The Korean War (12 page)

And MacArthur was to be their commander. In the light of the Administration’s subsequent difficulties with their general, it is remarkable how great was its almost mystic faith, in those first days of war, that SCAP could salvage the fortunes of the anti-communist cause in Korea. If his appointment, as the man on the
spot, afterwards seemed entirely natural, even in those dramatic days there were sceptics, who predicted with remarkable accuracy the risks of placing the direction of the United Nations forces in his hands. ‘. . . at seventy,’ wrote James Reston in the
New York Times
, ‘General Douglas MacArthur . . . is being asked to be not only a great soldier but a great statesman; not only to direct the battle, but to satisfy the Pentagon, the State Department and the United Nations in the process.’ MacArthur had never been regarded as an Eisenhower, with the Kansan’s genius for international teamwork. SCAP, noted Reston, ‘is a sovereign power in his own right, with stubborn confidence in his own judgement. Diplomacy and a vast concern for the opinions and sensitivities of others are the political qualities essential to this new assignment, and these are precisely the qualities General MacArthur has been accused of lacking in the past.’
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It was impossible for anyone subsequently to suggest that the perils of appointing MacArthur had gone unnoticed.

But there was little doubt about the enthusiasm of the American people for the course their President had adopted. A leader in the
New York Times
on 30 June was headlined ‘Democracy Takes Its Stand’. It praised Truman’s ‘momentous and courageous act’, and welcomed the revision of the American policy in the Far East that ‘helped to lose China’. Wall Street fell sharply in a fit of war nerves, and an unholy alliance of the
Daily Worker
, the
Wall Street Journal
and Colonel McCormick’s
Chicago Tribune
opposed American intervention in another foreign war. But Washington and Middle America seemed uncommonly united in support of the Administration. ‘The average American is pleased that the United States has for once boldly taken the initiative,’ the British Ambassador, Oliver Franks, cabled to London, ‘proud that it has called the Soviet bluff and “won’t let them get away with it”. Virtually all shades of opinion wholeheartedly support the President.’ An hour after Truman’s announcement of the American military commitment, Congress approved a bill extending the draft, by 314 votes to 4. On 30 June, the Military Assistance programme for Korea passed the
Senate by 66 votes to 0. Fuelled by the warmth of genuine outrage, the first American response to communist aggression in Korea enjoyed overwhelming popular support. ‘I have lived and worked in and out of Washington for twenty years,’ wrote Joseph Harsch in the
Christian Science Monitor
the morning after the announcement of American intervention in Korea. ‘Never before in that time have I felt such a sense of relief and unity pass through this city.’

Oliver Franks, Britain’s envoy, was a close personal friend of Dean Acheson. The two men spent much time together, at Acheson’s house in Georgetown, or at Sandy Springs. If their business was very secret, they would talk it out in the midst of the fields, where in those innocent days they could not be bugged. Franks sometimes received letters from right-wing senators, disgusted with the anglophilia of the American Secretary of State and some of those around him, saying ‘take your Acheson and your Marshall back to England with you’. By 1950, more and more conservative Americans were unhappy about an Administration which still revealed such a strong preoccupation with decadent Europe. But to a European, the quality of those men never seemed in doubt. More than thirty years later, almost the last living witness close to the very centre of events in the American capital in the summer of 1950, Franks remarked upon the extraordinary accident that, at this moment of history, such a group of Americans occupied the principal positions of power in the Truman Administration: The President himself – ‘a man of wider outlook than you might think; he had read and enjoyed a lot of history, especially of Europe and of the American Civil War; he had a background of depth’; Acheson – ‘a natural First Class in any university’; Marshall – ‘he was looking at the big world all the time, a cool, definite mind which looked for solutions to problems rather than simply worrying about them’: Bradley – ‘very, very high class’; Lovett; and in the second rank, George Kennan, ‘Chip’ Bohlen, Dean Rusk. Franks’ strongest personal enthusiasm, of course, was for the Secretary of
State: ‘He came to believe that the United States had an appointment with destiny, from which there was no way out but for the nation to lead and bend its whole energies to ordering the world. He could be irascible, romantic, short-tempered. But he was a blade of steel.’
⁸
To that group of men, Kim Il Sung’s invasion represented a watershed.

Their thinking [said Franks] moved from the Czech coup in February 1948, to the Berlin airlift, to Korea. These were seen as stages in Soviet risk-taking that would culminate in their armed forces crossing boundaries. It is hard now to remember the shudder about the Russian seizure of Czechoslovakia, and the ghastly memories that it evoked of 1938. There was the feeling ‘we couldn’t do anything in ’38, and we find we can’t do anything now’. There was the sense of not knowing where the Russians would break out next. I myself saw Korea as the last in a series of events. I favoured countering the North Korean invasion, because I thought that if any army could cross any frontier when it chose, then chaos had come. Looking back, I don’t think I disagree with myself in 1950. It was one of those moments when
people
– the presence of that extraordinary group in the Administration – made a decisive difference to history.
⁹

2. Tokyo

MacArthur first learned of the North Korean invasion when a duty officer telephoned from his headquarters: ‘General, we have received a dispatch from Seoul, advising that the North Koreans have struck in great strength south across the 38th Parallel.’ To the old warlord, it seemed an extraordinary rewriting of personal history. Here he was once more, in the Philippines in December
1941; ‘an uncanny feeling of nightmare . . . it was the same fell note of the war cry that was again ringing in my ears. It couldn’t be, I told myself. Not again! I must still be asleep and dreaming. Not again!’

Barring urgent developments, the Supreme Commander said, he wanted to be left alone with his own reflections. Stepping into his slippers and his frayed robe, he began striding back and forth in his bedroom. Presently Jean stepped in from her room. ‘I heard you pacing up and down,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’ He told her the news, and she paled. Later Blackie bounded in, tried to divert his master with coaxing barks, and failing, slunk off. Then Arthur appeared for his morning romp with his father. Jean intercepted him and told him there would be no frolicking today. MacArthur put his arm around his son’s shoulders, paused, thrust his hands in the pockets of his robe, and renewed his strides.
¹⁰

When MacArthur at last emerged from Olympian seclusion to drive to his headquarters and take up the web of vast new problems and responsibilities that now encircled him, his moods fluctuated. Some of those who saw him believed that ten years had fallen away, as a fresh crisis lent him new vigour. The extraordinary prospect that now, when it had seemed that the balance of his career could offer only dignified decline, he was once more to play a leading part in the destiny of the world, mantled him in serenity, almost euphoria. At first, he seemed slow to acknowledge that the North Korean action was more than a border incident. Even when events forced him to do so, he continued to declare his belief that the South Korean army could hold them. While the general was still wavering about the seriousness of the threat, it was John Foster Dulles, unconvinced by MacArthur’s view that Rhee’s forces could look after themselves, who cabled Acheson: ‘Believe that if it appears the South Koreans cannot contain or repulse the attack, United States forces should be used even though this risks Russian
countermoves. To sit by while Korea is overrun by unprovoked armed attack would start a world war.’

But if MacArthur was slow to grasp the climactic nature of the crisis, once he had done so he showed no further hesitation. For years, he had watched with dismay and disgust while the Administration focused its overseas attention overwhelmingly upon Europe. It had always been his fundamental conviction that America’s destiny lay in the Pacific. He declared that he was almost as astonished that the Administration was showing the will to intervene in Korea as he was by the communist invasion. He was deeply gratified by Washington’s decision, when it came.

Yet from the very beginning, the Supreme Commander entrusted with the execution of the American, and United Nations, response to the communist invasion revealed the gulf between his own attitude, and the policy of Washington. The Administration’s purpose was to conduct a limited war. Communist aggression was to be repelled by whatever means proved necessary. But the struggle was to be confined to the Korean peninsula. The ‘quarantining’ of Formosa, the diplomatic signals sent to Moscow, were intended to demonstrate America’s determination to prevent an Asian incident from escalating into a global conflict.

From June 1950 until his dismissal ten months later, MacArthur displayed a wholly different perception of the Korean conflict, which he never concealed from his superiors and scarcely at all from the world. He considered that it was the historic destiny of the United States, as the greatest capitalist power on earth, sooner or later to confront communism on the battlefield. He believed the immense advantage granted to America by her monopoly possession of effective nuclear forces could not last. It was therefore strongly in America’s interests to conduct a decisive struggle against worldwide communism sooner rather than later. The conflict between Washington and MacArthur that was to become one of the most dangerous and divisive factors in the Korean War was essentially a simple one. MacArthur did not believe in the concept
of limited war. He acknowledged the Thomist doctrine of just wars. As his biographer William Manchester has written, he ‘believed that if the battlefield was the last resort of governments, then the struggle must be waged until one side had been vanquished’. Furthermore, and far more alarming in its implications, had Washington chosen to grasp them, MacArthur took the view that once hostilities had begun, the general in the field became the central force in decision-making. If he was being entrusted with the direction of United States forces in the Far East in time of war, he expected to be granted the widest discretion in determining their employment. In World War II, he enjoyed extraordinary policy-making powers in the Pacific. He now expected to exercise such powers again, in the age of the new superpowers, and of the atomic bomb.

From the beginning, some members of the Administration felt uneasy about MacArthur, the ageing titan, the ‘overmighty subject’, wielding power in Tokyo. It was unthinkable to replace America’s greatest living field commander at such a moment. But given the convictions of the principal players in the drama, what was remarkable was not that Korea precipitated a crisis between the President and his principal subordinate in the theatre of war; but that the climax was delayed until the struggle was so far advanced.

Even the warmest admirers of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur have conceded his huge aberrations and defects of character. ‘His paranoia was almost certifiable,’ wrote William Manchester.
¹¹
‘He hated an entire continent: Europe.’ Another recent American study of MacArthur revealed some hitherto unknown details about his private life when Chief of Staff of the US Army before the Second World War: his penchant for histrionic threats of suicide; his enthusiasm for the platonic attentions of prostitutes, as an audience to boost his titanic ego. The author of this work suggests that, had these facts been widely known, they
would have provided sufficient evidence of instability to disqualify MacArthur from his command, either in World War II or Korea. This seems a hasty judgement. A moment’s reflection upon great commanders of recent history shows that many have possessed eccentricities, to say the least: Patton, Montgomery, Stilwell spring to mind. Humility and the higher peaks of intellectualism are also doubtful assets. A sense of destiny may be shown to have been mistaken in the case of certain commanders, in whose ranks Hitler might be included. But the same attribute has guided others to marvellous achievements on the battlefield. MacArthur’s role in the Korean War can be viewed as a tragedy; or as a case history of the overmighty subject in a democratic society; or as an example of unchallenged military authority leading to megalomania. But it is not enough merely to paint a portrait of an ageing general ruling a byzantine court in post-war Tokyo, and to argue that his nature and behaviour made all that followed inevitable. There was a greatness about MacArthur, which all his own efforts from the autumn of 1950 until his death have been unable to destroy.

Throughout his life, he acted on the assumption that the rules made for lesser men had no relevance to himself. Few commanders of any nationality could have borne so large a responsibility for the United States’ military débâcle in the Philippines in 1941–42, yet escaped any share of it. Fewer still could have abandoned his doomed command on Bataan, and escaped to safety with his own court, complete even unto personal servants, and made good the claim that his own value to his country surpassed that of a symbolic sacrifice alongside his men. Even less so could they have escaped public censure for accepting a vast personal financial gift from the Philippines president, at the very hour when the battle for his country was being lost. There remains considerable controversy about MacArthur’s achievement as Supreme Commander in the southern Pacific, forever struggling with the US Navy for greater personal authority, surrounding himself with sycophantic staff officers – ‘the Bataan gang’ – sometimes slow to grasp tactical opportunities.