Supreme Commander (18 page)

The Communists proceeded to hurt their own case, as when the secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Kyiuchi Tokuda, made it clear which sex should have the upper hand. “Women's organizations,” he said, “must not necessarily be run by women but should rather be guided by young men.”

The constitution fostered by MacArthur took a totally different position. Article 14 banned “discrimination in political, economic, or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin.” Article 24 guaranteed equal rights within marriage in terms of property, inheritance, and divorce. At MacArthur's urging the Diet followed up in 1947 by passing a revised Civil Code giving wives full legal rights, and a Labor Standards Law stipulating equal pay for equal work and guaranteeing working women twelve weeks' maternity leave.

Today these rights may seem perfectly normal, but in the late 1940s they were radical. In America women did not acquire the right of nondiscrimination until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent legislation in the 1980s, and even today their rights to equal opportunity and equal economic privileges are ensnared in a tangle of federal and state legislation. Women do not have automatic rights to shared inheritance nor do they, depending on the particular state they live in, necessarily have equal division of property at divorce. In Japan they do. MacArthur was decades ahead of his time—and remains so to this day.

The most direct benefit SCAP provided women was reform of the education system, whereby females were provided nine years of compulsory schooling along with the males, and many universities were opened to coeducation. Members of the education team of the Civil Information and Education section—men as well as women—were given the task of visiting schools and advising female teachers how “equal education” would work. But here they ran into an obstacle: deeply ingrained Japanese cultural values centering on the importance of the home. A frequent question was: “If girl students take the same courses as boys, how will they ever learn the domestic arts of cooking, sewing, caring for children, and flower arrangement?” The logical answer to this question was that girls could learn these skills at home and in no more than an hour a day, and that it was easy enough for women to learn both the domestic arts and the normal curriculum simultaneously. Many Japanese teachers were skeptical that this could be done. One SCAP member told the delightful story of how he once visited a rural school to give his standard lecture on education, and at the end of the lecture he invited the women to discuss any questions and concerns. The women asked him if he knew how to make tea, and when he said no, they invited him to have tea with them, upon which they treated him to an elaborate ceremony where they instructed him on how to prepare, make, and serve tea in the proper manner. They were, he noted afterward, teaching him rather than him teaching them.

15

“He Has a Letter from God”

T
HE VISITOR TO
MacArthur's office would find an office looking out at the enclosed grounds of the emperor's palace. For such a powerful man it was a surprisingly unprepossessing and small room, 581 square feet, formerly used for storage. It was now furnished with five items: a desk, a sofa, and three green leather chairs. Out in the hallway was a unique security feature found nowhere else in Japan: a shoot-the-chute tube for emergency exit to reach the ground floor in case of fire (or attempted assassination).

On the wall MacArthur had mounted a quotation by the historian Livy, attributed to the Roman general Lucius Aemilius Paulus (229?–160 B.C.). Paulus was talking about how a military commander should be counseled by people of known talent “whose knowledge is derived from experience . . . who are present at the scene of action, who see the country, who see the enemy, who see the advantages that occasions offer, and who, like people embarked on the same ship, are sharers of the danger.” The quotation goes on:

If, therefore, anyone thinks himself qualified to give advice respecting the war which I am to conduct . . . let him not refuse his assistance to the state, but let him come with me into Macedonia. He shall be furnished with a ship, a horse, a tent; even his travelling charges shall be defrayed. But if he thinks this too much trouble, and prefers the repose of a city life to the toils of war, let him not, on land, assume the office of pilot.

Such words about hands-on management are to be expected of a battlefield general, especially when the quotation ends with the stern warning: “We shall pay no attention to any councils but such as shall be framed within our camp.”

Yet this was not how MacArthur ran his organization. Even as SCAP kept growing to the point where he had over five thousand people reporting to him, he spent a great deal of time with officials sent from Washington to observe and give advice. He was going out to the airport so frequently to meet visitors that one newspaperman remarked, “MacArthur should move his office to Haneda Air Force Base—he spends most of his time there.”

Escorted to MacArthur's black Cadillac, the visitor might have noticed the license plate, “1.” Or the two flags over the headlights: one was the Stars and Stripes; the other, a blue flag with five stars. Because there were so few cars on the road, the drive to downtown Tokyo took less than twenty minutes—plenty of time for MacArthur to exercise his legendary charm. He was a master of the one-on-one conversation, always asking questions and catching every nuance of his guest's words. He could charm birds off trees. The celebrated editor William Allen White had a two-hour lunch with him and was dazzled: “I never before met so vivid, so captivating, so magnetic a man.” So captivating, apparently, that White was totally fooled. MacArthur, he wrote, “seemed to be entirely without vanity.” Admiral Halsey, when he met MacArthur for the first time in Australia, had said: “Five minutes after I reported, I felt as if we were lifelong friends. I have seldom seen a man who makes a quicker, stronger, more favorable impression.”

The general's charm worked equally well with women. The wealthy divorcée who became his first wife was smitten at first sight. “If he hadn't proposed the first time we met,” she told reporters, “I would have done it myself.”
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Joseph H. Choate Jr., a lawyer from California who visited Japan several times en route to Hong Kong to meet with a client, got to know MacArthur well. He tells the story of his first visit to Japan. He had arrived as a private citizen, and the military officers on duty at the airport were perplexed how a man with no “military status” could be in the country. They all gathered around and started peppering him with questions. Was he affiliated with a branch of the War Department? No. The State Department? No. How about the White House? No. Was he a member of a university faculty, here to teach? No. Was he an independent contractor of some sort? No. By now the questions were getting more hostile; this was becoming a very serious matter. Choate was definitely looking at getting deported on the next plane back home. “But I have a letter of introduction,” he protested. That wouldn't do any good, he was told curtly: He had to be there on official business. Choate tried to explain, “Sir, I received letter from a fellow who invited me to come and see him.” Impossible, said the military colonel, and anyway such a letter was meaningless. With great difficulty Choate extracted the letter from his briefcase and managed to get the colonel to read it. The colonel's face turned white as he skimmed down to the bottom of the page. Asked by one of his aides what was wrong, he pointed at the signature: “He has a letter from God.”

It was reminiscent of what George Marshall had said to MacArthur in World War II. MacArthur was talking about his staff, and Marshall corrected him: “General, you don't have a staff, you have a court.”

One of the advantages of being a god is that you can move walls. Which is what happened when MacArthur took an office on the top floor of the Dai Ichi Building in downtown Tokyo. The office was too small for MacArthur's carpet, just arrived from Manila. The Japanese building manager proposed to cut the rug to make it fit. No, he was told, you don't cut the carpet, you tear down a wall and move it. Several days later MacArthur had an office big enough for his carpet. The story got around, and added to the supreme commander's already considerable aura.

Another story that made its way around town was about the chair. When military translator Grant Goodman arrived in Tokyo in October, one of his first assignments was to procure a desk chair for General MacArthur. He found a suitable-looking one in the office of a Japanese company. The president of the company was sitting in the chair, working, when an American military officer marched in and ordered him to stand up. Before the poor gentleman could figure out what was going on, Goodman grabbed the chair and took off, leaving the businessman speechless. Told it was “by the orders of General MacArthur,” he was even more astonished to learn that under the terms of the occupation, the Japanese were obliged to provide whatever the army wanted. And, of course, he would never see his chair again.

MacArthur's office was a spartan one, totally devoid of the autographed photos of famous celebrities so often found on the walls of ambassadors or politicians. One wall had two yacht paintings (though MacArthur had never owned a boat or lived near the sea). On another hung a painting of Washington and one of Lincoln—to be expected of a general who believed in the “great man” theory of history: “George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,” he explained, “one founded the United States, the other saved it. If you go back in their lives, you can find all the answers.”

The office helped him keep physically fit. Being on the sixth floor, whenever the elevator was busy or didn't work, he would run up the five flights of stairs and arrive “cool as a cucumber, followed by a very out-of-breath orderly officer.” Because the office was scantily furnished, there was plenty of room to walk around. MacArthur was rarely at his desk, he was usually pacing back and forth from one end to the other. Multiplying the length by the number of paces, one aide calculated, MacArthur walked four to six miles a day. The Japanese prime minister Shigeru Yoshida had quite a different image: He compared the pacing to a lion prowling in its cage.

And it would be a young lion. Over MacArthur's desk was a framed message:

Youth is not a time of life—it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old only by deserting their ideals. . . . Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being's heart the love of wonder, the sweet amazement at the stars and the starlike things and thoughts, the undaunted challenge of the events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what's next, and the joy and the game of life. . . . You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

The office had only two personal items: a picture of his wife, Jean, and a box containing some fifty pipes, mostly corncobs. What was surprising was his desk: It was a large table with no drawers, suggesting a man who abhorred clutter and liked to reduce everything to its barest essentials. Even more interesting, there was no telephone, just a buzzer. To receive a telephone call, MacArthur had to go into the next room. His office was a place of no interruptions, enabling him to give his visitor his complete attention. Not having a telephone also solved the security problem. During his days in the Philippines he very rarely used the telephone lest his calls be overhead by the enemy. In Japan this problem continued. For reasons no one in SCAP could figure out, it seemed that information communicated with Washington always seemed to end up in Moscow as well—sometimes getting there first. The problem was never solved, making face-to-face meetings all the more imperative.

The amount of work MacArthur had to do was staggering. In a foreign country with its own language and culture, he had to create a huge start-up operation of several thousand people, issue directives, manage hundreds of programs, coordinate with two different governments, and serve as the public spokesman for his administration. For a man who was sixty-five when the occupation started, he was in remarkably good shape. His only infirmity was trembling hands from advancing Parkinson's disease. He hadn't taken a vacation in thirty-five years; he wasn't about to take one now. He may have been foolish to turn down President Truman's two requests to come to Washington, but he really couldn't afford to take the time off. He worked seven days a week. Every day from ten to two thirty he was in his office, then off to the embassy for lunch and a nap, then back to the office from five until eight. He left his desk clean every night; when he could not, he took his work home with him to finish after dinner. He never drank coffee. His consumption of alcohol was limited: In the evenings before dinner, he would indulge in an Orange Blossom (a gin-and-orange-juice drink that had originated during Prohibition). Retiring to the master bedroom, he would read, usually history. He was a voracious—and fast—reader, capable of reading three books a day, which he proudly added to his small but growing collection. (Almost all of his original library of five thousand books had been destroyed when the Japanese sought out his home in Manila and set it on fire.)

He was totally dedicated to his job. His refusal to return to America annoyed many people, from President Truman on down. He got a letter from his friend Dr. James Conant, the president of Harvard University, informing him that Harvard had selected him for an honorary degree and he should plan on coming to the commencement exercises. MacArthur said he was too busy to leave Japan. Because Harvard only awards honorary degrees in person, he never got it.

He was the hardest-working man in the entire occupation. Considering that people who are very intelligent can work a lot faster than most people, one can only imagine the volume of work this exceptionally bright man was able to get done. His air chief, Gen. George Kenney, liked to remind people of the Luzon campaign, where, late one night, he noticed MacArthur was hardly eating, he was so tired. At dawn the next morning, Kenney had to leave. He called the orderly officer and told him to tell the general he was sorry he couldn't stay to bid him good-bye. “Oh,” said the officer, “General MacArthur left for the front two hours ago.”

General Whitney told a similar story: He and MacArthur were working in the office late one Sunday night, it was ten thirty, and MacArthur closed his notebook and told him, “Well, what do you say we take the rest of the weekend off?” With MacArthur you could never be sure whether he was being humorous or dead serious. This was the man who, when accused of working his staff too hard, had responded: “What better fate for a man than to die in performance of his duty!”

No job should pass without occasional moments of levity, however. One day MacArthur summoned the Japanese premier, the mayor of Tokyo, and the Tokyo fire chief to a meeting in his office. There were too many fires in Tokyo, he told them, and he wanted something done about it right away. The two senior government officials bowed in obeisance. The poor fire chief, losing face in front of his superiors, protested mightily and made furious hand gestures. “Sir,” the translator explained to MacArthur, “the fire chief presents his respects and compliments and says that Japan has been famous for its fires for many centuries. Tokyo has always had the biggest and best conflagrations of any city, and he does not see why they should be prevented.”

Suppressing his astonishment at such Oriental psychology, MacArthur ordered the fire department to start holding a Fire Prevention Week just like in the United States. The three men left. Within days the Tokyo Fire Department held its Fire Prevention Week. It built a huge pylon right next to MacArthur's office, painted with scenes of firemen and houses on fire. Every day when the general went home for lunch, the firemen set the pylon on fire and then climbed it and doused it with water, putting the fire out. MacArthur loved the joke and went over and personally thanked the firemen.

Other than a quick one-day trip to the Philippines in 1946 and another one to Seoul in 1948, he never left Japan during his five years before the Korean War started in June 1950. He never visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki. He never relaxed by going to a baseball game. He never toured Japan, not even Kyoto, the ancient capital and cultural center spared from the atom bomb by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. His wife and son's favorite holiday retreat was the Fujiya Hotel at Miyanoshita, a suburb of Tokyo. He rarely ever joined them. He was always in the city, glued to his desk. Very rarely did he go out or attend social functions. In a nation's capital where diplomatic receptions occur every week, he was nowhere to be seen. His idea of a good time was to stay home with his wife and young son and watch a movie, preferably a Western. He adored his son, Arthur, but he was so busy that the only meal he had with him was breakfast, which he made sure to do every day.