On Saturday, March 22, 1952, MacArthur capped his campaign against the administration. Standing on the steps of the capital in Jackson, Mississippi, he charged that administration policies were “leading toward a Communist state with as dreadful certainty as though the leaders of the Kremlin were charting the course.” He deplored massive American aid to Europe; charity should begin at home, he said; although billions had been spent on the Continent, he doubted that the United States had “gained a single convert to the cause of freedom or inspired new or deeper friendships” there. Of the Korean truce talks, which had been under way for eight months, he said that “the only noticeable result is that the enemy has gained time,” and he prophesied that “our failure . . . in Korea will probably mean the ultimate loss of continental Asia.” The New York Times protested that “the bitterness of his attack . . . on the whole of the Marshall Plan, the strengthening of Western Europe, and the rescue of Greece and Turkey does violence to our own good name” and was “a disservice to the public.” So it was, but much of the public—enough of it to swing a close election—didn’t think so. The Times’s own correspondent in Jackson had reported that the audience of twenty-five thousand had interrupted his speech twenty-five times “by applause and scattered rebel yells.” MacArthur had become a symbol of opposition to the unwinnable war, enthusiasm for which, in Acheson’s tart phrase, had “reached an irreducible minimum.” The following Saturday Truman announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection. MacArthur’s nationwide campaign against him had not been the sole reason for the President’s decision, but it had certainly been a factor, and MacArthur felt avenged, felt he had achieved one of his goals in that election year.14
The second goal was to deny the Republican nomination to Eisenhower. On June 10 MacArthur had been chosen to deliver the keynote address at the GOP convention, then less than four weeks away, and U.S. News and World Report observed that “his role as keynoter is just a starter. He is ready to lay aside his uniform, retire from the Army, do anything necessary to . . . defeat his five-star colleague.” On May 15 he had bluntly told the Michigan legislature that he believed that no soldier should be President. Time commented acidly: “Perhaps because the public remembered his own past willingness to run, perhaps for other reasons, the MacArthur thrust failed to create any great stir. Among the great man’s well-deserved laurels nestled a bunch of slightly sour grapes.” The General’s favorite for the nomination, he intimated, was the son of the man who had humbled his father in the Philippines a half-century earlier. U.S. News and World Report said: “Slugging openly for Taft is Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur has been making speeches, talking to delegates, trying to assure the nomination of the senator . . . . If Taft is nominated, General MacArthur will become a front-rank campaigner.”15
Actually it was more complicated than that. MacArthur’s first choice was still MacArthur. Even Time, strongly for Ike, saw Ike’s former chief “in the center of the stage as the nation’s best-known anti-Truman leader.” Senators and congressmen returning home, the newsmagazine found, had learned that MacArthur had “not faded away. The feeling is not enthusiasm so much as unshakable respect and confidence. It varies geographically [and] is most pronounced in the West and Midwest and least in the East. . . . Speech-making Republicans need only to mention the General’s name, or to cite his stand on the Korean War, and the audience applause bursts out. At a rally in Illinois, an applause meter registered most sharply when Candidate Harold Stassen promised that his first act as President would be to recall MacArthur to active duty.” Republicans who wanted the Pacific general, not the Atlantic general, to lead their ticket banded together under various names; Texas had a “Demand MacArthur” movement, California an “Americans for MacArthur” drive, New Hampshire a “MacArthur for President” caucus, Pennsylvania a “Fighters for MacArthur” committee. They were, however, weaker than they seemed. A veteran political reporter for the Times thought the General would “sweep up all fourteen delegates” in New Hampshire. Instead, the big winner in New Hampshire was Eisenhower. Eight days later, after Ike had run a strong second to Stassen in Minnesota, he sent word from Paris that he had been persuaded to “reexamine” his “political position.” In short, he was packing. One reason, he told a newsman, was his “fairly considerable dislike for MacArthur’s politics and policies.”16
Defining the precise relationship between MacArthur and Taft at this point is impossible. Like most preconvention alliances, it was a marriage of convenience, subject to dissolution should the affections of either be alienated by a large bloc of delegates. Before the Eisenhower boom coalesced, Taft and MacArthur breakfasted in the General’s Waldorf aerie. Whitney, who was there, has said that MacArthur opened the conversation by saying: “Senator, I have been a Republican all my life and I want you to know that while I do not intend actively to campaign, you will have my fullest support for the Republican nomination.” According to Whitney, Taft replied that if he became President he would appoint MacArthur overall commander of the armed forces. But Sullivan, who was also present, remembers it differently. According to him, “the agreement was that Taft would try on the first ballot. If he felt he was picking up support, he would go on. If he felt he was going to lose he would go to the rostrum, withdraw, and ask his delegates to vote for MacArthur.” A third version, a penciled holograph found in Taft’s desk after his death, stipulated: “If Senator Taft receives the Republican nomination, in the course of his acceptance he will announce his intention to appeal to General MacArthur’s patriotism to permit his name to be presented to the convention as his [Taft’s] choice for running mate.” Taft would then announce that, if elected, he would make MacArthur his deputy commander in chief; the General would share responsibility with him for “the formulation of all foreign policy bearing upon the national security.”17
The first test in Chicago came before the platform committee. Dulles proposed a foreign policy plank affirming U.S. commitments in Europe. Taft, MacArthur, and Hoover were against it, and they lost. Then, at 3:00 P.M. on Monday, July 7, the former SCAP, wearing civilian clothes in public for the first time since his return, boarded a United Airlines flight to Chicago. Five hours later he mounted the rostrum for the keynote address. It was probably the worst speech of his career—banal and strident in content, wretchedly delivered, a bungling of his chance to become a dark horse. Whenever he mentioned God, which was often, his voice had a disconcerting way of rising an octave and breaking, and he had developed a peculiar habit of jumping up and down and pointing his right forefinger toward the ceiling for emphasis. Halfway through it the delegates began babbling so loudly among themselves that he could scarcely be heard. C. L. Sulzberger wrote: “He said nothing but sheer baloney. One could feel the electricity gradually running out of the room. I think he cooked his own goose and didn’t do much to help Taft.”18
After conferring with party leaders in the Stock Yard Inn, the General flew home to await the convention’s verdict. Discouraged by the poor reception of his address, he instructed the Waldorf switchboard to put no calls through to his suite. Apparently Taft tried to reach him. The crucial maneuvering on Tuesday was in the uncommitted Pennsylvania delegation. At 10:00 P.M. Red Blaik, in New York, received a call from Victor Emanuel, a key Taft aide. Since Howard Pew would not release the Keystone State delegates to Taft, Emanuel said, the senator had abandoned hope for himself. Pew would back MacArthur, however, and Taft was convinced that only a MacArthur candidacy could stop Eisenhower. If he added his delegates to Pennsylvania’s, MacArthur might make it. Blaik was asked to stand by until 2:00 A.M., prepared to go to the Waldorf and ask the General to phone Taft at once. Blaik recalls that “the call from Victor never came; the Eisenhower delegates overcame the more conservative elements in the Republican party, and I was not commissioned to inform MacArthur of the sudden switch in his favor.” According to another version, which cannot be verified, the senator was put through to the General on a private line in the hotel. If this ac
count is correct, Taft asked MacArthur to return to Chicago, make a dramatic reappearance on the rostrum, and urge the delegates to choose Taft by acclamation. Perhaps that call was made, but the memories of convention survivors, muddled by exhaustion, are often unreliable. All that can be said with certainty is that in the chaos of the stockyards MacArthur’s last chance to become President disappeared. Sullivan recalls that he was “deeply disappointed.”19
MacArthur delivers keynote address at 1952 GOP convention
But he hadn’t abandoned hope of solving the Korean conundrum. Speaking before a gathering of industrialists four weeks after the election, he said: “While it is well known that my own views have not been sought in any way, yet I am confident that there is a clear and definite solution to the Korean conflict.” He could not divulge it there, he said; “a present solution involves basic decisions which I recognize as improper for public disclosure or discussion, but which in my opinion can be executed without either an unduly heavy price in friendly casualties or any increased danger of provoking universal conflict.” Two days later he received a cable from President-elect Eisenhower, en route home from Korea aboard the U.S.S. Helena and feeling generous toward his pre-Chicago adversary: “I am looking forward to [an] informal meeting in which my associates and I may obtain the full benefits of your thinking and experience.” MacArthur replied: “You know, without my saying, that my service is, as it always has been, entirely at the disposition of our country.” The exchange seemed auspicious, but Ike, like Marshall, was a wary leader, and MacArthur’s plan was nothing if not venturesome.20
On December 17 the General, the President-elect, and John Foster Dulles lunched for over two hours in Dulles’s narrow, four-story town house on Manhattan’s East Ninety-first Street, just off Park Avenue. MacArthur handed Eisenhower a fourteen-point memorandum calling for a summit conference immediately after the inauguration at which Ike would present Stalin with an ultimatum, demanding the unification of Korea and Germany, the withdrawal of all foreign troops from them and from Japan, a U.S.-USSR guarantee of Korean, German, and Japanese neutrality, and the introduction in the Russian and American constitutions of “a provision outlawing war as an instrument of national policy.” If Stalin balked, atomic weapons would be dropped on North Korea and China’s “capacity to wage modern war” would be neutralized by bombing. The General acknowledged that these steps were drastic, but “it is obvious that American public opinion will not indefinitely countenance the present indecision and inertia. ”21
While Eisenhower studied the memo, MacArthur summed it up for the future secretary of state and asked him what he thought of it. Dulles vaguely praised it but said, “I believe that Eisenhower should first consolidate his position as President before attempting so ambitious and comprehensive a program. It might take him a year to do so. After all, it has been twenty years since the Republicans were in power.” MacArthur instantly replied that Ike would be “at the peak of his power and prestige” the day of his inaugural. He vigorously argued that “timing is of the essence, and logic requires a showdown at the height of the President’s world popularity. To procrastinate, however, is to give a signal to the Russians to expedite the arms race, eventually nullifying our advantage.” He turned to Eisenhower and said: “Today the Russians have such respect for you that strong action will bring them to terms. If you wait, they will no longer follow you as the leader of world opinion. This is the last time I shall call you ‘Ike’ and speak to you on equal terms. Hereafter you will be ‘Mr. President.’ So now I say that you have the opportunity to be perhaps the greatest man since Jesus Christ, as only you can dictate the peace of the world. I beg of you to take the initiative with bold action.” He took the memo, folded it, tucked it in Eisenhower’s breast pocket, patted the place, and said softly, “God bless you.”22
Outside, a small crowd awaited them: reporters, passersby, and, in that select neighborhood, nursemaids and poodles. Linking his arm in MacArthur’s, the President-elect said, “We had a very fine conversation on the subject of peace, not only in Korea but in the world in general.” MacArthur said of Ike, “. . . I haven’t seen him for nearly six years. It is the resumption of an old friendship and comradeship that has existed for thirty-five years.” That was the most that could be said of it. The two men, despite their close association in the 1930s, were incapable of understanding each other. One represented a poetic vision of great drama; the other, the even perspective of hard prose. So that was the end of it. Truman had directed Omar Bradley to write the Waldorf, asking for the details of the General’s peace plan. MacArthur frostily answered that he had given them to the President-elect, though he would, “of course, be glad to participate” in “a coordinated discussion of the matter with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” On December 29 Bradley thanked him in four terse sentences, wishing him “a happy and prosperous New Year.” Neither the White House nor the Pentagon approached the General on the subject again. His advice would be as unwelcome to the new administration as it had been to the old. Dulles, like Acheson, was a believer in limited wars. The old General, one feels, had become an embarrassment to the leaders of both parties, an unwelcome reminder of the gallant past, now lost forever, in which intolerable differences between great nations could be resolved by the sword.23
In its penultimate year the outgoing administration had dealt MacArthur one last, unforgivable blow. Diplomats from fifty-one nations were invited to attend the signing of the Japanese peace treaty in San Francisco, but the man who had created the postwar Nipponese state was ignored. The General said dryly, “Perhaps someone just forgot to remember.” But he hadn’t been forgotten. Bernard Baruch urged Acheson to send him an invitation. Ache-son explains in his memoirs: “I had not provided for this in the rules and was not inclined to do so.” A number of commentators, among them H. V. Kaltenborn, were highly critical of the lapse. So was Sebald, the senior adviser to the American delegation. Foggy Bottom was unimpressed. Shigeru Yoshida sent word to the Waldorf that he had wanted to fly east and pay his respects, but had been advised by the State Department that it would be “inappropriate.”24
Clark Lee called this “an unbelievably petty snub” and “a stupid propaganda error” which was “bound to have repercussions throughout the Far East.” It did not, however, diminish the devotion of the Japanese to their former ruler. Yoshida wrote him: “Fondly and gratefully I cherish the memories of our intimate contact—you as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and I as executor of your directives. You were so good to me, so kind and generous that I was able to perform my duty to the best of my ability, and thereby contribute my mite to the making of the new Japan.” The General, he said, would be delighted “to see with your own eyes how firmly your epochal reforms have taken root in Japanese soil.” Three years after the signing of the treaty Yoshida called at suite 37A, and the following year his foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, arrived there on the tenth anniversary of the surrender ceremony aboard the Missouri. MacArthur recalled SCAP’s veto of plans to punish the emperor and said he was against trials of all “so-called war criminals,” forgetting his execution of Yamashita and Homma. Japan awarded him the highest decoration it could confer on a foreigner who was not a head of state, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers. Accompanying it was a signed scroll from Hirohito. The General said he could “recall no parallel in history where a great nation recently at war has so distinguished its former enemy commander.”25
If he remained immodest, he became less jagged in his judgments. For a time he seemed to be mellowing toward the man who had relieved him. After a stag dinner in the Manhattan apartment of another retired general, a fellow guest had the temerity to ask his opinion of Truman. According to Sullivan, MacArthur surprised everyone by saying, “The little bastard had guts to fire me, and I like him.” On another occasion he called the former President “a man of raw courage,” and on a third he said with a chuckle, “Judging from the way he handled me, he’d m
ake a pretty good fullback.” But that was before Truman’s memoirs appeared. When they did, hinting that the General had been responsible for South Korean unpreparedness in June 1950 and accusing him of insubordination, MacArthur erupted. Prewar U.S. policy in Korea, he pointed out, “was initiated in Washington.” But it was the “belated claim of insubordination,” made by Truman “as a private citizen . . . without the officer concerned being given a hearing and an opportunity to defend himself,” which really rankled. It provoked the worst in him. He charged that everyone instrumental in his dismissal—Marshall, Harriman, Acheson, Bradley—had been “personally hostile to me.” In the case of Bradley this was difficult to justify, since the two men were virtual strangers. The General explained that Bradley knew he had been critical of him because “the Battle of the Bulge, where he was the ground commander . . . resulted in approximately as many American casualties as were sustained in the entire Southwest Pacific Area campaigns from Australia to Tokyo.”*26
Like the crowd at the Polo Grounds, his critics laughed. He didn’t know how to handle them; he never had. It was correct to say of his recall, as he did then, that “no office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies,” but that wasn’t the way to put it, and it should have come from someone else. There would have been no lack of volunteers. He still had legions of eloquent defenders. Truman, showing Carlos Romulo through his presidential library in Independence, pointed at a picture of the General and said, “Well, you know who that is; that’s God.” Romulo said evenly, “Mr. President, there are millions of Filipinos who think he is just that.” Chastened, Truman said, “It means a great deal to me that the citizens of another country feel that way about a fellow American.” In time MacArthur also regained his perspective. One afternoon on Park Avenue a stranger stopped him on the street and said, “Your pictures do you a great injustice, Mr. Truman.” The General told Jean: “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”28