Master of the Senate (78 page)

In his dramatic speech, MacArthur had assured the Senate that if the Chinese were driven out of Korea Mao Tse-tung would sue for peace. But, he was asked now, what if Mao didn’t sue for peace? Suppose when the Chinese were chased back across the Yalu River, they refused to sign a treaty—what then? What if they massed near the river, on their own territory, forces that could be used for a new offensive in Korea. MacArthur refused to take that premise seriously. “Such a contingency is a very hypothetical query. I can’t quite see the possibility of the enemy being driven back across the Yalu and still being in a posture of offensive action,” he said. But the senators did not let the matter drop, and by the end of that line of questioning, it had begun to be clear that at least a strong possibility existed that MacArthur’s proposals would have drastically widened the conflict.

And, of course, China was not the only opponent that might be drawn into the war if MacArthur’s policies were followed, as Russell, speaking in his calm, courteous voice, brought out. Tell me, General, he said, if the United States were—hypothetically, of course—to have to aid Chiang’s troops on the mainland of China; if hypothetically, the United States were to be forced to assume the defense of Formosa, if the United States was busy fighting China—what would happen if Russia then attacked Japan? And when MacArthur said, “I do not believe that it would be within the capacity of the Soviet Union…. I believe that the disposition of the Soviet forces are largely defensive,” Russell asked quietly, “How about the submarine strength of the Soviet in that area?”

And, Russell asked, what if Russia, seeing her allies being defeated, decided to enter the war on a larger scale? What if she attacked in Europe? What if she launched an atomic attack? “If we go into all-out war, I want to find out how you propose in your own mind to defend the American nation against that war?”

“That doesn’t happen to be my responsibility, Senator,” MacArthur replied. “My responsibilities were in the Pacific.”

Did the General know the number of atomic bombs the Russians possessed?
McMahon asked. No, MacArthur said, he did not. “Do you think that we are ready to withstand the Russian attack in Western Europe today?” McMahon asked.

“Senator,” Douglas MacArthur said, “I have asked you several times not to involve me in anything except my own area. My concepts on global defense are not what I am here to testify on. I don’t pretend to be an authority now on those things…. I have been desperately occupied on the other side of the world.” “That was the point,” McMahon said. “The Joint Chiefs and the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, has to look at this thing on a global basis and a global defense. You as a theater commander by your own statement have not made that kind of study, and yet you advise us to push forward with a course of action that may involve us in that global conflict.”

By the end of the three days, even
Time
had to admit that “When General MacArthur replaced the hat of a theater commander with the hat of a global strategist, he seemed less sure of his ground.” “Among themselves,” as William Manchester reports, “the committee members agreed that MacArthur’s bold proposals were … unrealistic.”

And when MacArthur had completed his testimony—with, of course, a compliment from the chairman, who praised his “patience, thoroughness and frankness” (there was no praise for his wisdom)—another General of the Army, George Catlett Marshall, entered Room 318 to sit before the senators. He was dressed in a civilian’s gray suit, as if to symbolize, as
Time
put it, “the civilian authority of the Secretary of Defense,” and he testified for five days, calmly, carefully, even ploddingly, in “a flat, unemotional voice and sparse phrases that contrasted sharply with his antagonist’s flow of words and orotund delivery,” and that fit in perfectly with the judicial atmosphere the chairman had established. By the end of the five days, the Secretary’s testimony, and the senators’ questions, had made clear that, at the very least, the question of escalating the war in Korea was far more complex than it had seemed when MacArthur first charged “appeasement” and said there was “no substitute for victory,” “no policy … no plan, no anything.” Russell led Marshall through testimony that showed that the Administration did have a policy: “To contain Communist aggression in different fashions in different areas without resorting to total war.” That policy, Marshall said, had worked in Berlin, it had worked in Greece, and it would work in Korea. Despite MacArthur’s ridicule of limited war, Marshall said, MacArthur’s proposals “might well mean formal Soviet intervention.” Contrary to MacArthur’s contention that the Soviets did not have sufficient forces in the Far East to pose a real threat, Marshall said they had plenty: not only a submarine fleet but “a considerable force in the vicinity of Vladivostok, Darien, Port Arthur, Harbin.” In a very quiet voice, Russell asked Marshall to tell the committee “what might occur if the Soviet intervened,” and with Marshall’s reply there were suddenly, in the Caucus Room, new realities. “That would immediately involve the defense of Japan, Hokkaido in particular,
attacks on our air all over Japan, all over Korea … and we couldn’t accept that without the maximum retaliation on our part which inevitably means a world war….” And a world war might well mean nuclear war—and the end of mankind. “My own view was—and I think it is similar to that of the Chiefs of Staff—that we were risking a hazard that had such terrible possible consequences that what we would gain was not comparable to what we were risking….”

T
HE CONTEST BETWEEN
these hearings and the usual headline-hunting Senate investigation could hardly have been greater. The method of releasing quickly edited transcripts turned what could have been a circus—the typical senatorial investigative circus—into what White was to call a “proceeding … quiet, unruffled, orderly and strangely at variance with the investigative habits of the Institution.” The hearings, White was to say, in an opinion echoed by Rovere and other Washington correspondents, dramatically increased the public understanding of the Korean War, of the Cold War as a whole, and of arguments for and against a policy of containment as opposed to that of all-out war. And this detailed presentation of facts and complexities had the effect of calming the waves of public indignation stirred up by MacArthur’s clarion call. Soon Rovere was writing that “it is possible to discern a slight dropping off of interest in the hearings….”

The calm would, during succeeding weeks of testimony, be maintained by Richard Russell.

Never had the respect in which he was held within the Senate been more evident, and more significant for America, than during these weeks, in which other generals followed Marshall to the witness table. Every outburst of rage by the Republican reactionaries, every maneuver they attempted as they saw they were losing, shattered against it. When Senator Wiley, attempting to drag Truman more directly into the controversy, demanded that General Omar Bradley, head of the Joint Chiefs, reveal the contents of his conversations with the President about the Korean War, Bradley refused, and Wiley, Knowland, and the other conservative Republicans exploded. “I am asking the chairman to rule that my question… should be answered,” Wiley said angrily. But the chairman ruled, calmly, that a “private conversation between the President and the Chief of Staff as to detail can be protected by the witness if he desires.” Wiley’s rage boiled over; accusing the Democrats of a “frantic desire to cover-up and whitewash,” he was to charge that Russell’s support of executive privilege had drawn an “iron curtain” over the investigation. Wiley said he would demand a vote by the committee. But his demand was not supported by Lodge, or Saltonstall, or by another Republican, H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, who said that he wanted to “compliment the chairman on conducting the hearing on the highest possible plane of fairness.” The vote upheld Russell, 18 to 8.

The leaking that would normally have accompanied closed hearings had
been drastically reduced by the committee’s new method of releasing the testimony, but in the early days, some sensitive information did find its way to the press. “Every half hour or so,” Rovere noted, Senator McCarthy “pops out of Room 318 … to brief his favorite correspondents.”

Russell reduced it further. When some of Marshall’s censored testimony found its way into newspapers, Russell said he wanted to say a few words to his colleagues. All the testimony except that which would endanger American men fighting in Korea was already being released through those edited transcripts, he said. He was sure, he said, that no committee member—that no senator of the United States—would deliberately give a reporter, and thus the enemy, information that would endanger American soldiers, but of course there was always the chance of “a careless word, a slip of the tongue.” And if American soldiers were endangered by such carelessness, he said, neither “God nor our fellow citizens will ever forgive us.” He paused for a moment, and the full power of Richard Russell’s personality was there in the Senate Caucus Room. “Nor would we deserve forgiveness,” he said.

Russell led Bradley, a World War II general almost as respected by the American public as MacArthur, slowly and carefully through an explanation of the flaws in MacArthur’s proposals, and, thanks to the transcript-release method, Bradley’s testimony was carried in newspapers across the country. On the sixth day of that testimony, Bourke Hickenlooper said he had a proposal: the hearings were consuming so much time, he said, why not skip the other three Joint Chiefs? “In doing so,” as
Time
reported, “Hickenlooper conceded … that the Republicans had just about abandoned their hope that the hearings would find the Joint Chiefs siding with MacArthur against the President.”

The proposal might well have carried the day had another senator been chairman of the joint committee: its conservative members had a political interest in cutting the testimony short; as for the others, they had already been hearing testimony for almost three weeks, and it was becoming apparent that more long weeks of testimony, weeks during which their presence would be required, lay ahead. But, as
Time
reported, “Russell put it up to the committee, and the committee, by a 14–11 vote, decided nothing doing; it would keep going down the line of witnesses in turn.”

The Chiefs of Staff who followed Bradley—Hoyt Vandenberg of the Air Force, Forrest Sherman of the Navy, and J. Lawton Collins of the Army—made clear that MacArthur’s claim of their support was, by the most charitable interpretation, a misunderstanding on his part. “One by one,” William Manchester writes, “officers who admired MacArthur seated themselves before the senators and sadly rejected his program for victory.” Day by day, as
Time
put it, “The glamour, excitement and anger of the first weeks of General MacArthur’s return subsided; the public, or at least a large part of it, admitted that things were more complicated than they had seemed.”

It was Russell’s demeanor, rather than any specific vote or ruling, that
made the tone of the hearings thoughtful, judicious—senatorial. It was difficult for even a Wiley or a Hickenlooper to shout for long when the chairman was so quiet and courteous and considerate of every point of view, when he introduced each witness with so glowing a recitation of his accomplishments and qualifications. When, in mid-June, the time for Dean Acheson’s testimony arrived, “Capitol corridors were charged with political tension,”
Time
reported. “‘Wait until we get Acheson,’ the more partisan-minded Republicans had crowed….” But, as
Time
reported, “once the committee doors swung shut, Acheson’s questioners, Republican as well as Democratic, settled into the attitude of grave decision that had dominated the investigation from the start. The Republicans, however noisy the blood cries of their colleagues outside, were courteous, dispassionate and earnestly in search of answers…. A calm seemed to settle over the hearing room. Not in years had an investigation in which feelings ran so high been conducted in so temperate and fair-minded a fashion.”

The torrent of mail that had inundated Capitol Hill became a stream, and then a trickle, decreasing as rapidly as if it had been water turned off by a tap. The onlooking senators in the audience melted away, and then the attendance of members of the joint committee began to decline; by the last week in May, when,
Time
said, “the dramatic thunder and lightning of the big MacArthur hearing had settled into a steady drizzle of repetitious questions and answers,” and testimony was nearing “the million-word mark, and there were still many witnesses … to come,” the Caucus Room was no longer needed, and the hearings were moved into the Armed Services Committee’s room—where, small though that room was, there were soon vacant seats. As for the tenor of public opinion, a baseball game was again the barometer. In April, before the start of the Senate hearings, President Truman had been booed at one for firing MacArthur. Now, in June, MacArthur attended a game at the Polo Grounds in New York, and left between innings, to the strains of “Old Soldiers Never Die,” striding briskly across the diamond toward the centerfield exit—until one fan yelled in a Bronx accent, “Hey Mac, how’s Harry Truman?” and the crowd burst into laughter and applause. A group of Texas oil barons flew him to Texas for a speech, in a seventy thousand-seat stadium, that was supposed to be the kickoff to a MacArthur presidential boom, but only twenty thousand of the seats were filled.

There was one more triumph—one more quiet triumph—for Russell. It came over the question of a formal committee report on the hearings. He didn’t want one. He had attempted to keep the hearings as free as possible from political controversy, and to a remarkable extent he had done so. A report was the last minefield; it “can only serve as a textbook for political arguments,” he scrawled on his desk calendar. So what he did, at the conclusion of the hearings, was, essentially, nothing. Pleading his work on the agricultural appropriations bill as an excuse, he did not convene a committee meeting to consider the question of a formal report until August 17, almost two months after the
hearings had ended. At this meeting he advised against issuing a report, saying that it would inevitably reflect a division of opinion, and that any division might affect truce negotiations in Korea. Knowland, Wiley, and three other Republicans objected; the vote against them was 18 to 5. On a motion by Saltonstall, the committee then decided to simply “transmit” the hearing transcript to the full Senate without comment. Eight of the committee’s eleven Republicans later issued a statement criticizing the conduct of foreign affairs in the Far East; it received relatively little public notice. No formal report, or any other action, resulted from the long investigation. Yet the investigation had had a profound effect. As William White was to put it, “Without rejecting outright a single MacArthur policy, without defending at a single point a single Truman policy, without accusing the General of anything whatever, the Senate’s investigation had largely ended his influence on policy-making. It had set in motion an intellectual counterforce to the emotional adulation that for a time had run so strongly through the country.” It had done, in short, precisely what the Founding Fathers had wanted the Senate to do, what their Constitution had designed it to do: to defuse—cool off—and educate; to make men think, recall them to their first principles, such as the principle that in a democracy it is not generals but the people’s tribunes who make policy. “It was, in all truth, a demonstration of what the Senate at its best was capable of doing,” White was to say.