This Day in Military History (MacArthur Named UN Commander in Korea)

July 8, 1950— Having claimed that he knew “the Asiatic mind,” and acclaimed as the architect of Allied victory in the Pacific only five years before, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was named commander of the UN troops desperately trying to repel Communist forces from taking control of the entire Korean peninsula.

At the time, the appointment seemed logical, even inevitable, considering the general’s decades of experience, bravery, intellect, and a strategic skill manifested during WWII with an “island-hopping” campaign that minimized loss of life.

But, within a year, MacArthur’s overweening ego and hubris would imperil US troops, threaten a wider conflict, and precipitate a historic showdown concerning civilian authority over American armed forces with President Harry Truman.

Some signs, even within the first two weeks after Communist forces invaded South Korea, were already ominous for MacArthur’s leadership. Aides were initially reluctant to break the news of the attack to their boss, and even after learning of it, for the first 24 hours he downplayed its severity.

If he could get the 1st Cavalry Division into action, he told GOP foreign-policy maven (and future Secretary of State) John Foster Dulles, “Why, heavens, you’d see these fellows scuttle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them,” according to Bruce Cumings’ The Korean War: A History.

When he was prevailed upon at last to depart from Tokyo (where he was serving as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan) for the first of a series of one-day flyovers over Korea, he veered sharply towards alarm, telling Truman that South Korean forces were in no position to repel the invaders without American support.

One military observer—like MacArthur, often mentioned as a Presidential candidate—Dwight Eisenhower, was skeptical but not surprised that his fellow WWII hero was not at the top of his game. Privately, he wondered if MacArthur, now 70, might be too old for command.

Eisenhower, who had noted acidly that he had “studied theatrics” under MacArthur as his aide in the Philippines in the 1930s, would have had the personal knowledge and credibility to gain immediate public approval for a decision to relieve his old boss of command. But MacArthur’s superior at the moment was Truman, who lacked the stature of the commander of US forces in Europe in the last war.

Two and a half months after his appointment, MacArthur pulled off the kind of unexpected, daring move for which he had become known by ordering an amphibious assault on Inchon, the port city of Seoul that, because of its tides and lack of beaches, was deemed by MacArthur’s subordinate Gen. Edward Almond, “the worst possible place” for such an operation.

Inchon achieved the surprise MacArthur desired, and he predicted to Truman that US troops would be home for Christmas. But instead of stopping at the 38^th Parallel, the point at which America’s allies had agreed would restore the division between North and South Korea at the start of the conflict, the commander “went ahead to the Yalu frontier and set up an enormous disaster, which clouded his reputation,” according to historian David Fromkin.

“There’s a spot where the mountains go down on a north-south basis,” Fromkin explained to C-Span’s Brian Lamb in a September 1995 interview on “Booknotes,” “and if you’re a commander going there, you don’t want to get in that position because you have to split your troops. But he [MacArthur] did and he shouldn’t have; he went all the way up to the Chinese border, although there were signs that if he did so, they’d come in against us with their limitless manpower.”

The counterattack by the Chinese forces reversed all the gains by the US at Inchon. Communist momentum was only blunted when Matthew Ridgway took over command of the US Eighth Army in Korea and re-energized the demoralized troops.

By now, MacArthur was not only violating Truman’s directive to clear any statements with the White House first, but alarming the Joint Chiefs of Staff and allies with his urging that China lay down its arms or face “a decision by the United Nations to depart from its tolerant efforts to contain the war…[that] would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.”

He provided GOP leaders eager to score points against Truman over the military stalemate with a soundbite for taking the war to China: “There is no substitute for victory.”

Truman’s decision to relieve MacArthur of command led to a firestorm of controversy back home, but it was necessary to preserve the constitutional structure of ultimate Presidential authority over the military.

Just as important, by scotching the general’s proposal to drop up to 50 nuclear bombs at air bases, depots, and supply lines to create a radioactive barrier and halt Chinese and North Korean advances, Truman prevented the direct intervention of the Soviet Union in the conflict—and the possibility of World War III.

Ike’s Leadership Lesson Lost on New Administration

“Character in many ways is everything in leadership. It is made up of many things, but I would say character is really integrity. When you delegate something to a subordinate, for example, it is absolutely your responsibility, and he must understand this. You as a leader must take complete responsibility for what the subordinate does. I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower quoted in Edgar F. Puryear Jr., Nineteen Stars: A Study in Military Character and Leadership (1971)

It would have been easy for Dwight Eisenhower to accept all the credit and shrug off the blame for operations he directed. For several years in the 1930s, he noted acidly later, he had “studied theatrics” for seven years under his boss, vainglorious Douglas MacArthur. Maybe the daily annoyance of watching MacArthur at close quarters as his aide inoculated him against similar conduct, or maybe it was the sober recognition that, if he were to send men into life-or-death situations, he needed to bind them to him through emotional loyalty, not just the obedience expected by his superior rank.

In the anxious hours before the D-Day invasion, Eisenhower was every bit as good as his word. Had the mass assault at Normandy failed, he was ready with a statement about how the public should judge the event. “The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do,” it concluded. “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

While critical as a candidate of many Eisenhower policies as President, John F. Kennedy must have come to understand that one source of his predecessor’s considerable appeal was this willingness to step up. The new young President had inherited planning done by the CIA for an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. But when the Bay of Pigs turned into a fiasco only three months into the administration, JFK realized that he could not blame someone else. “Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” he said mordantly if ironically, concluding, “I am the responsible officer of the government.”

Kennedy could not get over the fact that his approval rating actually rose after his first major failure. To be sure, diplomatic and military debacles have not been similarly rewarded since then. (After the botched hostage rescue mission in Iran in 1980, American voters did not recall that Jimmy Carter had taken to the air afterward to accept full responsibility, but that military officers had died in the desert because of an operation he ordered.)

But by and large, Americans—many with abundant experience as parents—would rather see a leader who, like a responsible child, steps up and admits that he was responsible for wrecking the family car, not a kid sibling.

Except for the Republican newcomer to the Oval Office, who seems never to have absorbed Eisenhower’s pungent lesson on credit and blame as a part of leadership. I refuse to accord that newcomer the dignity of naming him, as he has so very rarely displayed any dignity in the job he should never have attained in the first place. But a few words are in order on both his dereliction of duty as commander in chief and dereliction of character.

Two and a half weeks ago, at a press conference, the new President launched into his usual bragging mode about his famous victory this past November. He could not resist taking it even further, extending his ridiculous trope that he’d won in a “landslide.”

“I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” he concluded.

The normal untruth of the new President (let’s call him Agent Orange, in honor of his unusual hair color and of his possible status as a government employee in the service of a foreign power, ok?) is something so outrageous that it can’t be readily disproven. But this time, he went too far. He offered the kind of fact that can be verified or struck down by using virtually any almanac at hand. (Unless, like our new President, you show no signs of ever even opening any almanac to begin with.)

It fell to NBC news correspondent Peter Alexander to tell Agent Orange that Barack Obama, for one, had a higher Electoral College count. Well, okay—Republicans—the new incumbent said, almost comically unsure that most onlookers (never, of course, those “enemies of the people”) would give him a pass.  But even this didn’t work. After all, George H.W. Bush (yes, the father of “low-energy” Jeb) even had a higher Electoral College tally as a first-time nominee. And among Democrats, not only Barack Obama but Bill Clinton had higher electoral counts.

“Well, no I was told — I was given that information,” Agent Orange claimed.

Look at the construction of that last clause. It’s passive. More to the point, there’s no actor or cause of action involved. We don’t know who fed him that tidbit—indeed, if anyone did give him any. There’s every reason to think that nobody did.

But that wasn’t the last—or more serious—time that Agent Orange tried to shift blame. After questions began to be raised about the loss of life during a covert mission he authorized in Yemen against ISIS—one approved so soon after his inauguration that there was every reason to wonder how fully he absorbed his briefing on it—he said, in a Fox News interview, that the mission was started “before I got here.” It was, he said, something his generals “wanted to do”—and, he couldn’t resist adding, “they lost [US Navy SEAL William] Ryan [Owens].”

This was right after he had claimed the mission was “a highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies.” In other words, he was happy to claim credit for the part of the raid that (he said, offering no proof) “worked,” but ran as far away as he could from the part that didn’t.

There’s a word that Agent Orange uses every chance he gets in his overnight tweets, and it applies here to his attempt to grab the glory associated with leadership but run away from the blame that accrues to it: pathetic.

Flashback, November 1955: ‘National Review’ Publishes 1st Issue

Appalled by the march of collectivism and atheism around the world and liberalism holding sway at home, a new magazine of conservative opinion, National Review, released its first issue 60 years ago this month, announcing its intentions unapologetically in its publisher’s statement: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

The name affixed to the bottom of that piece, William F. Buckley, Jr., was entirely superfluous. The hallmarks of the style that had made the magazine’s founder an enfant terrible of conservatism four years before, in his polemic, God and Man at Yale, were all here, too—notably, puckishness (their opponents made them “just about the hottest thing in town”) and polysyllabic vocabulary (“supererogation”).

It is fascinating to contrast “What Would Eisenhower Do?” a tribute in the magazine’s 60^th anniversary issue to the Republican President at the time of Buckley’s broadside, with how the guiding light of NR felt about him at the time. Ike, according to historian Niall Ferguson, writing in 2015, “understood strategy better than almost anyone in his generation.” 

That kind of talk would have been hotly disputed in the Fifties by Buckley, who, when Ike announced his re-election bid in 1956, dismissed the leader of the successful invasion of Normandy a dozen years before as “undaunted by principle, unchained by any coherent ideas about man and society, uncommitted to any estimate of the nature of potential of the enemy.”

If an institution is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed, “the lengthened shadow of a single man,” then it is entirely apropos to examine NR in the context of its founder. The magazine’s 60^th anniversary issue this month makes this practically a necessity, since it contains even more self-congratulation than other journals of opinion, such as The New Republic and The Nation, have resorted to in the last year or so.

The label given Buckley by Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation, “The St. Paul of the Modern American Conservative Movement,” captures the reverence with which Buckley is held on the right.

According to The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Buckley brought three qualities to his fledgling movement: “extraordinary self-belief,” a large and necessary source of funds (his father’s oil business), and wit that not only won over conservative friends but disarmed liberal critics.

Like liberal counterparts The Nation and The New Republic, NR functioned as a kind of internal debating society for its movement. Its editor was ready and willing to isolate what he regarded as fringe elements that could damage the movement, including anti-Semites, isolationists, and the John Birch Society. 

In this, it was generally agreed, he was largely successful, though he was slow to acknowledge the moral necessity of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s until it had achieved its greatest successes.

Buckley, fighting a perception voiced by Columbia University’s Lionel Trilling that conservatism could only be expressed in “in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” recruited a host of thinkers from various strands of the movement: ex-Marxists or ex-leftists (such as Whittaker Chambers, William Schlamm, John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer and James Burnham), Catholics (L. Brent Bozell, Harry V. Jaffa and Garry Wills), and libertarians (by his own description, Buckley can be considered a charter member). In turn, the magazine influenced a host of politicians (Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were regular readers).

A figure of astonishing energy, Buckley propagated the conservative faith in more than 50 books, 6,000 newspaper columns totaling some 4.5 million words, editing NR for 35 years, appearing on his own TV show, Firing Line, running for mayor of New York City in 1965, lecturing on college campuses, and founding Young Americans for Freedom at his Connecticut estate in 1960.

But being in the shadow of such a magnetic figure was a mixed blessing for both his son and a protégé.

In the case of the latter, Richard Brookhiser had been groomed for years to succeed Buckley as editor when, without warning, the conservative literary lion sent him a letter informing him of a change of plans. 

It was one of the quirks of a figure known for never uttering a word out of place on Firing Line that not only could he not deliver bad news to employees face to face but that he also (as in this case) flew out of the country so that the magazine’s publisher would do so in his stead. 

Buckley had an infinitely more complicated relationship with his only son, Christopher, who, in his memoir Losing Mum and Pup, described the death of both his parents in a single year. 

William not only locked horns with his son over the latter’s agnosticism and much of his writing (about his Christopher’s satire Boomsday: "This one didn't work for me. Sorry."), but excluded from his will Christopher’s out-of-wedlock son.  

“I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley’s son,” Christopher remarked in an interview with Alexandra Wolfe of The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “But it may just be that…the book that may remain in print 50 years from now is the one about being William F. Buckley’s son.”

What would Buckley think of the state of conservatism today? Unlike the younger, more neo-con, Rupert Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard, NR has held its nose at Donald Trump, and there is a strong possibility Buckley would have loathed the billionaire as a lowlife. 

On the other hand, the 60^th anniversary edition of the magazine included a tribute to Buckley from Rush Limbaugh, who has helped dig the fetid hole in which much of contemporary conservatism finds itself.

Quote of the Day (Dwight D. Eisenhower, on Indifference and Voting)

“Our American heritage is threatened as much by our own indifference as it is by the most unscrupulous office seeker or by the most powerful foreign threat. The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter. ”— Dwight D. Eisenhower, 18th annual New York Herald Tribune Forum, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, October 24, 1949

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on How the GOP Could Lose)

“Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this--in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”—President Dwight David Eisenhower, letter to brother Edgar Newton Eisenhower, November 8, 1954, quoted in The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XV - The Presidency: The Middle Way, Part VI: Crises Abroad, Party Problems at Home; September 1954 to December 1954

Even in his time, Dwight D. Eisenhower—born on this day 125 years ago in Denison, Texas—attracted little affection from the conservative wing of the Republican Party he led. William F. Buckley, for instance, in 1956, called him “a man more distinguished for his affability and skills in reconciling antagonisms than for a profound understanding of his country’s political institutions.”

Journalists—particularly liberal ones—mocked him for his tangled syntax. But the President’s letter to his brother indicates just how mistaken detractors from both sides were. He could write quite clearly about, and he could see even more starkly, the dangers confronting his party by its far-right wing.

Unfortunately, as we have seen particularly over the last few years, while this “splinter group” remains irredeemably stupid, they are no longer a negligible portion of the GOP.