American Caesar

  When MacArthur learned of the Korean armistice on July 7, 1953, he said: “This is the death warrant for Indochina.” The Alsop brothers later concluded that one consequence of the growing crisis in Vietnam was “to vindicate the judgment of General Douglas MacArthur. The free world would not now be faced with a catastrophe in Asia if MacArthur had won his fight against the artificial limits of the Korean War.” Henry Luce, however, did not share the pessimism of Lippmann, MacArthur, and the Alsops. At the time of the General’s dismissal, Life recalled five years later, “The Korean War [had] fitted no larger American strategic goal or plan. Our resistance to Asian Communism was therefore spasmodic, opportunistic, and doomed to fail. Since then, however, there has been an improvement. ” As Luce saw it, the brightest spot on the Oriental map was Saigon. There, he said, “We have helped Ngo Dinh Diem bring South Vietnam to the threshold of true national independence.”95

  ELEVEN

  Taps

  1951-1964

  Shortly after MacArthur’s Senate testimony, Carlos Romulo breakfasted with him at the Waldorf. The General asked his guest what he thought of the uproar over his recall, and the little Filipino told him that he thought that he and Truman were both right and both wrong. The General raised his eyebrows, and Romulo explained. “You should have been allowed to cross the Yalu,” he said. MacArthur nodded. Romulo said, “You were the man on the spot and knew what should have been done.” MacArthur nodded again. The Filipino said, “You would have won the war.” Another, vigorous nod. Then Romulo said, “But civilian rule should always be supreme, and you were wrong to defy the President.” The General stared out across the shining city and said nothing. “Suddenly,” the Filipino recalls, “I realized that the conversation was over. He didn’t want facts or logic. He wanted salve for his wounded pride.”

  Millions of Americans were aching to give it to him, and for a full year, from the spring of his recall from Tokyo to the spring before the Eisenhower-Stevenson presidential campaign of 1952, he crisscrossed the United States in a one-man drive to arouse the country to what he regarded as its peril. Invitations from mayors and governors had been accumulating in his suite since the night he had reached the hotel. At first he agreed to visit six cities, then eleven states; in the end the Great Homecoming, as the MacArthur’ called it, took them to Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, San Antonio, Evanston, Fort Worth, Miami, Los Angeles, Little Rock, Seattle, Norfolk, Austin, Natchez, Lansing, Dallas, Murfreesboro, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Portland, Oregon. Had he yielded to the appeals of all the communities that wanted him to come, he would have remained in perpetual motion. “America,” the General said afterward, “took me to its heart with a roar that will never leave my ears.” Time noted that the nation was “gripped by a kind of patriotic emotion seldom evoked in the doubting cynical mid-century.”1

  Doubting cynics who were uncaptivated by the glamorous General observed that the taxpayers were entitled to enjoy his tour, because they were paying for it. That was not entirely true; the day after he said farewell to the Russell committee, he returned the Bataan to the Defense Department (“As it flies out of my life, I feel I am losing something of inestimable value”) and most of his personal expenses were paid by his admirers. When he decided that he wanted to take up permanent residence in the Waldorf Towers (“Here’s where we lighted, and here’s where we stay”), the hotel leased his $ 133-a-day suite to him for $ 450 a month. Oil tycoons chartered an Eastern Airlines Constellation to fly him to Texas. A friend at United Airlines took care of most of his other flights. When he rode to Massachusetts, the railroad gave him presidential treatment—a special train departing from a siding under the Waldorf, a luxurious private car, and a pilot locomotive steaming ahead to make certain the rails were clear—and Boston’s Copley Plaza contributed its finest suite, 531-533-535, as a gesture of appreciation for his services to the country. But he continued to draw his five-star, $ 19,541 salary from the army, and it was a navy ship which moved his and his aides’ forty-nine tons of furniture, forty-three pieces of baggage, and three automobiles from Tokyo to Manhattan. Like Eisenhower, MacArthur was a public charge to the end. Unlike Ike, however, he stormed the country, often delivering volatile political speeches, while still wearing his uniform and all his decorations. No one told him to his face that the propriety of this was questionable. If anyone had, he would doubtless have replied that he was still performing his soldierly duties. But many found the spectacle troubling. Americans have a way of consecrating their heroes, putting them on pedestals that are impossibly high and then knocking them off. MacArthur had seemed to be beyond reach. Yet each time he took a swipe at Truman he descended a little. He could never be entirely toppled from his plinth, but the possibility that he might become wobbly began to arise.2

  At first it had seemed impossible. His crowds were unprecedented. In Chicago, where he rode in a red Lincoln behind a hundred policemen on motorcycles, three million had gathered along the twenty-three-mile parade route, and that night on Soldier Field, 50,000 assembled in forty-three-degree weather to acclaim him as he stepped into the dramatic glare of a single searchlight. The next morning, midwesterners lined the ninety-mile highway which took him to the MacArthur’’ old three-story Victorian house in Milwaukee. In Murfreesboro another 50,000 welcomed him. In Houston a half-million surged against police lines as an electric sign flashed “Welcome General Douglas MacArthur” across the facade of the Shamrock Hotel, and cannon, parked on the hotel’s tennis courts, boomed a salute. Texans cheered him in the Cotton Bowl, in Rice Institute Stadium, in Fort Worth Stadium. In Boston another half-million watched his motorcade pass, and 20,000 packed Dewey Square there to hear him. Over 300,000 applauded him in Seattle, and in Miami ovations from 14,000 convening Legionnaires interrupted his forty-five-minute speech forty-nine times. He addressed the legislatures of four states. Streets were renamed for him. Lansing, Michigan, dedicated its annual tulip display to him. Arthur’s airforce jacket and peaked cap briefly became a rage among teenagers, and the boy and his mother, with her beanie hats and simple dresses, gave the austere General a warmth, a touch of humanity which pleased the mobs and intensified their frenzy.3

  They wanted to give the MacArthur’ things, to bestow gifts upon them, atoning in small ways for the injury their bluff President had inflicted upon them. At Soldier Field, while a fireworks replica of the Missouri blazed in the night sky and a band played “God Bless America,” Jean was presented a diamond brooch and Arthur a pair of silver skates while all three were showered with five thousand dollars’ worth of orchids. Marquette awarded MacArthur an LL.D. Houston gave him a Cadillac. In Murfreesboro, where Jean had lived for thirty-four years in a pillared mansion on East Lytle Street, she received a silver tray, a brooch, earrings, and a six-starred gold badge; Arthur—who had already been entertained by celebrities in Manhattan’s Stork Club and given box seats at both Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds—got a Boy Scout scroll, neckerchief, kerchief, slide, and a fishing rod. MacArthur, for once, took a backseat in Murfreesboro. (“I grew up with the sound of ‘Dixie’ and a rebel yell ringing in my ears,” he said. “Dad was on the other side, but he had the good sense to surrender to Mother.”) The city had proclaimed that Monday “Miss Jean’s Day. ” Bunting hung everywhere in her honor, and a huge sign read: “Welcome Jean, the General, and Arthur MacArthur.” Old memories moved her to tears there, as her husband was stirred in San Antonio, where Wainwright, Krueger, and Courtney Hodges greeted him in full uniform and escorted him to the Alamo.4

  MacArthur always introduced Jean to crowds as “my finest soldier.” These coast-to-coast journeys were, in fact, something of an ordeal for all of them. The possibility that they might be trampled by stampeding throngs worried Lou Sullivan, whom the New York Police Department had assigned as his out-of-town bodyguard. Sullivan thought Chicago “worse than Manhattan. The General stopped to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the crowd heaved forward. MacArthur ha
d to run to his car, which just took off. We were really scared. Our backup car was caught in the crowd and couldn’t catch up with him.” Gadflies were rare, but there were a few. In Los Angeles a man ran alongside the car with what Sullivan delicately describes as “a detrimental banner.” The General, with a fine disregard for the First Amendment, said, “Sully, get rid of that sign, will you?” “So,” Sullivan recalls, “I knocked the guy down and took his sign.” Jean’s stamina was greater than her husband’s or her son’s—she looked fresh when they were clearly exhausted—though the time came when she, too, was prostrated. The problem was her old nemesis, air travel. En route to Little Rock aboard a Capital Airlines flight they ran into a gale. The pilot flew under it at a few hundred feet, but the buffeting was severe, and the three MacArthur’, Whitney, Bunker, and Sergeant Valbueno, the General’s Filipino orderly, vomited into containers all the way. As they taxied toward the terminal, MacArthur said, “Sully, stand right next to me and take my arm. I’ll try not to shake.”5

  Yet “once on the ground, ” Sullivan recalls, “he was great: greeting dignitaries, reviewing the honor guard, telling the ladies, ‘It wasn’t the sombrero that won the west, it was the sunbonnet.’ At Natchez that evening a horse and buggy took us to a ball, and the MacArthur’ danced and danced.” Like presidential candidates, the General drew strength from the circus-air excitement of the crowds. There was always something to give him a lift: the ceremony on Chicago’s State Street, for example, where he laid a wreath on the Bataan-Corregidor Bridge and gave the Bataan veterans there a “Mabuhay,” or Herbert Hoover’s statement that “General MacArthur may say, ‘Old soldiers never die, they just fade away’ . . . but the great deeds of men live forever after them.” MacArthur was particularly invigorated by children; he issued a standing order that his motorcade always slow down for them, though perhaps he should have pondered the impact of all this commotion on his own gentle, sensitive son. As the throngs began to dwindle toward the end, he might also have weighed the impact of his rhetoric on his popularity. Only once did he yield to his wife’s entreaties that he resist the temptation to preach. At a dinner in Seattle’s Olympic Hotel he declined to speak because, he said, Jean had told him that he had “talked enough in Seattle.”6

  He certainly had. His remarks in the city that afternoon are a fair sample of what he was telling audiences who had gathered to honor his military and viceregal achievements, not his Republicanism. “Our political stature,” he had said, “has been sadly impaired by a succession of diplomatic blunders abroad and reckless spendthrift aims at home. . . . There is a growing anxiety in the American home as disclosures reveal graft and corruption over a broad front in our public service.” The people, he had continued, “have it in their power . . . to reject the socialist policies covertly and by devious means being forced upon us, to stamp out Communist influence which has played so ill-famed a part in the past direction of our public administration. . . . Our country will then reassume that spiritual and moral leadership recently lost in a quagmire of political ineptitude and economic incompetence.”7

  Hoover rejoiced in this, and so did Taft, but coming from an officer in full uniform it was unseemly. It wasn’t even an accurate reflection of his political philosophy. His liberal reforms in Tokyo, his often-stated feeling that Japanese policies should be “left of center,” were wholly inconsistent with it. To be sure, like most American conservatives, he had always linked politics and religion, perhaps because Christianity, and especially Protestantism, is identified with the American past. But he had scorned the racial chauvinism of ultra-rightists all his life; unlike them, he disdained Asian colonialism, which, as he had said on one occasion, he firmly believed should be replaced by “heretofore unfelt dignity, and the self-respect of political freedom.”8

  There was no hint of that in his homecoming speeches, no reminders that this was the man who had introduced so many liberal reforms into postwar Nippon. When Norman Vincent Peale declared, “No man of our time is more authentically the voice of real America than Douglas MacArthur,” he meant that no other American of MacArthur’s stature was speaking more forcefully for the McGuffey Reader-ism which the American electorate had rejected at the polls in the last five presidential elections. Standing bareheaded before the Alamo, the General praised “that small band of Texans who stood and died rather than yield the precious concepts of liberty,” concepts which, he evidently believed, were now extolled by another small band of Texans led by H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison. He urged removal of “the burden of taxation” from enterprising industrialists who would otherwise become “stultified and inert,” burdens imposed by “those who seek to convert us to a form of socialistic endeavor, leading directly to the path of Communist slavery.”9

  Picking up a GOP theme which found its ultimate expression in McCarthyism, he quoted Lincoln to enthusiastic Michigan legislators: “If this nation is ever destroyed, it will be from within, not from without.” Destruction would be the consequence of following U.S. leaders who, “more in line with Marxian philosophy than animated by a desire to preserve freedom, would finance the defense of others as a means of sharing with them our wealth.” He almost seemed to condemn NATO: “Our first line of defense for Western Europe is not the Elbe, it is not the Rhine—it is the Yalu.” Any other position relied on “passive defense,” which “in all history has never won a war.” He blamed “political and military leaders” who, after V-J Day, “dissipated with reckless haste that predominant military power which was the key to the situation. Our forces were rapidly and completely demobilized”— he omitted his own role in reducing U.S. troop strength in Japan—“and the great stores of war material which had been accumulated were disposed of with irresponsible haste and abandoned.”10

  Here and there he made useful points, deploring the concentration of power in the executive branch and warning that ambitious Pentagon officers were eager to forge foreign policy. But these were lost in clots of conservative piety and outrageous distortions. In Boston he said that he had been dismissed for three reasons: his warning “of the strategic relationship of Formosa to American security,” his “readiness to meet the enemy commander at any time to discuss acceptable terms of a cease-fire,” and his reply “to a Congressman’s request for information.” He told the Legionnaires that the administration had planned to give Formosa to Mao and seat Red China at the UN, and that his armistice appeal of March 24 “unquestionably wrecked the secret plan to yield on these issues as the price for peace in Korea.” That was too much for Truman. In a press conference the next day he called MacArthur, in effect, a liar. The General replied that the President “would relieve many millions of patriotic minds . . . if instead of indulging in innuendo and trying to alibi the past, he would announce the firm determination that under no conditions . . . would the U.S. permit Formosa to fall in Red hands or Communist China to be seated in the U.N. This simple and understandable assurance he has never given. I predict he never will.”11

  “MacArthur’s counterpunch,” Time jubilantly reported, “had plenty of steam behind it.” It did; the blows he was delivering undoubtedly contributed to the voters’ subsequent repudiation of the administration. Whether they were a wise expenditure of the General’s prestige is another matter. Every such speech heightened the impression that he was just another partisan politician, a spokesman for a right-wing creed whose other pulpiteers lacked his stature and his vision. He was inviting retaliation, and he got it. Truman’s retort had been one thing. Everyone knew that there was a blood feud between the two men now; that each, to justify himself, had to rage at the other. That was their common tragedy; neither could remain true to himself and leave the other unviolated. But in lashing out at the President, the General was also savaging policies embraced by millions who held no brief for Truman’s sack of him. Even as he was speaking in Seattle, several civic leaders in the audience had quietly walked out of the hall. The next morning Hugh Mitchell, the city’s Democratic congressman, called
him a “demagogue.” Oklahoma’s Robert Kerr cried: “The Mackado rides again!” The New York Post described him as “a desperate, demagogic Republican politician fighting a dirty political war,” and Eisenhower, commenting on the Legion speech, told C. L. Sulzberger that his old chief was “an opportunist seeking to ride the crest of the wave.”12

  Ike, of course, was about to join him on that wave. He is forgiven because he rode it into the White House. “Success,’ a shrewd French proverb runs, “can hide many errors.” What was so sad about MacArthur’s bitter campaign was that he lost so much and gained so little. By wading into the political surf up to his pipe and braided cap, the public opinion polls reported, he had sacrificed much of his following. Toward the end of a Polo Grounds game between the Giants and the Phillies, the band played “Old Soldiers Never Die” as he crossed the diamond to the center-field exit with Jean and Arthur. Moments before they reached it a man yelled in a Bronx accent: “Hey Mac! How’s Harry Truman?” and the bleachers burst into laughter and applause. Reminded of the incident later, Truman said: “Well, of course. The American people always see through a counterfeit. It sometimes takes a little time, but eventually they can always spot one. And MacArthur, I’ll tell you; if there ever was to be a Counterfeit Club, he would have been president of it. That is one position he wouldn’t have had to run for; he would have been elected, unanimously.” Truman added: “He struck me as a man there wasn’t anything real about.” That was a startling appraisal of an American whose place in the history of four Pacific nations, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea, was already assured. But the President hadn’t made a fool of the General. MacArthur himself had done that. He had asked for it, and Truman, being Truman, had given it to him.13