President Barack Obama’s decision to accept the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who had run the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, was the correct one. As commander in chief of the armed forces, no president can tolerate his generals and their associates being publicly disrespectful, as McChrystal and his aides were in an article in Rolling Stone magazine.
McChrystal’s indiscretions pale in comparison with the continual insubordination of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, head of the Far East Command at the start of the Korean War, toward President Harry S. Truman. But McChrystal’s resignation, which came just a few days short of the 60th anniversary of the beginning of hostilities in Korea, brought to mind the MacArthur controversy.
In public, both presidents employed diplomatically correct language in announcing the cashiering of their generals. We may not know Obama’s private assessment of the McChrystal incident for a while. But thanks to author Merle Miller and his book “Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman,’’ published in 1973 by Berkley Publishing Corp., we sure do know Truman’s.
When Miller asks Truman — the old World War I artillery officer — why he fired MacArthur, Truman bluntly replies, “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb [expletive deleted] although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail …’’
MacArthur’s insubordination — born of a mammoth ego that inspired him to act “like a blend of Caesar and Caligula,” in the words of Korean War chronicler Joseph Goulden — is the stuff of legend. An example of his disobedience occurred a little more than a month after the Korean War began on June 25, 1950.
Truman had sent MacArthur to Formosa to tell Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that the introduction of his Chinese Nationalist troops into the war — as some, including MacArthur, had advocated — would, in the opinion of Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, be “inappropriate’’ and could touch off World War III.
Soon after that meeting, a Chiang spokesman announced that Chiang and MacArthur were in agreement that Formosa should not be neutralized, as Truman had insisted. Further, MacArthur felt that Chiang’s troops should be unleashed and not bother with Korea at all, instead attacking the Chinese mainland.
Truman’s reaction to such MacArthur perfidy? “I didn’t know what to think,’’ he told Miller. “One of them [MacArthur or Chiang] was lying, but since I wouldn’t have trusted either one of them as far as I could throw them, I decided to wait and see. Sometimes that’s the best policy. I sent [national security adviser] Averill Harriman to Tokyo to see MacArthur and get him cleared up on anything he maybe didn’t understand …’’
MacArthur assured Harriman that he had no intention of letting Chiang draw the United States into a war with the Chinese Communists. Truman should have no worries on that account. MacArthur would, “as a soldier, obey any orders that he received from the president,’’ he told Harriman. No one, least of all Truman, believed that promise, even though MacArthur made essentially the same pledge when the two men subsequently met at Wake Island to discuss their differences.
For Truman, the final straw came when MacArthur derailed an early United States initiative for a negotiated cease-fire at the 38th parallel. With South Korea cleared of enemy troops early in 1951, Truman and the Joint Chiefs wanted to halt things there and arrange a settlement. MacArthur was having none of it, proposing not to stop the war — which was to drag on until July 1953 — but expand it.
And so it was that on April 6, 1951, Truman decided to fire him, naming Gen. Matthew Ridgway as his replacement. Gen. Omar Bradley warned Truman that if MacArthur got wind of his firing before being officially notified, he likely would embarrass the president one last time by resigning on him.
“The [expletive deleted] isn’t going to resign on me. I want him fired,’’ Truman replied. Foregoing normal channels, Bradley relayed the news directly to MacArthur. “And that’s all there was to it,’’ Truman told Miller. “I went to bed, and [press secretary] Joe Short called a press conference and read my statement, and it was all over but the shouting.’’
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.