Fifties (14 page)

She accompanied him to the Point and took up residence in a nearby hotel for four years, the better to keep her eye on him. She blocked most of his attempts to have serious relationships with women. His first marriage, to a socialite, ended soon, thanks to Pinky. “You must grow up to be a great man like your father,” she would say, which of course was the same as reminding him of his duty to her. She connived shamelessly to advance his career, using all her connections from her husband’s many years of service. Even as the young MacArthur was finding glory as a brigade commander in World War One, Pinky was writing Secretary of War Newton Baker: “I am deeply anxious to have Colonel MacArthur considered for the rank of Brigadier General and it is only through you that he can ever hope to get advancement of any kind.” Baker’s failure to respond did not deter her. A few weeks later, she wrote again: “Considering the fine work he has done with so much pride and enthusiasm and the prominence he has gained in actual fighting, I believe the entire Army, with few exceptions, would applaud your selecting him as one of your Generals ...”

In time he was promoted; at age thirty-eight he became the youngest division commander in the Army. Already he was somewhat paranoid about his contemporaries at headquarters, who, he believed, had denied him his due—the Medal of Honor—which would gain him parity with his father. In 1930, he became the Chief of Staff of the Army, not without a good deal of wheeling and dealing both on his part and, of course, Pinky’s. She wrote Black Jack Pershing, who was the dominating American general of his era. “You are so powerful in all Army matters that you could give him his promotion by a stroke of your pen! You have never failed me yet!” When her son became Chief of Staff, she gave him the highest accolade of all: “If only your father could see you now! Douglas, you’re everything he wanted to be!” Now she lived in his quarters and acted as his hostess, and he went home to lunch with her every day.

MacArthur was a complete narcissist. He was brilliant, talented, petulant, manipulative, highly political, theatrical, and given to remarkable mood swings. His favorite pronoun was the first person. In one of his most famous statements, promising his eventual return to the Philippines, he said
I
shall return, not
We
shall return. He did not share glory with subordinate commanders (he considered that a
weakness) and his headquarters always made sure that he was given full credit for every victory. He once told General Robert Eichelberger that he couldn’t understand why Eisenhower had allowed his subordinates like Bradley and Patton to gain so much publicity. It was not something that would have happened in the Pacific.

Like most narcissistic personalities, he idealized life and his role in it: He demanded perfection of himself, and when he erred, he was loath to admit it or accept any responsibility. The blame had to be apportioned—more often than not, to rivals who were suspected of seeking his downfall. It was typical that when the Korean War began and the first American troops sent from Tokyo to Korea turned out to be flabby, MacArthur did not assume responsibility, though they had been under his command. Rather, he blamed the Pentagon. It was as if he had been summoned from some distant planet to command troops that other, lesser generals had permitted to go soft.

He was obsessed with his looks and the degree to which they aided his myth. He always cut a dashing figure, even in World War One, when he had worn nonregulation clothes. A distinguished portrait painter who met him at the time thought he could easily have stepped out of the pages of
The Prisoner of Zenda.
Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by a woman if he had ever met MacArthur. “Not only have I met him, Ma’am; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and for four years in the Philippines.” During World War Two, Eichelberger wrote coded letters home to his wife. In them the code word for MacArthur was Sarah, as in Sarah Bernhardt. MacArthur was addicted to publicity and fame; he went nowhere without his chosen coterie of journalists and photographers. It was virtually impossible to take a photo of him that was not posed; he was aware every moment of where the light was best, of how his jaw should jut, and how the cap could be displayed at the most rakish angle.

Judging from the photographs of him, even in 1950 he was a slim, attractive man with perfect eyesight. In fact, he wore glasses, but he never permitted photographers to see them. If his public appearances seemed a bit contrived and self-consciously dramatic, it was because of his speech. He spoke, it seemed, for history in a cadence that some thought rather Victorian. At the end of his military career his cables to Washington were so self-conscious and self-justifying, they came to be known as his “posterity papers.” At even the simplest luncheon with a visitor he would dwell on the future of the West and the rise of the East.

It was sometimes difficult to separate fact from legend with so
gifted an automythologist as MacArthur. He was nonetheless the most brilliant strategist in the American Army, a great warrior, completely fearless—in the cool and unsympathetic eyes of George Marshall, “our most brilliant general.” During World War Two, his leadership in the Pacific dazzled colleagues, political leaders, and military historians alike. In that campaign, starting in early 1942, he had taken a severely understrength Allied army, with little air and naval support, and chartered a course of great originality. His strategy was simple: He shepherded his resources, rarely contesting the Japanese where they were strong, but instead striking at them on smaller islands, where they were weak. The day of the crude frontal attack was over, he had told Roosevelt at a meeting in Waikiki; modern weaponry had made it obsolete. Those inhuman battles of World War One, with their endless casualties, had spelled its end. Only mediocre commanders tried frontal attacks anymore. He used his growing number of bombers with great skill, searching for islands that would offer him better, more strategically located airfields. No general in World War Two used air power better.

He was also uncommonly deft in how he used his forces. He seemed to possess a sixth sense for what the Japanese were going to do and where they were vulnerable. His skills, plus the growing technological might of the Allied forces and the declining resources of the enemy, came together in a masterful campaign, in which he minimized his own losses. Ironically, the success of bombers in this particular theater—used, as they were, against fixed Japanese installations and massive Japanese convoys, marvelous targets all—left him with an exaggerated sense of what air power could do strategically. He was to pay the price for this in Korea.

After World War Two was over, for some five years, he served as the viceroy of Japan. His needs and those of the Japanese dovetailed perfectly—the Japanese needed to worship the man who had conquered them, and he needed to be worshiped. He prided himself on his expertise in Asia, yet there is some question as to how great it really was. He had significantly underestimated the military reach of the Japanese just before World War Two (Roosevelt, who had always recognized MacArthur’s political ambitions, kept handy an old report of the general’s written on the eve of World War Two, wherein MacArthur had spoken confidently of his ability to hold the Philippines because of the limits of Japanese air power).

Unlike Joe Stilwell, he had no bright area experts who could report to him on the vast changes taking place in Asia. His speeches and conversation were filled with simplistic and racist references “to
the Asiatic mind” and “the mind of the Oriental,” which blurred the vast ethnic, historical, and social differences of the many countries of Asia. His Victorian mind could not see the revolution against colonialism taking place in Asia, most particularly in China. The China he felt he knew so well no longer existed.

In the Pusan perimeter, the tide was beginning to turn. Day by day as August wore on, American positions grew stronger. The North Koreans were literally and figuratively running out of gas, as well as men and ammunition. This was the moment that MacArthur had been waiting for. From the first moment he had visited Korea, right after the invasion, a strategic vision had taken hold of MacArthur: In one brilliant, audacious move we would make an amphibious assault far behind their lines. They would be unprepared, since most of their army was committed to the South. We would then move quickly both north and east across the thin neck of the country to entrap them. MacArthur even had his site picked out—the great natural port of Inchon, on the west coast. MacArthur would explain to doubters, “It will be like an electric fan. You go to the wall and pull the plug out, and the fan will stop. When we get well ashore at Inchon, the North Koreans will have no choice but to pull out or surrender.”

Virtually no one agreed with him. The Navy thought the plan impractical, indeed impossible, because there was no natural beach. One sunken ship could block the whole harbor. The tides could be terrible, up to thirty-two feet. Only the Bay of Fundy had higher. There were only three dates in the next two months on which the tides would be high enough to carry the big landing craft far enough in before the whole shoreline became nothing but mud: September 15, September 27, and October 11. “Make up a list of amphibious ‘don’ts’ and you have an exact description of the Inchon operation,” one naval officer noted. In addition there was evidence that the Russians were aiding the North Koreans by sending mines to protect their harbors. Yet MacArthur remained steadfast in his vision. To him the alternative was a meat-grinder war up the Korean peninsula, with the possibility of slow but steady progress and unacceptable casualties. “Beef cattle in the slaughterhouse,” he called it.

The critical meeting on Inchon was held in Tokyo on August 23. Two members of the Joint Chiefs, Joe Collins and Admiral Forest Sherman, went to Tokyo to talk MacArthur out of it. If there must be an amphibious landing let it be more modest, to the south of
Inchon. At the August meeting, one naval officer after another got up to explain the reason why Inchon could not work, why the risks involved were too high. Finally, MacArthur took the floor. The Navy, he said, had never failed him before. After dismissing the doubters, he gave a great soliloquy: “I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We must act now or we will die.... We shall land at Inchon and I shall crush them.” He finished and there was a moment of silence. Then Admiral Sherman spoke: “Thank you. A great voice in a great cause.” Rear Admiral James Doyle, whose job it would be to execute the landing, later said, “If MacArthur had gone on the stage you never would have heard of John Barrymore.” The next day Sherman was as nervous as ever (“I wish I had that man’s optimism”), but MacArthur had won. Inchon was his.

On the morning of September 15, the Marines landed on Wolni, a small island guarding the mouth of Inchon harbor. The North Korean garrison there, composed of young, inexperienced soldiers, quickly collapsed. That afternoon 13,000 Marines poured ashore against marginal resistance. Only twenty-one men were killed. North Korean forces were routed, moving back as best they could to blocking positions between Inchon and Seoul. Now for the UN forces, it was a race for Seoul, and to entrap the In Min Gun, before they retreated north from Pusan. It was MacArthur’s finest hour. If before Inchon he had been an “untouchable,” now he was a god. One of the worst defeats in American military history had, overnight, been turned into a stunning success. “The Sorcerer of Inchon,” Dean Acheson, not one of his great admirers, called him afterward. From then on, Matt Ridgway wrote mordantly, if MacArthur had suggested “that a battalion walk on water to reach the port, there might have been someone ready to give it a try.”

Seoul fell on September 26, eleven days after the landing. But even though the Allied forces moved steadily forward, the bulk of the North Korean forces was slipping away. The Americans had hoped, but failed, to capture it en masse, and some forty thousand men had managed to slip through. MacArthur’s forces continued to pursue to the 38th parallel. On October 1, ROK forces became the first UN soldiers to go north of the 38th. In the rush of events and the seeming collapse of the enemy, it was not a decision that weighed very heavily on anyone in Washington at the time. A few of the old China hands, and George Kennan and Chip Bohlen, warned that North Korea was a satellite state and that either Peking or Moscow would not tolerate it if we violated the 38th parallel. Truman, already under fire
for being soft on Communism, was in no position to slow down so rapid and spectacular an advance—in truth, a rout. “It would have taken a superhuman effort to say no [to crossing the parallel],” Averell Harriman said later. “Psychologically, it was almost impossible not to go ahead and complete the job.” And yet no one had spent very much time, in fact, defining what the job was. Worse, at the highest levels, particularly in MacArthur’s command, there was almost complete ignorance about Mao’s army and how its extraordinary victory over Chiang had molded it into a remarkable, modern fighting machine.

So it was that we blundered ahead toward the most dramatic confrontation of the Cold War to that date. From the moment that the ROK forces crossed the 38th parallel there were rumblings from Peking. Gradually, as we pressed forward toward the Yalu, these warnings became more strident. The British became increasingly wary, but MacArthur dismissed them as appeasers. American troops crossed the parallel on October 7. The next day, Mao ordered his forces to ready themselves to fight and a massive movement of men started toward Manchuria and the Korean border.

Now Truman himself started to become nervous; the noise from Peking was like a distant but steady drumroll. Moreover, his own shrewdness told him that while his forces were doing well, they were doing it at a price, getting further from their own lines of supply, ever deeper into hostile terrain and doing this as the weather got colder. In late October, he arranged a meeting with MacArthur at Wake Island. The two men were not a natural fit. Long before Korea, Truman, the good old-fashioned unvarnished populist, had written a memo on the dilemma of dealing with MacArthur: “And what to do with Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur. He’s worse than the Cabots and the Lodges—they at least talked with one another before they told God what to do. Mac tells God right off. It is a very great pity that we have to have stuffed shirts like that in key positions ... Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower and Bradley, and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.” That, of course, was before they even got to know each other.