Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Senator Taft, now unchallenged leader of the isolationist bloc, argued that Governor Dewey’s “internationalist” approach had lost the presidential election of 1948 and that his own wholesale opposition to the Administration on an isolationist basis had been victorious in 1950 and would win the Presidency (apparently for himself) in 1952. On this basis a powerful attack was built up against Secretary of State Acheson, against NATO and other American commitments in Europe, and against foreign aid or any efforts to extend America’s ground forces. Truman’s efforts to send four divisions to Europe and to make General Eisenhower Supreme Commander of NATO were violently opposed, by Taft (who had voted against ratification of NATO) and by Senator Wherry, the Republican floor leader. Every effort was made to reduce the defense of the United States to a simple matter of control of the air and the oceans without need for overseas forces or overseas allies. All this, of course, was simply a refusal to face twentieth-century conditions by men with nineteenth-century ideas, and gave great support to MacArthur’s insubordination.

This insubordination and the general’s alliance with the Republican opposition in the Congress was brought to a head on April 5, 1951, when the House Republican Leader, Joseph Martin, read to the Congress a letter from MacArthur which was a broad-gauged propagandist attack on the Truman Administration’s policies in the Far East. Truman used this as an excuse to remove MacArthur, although his real reason was the general’s sabotage of American and British efforts to negotiate an end of the war along the 38th parallel.

Five days after the MacArthur-Martin letter had been read in Congress, Truman removed the general from all his commands in the Far East. This was used by the isolationist opposition for a great triumphal homecoming for MacArthur. The Republican leaders spoke publicly of impeaching the President; Senator Nixon wanted congressional censure of the President and restoration of MacArthur to his commands, since his removal was “appeasement of World Communism.” McCarthy said the President had made the decision while he was drunk, while Senator William Jenner said from the Senate floor: “This country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction.” Sentiments similar to these were frequent, both in public and in private, for the next few years.

MacArthur’s return to the United States after an absence of almost fifteen years was built up into an amazing display of popular hysteria. On landing at San Francisco he was greeted by half a million people in one of the greatest traffic jams in the city’s history. At Washington’s airport, after midnight on April 19th, the crowds broke out of control. That afternoon, before a joint session of Congress and over a nationwide television broadcast, he made a speech which ranged from old-fashioned eloquence to pure ham. It ended on pathos: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-by.” This was followed by a parade in Washington before 250,000 spectators, but the real climax was reached in New York, the following day, when, for six and a half hours, more than seven million people, spread over a nineteen-mile parade route, cheered themselves hoarse over the general. This was twice the crowd which had seen Eisenhower’s return from Europe after the defeat of Germany in 1945.

The general did not fade away immediately. By May he was back in Washington as star witness for the prosecution in a congressional investigation into the country’s Far East policies. Only an infinitesimal fraction of those who had cheered the general so heartily two weeks before paid any attention to the hearings. This was unfortunate. MacArthur seriously maintained that his policies could lead to the total defeat of Communist China, without any increase in ground forces, simply by naval and economic blockade of China, by air attack on Chinese industry, and by “lifting the wraps” off Chiang Kai-shek. On this basis he promised immediate victory with a minimum of risk and casualties. The Administration’s policy, he insisted, was not victory but “to go on indecisively fighting with no mission for the troops except to resist and fight ... a continued and indefinite extension of bloodshed.”

Subsequent testimony from others, including the country’s leading military experts and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed the unsubstantial nature of this vision of Utopia. They rejected MacArthur’s ideas as unrealistic and impossible: the bombing of Manchuria alone would take twice as many bombers as SAC had available; bombing of Chinese industry would not deprive the Chinese of military supplies, as their arsenals were in the Soviet Union; an economic and naval blockade could not seriously injure a country as self-sufficient as China, with an open land frontier, and could not be effective at all unless active military combat on the ground increased consumption rates; efforts to adopt these policies would alienate the United States from its allies and the United Nations and would jeopardize the whole anti-Soviet position in Europe.

Few Americans followed the arguments to this point, but MacArthur had given the opposition a new war cry: “In war there is no substitute for victory.” This slogan, in which neither war nor victory was defined, was used as a weapon by the neo-isolationists, partisan Republicans, and Radical Right for more than a decade, although by 1960 it had been shortened to the charge that the Democrats favored a “No-win policy.” After a decade of reiteration, many persons seriously believed that it was impossible to stop Communism without all-out nuclear war and that continued survival, instead of mutual destruction, could not possibly be regarded as winning! Peace had become appeasement.

These neo-isolationist policies had no relationship to reality, but they exerted great pressure on the last two years of the Truman Administration, driving it toward an increasingly unrealistic course. In 1951 Senator Taft was advocating a three-fold program of reduced military preparedness, reduced government expenditures, and a more aggressive foreign policy in the Far East. This combination could be supported only by assuming a number of things which were not true. One of these was that Chiang Kai-shek’s regime on Formosa was still a great Power and that Red China, on the other hand, was on the verge of collapse and was, indeed, so weakened that Chiang would be enthusiastically welcomed back if he merely landed on the mainland. This unrealistic version of the present could be sustained only by an equally unrealistic version of the past, that the Red victory in China was the inevitable consequence of opposition to Chiang by the Democratic Administrations of Roosevelt and Truman and that this opposition was caused by the existence within the Administrations of Communists and Communist sympathizers from the top down. Since almost all experts, including scientists, area and subject experts, and military men, did not accept this version, either of the past or the present, all experts were regarded as suspect and insulted or ignored. In fact, educated or thoughtful men were generally rejected. Instead, emphasis was placed on “practical men,” defined as those who “had met a payroll or carried a precinct.” This admitted to the charmed circle businessmen and politicians of local stature (like Senator Wherry).