58
MacArthur instantly complied, but he was, he said, “utterly astonished.” Sending for a copy of his VFW statement and reexamining it, he wrote, he “could find no feature that was not in complete support of the President.” He replied to Johnson: “My message was most carefully prepared to fully support the President’s policy position. My remarks were calculated only to support his declaration and I am unable to see wherein they might be interpreted otherwise.” He was hurt and angry, and with some justification. He was capable of impudence and provocation, but in this instance his only sin was in taking Truman’s pronouncements on Formosa at face value. The President was following one course in the United Nations and another in fencing with his critics on Capitol Hill. MacArthur, believing that the administration was determined to keep the island out of hostile hands as a link in the U.S. defense system, had unintentionally embarrassed the chief executive in the world forum. He was wrong to have said anything—the contretemps over his trip to Taipei should have taught him that—but right in his paraphrasing of what the White House was telling the American people. He was a casualty of rough politics, a loser in a game whose rules he never mastered.59
This b
ruising encounter fueled his paranoia. “To this day,” he wrote at the end of his life, “I do not know who managed to construe my statement as meaning exactly the opposite of what it said, and how this person or persons could have so easily deceived the President.” Somebody had to be to blame, there must be a villain somewhere — so his reasoning went, and Whitney, his starets, encouraged him in it. It was “logical,” Whitney told him, to assume that the VFW letter had “innocently” run afoul of “plans being hatched in the State Department to succumb to British pressure and desert the Nationalist government on Formosa,” and it was a “clear illustration of the devious workings of the Washington-London team.” As Walter Millis observes, “a theater commander in wartime who really believed that the civil authorities were working against him would surely be compelled to resign.” Instead MacArthur nursed this new grudge, watched warily for more blows from Washington, and vowed to confound his enemies by unsheathing his sword in a dazzling stroke that would blind them all.60
Over his desk the General had hung a framed message: “Youth is not a time of life—it is a state of mind.” By all accounts, he himself continued to be buoyant. Visitors found it hard to believe that he was in his seventy-first year. In October 1950 George Kenney found him “still tall, erect, graceful, and a fine figure of a man. His step is firm. His eyes are clear and alert. His face and hands are without wrinkles. His dress is meticulous. . . . His hair is thin on the top of his head, but there is no gray in it.” Kenney had heard the gossip that SCAP dyed his hair; watching him washing it in the shower, the airman said: “General, I wish you would tell me what brand of hair dye you use. My hair is beginning to show quite a bit of gray.” MacArthur laughed, stepped out of the shower, toweled his head vigorously, and held out the uncolored cloth. He said: “It’s good at that. See, it doesn’t even stain the towel. But I won’t tell you what it is.”61
Had he needed dye, he might have used it. He was as vain as ever. Like Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, he rarely permitted himself to be photographed wearing glasses. In the privacy of the embassy, however, he was rarely without them. There he could be himself. Within its walls the only visible reminders of the horrors across the Korea Strait were silent motion pictures from the battlefield; according to Norman Thompson, these reels were rushed back to Tokyo each afternoon and shown evenings before the feature films. Yet in conversations afterward he avoided discussions of them. Mostly he preferred familial topics: the flowing diplomatic career of his nephew, Douglas MacArthur II, for example, or his twelve-year-old son’s first dance. Wearing the thick-soled shoes then fashionable among American teenagers, Arthur had escorted Joyce Yamazaki, the nisei daughter of a SCAP employee, and like most boys on such occasions, he had been painfully shy. The General was eager for every detail. Fully debriefed, he then offered several suggestions on how to outmaneuver rivals for the prettiest girl.
MacArthur’s first words on landing at Haneda after a tour of the front were always: “Where’s Jean?” She was always on the tarmac, bounding up and down for a glimpse of him. She wanted his family to be, so to speak, a privileged sanctuary. At home she hid newspapers and magazines criticizing his conduct of the war, though she knew it was pointless—others mailed clippings to his office from the States—and she watched over him anxiously, more like a mother than a wife. She insisted he slip between the sheets at bedtime before she opened his window. “But, Jean, I can open windows!” he would protest. Ignoring his objections, she would finish the job and retire to her own bedroom, though not to sleep; in ten minutes or so she would peek in to be sure he had drifted off. Despite his remonstrances, his need for her attentions grew as the peninsular conflict grew. He seemed to sense whether or not she was nearby in the night. Once, when he returned from Korea fighting a cold, she put him to bed early; after he had dropped off, she tiptoed downstairs to read to Arthur. Ten minutes later they heard him shuffling down in his slippers. Entering in his old robe, he grinned sheepishly and said to them: “Where is everybody? It’s lonesome up there.”62
In the morning he would be the five-star General again, however, pacing about briskly and dictating crisp memoranda while she typed. Other thoughts he jotted on the backs of envelopes or any other scrap of paper handy; these would be crammed into his pocket and transcribed in the Dai Ichi. Revising and editing typescripts, he was polishing his plans for his great end-run around the enemy. Bluehearts had been revived and rechristened “Chromite.” He had told Harriman that the North Koreans were “as capable and tough” a foe as he had ever faced, but that they were vulnerable because the best of them were concentrated in the southeast tip of the peninsula, hammering at “Johnnie” Walker’s Eighth Army perimeter. Now he meant to exploit that vulnerability. Earlier, he had reported to the Pentagon that an attempted UN breakout on the Pusan front would be costly and indecisive, redolent of World War I siege warfare, impaling UN troops on the In Min Gun’s spearhead instead of moving against its exposed sides and rump. Therefore he had radioed the Joint Chiefs on July 23: “Operation planned mid-September is amphibious landing of a two division corps in rear of enemy lines. . . . The alternative is a frontal attack which can only result in a protracted and expensive campaign.” Afterward he would write in his Reminiscences: “I was now finally ready for the last great stroke to bring my plan into fruition. My Han River dream as a possibility had begun to assume the certainties of reality—a turning movement deep into the flank and rear of the enemy that would sever his supply lines and encircle all his forces south of Seoul.”63
Great turning movements are as old as warfare, though only commanders possessed of military genius have been able to execute them successfully. Hannibal did it repeatedly by adroit deployment of his cavalry in the Punic Wars; so did Napoleon, who wrote of his maneuver against Treviso to relieve enemy pressure on the Adige River in 1813: “. . . it is my style, my manner of doing things.” It was Robert E. Lee’s style, too; his use of Jackson at Chancellorsville is a classic example. And it had long been MacArthur’s manner of doing things, as he had demonstrated along the New Guinea-Philippine axis, most memorably at Hollandia. A victorious blow in Korea, however, depended on speed; the Russians were rushing naval mines to their PA puppets, and soon every South Korean port would be sown with them. The General had no doubts about his ability to move his men rapidly, to display, in Churchill’s words, “that intense clarity of view and promptitude to act which are the qualities of great commanders.” “One of MacArthur’s greatest attributes,” recalls Vice Admiral Arthur D. Struble, “was to get going and to hit quick” — but persuading the Pentagon to match his pace was more difficult.64
During Truman’s second administration the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was Omar Bradley. MacArthur was convinced that the chairman hated him because in 1945, when planning the invasion of Kyushu, he had rejected Bradley as a senior commander. It seems extremely unlikely that the chairman would have borne such a grudge, though it is true that he took a dim view of a Korean sea-to-shore envelopment. Testifying before a Senate committee in 1949, he had said: “I am wondering whether we shall ever have another large-scale amphibious operation. Frankly, the atomic bomb, properly delivered, almost precludes such a possibility.” That was not Bradley’s most prescient moment, but neither was it the only basis for the Joint Chiefs’ reluctance to approve MacArthur’s grand design. The army was desperately short of troops, a partial consequence of Washington’s determination to reinforce European garrisons. Collins told CINCFE in the Dai Ichi, “General, you are going to have to win the war out here with the troops available to you in Japan and Korea,” and MacArthur, according to Arthur W. Radford, smiled, shook his head, and said, “Joe, you are going to have to change your mind. “ In message after message the UN commander bombarded the Pentagon with reasons for an amphibious assault: it would present the PA with a two-front war, starve their troops, cut their communications, seize a large port, and deal the enemy a devastating psychological blow by recapturing Seoul. He believed the Chi
efs would yield to him because he knew, like John Jervis before Cape Saint Vincent in 1797, that “a victory is very essential at the moment.” Sure enough, on July 25 they gave in and agreed to provide him with marines to lead the way. “MacArthur’s scheme,” writes Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “now had its cutting edge.”65
Almost immediately Washington had agonizing second thoughts. The General was maddeningly vague about just where he proposed to put his troops ashore, and now the Chiefs began to suspect he had reason to conceal it. He did. He had chosen the unlikeliest harbor on the peninsula: Inchon, on the Yellow Sea, 150 miles north of Pusan and the landing area nearest Seoul. Inchon is about as large as Jersey City, as ugly as Liverpool, and as dreary as Belfast. Its anchorage is sheltered and its waters always ice-free, but “this,” notes Heinl, “is about all that can be said for Inchon as an amphibious target.” When MacArthur confided his plan to Rear Admiral James H. Doyle, who would have to execute it, Doyle was dumbfounded. He knew that Inchon had no beaches, only piers and seawalls. The attack would have to be launched in the heart of the city. The waters approaching it could easily be mined; possibly they already were. Currents there ran as high as eight knots. In any one of a hundred turns, a sunken or disabled ship could block the little bay, which was interlaced with moles and breakwaters. Steaming shoreward from the sea, vessels maneuvering through the rocks and shoals of Flying Fish Channel would find their objective masked by a squat, fortified obstacle, Wolmi Do (“Moon Tip Island”), which jutted into the channel and would have to be captured before any landings on the wharves could be attempted.66