The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read online

  MacArthur, by then the military governor general of the islands, was furious at this potential challenge to his absolute control, and he never gave Taft a chance. Instead of meeting Taft and the other commissioners when they first arrived in Manila, as protocol required, he sent a deputy to the dock; and, to make things worse, in the words of the diplomat-historian Warren Zimmermann, “he tried to humble the commissioners by keeping them waiting all day in the blistering heat, then receiving them like an Asian potentate.” Even meeting with them represented a humiliation for him, he informed them. Neither Taft nor MacArthur had an easy job—and the division of authority between the civilian and military side was never entirely clear—but MacArthur made it much worse with his disrespect for Taft, who was generally regarded as being able and fair-minded. It seemed not to bother MacArthur that in treating Taft with contempt he was treating the president with contempt as well. His struggle was a triumph of ego over common sense: he was setting up himself, not Taft, for a great fall.

  Taft’s mission was political—more than anything else to protect American future interests and to midwife some distant form of Filipino independence. He would sometimes use phrases like “the Philippines for the Filipinos” or, on occasion, in the style of the times, refer to the Filipinos as “little brown brothers.” But the troops fighting under MacArthur did not think of their adversaries as potential siblings. They had a ballad that went: “He may be a brother of William Howard Taft / but he ain’t no brother of mine.” There was as little informal contact as possible between the general and the lead commissioner; in order to communicate with MacArthur, Taft had to write him letters. Having dealt with some of the most able men in American politics over the years, Taft was underwhelmed by Arthur MacArthur’s inflated ego and wrote home to figures of substance like Secretary of War Elihu Root on the qualities in the general that he did not admire, words that would have an odd resonance half a century later. Arthur MacArthur was lacking in a sense of humor, “rather fond of profound generalizations on the psychological conditions of the people; politely lacking in any great consideration for the views of anyone as to the real situation who is a civilian and who has been here only a comparatively short period of time.” He was a man, Taft thought, quick to give lectures and slow to listen.

  Given that Taft not only bore the personal imprimatur of the president of the United States but was a close personal friend as well, MacArthur’s behavior was not merely petulant, it was shortsighted, and wildly self-destructive. In the process of proving to Taft who was really important in this two-man civilian-military struggle for power, MacArthur quite gratuitously offended the four most important Republican political figures of the era: McKinley; Root; Teddy Roosevelt, who became McKinley’s running mate in 1900 (succeeding him the next year when McKinley was assassinated); and Taft himself, who became governor-general of the Philippines in 1902 and then secretary of war, before winning the presidency in 1908. It took thirteen months of MacArthur’s constant resistance to Taft before he was recalled. The job in Manila would prove the high-water mark of his career. Eight years passed from the time he was recalled to the moment when Taft assumed the presidency, and when he did, MacArthur quickly resigned his military commission. But it had all been over long before that. Though he became a lieutenant general, then the highest rank in the Army, he was never offered the post of Army chief of staff, the job he wanted more than anything else. Despite his considerable accomplishments, Arthur MacArthur ended his career and life caught up in his own bitterness, a constant rage that was like a self-inflicted virus. In those years, as William Manchester wrote, he planted a terrible seed of conflict between civilian and military authority in his own son: “The seed took a long time to flower—a half century—but in the end its fruit would be extraordinary.” To anyone coming somewhat belatedly upon the story of Arthur MacArthur and how he mistreated Taft (and thus his president), and already knowing something of the story of Douglas MacArthur’s collision with his president, Harry Truman, it would be an eerie kind of footnote to future events—history not so much repeating itself as preceding itself.

  Arthur MacArthur lived for three more years after he resigned in 1909. The real keeper of the flame, the person who kept the myth of him alive, was his widow, Pinky MacArthur. In her mind it would be up to her son, young Douglas, to avenge the family honor. “You must grow up to be a great man,” she constantly told him, “like your father,” or, she added, “like Robert E. Lee.” It would be his job not merely to live up to his father but to exceed his accomplishments, making her the ultimate successful mother. When he was eventually named Army chief of staff, the job his father had been denied, she said, “If only your father could see you now! Douglas, you’re everything he wanted to be.”

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  WHAT AN ODD thing that a woman born in another century, ninety-eight years before the start of the Korean War, a decade and a half dead by 1950, should have so profound an influence on a battle taking place in the middle of the twentieth century. But there was no way of comprehending Douglas MacArthur without understanding not only his self-absorbed father but his mother as well. For more than any figure of that era, including Franklin Roosevelt, who had his own domineering mother, Douglas MacArthur was a mama’s boy. Congressional Medal of Honor winner he might be and brave in the face of enemy fire he certainly was—indeed almost on occasion suicidally so—but he was a mama’s boy nonetheless. Of not many American military heroes could it be said that when they left home for West Point, their mothers uprooted themselves and moved to that small town on the Hudson. Pinky MacArthur took a room in the best local hotel, Craney’s, in order to stand watch over Douglas for four full years at the academy, lest he fall below her expectations and slough off into mediocrity. West Point might have been the most rigidly demanding four-year institution in America, but Pinky MacArthur was there anyway, just in case the academy’s contemporary custodians slipped a bit or did not realize how remarkable a young man she had bequeathed them.

  Pinky MacArthur was not just the key architect of Douglas MacArthur’s career, but more important, the molder of his psyche, the creator of the almost unique self-absorption that cloaked and on occasion diminished his equally great talent. What she had wrought, all sorts of other talented, devoted public men would struggle with and against for four decades. In contemporary parlance, she would have been known as a stage mother, that is, an immensely ambitious, driven woman who, lacking the outlets for her own ambitions, transferred them to her son and lived through his success. Her career, and she was a world-class careerist, was her son. As MacArthur rose, Pinky MacArthur rose too; as he conquered the varying challenges before him, so did she; as he was honored, so was she. He was raised not just to succeed, but to succeed at the expense of all other human qualities. To be successful you simply could not afford to think of anyone else; if you did, you might be pulled down by them.

  In this way, his mother raised him to be the most self-absorbed and thus self-isolated of men. From the start, he was a young man apart in terms of peer relationships. His first wedding—though the weddings of West Point men are normally notable social occasions, reflecting the fierce bonds between the groom and his classmates—was notable for the lack of friends and colleagues. Only one real friend attended. Years later he would end his career very much apart from other officers, save his own staff, one known for its sycophancy. He was a man with no capacity for genuine peer friendships, in no small part because in his own mind he had no peers.

  Pinky MacArthur quite deliberately sent him out not merely to avenge the wrongs done to his father but to compete against him. She was raising a gifted, talented, cerebral man cut off from almost anyone else—a kind of military genius/human monster, someone who was never to be wrong. Never. He was never to make a mistake, never to fail. He was a man who for all his very considerable talents was, in some terrible, unrecognized way, incomplete. Perhaps the greatest struggle, as the Korean War began, would not be that of MacArthur against Tr
uman or MacArthur against the Chinese, but MacArthur against MacArthur—the competition between his better self, the side of him that was so truly intelligent, creative, and audacious, and the part of him that was so vainglorious, selfish, and arrogant. The writer Cole Kingseed, a professor of military history at West Point, once noted that a description of Oliver Cromwell, the seventeenth-century Puritan general, was applicable to MacArthur as well in trying to decide whether he was a good man or an evil man: he was “a great bad man.”

  Much of that came from Pinky MacArthur. From her he learned the need to be perfect or seem perfect, to cover up any sign of weakness or frailty. Perhaps more than anything else, she left him unable to admit to error. From that need to be perfect came inevitably a certain paranoia. People, in his mind, were always out to get him. How could they—there was always a “they,” back at headquarters in France when he was younger, in Washington when he became more senior—have done this to him? He lived in a world where the only memories, his own and those of his staff members, were of his successes, of the perfection of his deeds. If things had gone wrong, they had gone wrong because of others, enemies surely, not because of his own flaws. About the lack of preparation in the first American troops to enter combat in Korea, he would later write: “How I asked myself could the United States have allowed such a deplorable situation to develop? I thought back to those days, only a short time before, when our country had been militarily more powerful than any nation on the face of the earth. But in the short space of five years this power had been filtered away in a bankruptcy of positive and courageous leadership towards any long range objectives.” He did not, of course, mention that he had helped accelerate the forces of demobilization by announcing on his own that he needed fewer than half the troops in Japan originally ticketed for his command; nor did he mention that the garrison-duty soldiers who first went to Korea, and were so ill-prepared, had been under his direct command; that he had rarely deigned to pay attention to them unless they were at intra-Army football games; that, like the country itself, he had essentially been on a peacetime footing.

  MARY PINCKNEY HARDY was a Southern belle, back when that mattered a great deal. The daughter of a Norfolk, Virginia, cotton broker, she met Arthur MacArthur in New Orleans during Mardi Gras and they were married in 1873, only eight years after the end of the bloodiest war in American history, when the passions and prejudices it generated were still at their height. Two of her brothers who had fought with the South refused to attend the wedding. Her married life was never easy. She had been born to relative luxury and status, a debutante of her era, but she signed on, for better or for worse, to a harsh life, moving from post to post, turned unwittingly into a pioneer woman, often in godforsaken parts of the West and Southwest where she would be greeted by marginal creature comforts. Given her privileged background, it was amazing that she stuck it out. William Manchester calls it “a tribute, to her courage and perhaps to the strength of social discipline then.”

  Her first son, Arthur MacArthur III, entered the Navy, and died relatively young in 1923; a second son, Malcolm, died of the measles at the age of five. Douglas was born in 1880 at Fort Dodge, Arkansas, which eventually became Little Rock. How much the death of her second son affected the emotional intensity Pinky MacArthur would focus on her third and last child, one can never know; but surely she had suffered no small amount of emotional damage, and there is no doubt that he was the one on whom she dispensed her very considerable energies—he was the last best hope. If his father, a national hero seventeen years before Douglas was born, was the beau ideal that he was to live up to, a constant almost mythic presence, then his mother was his drill sergeant, reminding him of those deeds of his father’s that were still to be matched. On the day that the Japanese Diet passed a land reform act in his years as the unofficial ruler of Japan, MacArthur leaned far back in his chair as if looking up at heaven, though it was actually at a photo of his father, who had pushed unsuccessfully for land reform when he was in the Philippines—and said, “How am I doing, Dad?”

  Pinky MacArthur had wanted him to go to West Point, but surprisingly enough, despite the family’s political connections, it had been hard for him to gain an appointment. Finally, she moved them to a district where the congressman was a friend of Douglas’s grandfather. He still had problems getting in: when he flunked his first physical, thanks to curvature of his spine, she went out and found a doctor who would work on correcting it. When the congressman, overwhelmed by applicants with comparable connections, set up a special exam, she immediately hired a high school principal to tutor young Douglas. The night before the exam, he was nervous and anxious, barely able to sleep. She rose to the occasion, giving him her most rousing motivational speech: “Doug, you’ll win if you don’t lose your nerve. You must believe in yourself, my son, or no one else will believe in you. Be confident, self-reliant, and even if you don’t make it, you will know that you have done your best. Now go to it.” There were thirteen young men taking the test. MacArthur scored 99.3; the next highest grade was 77.9.

  He excelled at West Point. He was first in his class, of course. That was to be expected. His grades were for many years the third highest ever recorded, and of the two men who had done better, one was Pinky’s other hero, Robert E. Lee. Though her son had done brilliantly during World War I and was so acknowledged by his superiors (seven Silver Stars, and he almost won the Congressional Medal of Honor), was much recognized for his skilled leadership of the Forty-second or Rainbow Division, and had ended up its commander, the youngest division commander in World War I, it was a meteoric career that was never quite meteoric enough. Pinky MacArthur was always there to remind him that there was more to conquer, and just in case others were not aware of his superior abilities, she was always out there publicizing them. Her letters to his superiors were coy and manipulative, full of flattery of the recipients, reminding them not only of his deeds in France but, of course, of his West Point grades as well, evidence of the old Southern belle at work. When during World War I she felt that Douglas had been a colonel too long, she wrote Secretary of War Newton Baker, suggesting he be promoted to general: “This officer is an instrument ready to hand for large things if you see fit to use him…. He is a loyal and devoted officer and I present his name for consideration as I believe his advancement will serve—not only to benefit his own interest—but on a much broader scale, the interest of our beloved country in this great hour of her trial.” Baker did not respond, but Pinky was not deterred. Eight months later she wrote him again: “I am taking the liberty of sending you a few lines in continuation of the little heart-to-heart pen and ink chat I had with you from California with reference to my son, Douglas, and my heart’s great wish that you might see your way clear to bestow upon him a Star…. Considering the fine work he has done with so much pride and enthusiasm, and the prominence he has gained in actual fighting, I believe the entire Army, with few exceptions, would applaud your selecting him as one of your Generals.”

  Baker quickly passed her on to General John J. (Black Jack) Pershing. Now she had Pershing in her sights—a man who had been a young captain in the Philippines when Arthur MacArthur, then a major general, had befriended him. Pershing soon received what she called a “little heart-to-heart letter emboldened by the thought of old friendship for you and yours and the knowledge of my late husband’s great admiration for you…. I know the Secretary of War and his family quite intimately and the Secretary is deeply attached to Colonel MacArthur and knows him quite well.” Nor, of course, did the letter writing end when MacArthur finally made general in 1917. If anything, the process taught his mother that pressure worked, and when he had been a brigadier general for five years—far too long in her view—she began a new campaign to get him his second star, a campaign in which his first wife, Louise, also participated. Louise MacArthur hired a former Rainbow Division officer who was by then a well-connected lawyer in Washington to lobby for her. (“I don’t care what it costs. Just go ahea
d and send the bill to me personally. Don’t tell Douglas.”) The lobbyist arranged for a group of men who had been colonels in MacArthur’s division in France in World War I to meet with the secretary of war, John Weeks, who told them that MacArthur was too young. Too young, MacArthur later muttered, when he heard what Weeks had said, why, Genghis Khan commanded his hordes at thirteen, Napoleon his armies at twenty-six.

  When he was superintendent at West Point, his mother was his hostess. When her son married for the first time—an attractive divorcée—she did not approve; in fact, she immediately took to her bed exhibiting a frailty, never manifested before, but a warning signal that he had better attend to her first, and his wife second. It was a move she would make again and again whenever he seemed to be slipping away from her control. She did not, of course, attend the wedding. To no one’s surprise MacArthur’s first marriage did not last long, and by the time he was Army chief of staff, Pinky MacArthur was back in charge, serving as his official hostess, and he was returning home every day for lunch. His second marriage, the one that worked, did so in part because Pinky MacArthur handpicked Jean Faircloth for him, and because the second Mrs. MacArthur, herself something of a Southern belle, also revered and idolized him, cherishing her role as the general’s lady, referring to him in public as “The General” and calling him in private “Sir Boss.”