Truman (28 page)

By May 20th the Communists were stopped. On May 23rd the UN command began yet another offensive which took them once again north of the parallel and to the occupation by June 12th of the two tactically important towns of Chorwon and Kumwha. There, as the anniversary of its outbreak approached, the war settled down. On June 23rd Malik proposed at the United Nations that cease-fire negotiations should be opened between the participants. They were, but not with a great will to peace. It took another 25 months before an armistice was signed at Panmunjon.

These long drawn-out negotiations were punctuated by occasional outbursts of hard fighting, by substantial American trouble with the intransigence of Syngman Rhee, and by North
Korean accusations, strongly supported by Dr Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean' of Canterbury, that the UN forces were engaging in germ warfare, all against the theme of continuing dispute over the repatriation of prisoners of war. This issue was greatly complicated by the facts that the Communists had engaged in some remarkably successful brain-washing of American and British prisoners and that many of the North Koreans in the hands of the UN were determined not to go back. The war dragged on as a running irritant throughout the last eighteen months of Truman's presidency, and the need to break the log-jam of the stalled negotiations was successfully exploited by Eisenhower in the 1952 campaign. But the crisis went out of the war after June 1951.

During the course of the war Truman had faced three major crunches: first, the decision to resist and then rally the United Nations in June 1950; second, the absorption of the shock of defeat six months later, and the decision to fight back in a still limited war, resisting alike the rival temptations of withdrawal and escalation; and third, the belated dismissal of MacArthur in April 1951.

Although this last was belated, overwhelmingly justified, and essential if the authority of the presidency was to be maintained, it was nonetheless an act of stark courage. I doubt if Franklin Roosevelt would have done it. He would have more successfully massaged MacArthur, while patronizing him a little and certainly not allowing the reverse to happen, as at Wake Island. And he would have shunted him gradually sideways and downwards, so that he ended up somewhere between a grand emissary to the then powerless Emperor of Japan and a keeper of American war graves in the Pacific. But he would probably not have sacked him.

Truman did not decide to do this following the defeat and the Attlee protests of December. In January he was still trying hard, using a mixture of flattery and logical exposition, to find a
modus vivendi
with MacArthur. This was a hopeless task, for MacArthur, particularly after Ridgway took over the joint command in Pusan, was looking for departure with a flourish and not for quiet cooperation. In mid-March, with South Korea again free of invading troops, Truman ordered careful work to be done on preparing a cease-fire proposal to be put to the Chinese. MacArthur was consulted on the key paragraphs. Thereupon he issued his own ultimatum to the Chinese, couched in terms of such insulting
rhetoric that there could be no possibility of their accepting it. That made it impossible for Truman to send his message to the Chinese, and, he subsequently claimed, was when he made up his mind to get rid of him:

‘That is what he got fired for … He prevented a cease-fire proposition right there. I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea at that time. I was never so put out in my life. It's the lousiest trick a Commander-in-Chief can have done to him by an underling. MacArthur thought he was proconsul for the government of the United States and could do as he damned pleased. ‘
²³

General Marshall subsequently put much the same point in more restrained and logical language: ‘What is new and what brought about the necessity for General MacArthur's removal is the wholly unprecedented situation of a local theater commander publicly expressing his displeasure at, and disagreement with, the foreign policy of the United States.'
²⁴

MacArthur did not however go immediately after his epistle to the Chinese. Truman showed some guile over the timing. He needed to get some important congressional votes on appropriations for the Marshall Plan and NATO out of the way before lobbing his bomb into the political arena. He also wanted to be under pressure from his advisers, rather than vice-versa, to agree to the removal of MacArthur. He therefore waited for a further act of provocation, which was a letter from the General to Representative Joseph Martin, the Republican minority leader, which again set out his own foreign policy and which was duly read to the House by Martin on April 4th.

Truman conferred that day and subsequently with a group composed of Marshall, Acheson, Harriman and General Bradley. By April 7th they unanimously recommended to him that Mac-Arthur be relieved of his command. Bradley had conferred with the three service chiefs, and on April 8th brought them to see Truman, when they each gave him their opinion that he should act as proposed. This somewhat deliberate method of proceeding had the great advantage that it led to them all giving extremely firm testimony to a special Senate Committee which subsequently and inconclusively considered the merits of MacArthur's dismissal.
It was the direct opposite of the mood which Louis Johnson had achieved amongst the witnesses before the House Armed Services Committee in 1949.

Its disadvantage was that it defeated the plans for the most courteous possible conveying of the news to MacArthur. This was to be done personally by the Secretary of the Army, Frank Pace, who was in Korea and was to proceed to Tokyo and quietly inform the General. Instead there was a leak, the announcement had to be brought forward, and MacArthur was first informed, not by Pace, but by his incredulous wife, who had just heard it on the radio. This infelicity gave him an exploitable, but hardly decisive, grievance. It is doubtful if he would have taken the news well had it been conveyed to him a week in advance of publication by a joint deputation of every other five-star general in the US Army.

For the moment, however, it was the reaction of the public rather than of the General which made the impact. ‘Quite an explosion,' Truman wrote fairly laconically in his diary for April 10th. ‘Was expected but I had to act Telegrams and letters of abuse by the dozen.'
²⁵

‘By the dozen' was something of an understatement. 78,000 pieces of mail on the issue eventually reached the White House, and they broke approximately twenty to one against the President. On the Gallup Poll he did somewhat better, only 69% supporting MacArthur as against 29% for the President. The loyal 29% were not enough to prevent Truman being burnt in effigy in many places across the nation, and there was a great deal of muttering about impeachment, some of it from relatively responsible members of the Congress. The press was substantially better than the public. The
New York Times
and the
Washington Post,
not then the heavenly twins of East Coast liberalism which they subsequently became, both supported the President. So did the
New York Herald Tribune,
the
Boston Globe,
the
Christian Science Monitor,
the
St Louis Post-Dispatch,
the
Chicago Sun-Times,
to cite only a few.

There was however a second spasm of the earthquake still to be faced: the return of MacArthur to the United States. As it was the first time he had been seen in America since 1937, his arrival would in any event have caused considerable interest. In the circumstances it aroused hysteria. He reached San Francisco on April 17th. He was greeted by a crowd of 100,000 and seemed to show himself a dangerous master of sententious demagogy by announcing: ‘The
only politics I have is contained in the simple phrase known well by all of you: God Bless America.'

He then proceeded to Washington for the joint session of Congress which he had been invited to address. Truman made a good if daring joke by sending General Vaughan to greet him. The Pentagon, even though firm on the issue, was more respectful. Marshall, Bradley and the three Chiefs of Staff were all present on the tarmac at National Airport. The address to Congress was powerful and provocative. The Cabinet, apart from Truman and Acheson, were sunk in gloom. They both believed there was an element of bathos about the much-acclaimed speech. They turned out to be right, but it required some bravado on their part to feel it at the time.

Perhaps MacArthur made a symptomatic mistake by ending in ambiguity. ‘“Old soldiers,” he said, “never die; they just fade away.” And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away– an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.'

Immediately he faded away to the Waldorf Tower in New York, but from there he made several powerful early forays. However his balloon fairly quickly began to subside. Truman, not the most impartial of witnesses perhaps, thought the beginning of the exhalation was when he was half laughed at at a baseball game in Queen's. Certainly he was never seriously considered as a presidential candidate for 1952. He was of course immensely old, even by more recent sandards, to
start
a political career. He died, almost forgotten, in 1964, at the age of 84.

Truman, when led in that direction by an interlocutor,
²⁶
said that the sacking was the greatest test of his presidency. In a negative sense it was. But it required more nerve than judgment. It was a question of enduring the noise of bombardment, which was fearsome, but which, once he had got the rest of the military establishment on his side, was unlikely to prove fatal. And Truman was very good at that. Other crises of the war called for a rarer combination of qualities, and ones which came less easily to him. These, too, he surmounted well. The Korean War destroyed any hope of a joyous second term, but in all but the small change of short-run partisan advantage, it enhanced his reputation.

There were nineteen months between June 1951, when the Korean War subsided into a bickering stalemate, and the end of Truman's presidency. After the searing years through which he had passed, and as an introit to the subsequent soaring of his reputation, it would be agreeable to record that they were a period of calm fulfilment and grateful recognition.

Unfortunately it would be completely untrue. The best that could be said for this final year and a half was that, by the standards of his presidency, relatively little happened during it. But most of what did occur was disobliging to Truman, and some of it was humiliating. His administration was plagued by the eruption of one petty scandal after another, cumulatively very damaging, although only those permeating the Bureau of Internal Revenue reached objectively serious proportions. Partly as a result his poll rating at the end of 1951 was down to 23%, substantially worse even than in 1946. He had to sack his Attorney-General and replace him with the third second-rater he had appointed to that post since getting rid of Roosevelt's Biddle. He finally lost Marshall, who withdrew from the Department of Defense in September 1951, and he witnessed the sad spectacle of Acheson's authority at home being increasingly undermined because the President lacked the power to protect his Secretary of State from McCarthy's vituperation. Confronted with a steel strike Truman once again shot impulsively and probably illegally from the hip (although this time it was the companies, not the unions, who were his target), and was overturned by the Supreme Court.

As the 1952 elections approached he made almost every possible misjudgment about who the Republican candidate was likely to
be, who the Democratic candidate ought to be, and which party was likely to win. He played with the idea of changing his mind and running again himself, but was dissuaded by the near unanimous advice of his family, his friends and his staff: a candidate with an age of 68 and a poll rating of 23% might reasonably be regarded by even his most fervent supporters as having got things nearly the wrong way round. He then had an unhappy campaign relationship both with Stevenson, whom he tried unsuccessfully to make his protégé, and with Eisenhower, with whom he entered into a bitter feud for a mixture of about one to two of good and bad reasons. After threatening darkly (to himself at least) that he would do nothing throughout the election but ‘sit on his front porch'–or, as it was the White House,
¹
the south or back porch—he then conducted a frenetic, ill-judged and unwelcome campaign on behalf of Stevenson.

His last two months of office, apart from a few prickly brushes with Eisenhower, were fairly satisfactory. With a strong sense of the august nature of the presidency (but not of the President) he naturally felt to the full the change in his life which was about to occur. He had a lively awareness of doing things for the last time. But he did not regret this. He felt he had served his time and done his duty. He was ready to go. And when he went he had a grand send-off.

Some of the newer members of his staff sensed a certain lack of grip. Joseph Short, who had replaced Charles Ross as press secretary, thought that Truman was much too inclined to believe that the minor financial scandals could be left to blow themselves out. Roger Tubby, Short's assistant, wrote an extensive and often worried journal. During a holiday visit to Key West a little before the beginning of the final nineteen months, he wrote: ‘Poker, poker, I wonder why he played so much … a feeling of vacuum otherwise, no struggle, excitement? … companionship, banter, escape from the pressing problems of state?' Then, the train of his thought being obvious, he added: ‘I read the
New Republic
editorial expressing fear lest Truman end up in as bad repute as Harding—though that hardly seems possible … the
stuff so far [has] been such chicken feed compared to Teapot Dome.'
^2
1

No doubt the newer staff found it less easy than the longer serving ones to understand the peculiar mixture of his weave of relaxation and decision taking, which had certainly not left the country short of firm government. There was no suggestion of disloyalty developing amongst either group. What was striking, however, was the unanimity with which they all said ‘no' when, in early March 1952, he seriously considered running again.