Truman(75)

‘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.