April 11, 1951—When President Harry Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of command of American and United Nations forces in the Far East battling in Korea, it plunged the Missourian into the fiercest firestorm of his two controversy-filled terms.
But, though the short-term political damage was intense, the President demonstrated what distinguished the United States from younger, infinitely more fragile republics: the clear ascendancy of civilian over military authority.
It’s funny how current news items confirm the truth of Mark Twain’s observation that history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. This morning’s edition of The New York Times reported on retired General Stanley McChrystal’s decision to accept an offer from the Obama administration to lead an advisory board supporting military families.
Yes, that’s the same soldier who last year was removed by the President from his post overseeing our surge in Afghanistan. As far as I know, nobody today bothered to note the remarkable coincidence of this more recent event with the anniversary of the earlier civilian-military clash. A year ago, though, the parallel with MacArthur’s firing—a Democratic President in the midst of a troubling Asian land war sacking a general who questioned his leadership—was too irresistible for the media to miss.
But when you get right down to it, that’s about as far as the similarities went. Walter Karp’s extraordinarily incisive analysis of the MacArthur situation in American Heritage 27 years ago makes clear why the McChrystal case was at best only a 48-hour news story: plain-speaking Harry had done all the heavy lifting for Obama and, indeed, all his other successors in the Oval Office these past 60 years.
The differences in the outcomes of what we can call “the two Macs” are so stark that they speak volumes about the changed landscape in this country:
* Truman acted at a point when the prestige of the military was close to an all-time high. By mid-1951, Americans were dismayed that American soldiers had been set back on their heels by North Koreans backed by Chinese and Soviet Communists. But they hadn’t forgotten that just six years before, American commanders had brought “The Good War” to victory. The questioning of military authority that erupted in the Vietnam War was still off in the distance.
* Truman, a captain who led troops under fire in WWI, then achieved national attention investigating procurement policies in WWII, was intimately experienced with war and its commanders in a way that Obama is not. Truman had seen enough of war in his week’s worth of combat to understand the chaos of conflict and know that leaders were not infallible (the commanding officer and chief of staff of his division left headquarters just as the Meuse-Argonne offensive began). As head of a Senate committee investigating the defense industry in the war, he learned all the tricks used by what Dwight Eisenhower would memorably call “the military-industrial complex.” In contrast, Obama would not only be part of a generation that, because of the all-volunteer military, would be unlikely to serve in the armed forces, but, because he had only served in the Senate four years before he ran for President, he had little time to master the details of his work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
* MacArthur was an American legend, used to getting his way in several high-profile posts; McChrystal fell to earth almost as soon as he had nobody to run interference for him. Given a command of his own, no longer simply reporting to David Petreus, McChrystal ran straight into political headwinds. A Los Angeles Times piece that ran last year about McChrystal used terms such as “flinty,” “forbidding,” “hard-charging” and “unyielding.” Still, he certainly had nothing on MacArthur, who had been a WWI hero, superintendent of West Point, Army Chief of Staff, head of U.S. Army forces in the Far East in WWII, and overseer of the occupation of Japan after the war. Eighteen years before tangling with Truman, he disregarded orders from President Herbert Hoover by ordering attacks on the tents and shacks where the “Bonus Army” and their families were encamped in D.C. A few years later, when he bitterly complained about his reduced military budget to Franklin Roosevelt (“When we lose the next war and an American boy is writhing in pain in the mud with a Japanese bayonet in his belly, I want the last words that he spits out in the form of a curse to be not against Douglas MacArthur but against Franklin Roosevelt"), the President shot back: “Never speak to the President of the United States that way." MacArthur was fortunate not to be fired long before Truman got around to it.
* McChrystal was fired more for comments made by his staff in front of a Rolling Stone reporter than for what he himself said; MacArthur was relieved of duty for a letter he wrote to Republican Congressman Joseph Martin criticizing the President’s decision to seek a negotiated end to the Korean War. The lips of McChrystal’s staff concerning Obama and his aides loosened through considerable consumption of alcohol; MacArthur initiated his firing offense while he was stone-cold sober.
* McChrystal, a soldier with no discernible political ambitions, apologized before his last meeting with Obama, then left his post quietly; MacArthur, of course, did not. When asked what he did before WWII, Eisenhower replied that he had studied theatrics under General MacArthur. Has there ever been another American commander with such a flair for the dramatic as MacArthur? Do you think he could possibly leave the national scene without saying, “Old soldiers never die--they just fade away”? Do you think he could simply “fade away”? Not on your life--particularly when, even in the midst of WWII, he had done little to discourage speculation that he might run for President one day as a Republican.
* McChrystal was a blunt soldier serving a famously silver-tongued Chief Executive; MacArthur was an ornate rhetorician serving a President famously given to “Plain Speaking.” If a general’s staffers are any reflection on him, then McChrystal’s were, at times, almost hilariously offensive. On the other hand, while the press eagerly reported on every saying of MacArthur (perhaps the only American general to deserve a monograph entitled, Douglas MacArthur: Warrior as Wordsmith), Truman could not have been more direct in a radio address about the aim of the limited war he wanted MacArthur to conduct: “In the simplest terms, what we are doing in Korea is this: We are trying to prevent a Third World War.” The general, confident that he knew “the Oriental mind,” had previously dismissed warnings that advancing on the Yalu River risked bringing Chinese Communists into the war. The resulting massive offensive by Mao Tse-tung’s troops unleashed what MacArthur mordantly told the Joint Chiefs of Staff was “an entirely new war.”
A farmer and failed haberdasher before his entry into politics, Truman, unlike the Ivy-educated Obama, was not perceived by the public as a learned man, but he enjoyed reading history--and there is every reason to think it left an impression on him.
Several weeks ago, I caught a few minutes of a C-Span special featuring the descendants of American Presidents. The reminiscence I recall most vividly was from Clifton Truman Daniel, Harry’s grandson. (He also recounted this story in the pages of Prologue Magazine.) When four-year-old Clifton and two-year-old brother William came downstairs in their house, after their grandfather had left the 0val Office, Truman found them sneaking into the den to watch television. Nothing doing, the ex-President said: “I have a better idea.”
Truman pulled a book down from the top shelf, then began reading it to them. It wasn’t a comic-strip book, a boys’ adventure, or anything like that. It was Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. More than 40 years later, a now-grown-up Clifton still found that book “tough going.”
Maybe so, but Harry Truman appears to have absorbed the wisdom of the ancient Greek: even the seeming justice of a cause does not justify foolhardy military adventurism. He wanted Communist rulers to know that aggression would be countered, but he was absolutely bent on ensuring that military action would not be widened beyond a point where it could provoke a war waged against astronomical odds. Because Douglas MacArthur did not share this outlook, he had to go.
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