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Two 20th century American males more diametrically opposite than President Harry S. Truman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur would be hard to find. One was a plain-spoken Midwesterner who said what he meant and meant what he said, the other the kind of self-aggrandizing egomaniac (with a touch of genius) for whom the word "grandiloquent" might well have been invented. Yet during the Korean War, these two very different but equally stubborn men were set on a constitutional collision course that, as H.W. Brands vividly describes in "The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War," would bring the world terrifyingly close to its last and most destructive war.
By the time Harry Truman became president in the spring of 1945, after serving only 82 days as FDR's vice president, Douglas MacArthur was already a legend, and there is no doubt that he reveled in his fame. First in his class at West Point, where he scored higher than all but two former graduates in the military academy's history (one of them being Robert E. Lee), MacArthur was held in awe by the doughboys of WWI for his physical courage (the GIs of WWII thought rather less of him, referring to him disdainfully as "Dougout Doug"), and after the end of WWII MacArthur was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, becoming, as Brands says, "a Japanese institution," almost a second emperor. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, who commanded the Eighth Army in Korea, and who would become MacArthur's successor, described MacArthur's major flaw as "a faith in his own judgment that created an aura of infallibility and that finally led him close to insubordination." General of the Army Omar Bradley, however, put it rather more succinctly: "MacArthur was a megalomaniac."
In his early chapters, where Brands fills in the back story of his dual protagonists, he can feel sketchy almost to the point of seeming disengaged (he skims through five crucial years of Truman's life and political career simply by quoting from a single autobiographical letter to his daughter), and this section of the book is somewhat disappointing. But when Brands gets to the Korean War, his narrative comes into its own.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson, while discussing America's defense perimeter in a speech to the National Press Club in January 1950, inadvertently left out Korea, giving the North Koreans the impression that an attack on South Korea would not be defended by the U.S. Six months after Acheson's "colossal gaffe" (as David Halberstam aptly put it in his book on the war, "The Coldest Winter"), North Korean troops swarmed across the 38th parallel and easily captured the South Korean capital of Seoul. It looked like they would be able to unify the country as a communist dictatorship within a month. President Truman very much did not want to go to war (it was, after all, barely five years after V-J Day), but felt he had no choice, and selected to lead the American forces the only man who had the authority as well as the military genius to salvage the debacle before it was too late: General Douglas MacArthur.
Truman refused to even glorify the conflict by calling it a war. Instead, taking a cue from a reporter at a press conference, he euphemized it as a "police action." MacArthur knew better, which in a way was part of the problem: He always knew better than his commanding officers, whether they were the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the president of the United States, and always felt free to question, circumvent, countermand or just flat-out disobey the orders of his superiors whenever it suited him. And it suited him more often than not.
Truman was guided in Korea by two motivating principles: aggression must be instantly confronted and repelled (here the obvious analogy was Munich, used as an excuse for military intervention by almost every American president from Harry Truman to George W. Bush), and the notion that any military conflict involving a communist country was invariably directed by the Soviet Union.
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Truman would inform the nation in a televised address on Dec. 15, 1950, that "Our homes, our nation, all the things we believe in, are in great danger. This danger has been created by the rulers of the Soviet Union." Truman's innovation in Korea was to assemble a multinational coalition and fight under the auspices of the United Nations, which allowed him to circumvent the tedious but arguably necessary constitutional prerequisite of going to Congress and acquiring a declaration of war before sending American troops into combat. (George H.W. Bush would update this template in order to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991, and his son would attempt much the same thing in Iraq a decade later — with disastrous results.)
When things looked very bad for the United Nations forces, MacArthur came up with a scheme that was either brilliant or harebrained, depending on how you looked at it. The 70-year-old general laid out an amphibious landing at Inchon, west of Seoul, where the North Koreans would least expect it. The harbor was so inhospitable to an invading force that everything would have to go perfectly for the expedition to have even the slightest chance of success. Once ashore, MacArthur claimed, his troops along with the Eighth Army would combine to destroy the enemy with "a decisive and crushing blow." The whole thing could have been a disaster, but against all odds it exceeded all expectations, proving MacArthur right and further fueling his sense of innate invincibility.
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Inchon was a work of genius, a military masterstroke comparable to such late-in-life masterpieces as Verdi's "Falstaff" or Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus." Unfortunately, like a Greek tragic hero, MacArthur had his hamartia, or tragic flaw, and once he got the enemy on the run he did not want to stop until he reached the Chinese border, even when doing so threatened nuclear war. The man who bragged that "I hope to get the Eighth Army back by Christmas" and who fancied that he understood "the Oriental mentality" eventually found himself facing hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers whose entry into the war he had failed to anticipate. ("He had been made a fool of by the Chinese communist armies," Gen. Ridgway cruelly but accurately pointed out.)
At a time when President Truman was hoping to initiate peace talks with the Chinese, MacArthur sent out a statement in effect threatening them with full-out war, which Dean Acheson described as "insubordination of the grossest sort to his Commander in Chief" Rather than risk a nuclear war with the Chinese and possibly the Soviet Union merely to placate MacArthur's wounded pride, Truman fired the general, which had the effect of making MacArthur appear to be a martyr to partisan politics and turning Truman for a while into one of the most unpopular presidents in history.
After a tumultuous hero's welcome back to the United States, MacArthur would, as he claimed all old soldiers must, fade away, spending his retirement in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, and on his deathbed, according to biographer William Manchester, he would beg President Lyndon Johnson to stay out of Vietnam.
In time Truman's reputation would recover (by the 1970s he would become positively trendy, given the fact that his plain-spoken style made for a nice contrast with Richard Nixon, who was by then enmeshed in Watergate), and a filmed one-man show about his life would garner an Oscar nomination for James Whitmore. But the war they fought and the terrible risks they ran in fighting it haunt this country to the present day. President Eisenhower would eventually manage to broker a truce in Korea (an example that his former Vice President Nixon failed to emulate in Vietnam), but the war has never officially ended. North Korea is still a communist dictatorship, only now it has nuclear weapons.
Brands deftly utilizes a wide array of sources, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of foreign correspondent Marguerite Higgins, who landed with the troops at Inchon, to the papers of both Truman and MacArthur, as well as material that was unavailable to previous scholars. He tells his story with admirable objectivity and fairness, letting the facts speak for themselves. For anyone looking to understand the Korean War, this book is an admirable place to start.
'The General vs. the President'
By H.W. Brands, Doubleday, 448 pages, $30