ON A SUNNY spring afternoon in 1951, a seventy-year-old Japanese gentleman was hosting his first flower-viewing party of the season. During the party, he was given the news that had just reached Tokyo from America: President Truman had fired General Douglas MacArthur from all of his posts, including his battle command in Korea and his position as Supreme Commander of the Allied Occupation in Japan. The host looked stricken and excused himself from the receiving line. He was so upset that it took him half an hour to pull himself together.
The gentleman—Shigeru Yoshida, Japan’s hard-as-nails Prime Minister—knew this was no time for sentimentality. He had brought the hammer down on enough of his own opponents to realize that politics was a rough business. MacArthur and Truman had been locked in a titanic political struggle, and MacArthur had lost. Regardless of whether Truman was right or wrong, Japanese-American relations would continue to develop without the popular general. Yoshida had to be careful not to offend the President and thus cloud the prospects for the U.S.-Japan peace treaty, which he had sought since 1946.
Yet the statement Yoshida made in a broadcast to his nation was undiplomatically profuse in its praise for his departing friend. It also resonated with emotion, which was even more unlike Yoshida. “The accomplishments of General MacArthur in the interest of our country are one of the marvels of history,” he said. “No wonder he is looked upon by all our people with the profoundest veneration and affection. I have no words to convey the regret of our nation to see him leave.”
Yoshida’s remarks were reported in the American press, but they were engulfed and soon forgotten in the din that followed the firing and that dogged MacArthur for the rest of his life. Three decades later most Americans, when they are reminded of MacArthur, think of Korea or of the brilliance of his military leadership in World War II. But his greatest legacy was pinpointed by Yoshida in the first moments after MacArthur’s career ended. “It is he who has salvaged our nation from postsurrender confusion and prostration,” Yoshida said of the man who was just then being keelhauled by his critics for brash trigger-happiness. “It is he who has firmly planted democracy in all segments of our society.”
His own role in the rebuilding of Japan was just as important, but the Premier was being characteristically modest. In fact MacArthur and Yoshida—victor and vanquished, Occidental and Oriental, general and politician—had together executed the swiftest and most dramatic transformation of a major nation in the history of the modern world.
MacArthur was an American giant, a man of legendary stature who embodied all the contradictions and contrasts of a legend. He was a thoughtful intellectual and a swaggering, egotistical soldier, an authoritarian and a democrat, a gifted and powerful speaker given to flights of Churchillian rhetoric that inspired millions—and sent most liberals right up the wall.
Yoshida was Japan’s temperamental and obstreperous leader in its darkest hour, a puckish, cigar-smoking former diplomat who helped his country snatch economic victory from the jaws of military defeat. Because of his intestinal fortitude, his sharp tongue, and his stout figure, and because he was raised to power at an age when most men have been retired for years, Yoshida has often been called the Churchill of Japan.
In 1945 MacArthur took control of a Japan beaten in body and spirit. Two million of its people, a third of them civilians, had died. Its factories were crushed. Foreign trade, the cornerstone of Japan’s strength in the 1920s and 1930s, had ceased to exist. There were critical shortages of food. Even worse, the Japanese people had invested all of their faith and energy in a war they thought heaven would not let them lose. Their Emperor had told them to lay down their arms and, for the first time in Japan’s history, endure the humiliation of surrender: Soon Emperor Hirohito would publicly renounce the myth of divinity in which emperors had wrapped themselves for centuries and which was the foundation of the Japanese religious system.
Rarely had military defeat left such a material and spiritual vacuum. Yet, nine years later, when Yoshida stepped down as Prime Minister, Japan was a flourishing, vibrant democracy that was in the process of building the second largest economy in the free world.
It is widely believed that all of this was MacArthur’s doing, because it was during his proconsulship, from 1945 to 1951, that most of the social, economic, and political reforms that transformed Japan were undertaken. I knew both him and Yoshida well enough, and know enough of their lives, to say that Japan was remade by both men working together in an extraordinary partnership in which MacArthur was the lawgiver and Yoshida the executive. MacArthur’s edicts were cast in the form of principle. Yoshida molded them to fit Japan. The result was the transformation in a few years of a nation from totalitarianism to democracy and of a ruined economy to one that has since proved itself among the strongest in the world.
For each it was an exercise in the unexpected. MacArthur’s critics had pegged him as a pompous martinet. He turned out to be one of the most progressive military occupation commanders in all history—and one of the few who were successful. Yoshida took office as a caretaker and had no experience in running for office or running a government. He became one of the postwar period’s best Prime Ministers and created a model of moderately conservative, probusiness government from which Japan has yet to deviate.
MacArthur cast a long shadow, and in many accounts of the Occupation Yoshida seems to slip into it. One reason for this is the difference in personality between the two men, which is clear enough in their own writing. MacArthur’s Reminiscences are dramatic and occasionally self-congratulatory; in them the Occupation appears to be almost a one-man operation—MacArthur’s. His only reference to Yoshida, besides the quotation of laudatory messages from Yoshida to himself, is to Japan’s “able” Prime Minister. In contrast Yoshida’s Memoirs are disarmingly modest. In them, he seems reluctant to take credit for many of his accomplishments.
Between these two versions is the truth about the Occupation, which is that Japan was run for seven years by two governments that sometimes meshed and sometimes clashed. MacArthur operated by proclamation, Yoshida by sometimes unseen and unrecorded smaller actions. Each man was as important as the other, but Yoshida was hard to see in the glare of MacArthur’s enormous power and towering personality.
To make matters worse, Yoshida’s seven years in office are habitually described by many scholars in negative terms. Some brand him as a disgruntled old-style conservative who spitefully reversed MacArthur’s labor, education, and police reforms as quickly as he could. Others say that Yoshida’s revision of these reforms was actually the work of the Americans suddenly conscious of the need for a strong anti-Communist ally in the Far East.
Yoshida was in fact a careful politician, with basically liberal instincts, who was justifiably concerned that the flurry of reform initiated by the Americans was a matter of too much, too quickly. The Japanese, probably the least xenophobic people on earth, had a long tradition of “borrowing” from other cultures, but they were always careful to regulate new influences so they would enrich Japanese society rather than disrupt it. It was no different with the concepts imported by MacArthur. He created democratic institutions and expected the Japanese to become democrats. Yoshida knew it would take time for his people to appreciate both the benefits and the responsibilities that came with their new freedom. He also knew that everything that worked in the United States would not necessarily work in Japan.
The vastly different roles MacArthur and Yoshida played required men of vastly different temperaments. My own first encounters with them reflect their differences.
I first saw MacArthur in 1951, when I was a U.S. senator and heard his “Old soldiers never die” speech to a joint session of Congress. Awash in the drama of one of the great confrontations of modern political history, he was almost Olympian in stature. His presentation was hypnotically powerful. Time after time he was interrupted by prolonged applause. When he finished with his emotional farewell—“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away”—the congressmen and senators, many of them in tears, leaped to their feet and cheered wildly. It was probably the greatest ovation ever given to anyone, including Presidents, who had addressed a joint session of Congress. Bedlam reigned as MacArthur marched majestically down the aisle and out of the chamber. One member said that we had just heard the voice of God. Another pro-MacArthur senator joked to me later that the speech had left the Republicans with wet eyes and the Democrats with wet pants.
I first met Yoshida two years later in Tokyo. When he arrived a few moments late for our first meeting, he was holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. He apologized profusely and said he had been attending to a nosebleed—which resulted, he added with an embarrassed chuckle, from eating too much caviar the night before. I remember thinking that few leaders would have been down-to-earth enough to admit such a thing, especially when it would have been so easy to make up some excuse about the urgency of government business.
The impressions I received from these encounters were borne out by later ones. MacArthur was a hero, a presence, an event. Those who were invited to meet with him, as I was during his retirement years in New York, listened in deferential silence as he paced around the room, declaiming upon whatever subject happened to be on his mind at the moment. Yoshida was as human and accessible as MacArthur was remote. Sitting low in a chair, his roguish grin sometimes hidden in a cloud of cigar smoke, he reveled in the good-humored give-and-take of a well-informed conversation.
They had their similarities. Both were well-read intellectuals. Both were in their seventies when they exercised their greatest power. Victorians by birth, each carried himself in public with a certain old-world dignity and austerity. But MacArthur never softened his bearing. A onetime assistant said, “Even in reproof and rebuff, he kept the lofty manners of a gentleman.” Yoshida, in contrast, could be refreshingly coarse when the moment demanded it, as when he called a Socialist in the Diet a “damned fool” or when he poured a pitcher of water over the head of an annoying photographer.
If I had had to guess from my first encounters with MacArthur and Yoshida which man was the lofty idealist and which was the stubborn pragmatist, I think I would have guessed right. As it turned out, postwar Japan needed both. Without MacArthur’s vision, the necessary reforms might not have taken place. Without Yoshida’s meticulous attention to detail, those reforms might have jarred Japan from confusion into chaos.
In essence MacArthur was an Occidental whose life unfolded East, while Yoshida was an Oriental whose life unfolded West. They shared a vision of the way their cultures could meet on the crowded archipelago of Japan and produce a new and powerful free nation.
• • •
Douglas MacArthur was one of the greatest generals America has produced. He was also one of the most flamboyant, and as a result his personal style sometimes attracted more attention than his accomplishments. Because of his aristocratic bearing and grandiloquent speech, he made an easy target for tastemakers and satirists, who portrayed him as a vainglorious anachronism, a haughty Victorian born fifty years too late. His speeches, often composed of towering, stirring invocations of the greatness of the American system, were laughed off by many as jingoism.
But his critics found it difficult to stereotype MacArthur. His was so richly complex a personality that, great actor though he is, even Gregory Peck was unable to capture it on film as George C. Scott so ably captured another great, but less complex, general, George Patton.
I first became keenly aware of MacArthur during World War II, when I was assigned as a Navy operations officer to a Marine combat air-transport unit in the South Pacific. What I heard was uniformly negative, because it was tainted both by the press, which was generally biased against MacArthur, and by the usual Army-Navy rivalry.
For example there were two kinds of seats in the C-47 cargo and transport planes we used: the uncomfortable bucket seats that were the lot of most servicemen, and a pair of more luxurious, airline-type seats for high-ranking officers. The latter were derisively called “MacArthur seats.”
As it turned out, the general’s reputation was completely at variance with the facts. During the seige of Bataan and Corregidor, MacArthur insisted on living in a house above ground rather than in a bunker, thus exposing himself and his family to Japanese shelling. Yet all we heard was that his men on Bataan called him “Dugout Doug.” When the situation became hopeless, MacArthur had every intention of staying on the island and dying after he had killed as many Japanese as he could with his derringer. President Roosevelt finally ordered him to leave, but all we heard was that MacArthur, when the going got rough, beat a hasty and cowardly retreat, taking along his wife, his three-year-old son, and their Chinese nursemaid.
It was ironic that MacArthur’s World War II nickname was Dugout Doug, because in World War I that is where he really was—in the dug-outs and trenches with the doughboys in France. As chief of staff and later commander of the Rainbow Division, he was admired, even revered, by his troops because of his tactical skill and his eagerness to face every risk they did. During more than one American charge he was the first man over the top, and in the course of a year he was wounded twice and collected seven Silver Stars for gallantry.
Throughout his career his brushes with death were so frequent as to be almost routine. During a dramatic reconnaissance mission at Vera Cruz in 1914, Mexican bullets tore through his uniform. During World War I he was gassed, his sweater was tagged by machine-gun fire, and his command post at Metz was destroyed the day after he moved out. In the midst of an earlier barrage at Metz he stayed calmly in his seat, saying to his understandably concerned staff, “All of Germany cannot make a shell that will kill MacArthur.”
After the war, when his car was pulled over by a highwayman in New York, MacArthur told the man to put down his gun and fight for his money. When the man learned that he was trying to rob General MacArthur, under whom he had served in the Rainbow Division, he apologized profusely and let him go.
During World War II MacArthur could often be found staying calmly in his chair during Japanese strafing runs, peering through binoculars at the action while others wondered which way they would jump if a shell hit, and ignoring officers and enlisted men who begged him not to endanger himself. The bullets, he would say, were not for him.
He frequently combined displays of courage with strokes of drama that bordered on rashness. When he landed in the Philippines in 1945 and visited Japanese POW camps that held the malnourished and mistreated remnants of his Bataan and Corregidor forces, he turned to his staff physician and said, “Doc, this is getting to me. I want to go forward till we meet some fire, and I don’t just mean sniper fire.” He strode forward, past the bodies of Japanese troops, until he could hear the fire from an enemy machine-gun nest directly ahead. Then he turned and walked slowly back, daring the Japanese to shoot him in the back.
MacArthur’s whole life, including the displays of fearlessness that sometimes verged on foolhardiness, was in a sense a struggle to do justice to the memory of his father, General Arthur MacArthur.
Whether by coincidence or design, the careers of father and son had much in common. In 1863 Arthur, then an eighteen-year-old adjutant in the Union Army, earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for being the first soldier to plant his division’s colors on top of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, which set the stage for Sherman’s march through Georgia. Douglas, too, won the Medal of Honor, for his heroism on Corregídor. Arthur spent much of his career stationed on America’s frontiers; first the Southwest, then the Philippines. Douglas, from 1935 until his recall in 1951, visited the U.S. only once.
MacArthur the Elder and MacArthur the Younger, as they were differentiated by the Filipinos, were both obsessed with the importance of the Far East and of the Philippines to the future of the West. And both men’s careers were marked by dramatic clashes with civilian authority—Douglas with President Truman and Arthur with William Howard Taft, president of the civil commission in the Philippines when he was military governor.
If Arthur was the example, MacArthur’s mother, Pinky, prodded him toward a lifelong compulsion to follow and even surpass it. When he went to West Point, she went with him to make sure he studied and to protect the handsome cadet from romantic entanglements that could distract him from his career. He was graduated first in his class. While thirty-eight-year-old Colonel MacArthur was fighting in the trenches of France during World War I, his mother was writing fawning letters to his superiors, including General Pershing, who had served under his father. Finally, when he was appointed the youngest Army chief of staff in history in 1930, she ran her hand over the four stars on his shoulder and said, “If only your father could see you now. Douglas, you’re everything he wanted to be.”
MacArthur always felt compelled to be different from those around him, and this led to certain glaring but harmless eccentricities. In the military, uniform dress is intended in part to reinforce the command hierarchy. But MacArthur wanted to stand out, not fit in. To another officer who asked about his unusual garb, he said, “It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous.”
At various times in World War I he wore a rumpled cap in place of the regulation steel helmet, a turtleneck sweater, a plum-colored satin necktie, and riding breeches. Once he was mistaken for a German and momentarily arrested.
When he was superintendent at West Point from 1919 to 1922, he could be seen walking across campus carrying a riding crop. Later, in the Pacific during World War II, his simple but unorthodox uniform—familiar to Americans from pictures of the general wading ashore on one South Pacific island after another—consisted of sunglasses, faded khakis, a worn cap, and a corncob pipe. He wore none of his twenty-two medals, only small circles of five stars on his shirt collar.
One would think that MacArthur’s refusal to deck himself out in gold braid, brass, and ribbons would have been endearing rather than irritating, especially since by the middle of the century the age of the common man was in full swing. But MacArthur’s appearance enraged Truman, for example, when the two men met at Wake Island in 1950 to discuss the Korean War. Many years later Truman blurted out that the general “was wearing those damn sunglasses of his and a shirt that was unbuttoned and a cap that had a lot of hardware. I never did understand . . . an old man like that and a five-star general to boot, why he went around dressed up like a nineteen-year-old second lieutenant.”
MacArthur did not have to dress bizarrely to stand out from the crowd, because he was one of the most handsome public figures of his time. He also had a powerful personal magnetism—which, abetted by his shrewd intelligence, helped him captivate audiences, inspire troops, and command absolute loyalty among the people who worked on his staff. His aide at West Point said, “Obedience is something a leader can command, but loyalty is something, an indefinable something, that he is obliged to win. MacArthur knew instinctively how to win it.”
MacArthur had a special knack for attracting and keeping the loyalty of subordinates. Both Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger, prominent members of both my administration and President Reagan’s, worked for MacArthur, and they still count him among their idols. Weinberger was a young captain on MacArthur’s staff in the Pacific near the end of World War II. Haig, as a lieutenant on the staff of the American Occupation in Japan, was the duty officer who first informed MacArthur that the Communists had invaded South Korea.
MacArthur was almost never ill. Though his only formal exercise was calisthenics, he paced constantly, sometimes miles each day, in his office and living room, in airplanes, or on the decks of ships during attacks. MacArthur himself attributed his good health and physical condition to his afternoon naps, his near-abstention from drinking, moderate eating habits, and his ability to fall asleep almost at will. He was a profoundly religious man but not a churchgoer.
MacArthur was a totally disciplined man in thought, speech, and action. While he is best remembered for his “Old soldiers never die” speech and his farewell address at West Point, one of his best public performances was during the Senate Korea hearings. I did not participate in the questioning, since I was not a member of the committee conducting the hearing. I dropped by the first day just to see how MacArthur would handle himself under intensive questioning and expected to stay only a few minutes. His performance was so brilliant and spellbinding that I stayed for the entire three days of his testimony. Democratic senator William Fulbright and others came well prepared and asked some brutally tough questions aimed at demonstrating that MacArthur had violated presidential directives and had refused to accept the principle of civilian control of the military.
A lesser man would have crumbled under this assault. But MacArthur remained in command throughout. He was never trapped into a damaging admission; he used every question to get across a point he wanted to make in his answer; he was as quick and sharp at the end of a long, grueling day as at the beginning.
But even more impressive than what he said was how he said it. What particularly impressed me was his ability to put things in perfect, orderly English no matter how complex the issue was that he might be discussing. As was the case with de Gaulle, there were no pauses, no incomplete thoughts, no stopping a sentence and going back to start it again. It was almost as if he had written out his answers beforehand and memorized them. I was soon to see firsthand that he talked that way in private conversation as well.
• • •
It was at Robert Taft’s funeral in August 1953 that I first spoke with MacArthur. I mentioned that Taft had been one of his most loyal friends. MacArthur replied expansively, “I was his greatest friend!”
Shortly thereafter I received a message from his aide, General Courtney Whitney, that MacArthur would like to see me the next time I was in New York. I shall never forget that day. First I had breakfast with President Hoover in his suite in the Waldorf Towers, 31A. I always profited from my meetings with the man we affectionately called The Chief. Hoover, as was his custom, asked me for my views and listened attentively as I replied to his questions about the administration’s budget and the prospects for maintaining the Korean truce.
He was a man who was at peace with himself. He had been a Taft supporter, but now his only interest was in ensuring the success of the Eisenhower administration. The only uneasy moment came when he asked me to join him in smoking one of his fine Cuban cigars after breakfast. I had never smoked a cigar in the morning before, and twenty-five years passed before I tried it again.
After our talk I took the elevator up to MacArthur’s suite, 37A. General Whitney met me at the door and escorted me into the drawing room. Hoover’s suite was impressive in its simple, uncluttered dignity. MacArthur’s, while the same size, was spectacular. The memorabilia that covered the walls, gathered during his years of service in the Pacific, gave me the feeling that he rather than Hoover had served in the highest position America could offer. He also had a fine collection of Japanese art.
MacArthur walked toward me as I entered the room and took both of my hands in his. He said, “How good of you to come” and introduced me to Mrs. MacArthur, then and now one of the most gracious and charming women it has ever been my privilege to meet. She asked me about Mrs. Nixon and the children and then excused herself.
It was the first of what would become a series of conversations I had with him over the next eight years, all of them fascinating. We usually discussed the American political scene and current foreign policy issues—or, rather, he discussed and I listened. While Hoover had always asked for my thoughts on the various topics we discussed, MacArthur almost never did. A meeting with him was like a graduate seminar in whatever subject he was discussing, and the best policy for a visitor was either to listen quietly or to take notes. One colonel booked a fifteen-minute appointment with MacArthur during the Japanese Occupation, but was so stunned by the formidability of the general’s monologue that he forgot to bring up the reason for his visit. Later the colonel learned that MacArthur had judged him a “fascinating conversationalist.”
As it turned out, my meetings with MacArthur were among the very few high-level contacts between him and the Eisenhower administration. I did not report on them to the President, and in fact I cannot recall ever discussing MacArthur with Eisenhower. I always had the distinct impression that any mention of MacArthur would be unwelcome.
These two great American generals had held each other at arm’s length ever since the 1930s, when Eisenhower was MacArthur’s aide. During the 1950s I knew that MacArthur desperately wanted to come to Washington. He would describe to me, at great length and with extensive accompanying detail, how he would trim the military budget or how he would “straighten out the Pentagon in a month” if he were appointed Secretary of Defense or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the call never came.
While Eisenhower probably had good reason not to install the controversial five-star general in his administration—many in the Pentagon would have chafed at taking orders from him—there can be no doubt that MacArthur was hurt by the way he was treated. He would never speak disparagingly of Eisenhower in a direct way, but he did sometimes manage a backhanded jibe. Once, when talking with me about Eisenhower’s years as his aide, MacArthur said, “He could write a brilliant paper for a position or against a position. You just had to tell him what the position was.”
When Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack in 1955, setting off speculation about whether he would or should seek a second term, I received a message from MacArthur through Courtney Whitney. “General MacArthur is in the Vice President’s corner all the way,” Whitney told me. “He says that what should happen is that the other fellow should get out of there right away.” MacArthur’s message was highly inappropriate under the circumstances and would have been embarrassing to me, to say the least, if Eisenhower had learned of it. I recall thinking at the time that MacArthur was probably more eager to see Eisenhower out of the White House than to see me in it.
MacArthur resented Eisenhower’s popularity. He also believed that the attention paid to Eisenhower and Europe during and after World War II encouraged Washington’s neglect of the U.S. position in the Far East. Eisenhower, in turn, thought MacArthur, though a great general, was pompous and overly theatrical. While he usually kept such opinions to himself, he once wrote in his diary after receiving some strategic advice from MacArthur in 1942, “Wonder what he thinks we’ve been studying all these years. His lecture would have been good for plebes.”
While MacArthur did not play a public role in the 1960 presidential campaign, he did take pains to let me know that he was on my side. In June I sent him a wire congratulating him on receiving an award from the Japanese government for his work promoting Japanese-American friendship. I warmly praised his “heroic” contributions to history and expressed confidence that these would leave their mark “on the heritage of free people everywhere.” He wired in reply, “You have sent me a magnificent message. I have given it to the press to show my complete support of your candidacy for the presidency.” Perhaps only a man of MacArthur’s ego would have assumed that his releasing the text of my praise of him showed his support of me, but he seemed completely unabashed about making the assumption.
Often he made comments to me that were highly disapproving of Kennedy. Not surprisingly I appreciated them—before the election because they buoyed me up, and after the election because they helped salve the wounds. Once before the election he spoke disparagingly of Kennedy’s PT boat exploit, saying that Kennedy was “brave but very rash” and that “he could have been court-martialed for his poor judgment in the episode.” In June 1961, two months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he was brutally critical of Kennedy. He mentioned that he had recently had a conversation with Jim Farley, the legendary former Democratic National Committee chairman and FDR confidant. Farley had made the point that Kennedy had a very quick, agile mind. MacArthur’s response was that he did not think that Kennedy had judgment—the kind of broad judgment that involves weighing all the factors before reaching a decision. MacArthur went on to tell me that “a commander’s most important function is to separate the five percent of intelligence he receives which is important from the ninety-five percent which is not important.” He said he thought Kennedy had failed that test in making his decisions on the Bay of Pigs and that, as a result of the fiasco, Kennedy had unfortunately totally lost confidence in the military and the CIA. He did credit Kennedy with being “clever” politically and attributed to politics Kennedy’s having provided MacArthur with a plane for his sentimental journey to the Philippines. But he called Kennedy “just dumb when it comes to decision making.” Having said that, however, he added very emphatically—he always spoke emphatically—that “Kennedy will take Cuba. Now is not the time, but later he must do it and he will do it.”
Nearly always MacArthur’s comments got back to Asia at one point or another. He once told me that, looking back, he believed that if he had had half a million Chinese Nationalist troops under his command at the Yalu, he could have split China in two and, in one stroke, changed the world’s balance of power. But that opportunity was gone. He had grown pessimistic about Asia’s future because of Communist encroachments, but thought it would be a grave mistake for the U.S. to become involved in an Asian land war. His last advice to a U.S. President was his urging of Lyndon Johnson not to commit more forces to Vietnam. He felt that all we could usefully do was to continue to bluff and to support local governments against Soviet- or Chinese-supported insurrections.
His attitudes on political matters were also unequivocal. He said that living in New York and serving as board chairman of Remington Rand had given him the opportunity to study Wall Street businessmen more closely, and he had found that they had “no character” whatsoever. “They will never stand up for principle,” he said. “The only guideline they follow is to pick a winner and support him regardless of what he may stand for.” In the early 1960s he told me that high taxation was the major issue and that the country was turning more conservative. But before the 1964 Republican convention he emphatically expressed the view that Goldwater could not be nominated because he was too conservative.
He told me in 1961 that Kennedy had seemed “almost a Socialist” when Kennedy’s father had brought him to meet MacArthur at the Waldorf in 1951. He did credit Kennedy with a “remarkable memory,” recalling that when he had seen him after he became President, Kennedy’s memory of their first meeting ten years earlier had been remarkably accurate. What particularly fascinated me about this was what it showed about MacArthur’s memory.
MacArthur gave me one bit of personal advice that many believe I should have followed. When I asked him whether he thought I should run for governor of California in 1962, he grasped my hand and said, “Don’t do it. California is a great state but it is too parochial. You should be in Washington, not Sacramento. What you should do is run for Congress.” Herbert Hoover had given me the advice just two hours earlier and six floors below.
My conversations with MacArthur are always linked in my own mind with those I had with Hoover. Both were aging, both were wise, both lived in the Waldorf Towers, and I usually visited both on the same day. Often the comments of the two offered curious parallels and contrasts.
My last conversation with Hoover was on August 10, 1963, when I dropped in to see him on his eighty-ninth birthday. His nurse told me that he had been very sick and it was a miracle for him to have recovered, but that his mind had never wavered. She said that he often got up in the middle of the night to write on his yellow pad. For years Hoover had answered each of his hundreds of birthday cards with a personal letter. His nurse said that he still read each card but was unable to answer them personally.
As she wheeled him into the room in his wheelchair, I was saddened to see how painfully thin he was. But his handshake was firm, his voice was surprisingly strong, and his comments on issues were succinct and to the point. Despite his hard-line anticommunism, he supported the test-ban treaty, which was signed that month by the U.S. and the Soviets. His view was that “at least it gives some present relief from tension.” As he put it, “ ‘Khrush’ needs friends because of the Chinese.” He disagreed with Adenauer’s view that we should play the Chinese against the Russians. He pointed out that they were in an early stage of communism and therefore especially aggressive. Also, he told me the Chinese were a highly emotional people who could be “bloodthirsty” both against foreigners and against their own people.
Hoover’s attitude was colored by his experiences while working as a mining engineer in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. He and his wife had a hand in defending a settlement of foreign families at Tientsin against the xenophobic Boxer rebels. Both the Boxers and the government troops committed horrible atrocities against one another; Hoover reported seeing thousands of bodies floating in the river that ran by his settlement. To him the carnage of the Chinese revolution was just another chapter of the same story. He predicted that the Chinese people had not been changed by twenty-five years of Maoism because “a national heritage is slow to change,” and said that the U.S. should have as little to do with them as possible.
He was more generous to Kennedy than MacArthur had been, commenting that “he was much better than I had anticipated.”
Hoover also differed with MacArthur about Goldwater. His view was that it might be best to give the extreme right a chance to try itself and to “get it out of our system.”
Although MacArthur and Hoover had very similar outlooks on a wide range of issues, I cannot recall an occasion when either one mentioned the other. At first I assumed that they rarely saw each other. But I learned later from Mrs. MacArthur that President Hoover invited the MacArthurs to his suite for private dinners five or six times a year, and that these events were the setting for some fascinating conversations between two of the most eminent leaders of our time.
• • •
MacArthur’s disregard for military policy was not confined to the officers’ dress code. Soldiers are supposed to obey their superiors to the letter, which MacArthur did not always do, even if the superiors in question were Presidents of the United States.
Often enough MacArthur was right and his superiors were wrong. In World War II he leapfrogged his forces across the South Pacific so expertly that he suffered fewer casualties from 1942 to 1945 than the Americans suffered in the Battle of the Bulge alone. His successes in this encouraged him to second-guess orders from Washington.
Once the Pentagon told him a plan to recapture the Philippine island of Mindoro was too risky. MacArthur went ahead anyway and succeeded. After taking the big island of Luzon, he began to take the other islands in the archipelago without authorization—losing only 820 men in the process. And in Japan his forays into social and economic reform went way beyond the letter of his authority as Supreme Commander, but his achievements were so brilliant that President Truman, who later fired him for insubordination, sent him nothing but praise.
In addition to his father’s example, two factors in particular contributed to MacArthur’s disregard of higher authority. First, from the beginning of his career he suspected other officers of trying to torpedo him. During World War I he mistrusted the men around General Pershing at the Allies’ Chaumont headquarters in France. Later his major antagonists were officers like George Marshall, who had himself been at Chaumont with Pershing.
In a conversation with me Herbert Hoover, Jr., an admirer of MacArthur, called these officers the “Pentagon Junta.” They were men whose overseas experience had been in Europe and whose outlook remained primarily European. MacArthur thought many of them, particularly Marshall, were intent upon thwarting his every move in the Pacific for both political and personal reasons. He also believed that Truman and his military advisers had not done enough to resist the Communist victory in China and that the administration’s unclear Asian policy had left South Korea open to Communist invasion.
MacArthur also had contempt for desk men. He was a field commander at heart, and he felt he understood better than men in offices what needed to be done on the battlefield. Presidents of the United States, of course, are the ultimate desk men, and MacArthur was no more intimidated by them than he was by his superiors in World War I or the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II.
None of MacArthur’s relationships with the Presidents he served from the 1930s on was ideal, though the irritants were different in each case.
With Hoover there was the famous “Bonus March” during the Depression, when 25,000 veterans and their families came to Washington demanding cash bonuses. Army Chief of Staff MacArthur questioned the marchers’ motives and personally went into the field against them. Hoover sent orders to MacArthur not to send his troops into the marchers’ makeshift camp, but MacArthur ignored Hoover’s orders and routed the protesters.
With Franklin Roosevelt, despite a veneer of cordiality, there were disagreements with MacArthur over the Army and Air Force budget in the 1930s and the general’s resentment over FDR’s decision not to reinforce the soldiers on Bataan. When MacArthur learned of Roosevelt’s death in 1945, he said to a member of his staff, “So Roosevelt is dead: a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well.”
But no two American leaders had greater distaste for each other than MacArthur and Truman. As early as June 1945, Truman noted in a memorandum to himself that a big question for the U.S. after the war would be “what to do with Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur.” He added, “It is a very great pity we have to have stuffed shirts like that in key positions. I don’t see why in hell Roosevelt didn’t order [Bataan commander Jonathan] Wainwright home and let MacArthur be a martyr [on Corregidor].” MacArthur, in turn, thought Truman was ignorant about Asia, “subject to paroxysms of ungovernable rage” (such as when he threatened physical assault on a critic who panned his daughter’s singing), and inclined to lose his nerve at crucial moments. The tension between the two came to a head over Korea.
• • •
The most spectacular event of MacArthur’s command in Korea, and possibly of his career, was his amphibious landing at Inchon, a classic example of his “Hit ’em where they ain’t” battle strategy.
In Korea in the fall of 1950, U.N. troops were holed up at Pusan, in the southeast corner of the peninsula. Rather than risk the high casualties that might result from an assault against the North Korean Communists massed along the Pusan front, MacArthur decided to stage a surprise landing at Inchon, the port of Seoul, on the west coast of Korea. After the landing he planned to seize the South Korean capital from the Communists and seal off the enemy troops in the south in much the same way he had isolated the Japanese on islands he passed over in the Pacific.
Inchon was a treacherous place for a landing, and at first MacArthur’s superiors were hesitant. In August Truman sent one of his advisers, Averell Harriman, to Tokyo to meet with the general and survey the situation in Korea. Harriman’s military aide was Vernon Walters, later a close friend of mine whom I appointed deputy director of the CIA.
Over breakfast one morning in the dining room of the American embassy in Tokyo, where MacArthur lived with his family during the Occupation, the general gave Harriman a list of the reinforcements he would need at Inchon.
“I cannot believe that a great nation such as the United States cannot give me these few paltry reinforcements for which I ask,” MacArthur said as Walters, fascinated, listened. “Tell the President that if he gives them to me, I will, on the rising tide of the fifteenth of September, land at Inchon, and between the hammer of this landing and the anvil of the Eighth Army, I will crush and destroy the armies of North Korea.” Walters told me later, “The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.”
Harriman was also impressed. MacArthur got his reinforcements—and approval of his plan by the Joint Chiefs. On September 15, 1950, with their seventy-year-old commander watching from aboard the command ship Mount McKinley, troops spearheaded by the First Division of the U.S. Marines landed at Inchon and defeated a North Korean force of over 30,000, losing only 536 men in doing it. By the end of the month MacArthur had driven the Communists back over the 38th Parallel and returned Seoul to a grateful Syngman Rhee.
After Inchon the U.N. Security Council voted that the objective of MacArthur’s forces was to unify Korea, an action that echoed a policy the Truman administration had already decided upon unilaterally. But in late November, as MacArthur’s forces pressed toward the Yalu River, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops under Lin Biao—their movements had been misjudged by both the CIA’s and MacArthur’s intelligence teams—surged down from the hills, forcing the general to execute a humiliating but typically expert and orderly retreat.
The following spring, after learning that Truman had decided to seek a truce, MacArthur issued a military appraisal of the Korean situation that included pointed references to the inferiority of the Chinese forces and hinted that the Communists ought to come to terms. MacArthur argued later that any commander in the field had the right to issue such a message to the enemy. What was probably unwise was the contentious tone of his appraisal, which drew violent criticism in Peking and Moscow and forced Truman to delay his own diplomatic initiative.
To make matters worse, a few days before his call for the Chinese to negotiate became public, MacArthur had written a letter to House Republican leader Joe Martin, who had asked the general’s opinion about whether troops under Chiang Kai-shek should be used in the war. MacArthur wrote that they should be used and added that diplomats were trying to fight the war against communism with words. Communist victories in Asia would lead to the fall of Europe, he said; “win [the war] and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom.” He added, “There is no substitute for victory.”
When Martin read this letter on the floor of the House, it created a firestorm that swept over the Capitol and down to the White House. Even the usually staid Senate, where I was then serving, was in an uproar. Although Martin had made the letter public without MacArthur’s permission or knowledge, Truman announced his decision to fire the general. MacArthur suffered the additional humiliation of learning first from a news program that he had been removed from all his commands. Former President Hoover managed to reach him directly on the telephone and urged him to come home immediately and tell his side of the story to the American people—sixty-nine percent of whom, according to a Gallup poll, supported MacArthur against Truman.
After MacArthur was fired, I introduced a resolution in the U.S. Senate calling for his reinstatement. “Let me say that I am not among those who believe that General MacArthur is infallible,” I said in what was my first major speech in the Senate. “I am not among those who think that he has not made decisions which are subject to criticism. But I do say that in this particular instance he offers an alternative policy which the American people can and will support. He offers a change from the policies which have led us almost to the brink of disaster in Asia—and that means in the world.”
In retrospect I believe this summary of the matter stands the test of time in that it puts the blame on both parties. MacArthur had defied the principle of civilian control of the military and had in effect interfered with the President’s conduct of foreign policy. But the Truman administration’s policy had been timid and equivocal. For years it had been a source of enormous frustration to MacArthur, one of the few U.S. leaders at that time who knew enough about Asia to see that ominous forces were at work there and that we courted disaster by failing to counter them resolutely.
The Martin letter and the military appraisal were not the first examples of MacArthur’s comments on Washington policy decisions. Turman said later he had considered removing MacArthur from the Korea command the previous August, over a letter about the defense of Formosa that the general had sent to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but had not done so because he did not want to “hurt General MacArthur personally.”
Throughout the war MacArthur’s stock with the Truman administration seems to have risen and fallen according to the administration’s political requirements. After the VFW letter he was nearly fired. After the triumph at Inchon, Truman flew to Wake Island for a conference whose only apparent purpose was to generate news photographs of the beleaguered President and the popular general standing together. After the second U.N. capture of Seoul, MacArthur’s convictions about total victory became an obstacle to a negotiated settlement. As Charles de Gaulle said in a speech four days after the firing, MacArthur was a soldier “whose boldness was feared after full advantage had been taken of it.”
In the end the President who claimed to have cared so much about MacArthur’s personal feelings did not even get a personal message through to him. MacArthur wrote, “No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies.”
• • •
The personal clash between MacArthur and Truman was the most dramatic highlight of the dispute over Korea. But the dispute can also be explained as a struggle between MacArthur, with his predominately Asian outlook, and a U.S. foreign policy that was excessively weighted in favor of Europe.
Truman’s policies in Europe—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Berlin airlift, for example—were strong and forthright. His Asian policies, however, were curiously mixed. The idea that the Communist victory in China or the Korean stalemate presaged the fall of other Asian or Southeast Asian nations to communism seemed outlandish to many of the administration’s policymakers. It seems less outlandish now.
This myopia regarding the Far East was shared by most Americans, perhaps because their roots are in Europe. MacArthur, however, spent much of his life in Asia, and many speculated that he was more comfortable with Asians than with fellow westerners. When he served in the Philippines in the 1920s and 1930s, he ignored the traditional “color bar” by which Filipinos and westerners had always been segregated. At his dinner parties in Manila in the 1930s there were often few white faces to be seen.
Now that China has once again been brought onto the world stage—and now that the threat the Japanese economic miracle poses to American economic dominance is becoming more and more obvious—Americans are beginning to realize that the history of the world for the next several generations may well be dictated by the men and women of the Orient. This lesson has taken a long time to sink in.
• • •
In 1953, my first year as Vice President, I undertook a two-month tour of nineteen Asian and Pacific countries at the request of President Eisenhower, who felt the previous administration had neglected Asia and wanted to get a firsthand report on conditions there before making major decisions that might affect the area. Along the way Mrs. Nixon and I met hundreds of leaders and thousands of people of all backgrounds. We saw the enormous potential of the region, but at the same time saw clear evidence of the ominous thrust of direct and indirect Communist aggression emanating from both Peking and Moscow. We were concerned that some countries, especially those in French Indochina, were not getting the quality of leadership they needed to meet this threat. Most of all, our visits and discussions convinced me that Asia could well become the most important part of the world, as far as U.S. policy was concerned, for the rest of the century. This was the thrust of my report to President Eisenhower and to the nation at the conclusion of my trip.
But one trip by a Vice President could not begin to change the attitudes of an entire nation. The U.S. continued to face west. In a 1967 article I wrote, “Many argue that an Atlantic axis is natural and necessary, but maintain, in effect, that Kipling was right, and that the Asian peoples are so ‘different’ that Asia itself is only peripherally an American concern.”
A half-century before, MacArthur had made his own survey of the Far East, and he, too, fell under its spell. After leaving West Point in 1903, he joined his father on an inspection tour of Japanese positions in Asia and of European colonies throughout the Far East. The whole tour took nine months, and it was one of the most important events in MacArthur’s life.
“Here lived almost half the population of the world, and probably more than half of the raw products to sustain future generations,” he wrote later. “It was crystal clear to me that the future and, indeed, the very existence of America, were irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts.” Following his three years as the reform-minded superintendent of West Point (where he ordered maps of Asia displayed so cadets could study them), MacArthur’s personal history was caught up with the history of the American presence in the Pacific for more than two decades.
MacArthur’s influence over America’s position in the Orient began in 1930 when, as Army chief of staff, he had responsibility for keeping the Army and Air Force ready to fight. Winning adequate military budgets during peacetime is a frustrating and difficult job, and in the Depression the going was even tougher.
In 1934 MacArthur was able to dissuade Franklin Roosevelt from making further drastic cuts in the defense budget in an explosive confrontation in the White House. “In my emotional exhaustion,” MacArthur wrote later, “I spoke recklessly and said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt.” When he left the President’s office, the Secretary of War told him he had “saved the Army”; MacArthur, aghast at his own audacity, vomited on the White House steps.
In 1935 MacArthur returned to the Philippines, then a U.S. commonwealth, to take charge of its armed forces. Like his father, he believed the islands were crucial to any U.S. defense scheme in the Pacific, but his military spending requests went largely unmet. It was the first of many brushes MacArthur would have—before, during, and after World War II—with what he called “North Atlantic isolationism”: Washington’s neglect of U.S. interests in the Far East and its obsession with developments in Western Europe.
Though Washington finally sent MacArthur more money in 1941, the Philippines fell to the Japanese the following year. From the island fortress of Corregidor, after MacArthur had directed a brilliant retreat onto the Bataan peninsula, he promised his struggling troops that Roosevelt was sending help, but the help went instead to the European theater—embittering him toward Roosevelt and feeding his suspicions about the “Pentagon Junta.”
When he was Supreme Commander in Japan, he lamented to visitors that Americans had not yet begun to recognize the importance of Japan to Asia and of Asia to the world—or to appreciate Asia’s vast potential. After Acheson’s statement in January 1950 that Formosa and South Korea were outside the U.S. defense perimeter, MacArthur concluded that the Secretary of State was “badly advised about the Far East.” He invited Acheson to Tokyo, but Acheson said his duties prevented him from leaving Washington—though he found time to go to Europe eleven times while in office. In 1950 the Communists invaded South Korea, and MacArthur was called to arms for the last time.
MacArthur’s dispute with Washington over Korea must be viewed in this context. MacArthur believed the Chinese intervention in the Korean War demonstrated “the same lust for the expansion of power which has animated every would-be conqueror since the beginning of time.” A compromise with the Chinese would encourage further Communist adventures in Asia and even Europe. With adequate support from Washington, MacArthur believed he could hand the Communists a defeat that would discourage them from such adventures. At that time the rift between the Chinese and the Soviets was still years away, and many of us in Congress agreed with MacArthur that defeating the Chinese Communist “volunteers” in Korea was essential to the containment of aggressive forces that threatened all of free Asia.
MacArthur challenged Truman not because he was eager to extend the war into China for the sake of doing so. In fact he never proposed using American ground troops to counter the Chinese intervention and contended until the end of his life that sending U.S. soldiers to fight on the Asian mainland would be folly. He challenged Truman because of his longtime suspicion that policymakers in Washington did not understand Asia and the threat that Communist expansion posed to it. He also believed it was dangerous to let the idea get around that an aggressor could safely have a small war with the U.S.
He understood from experience what Whittaker Chambers grasped intuitively. “For the Communists,” Chambers told me in urging support for Truman’s decision to commit American forces in Korea, “the war is not about Korea but about Japan. If Korea is taken over by Communists when Japan is in a very unstable condition and trying to recover from the devastation of war, the Communist movement in Japan will be given enormous impetus.”
MacArthur thought Truman already had two strikes against him in Asia. He had failed to hold China, and his ambiguous Korea policy may have encouraged the Communists to attack the south. Now, with Chinese troops in the war, MacArthur thought Truman and Acheson had once again lost their nerve. It was his fear that the administration’s timorousness could eventually imperil the entire Far East, including Japan, that prompted the actions for which he was fired.
• • •
On the day of MacArthur’s dismissal, William Sebald, the head of the Occupation’s diplomatic section and one of America’s ablest foreign service officers, received orders from Washington to meet with Prime Minister Yoshida and assure him that U.S. policy toward Japan was unchanged. By the time Sebald was ushered into Yoshida’s upstairs study, the Premier—who had been dressed in western clothing during his garden party that afternoon—had changed into a kimono. He was “visibly shaken,” his guest wrote later.
Sebald, upset by the news himself, feared that Yoshida would resign, both as a characteristically Japanese gesture of responsibility and because the Premier was so close to MacArthur. He told Yoshida that the Japanese people would need strong leadership in the days and weeks ahead to help them recover from the shock of MacArthur’s departure. At the end of the interview Yoshida promised Sebald that there would be no resignation.
Though Yoshida remained in office for over three more years, one of postwar history’s greatest partnerships had ended. Except for a brief period when Yoshida was out of office, he and MacArthur had been working together since 1946 to raise a new Japan from the ruins of the old.
MacArthur’s part in this effort is relatively common knowledge. Yoshida, however, is one of the unsung heroes of the postwar world. Vigorous, compassionate, articulate, politically skilled, selfless, and deeply loyal to his country, he was a giant among postwar leaders of nations. He was also one of the few whose influence lasted beyond his retirement and death. It continues even today, for Japan is still governed in 1982 according to basic principles of moderation and restraint Yoshida established over three decades ago.
Yet in a world in which every schoolchild knows the names Churchill and de Gaulle, Yoshida, who was in many ways the equal of these men, is unknown to almost all except the Japanese, academics, and those who had the privilege, as I did, of knowing him personally.
Yoshida was as captivated by the West as MacArthur was by the Orient. Along with many other educated Japanese of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was eager to find ways for Japan to advance its own interests through its foreign relations. In a sense his life was a reflection of a dichotomous nation that for centuries encouraged foreign influences without allowing them to disrupt what was fundamentally Japanese about Japan.
Since the seventh century China had exerted tremendous influence on Japan. It had been the model for Japanese governmental and military organization, land reform, religious and ethical systems, art, and literature. From the nineteenth century on, Japan has been bound up with the United States in much the same way it had been bound up with China before. This new relationship has encompassed the booming trade of the 1890s, the agonies of Pearl Harbor and Bataan, the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the intricate commercial and security arrangements of the postwar era.
“Japan’s decisive century,” to use Yoshida’s phrase, began after the sight of the bristling cannons on the decks of Commodore Perry’s black ships in 1854 helped convince the Japanese that they could no longer resist pressure to join the modern world. Soon a group of reformers abolished the shogunate, which had ruled Japan in the name of a powerless Emperor for 270 years. The reformers restored the Emperor Meiji, whose court had been restricted to the political backwater of Kyoto, to supremacy within the ancient palace walls in Tokyo.
The Emperor Meiji and his counselors believed modernization was the only way Japan could avoid being colonized by western powers as parts of China and Indochina had been. They also believed modern government would help bring economic prosperity. Thus, during the late nineteenth century, the Japanese began to take a long, sophisticated look at the U.S. and the West and soon borrowed principles of education, law, agriculture, and government.
The Meiji reformers created a democracy but of a decidedly limited variety, closer to Bismarck’s Germany than to the U.S. or Britain. The grafting of West onto East was incomplete. Western democracy was introduced, but eastern absolutism, in the form of the Japanese Emperor, was invoked to make it work. The 1930s brought economic crises and increased international hostility toward Japan. A relatively small group of militarists was able to exploit the resulting surge of nationalism and seize the government.
When the militarists—Yoshida called them the “uniformed politicians”—took control, they commanded obedience because they, like the shoguns a century before them, had made a captive of the throne and spoke with its authority.
• • •
Yoshida was born in 1878 in the midst of the upheavals of the Meiji Restoration. Though he was born near Tokyo, his family was from Tosa, a province of Japan’s smallest island. The men of Tosa were lumberjacks and sailors—brusque, rugged individualists in a society that valued consensus and politesse. The Tosans have been called “the Basques of Japan”; Yoshida, as rugged and brusque a son as Tosa ever produced, was later called “One-Man Yoshida” for his high-handed style of government.
Yoshida was the fifth son of a Tosan who was closely identified with Meiji-era politics. In Japan before primogeniture was abolished during the Occupation, sons after the first were often adopted by other families, and Yoshida’s adoptive father was a family friend named Kenzo Yoshida, who died when Shigeru was eleven, leaving behind a substantial fortune.
After he was graduated from college in 1906, Yoshida began a career as a diplomat. Perhaps because of his provincial background, he was at first relegated to the China service, which was then a diplomatic slow track. He spent much of his time spending his inheritance on high living. But Yoshida married shrewdly. His wife, Yukiko, was the daughter of Count Makino, a trusted adviser of the Emperor. When Makino served as one of the Japanese delegates to the 1919 peace conference, he took the forty-year-old Yoshida along with him, which boosted the young diplomat’s stature enormously.
The Japanese went to Versailles full of optimism about Wilson’s Open Door foreign policy. Acting in the Wilsonian spirit, Makino proposed a clause in the treaty affirming the basic equality of the races. But the British, deeply suspicious of the Japanese and their growing power on the sea, vetoed the proposal—with the support of the United States. Yoshida found that the idealism of the Meiji Restoration and the Open Door was no match for the hard realities of postwar international relations. He went home bitterly disappointed.
I met with Yoshida for the last time in 1964, when he invited me to his estate at Oiso for dinner. Then eighty-six, the retired Premier reflected at length about his experience at Versailles. He said that he had often wondered whether the course of history would have been different if the great western powers had been more receptive to the Japanese point of view after World War I. Personally I always found it remarkable that Yoshida never let the experience sour him permanently on Britain and the United States. It was one sign that Yoshida had great character and strong convictions even as a young man.
Nevertheless the peace conference had its effect on him. As international hostility toward Japan increased—the U.S. Exclusion Act of 1924, which banned all Japanese immigration, was an example—he and many other Japanese grew more concerned about ensuring sufficient Asian markets for Japan’s products and sufficient Asian raw materials for its factories. From 1925 to 1928, as Japanese counsel at Mukden, Yoshida played a significant role in preparing the ground for his country’s Manchurian conquests in the 1930s.
However, Yoshida was never one to pay attention to political fashions, and he began to drift away from militarism at the same time Japan was succumbing to it. On a tour of Japanese foreign embassies in 1932 and 1933, he met a man who had also been at Versailles: Colonel Edward House, who had been Wilson’s close aide and adviser during the war. House gave Yoshida the same advice he said he had given the Germans before World War I: If Japan chose violent rather than peaceful means of solving its foreign disputes, it would sacrifice everything it had built up so painstakingly since the time of Meiji.
Having been steeped in the prowestern tradition of Meiji Japan, Yoshida by now had become a vigorous proponent of internationalism in spite of Japan’s increasing nationalism. He returned to Japan and began conveying House’s message to everyone who would listen, a course of action that probably contributed to the “uniformed politicians” growing distaste for him.
After an attempted coup d’etat in 1936 by a group of renegade officers in Tokyo—from which Count Makino barely escaped with his life—the militarists controlled Japan. Yoshida was soon nominated to be Foreign Minister by the new Prime Minister, who hoped to hold the line against the militarists, but the army vetoed him. Yoshida was named Ambassador to Britain instead.
The appointment was lucky for two reasons. First, it took Yoshida out of Japan, where opponents of the army were in danger of harassment by the “thought police,” imprisonment, and even assassination. Also, three years of constant exposure to British politics cemented his moderate, prowestern political philosophy in place. In many ways England was what Japan could have become if the dreams of the Meiji reformers had been allowed to flower: a powerful and influential island nation with a constitutional monarchy, a parliament, and a strong, competent civil service.
Yoshida became convinced that Japan could protect its economic interests in Asia without submitting to angry nationalism. He advocated aggressive diplomacy instead of military aggression. In spite of his antimilitarist views, Yoshida managed initially to stay out of jail when he returned to Japan in 1939. Yoshida was in touch with influential members of the Japanese government, and he struggled in vain to find a way to avert war with Britain and the U.S. Much later he recalled telling Tojo’s Foreign Minister that if he could not “prevent a Japanese declaration of war on the United States, he should resign, an act which would hold up Cabinet deliberations and give even the army something to think about; and that if as a result of such a gesture he should be assassinated, such a death would be a happy one.” After Pearl Harbor he sent an apologetic note to U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew and made sure Grew had enough food while he was being held at the American embassy, two small gestures that took great courage.
During the war Yoshida was a member of the informal network of antimilitarist politicians known as the “peace faction.” Like Konrad Adenauer in Nazi Germany, he avoided the sort of aggressive resistance that might have landed him in jail or worse, but at several points during the war he discussed with other antimilitarists the possibility of putting out peace feelers. Finally, in April 1945, he was arrested by the military police. They questioned him about his note to Grew and about his role in a written peace appeal to the Emperor, a copy of which had been discovered by a government spy on his household staff. He was then thrown in jail.
Yoshida endured his forty days in jail with characteristic good humor. With Tojo now out of office, he was confident that no real harm would come to him. His natural father had been a political prisoner at the time when his son was born, and Yoshida decided “a taste of prison life might not be so bad for me either for a change.” He became popular with the other prisoners and the guards by distributing the extra food he received from home. He was transferred to a suburban jailhouse when the military prison suffered a direct hit during the bombing of Tokyo (“I was thinking how unpleasant it would be to be roasted alive,” he wrote later) and was released shortly afterward. He went home to his estate at Oiso, forty miles south of Tokyo, to recuperate, assuming—mistakenly, as it turned out—that he would spend the rest of his life there as a little-known retired diplomat.
• • •
One day early in the Occupation of Japan, Yoshida was driving on a deserted highway between Oiso and Tokyo. “Two American GIs suddenly appeared and signaled my driver to halt,” he wrote later. “I imagined them to be on some kind of marauding expedition, but they turned out to be soldiers returning to Tokyo who had lost their way.” Yoshida offered them a lift, and “we had not proceeded far before they were pressing chocolates, then chewing gum, and finally cigarettes upon me.”
This was one of Yoshida’s favorite stories. “I recall thinking at the time,” he wrote, “that it was this natural way of acting on their part, and the inherent good nature of the average American, which enabled the Occupation of Japan to be completed without a shot being fired.” A group of liberal Japanese intellectuals I met in 1953 seemed to agree. They told me that to the extent there was anti-American sentiment in Japan, it was not caused by the behavior of our troops.
The Americans’ friendliness was certainly one reason the Occupation was a success. Another was the stoic acceptance of defeat by the Japanese and their openness to the change that came with defeat. But it was Douglas MacArthur’s immediate recognition of these qualities in the Japanese that got the Occupation off to such a successful and dramatic start.
On August 30, 1945, MacArthur flew to Yokohama, where he was to establish a temporary headquarters. Nearby were some kamikaze pilots who had refused to surrender and 250,000 armed Japanese soldiers. The fighting had ended only two weeks before, and the two sides still regarded one another with a high degree of understandable suspicion.
Many Japanese expected the victorious Americans to overrun the country, plundering and raping as they went. Many Americans, in turn, worried that the Emperor would take the remnants of his army, flee into the mountains, and wage a lengthy guerrilla war. No one believed that the same army that had conducted the Philippine Death March and had fought to the last man on Iwo Jima and other Pacific islands would surrender quickly.
No one except MacArthur. In spite of his aides’ warnings, MacArthur insisted on landing at Yokohama alone and totally unarmed. He even forbade his aides to carry sidearms. He was convinced that a show of absolute fearlessness would impress any recalcitrant Japanese more than a show of strength. Characteristically it was a gamble; characteristically MacArthur was right. He landed safely. Churchill called it the most courageous single act of World War II.
It was in ways such as this that MacArthur, who had already become virtually a demigod to the people of the Philippines, established a similar relationship with the Japanese—a relationship based on absolute mutual trust. He cemented this relationship for all time with one inspired decision. Many—the British, the Russians, even some in Washington—demanded that Hirohito be tried as a war criminal. The Emperor himself paid an unprecedented call on MacArthur at the American embassy and said that the ultimate responsibility for Japan’s warmaking was his and his alone.
But the general saw that reverence for the Emperor, even in surrender, was what held Japan together. Hirohito’s radio broadcast in August 1945, telling his people to “bear the unbearable” and surrender, was one reason MacArthur was able to land safely at Yokohama. MacArthur also took an immediate liking to the bookish, unassuming yet quietly dignified monarch. The Supreme Commander decided to keep the Emperor in place and throughout the Occupation treated him with respect. Under the MacArthur constitution, promulgated in 1947, Hirohito became a constitutional monarch whose ceremonial role was carefully circumscribed. This decision went against much of the advice MacArthur was receiving at the time. The insight behind it could only have come from a profound understanding of the history and culture of the people he now governed.
In the end MacArthur did not so much abolish absolute political authority as transfer it from the Emperor to himself. He located his own permanent headquarters across from the moat that surrounded the Imperial Palace. Throughout the five years of his rule he remained as aloof and mysterious as Hirohito had before. Each day he was seen only in his office, at home at the American embassy, or en route between the two. Between 1945 and 1951 he left the Tokyo area only twice, both times for destinations outside Japan.
Hirohito, meanwhile, toured factories and farms and appeared at baseball games, mingling with his people as never before. But although power flowed from him to MacArthur and eventually, in 1952, to the people, there was still the sense that the general, like the shoguns and the Meiji reformers before him, was simply ruling at the behest of the Emperor. One Japanese said about MacArthur, “The Emperor couldn’t have picked a better man.”
Although Yoshida was an advocate of parliamentary democracy, he was also fiercely loyal to the Emperor. He thought MacArthur’s treatment of Hirohito was, more than any other factor, responsible for the success of the Occupation. It was also in large part responsible for Yoshida’s remarkable affection for MacArthur.
When Yoshida became Japan’s third postwar premier in 1946 at age sixty-seven, he did so both unexpectedly and reluctantly. As a result of MacArthur’s purge of men who were linked with the militarists, the Liberal (actually conservative) party had found itself without a candidate for Prime Minister. Yoshida had already left Oiso to serve as Foreign Minister, and the leaders of the Liberal party turned to him for the top job only to find him reluctant to accept. He finally said yes, but only after warning the party that he would avoid intraparty squabbles and fund raising. He was expected to be only a caretaker Premier. As it turned out, he served over seven years and seated five cabinets.
He was a decisive and, at times, painfully blunt leader. For instance he had a wary but genuine respect for the contributions scholarship can make to society, but he was not particularly fond of scholars themselves unless they agreed with him. He publicly called one who did not a “prostitute of learning.” A reference in his 1947 New Year’s message to “renegades” in the labor movement helped spark plans for a nationwide strike that MacArthur had to call off personally and that brought down Yoshida’s first government. In 1953, when he called a Socialist Dietman a bakayaro (damned fool) in his exasperation over his opponents’ attempts to prevent him from modifying some of the more unworkable Occupation reforms, his opponents were able to engineer a no-confidence vote in his government. However, he still won the next election and was able to continue his efforts.
The Churchill of Japan governed according to one of the most realistic edicts of the Churchill of England, who once wrote, “People who are not prepared to do unpopular things and to defy clamor are not fit to be Ministers in times of stress.” In the confusion of postwar Japan, when public opinion was fluid and malleable, Yoshida steadfastly went his own way, governing according to his own instincts. As his father-in-law, Count Makino, said admiringly, “Shigeru may not have the most appealing personality, but he has backbone, and that’s what counts.”
He did not distrust the Japanese people in the same way Konrad Adenauer distrusted the Germans. He blamed only the small militarist clique for the calamity of World War II. A relative of the Premier told me, in fact, that Yoshida trusted his countrymen absolutely and was certain they would be able to rebuild their country as long as their leadership was sufficiently forthright.
Often he donned a beret and inverness and wandered through the streets of Tokyo, listening to what people had to say about him. He was seldom recognized and more than once heard himself described as the “one-man” Premier. He did not seem to take it as an insult. Most of the criticism of his tactics came from the minority parties, which bore the brunt of them, and from the anti-Yoshida press. The people themselves found him inspiring and even entertaining. Other politicians rained abuse on him for calling a Diet opponent a bakayaro, but an American reporter wrote that one could call a taxi driver a bakayaro and “earn a grin instead of a scowl” once Yoshida had sanctified the term.
Yoshida could be as hard on his subordinates as he was on his political opponents. Once he held a dinner in honor of William Sebald, and he also invited a Japanese foreign service officer who was about to take up a diplomatic post in the U.S. The foreign service officer and his wife left the party early so they could catch the last train for their home in the suburbs. A few days later Sebald learned that Yoshida had canceled the man’s U.S. assignment because he had left the party before the guest of honor—an offense that Yoshida considered unconscionable both for a Japanese gentleman and a would-be representative of Japan abroad.
Despite his occasional high-handedness, Yoshida had a reputation for listening carefully to experts and advisers before making a decision. He was not the sort whose pride or stubbornness prevented him from changing his mind in the face of new evidence or effective arguments. He respected those who had more experience in a field than he did; for instance Yoshida knew he was comparatively weak in the area of economic policy. For his economic advice he was more likely, as was Eisenhower, to turn to businessmen than bureaucrats, and in fact was one of the few Japanese Premiers to appoint businessmen to his cabinets. Most important, like de Gaulle and Adenauer, he chose able Finance Ministers, such as Hayato Ikeda, a Yoshida protégé who later became Prime Minister himself.
While he acknowledged the deficiency of his economics background, Yoshida had a certain intuitive grasp of basic economic questions. For instance he was correct in believing that Japan would need to modernize its industrial base to succeed in the postwar international marketplace. “Fortunately, Japan was reduced to ashes by air raids,” he once said mischievously. “If Japan introduces new machinery and equipment now, it should be able to become a splendid country with productivity far higher than the countries that have won the war. It costs much to demolish machinery, but the demolition was done for us by the enemy.” While Yoshida was being facetious, he was, as it turned out, absolutely right.
In my meetings with Yoshida, from our first talks in Tokyo in 1953 through the dinner he gave for me at Oiso in 1964, I found his private persona differed markedly from his blustery public one. His wit in private was disarmingly subtle. For westerners, unaccustomed to dry Japanese humor, it was at times hard to detect. At a dinner given in our honor in 1953, Yoshida turned to Mrs. Nixon, who was sitting next to him, and remarked that a U.S. destroyer group was docked in Tokyo Bay. “Tell me,” Yoshida said, “are they there to protect you from us?”
With his stern expression and severe crew cut, the Premier at first looked deadly serious. It was only when his eyes twinkled and a faint smile came to his face that we knew he was joking.
Yoshida often put humor to work in his diplomacy. After the war many Asian nations clamored for war reparations. Correctly anticipating these might be on Indonesian President Sukarno’s mind during a state visit to Japan, the Premier took the offensive.
“I have been looking forward to your arrival,” Yoshida said pleasantly. “Your country always sends us typhoons which have caused serious damage to Japan. I have been waiting for your arrival in order to ask for compensation for the damage caused our country by your typhoons.” Yoshida laughed heartily; Sukarno, completely flabbergasted for one of the few times in his life, decided not to raise the subject of war reparations.
Yoshida governed and lived zestfully, with the aplomb that comes only with age and a certain inbred sense of superiority. By six in the morning he was walking in the garden of the Prime Minister’s residence, chopping weeds from around his beloved bonsai trees with a sickle. Recreation was a good conversation—he was a gifted raconteur and a good listener—or a horseback ride. As a youth he had been one of the few children in his neighborhood to ride a horse to school. When he was Prime Minister, he used the Imperial equestrian ground.
He liked food of all kinds, except Chinese, and savored sake and cigars, which he dispatched at a rate of three a day. He enjoyed reading biographies of Japan’s most illustrious diplomats. He also read French and English and was familiar with the literatures of both languages. When he suffered from insomnia, he read himself to sleep instead of taking sleeping pills.
As any proper Meiji Japanese might, Yoshida read The New York Times and The Times of London each day, marking articles and sections he thought his aides should read and sending them around to the various departments. He had less time for the Japanese mass media, which he considered unruly and overly opinionated. He did sometimes meet with individual reporters whose work he admired, but he also often expressed his attitude toward the mass media by quite unmistakable actions. Once he called the police to oust reporters from a chrysanthemum-viewing party, and frequently he was seen fending off photographers with his cane.
Yoshida loved his wife, Yukiko, dearly. She was an amateur poet whose works were praised by Japanese critics for their juxtaposition of Japanese themes against foreign settings, which she no doubt described from her memories of places Yoshida had worked as a diplomat. She died two months before the beginning of the war. When she fell ill, Yoshida was at her bedside each day throughout her three-month hospitalization. Mrs. Joseph Grew, the wife of the U.S. Ambassador, also visited Madame Yoshida daily and brought her homemade soup.
Yoshida never remarried. Once, when somebody asked him for his ideas on women, he said shortly, “Since my wife died, I have no ideas about women.”
After Madame Yoshida’s death, his official hostess was his multi-lingual daughter, Madame Kazuko Aso. She was sometimes called “the power behind the throne,” though she scoffed at the notion. Nevertheless, before our visit to Japan in 1953, William Bullitt, who had served as Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Russia and France, told me that she rated with Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the very top of his list of first ladies on the international scene. She measured up to his evaluation in every way. Highly intelligent and gracious, she was a worthy companion for her illustrious father. She once told me that many leaders were great men but not good husbands. “I would much rather have the latter,” she said. But it was clear that she considered her father to be both.
• • •
By all accounts, while it was not in MacArthur’s nature to reciprocate Yoshida’s effusive public praise of the general, there was a strong personal friendship between the two men.
Each morning MacArthur and his son, Arthur, would romp at the embassy with their pet dogs before Arthur went off to his lessons and the general to his headquarters. A relative of Yoshida told me what happened one day when Yoshida went to MacArthur’s office and found the general in low spirits. One of the dogs, MacArthur said, had suddenly and unexpectedly died.
By then Yoshida had grown to love Arthur as if he were his own son. Not telling MacArthur what he was doing, the Prime Minister managed to get a picture of the pet and gave it to his Agriculture Minister, telling him to find another dog that looked just like it. When one was located at the National Institute of Animal Husbandry, Yoshida took it personally in his car to the American embassy and gave it to Arthur while a delighted MacArthur watched.
Another time Yoshida brought MacArthur an ingenious toy horse that he had bought for Arthur during one of his anonymous walks through the streets of Tokyo. When Yoshida visited MacArthur’s office again a few days later, he saw the toy still sitting on the general’s desk, next to a stand containing his famous corncob pipes. Yoshida asked MacArthur why he had not yet given it to his son. The Supreme Commander answered somewhat sheepishly that he had been having too much fun playing with it himself. Later he reluctantly passed the toy on to Arthur.
Perhaps the most convincing evidence of MacArthur’s regard for Yoshida was that he allowed him to remain Prime Minister. Over 200,000 Japanese, including the man whose place Yoshida took as head of the Liberal party, had been purged by the Occupation, and MacArthur could just as easily have purged Yoshida when the Prime Minister became resistant to one or another of MacArthur’s wishes, as he occasionally did. Instead he was known to purge political opponents of Yoshida at the Premier’s request.
Just as he did not earn the affection of the Japanese people by being polite or nonabrasive, Yoshida did not earn MacArthur’s respect by being submissive. In 1946, while he was choosing the members of his first cabinet, demonstrators filled the streets of Tokyo, protesting the shortage of food. Soon he let it be known that he would not complete his cabinet appointments unless MacArthur promised massive food shipments from the United States. “The Americans,” he said privately, “will certainly bring food to Japan once they see people waving red flags throughout the country for a whole month.”
When MacArthur heard of this, he sent a covered jeep to fetch the new Prime Minister to his office. Yoshida returned twenty minutes later looking noticeably calmer. MacArthur had promised he would not let a single Japanese starve to death while he was in charge of Japan. Yoshida had in turn promised to complete his cabinet that night.
MacArthur still had to sell the idea to Washington, where some were self-righteously opposed to using surplus from Army stockpiles to feed America’s former enemies. He wired, “Give me bread or give me bullets.” Washington sent the food, and MacArthur was able to keep his promise.
As Premier, Yoshida’s position was particularly difficult because it severely limited the extent to which he could exercise personal initiative. His government spent most of its time reacting to directives from MacArthur and his staff. Some reforms he accepted wholeheartedly. Others he resisted but ultimately had to accept. Still others he resisted and eventually reversed.
He was caught in the middle. His opponents called him an American patsy. When I visited Japan in 1953, Ambassador John Allison told me that some of the anti-American sentiment in Japan was actually anti-Yoshida sentiment caused by his strong pro-U.S. posture. At the same time some on the American Occupation staff thought he was a trouble-maker and had tried to keep him out of office in 1948, when he formed his second cabinet.
Yoshida supported MacArthur’s broad aims for Japan: demilitarization, democratization, and revitalization of the economy. The general’s land redistribution program and his new constitution were among his first and most sweeping accomplishments. In swift, decisive strokes he shattered the two fundamental institutional causes of Japan’s militant imperialism: the rural discontent that had filled its armies and the Emperor-centered system of government that had allowed the militarists to take power so easily.
In 1945 most Japanese farmers tilled fields owned by absentee landlords, a situation MacArthur believed amounted to “virtual slavery.” Yoshida, in turn, knew that rural discontent could fuel a Communist revolution in Japan as easily as it had fueled militarism in the 1930s. Working along lines set down by MacArthur, Yoshida’s government devised a sweeping land reform bill. By 1950 ninety percent of Japan’s farmland was owned by the farmers themselves.
The MacArthur land reform gave farmers both a sense of individual worth and an incentive to produce more. After it was completed, communism in Japan became almost entirely an urban phenomenon because MacArthur had stolen the Communists’ big rural issue. As biographer William Manchester notes, “It is ironic that MacArthur should be remembered by millions as a man who wanted to resolve the problem of communism on the battlefield.”
It is also ironic that the Taiwan “economic miracle,” which can be compared in character if not in size to the Japanese “miracle,” was made possible in large part by Chiang Kai-shek’s liberal land reform program, which he instituted soon after he came to Taiwan from the mainland. Had Chiang been able to initiate such programs on the mainland, Mao might not have been able to exploit the rural discontent that contributed to the success of the Chinese Communist revolution.
If MacArthur’s most obvious target was the agricultural system, one of the trickiest was Japan’s top-heavy political system. The Japanese people had no specified political and civil rights, and MacArthur granted them at an astonishing rate. He established habeas corpus. He abolished all restrictions on civil liberties and fired five thousand officers of the secret police.
He also gave women the vote, believing, as he had confided to an aide, that “women don’t like war.” Fourteen million women went to the polls for the first time in April 1946—many apparently thought MacArthur would reprimand them personally if they stayed away—and thirty-nine women, including one well-known prostitute, were elected to the Diet.
Some Japanese politicians, eager for democracy to get off on the right foot, thought the prostitute’s election was inauspicious, and a nervous senior legislator arrived at Occupation headquarters to break the news to MacArthur. The Supreme Commander asked him how many votes she had received; the legislator sighed and said 256,000. MacArthur replied—“as solemnly as I could,” he wrote later—“Then I should say there must have been more than her dubious occupation involved.” He sent all the new Diet members, including the prostitute, letters of congratulations.
The textbook in MacArthur’s school for democracy was the MacArthur constitution. When the pre-Yoshida Japanese government balked at rewriting the Prussianesque Meiji constitution, the general took yellow legal pad in hand and composed his own outline for the new charter. The final product, written by his staff in somewhat awkward Japanese, combined the American executive and British parliamentary systems. It abolished the peerage, renounced war as a means of settling disputes with other countries, and outlined a bill of rights. Most important, it made the Japanese people sovereign and designated the Emperor as the “symbol of the nation.” After it was approved by the Diet, the Emperor proclaimed it the law of the land.
The MacArthur constitution has always had its critics, many of whom say it is illegitimate because it was written by foreigners and forced on a weakened and irresolute public. Still, Japan has so far resisted all attempts to amend it, and most Japanese apparently approve of the Emperor as a constitutional monarch.
• • •
MacArthur had masterfully turned back overt attempts by the Soviets to influence the conduct of the Occupation, in which they were nominally partners. When Stalin’s man in Tokyo said the Russians might occupy the northernmost island of Hokkaido, MacArthur promised to throw him in jail if even one Russian soldier set foot on Japanese soil. He thus saved Japan from the anguish of being divided into a Communist north and a non-Communist south.
But domestic communism was more insidious. When Stalin finally returned Japan’s World War II POWs in 1949, they had been organized into cadres and indoctrinated. Communist-inspired violence escalated the following year when the Soviets ordered the Japanese Communist party to emphasize illegal and terrorist tactics and abandon its policy of seeking a “peaceful revolution.”
When I went to Japan in 1953 I felt strongly that Communist-inspired violence there justified the step of outlawing the Communist party. MacArthur, before his recall in 1951, and Yoshida had already purged party members from government and business. I was surprised to discover, however, that Yoshida—as staunch an anti-Communist as I have ever met—was against outlawing the party outright unless the threat it presented to the stability of Japan increased.
He was typically whimsical about the shift in our own attitudes about communism from 1945 to 1950. “Americans are very interesting people,” he said once. “When you came here in 1945, we had all the Communists in jail. You made us let them all out. Now you tell us to put them back in jail again. That’s a lot of work, you know.”
Yoshida was probably reluctant to take further action against the Communists in 1953 because by then Japan’s economic recovery was in full swing. Land redistribution was complete and farmers were brimming with enthusiasm and vigor, as I found during my conversations with some of them at the time. As a result, the Communist party was doing poorly at the polls.
Still, Yoshida continued to worry about the Communists. During one of our meetings in 1953 he ruminated about “our natural tendency to be sympathetic toward communism.” He was concerned because young intellectuals tended to support left-wing radicals. Madame Aso added that intellectuals supported the Communists because it was the fashionable thing to do. “It just isn’t fashionable to be conservative,” she said. The problem was compounded by the fact that many Communist slogans, the ones about freedom and equality and the rights of workers, only sounded like slightly more strident versions of MacArthur’s reforms. Yoshida believed that many Japanese, lacking an instinctive feeling for what democracy meant, had confused democracy with license and anarchy. MacArthur had set up a giant experiment in democracy, but Yoshida had to keep it from boiling over.
MacArthur, for instance, quite properly wanted to encourage a free labor movement. But his staff, which included many idealistic junior social engineers, recruited Japanese Communists to help them establish new unions, and it was no surprise that they were prone to unreasonable demands, strikes, and violence. When he could, Yoshida modified the new labor laws, over the outraged howls of the Socialist opposition. Eventually most unions turned away from the Communists.
The Americans were also intent on trust-busting—not just the giant combines, or zaibatsu, such as Mitsubishi, but also over a thousand smaller companies. Many on the Occupation staff mistakenly believed that big business was the root of all the evils of the 1930s, in Japan as well as in the U.S. Yoshida correctly believed that Japan would not survive without healthy commercial and industrial sectors and resisted the anti-monopoly drive. Many of the breakup schemes were finally abandoned, and in 1953 Yoshida’s government modified the stringent anti-monopoly laws.
Yoshida was severely criticized by liberals in both Japan and the U.S. for resisting some of the reforms MacArthur’s staff had insisted upon. But in retrospect he was right: Many of the reforms—in areas ranging from labor and business to education and law enforcement—were unsuited to conditions in postwar Japan. Yoshida’s stubborn defense of his nation’s interests against radical reforms at a time when Japan could least afford them was a key factor in the success of MacArthur’s Occupation.
• • •
Yet, as important as Yoshida’s role was in modifying some of the Occupation’s more extreme domestic measures, his greatest legacy was a shrewd foreign policy that had two parts: opposition to large-scale rearmament, a domestic issue with international ramifications; and determined pursuit of a peace treaty and security alliance with the U.S. Together these policies meant that Japan could have national security without paying for it and could devote all of its attention and resources to building one of the greatest economies in the world.
As an American, I did not support the Yoshida foreign policy in its entirety. But as an observer of leaders and leadership, I can appreciate its soundness from his standpoint and the enormous boost it gave to Japan’s economic recovery.
Before the realities of the Cold War began to press on Japan and the U.S., MacArthur had thought Japan could become a new kind of nation: an economic powerhouse that had renounced forever the intention of resorting to war to solve its disputes with other nations. He used the phrase Switzerland of the East, and the idea was written into the MacArthur constitution as Article 9, the “no war” clause.
Vernon Walters once told me, “Most generals see only to the end of war. MacArthur looked beyond war.” Article 9 of the Japanese constitution is the most concrete proof that MacArthur, who had seen firsthand the horrors of two world wars, dreamed of a world in which war would no longer be necessary. Unhappily his optimism was premature. By the late 1940s many Americans believed that the enactment of Article 9 had been a mistake. With the Soviet Union and, after 1949, Communist China on its western flank, Japan needed some means of self-defense. When the Korean War broke out, MacArthur took most of his troops to Korea and in their place created an indigenous 75,000-man Japanese security force—later called the Self-Defense Force. Yoshida believed that Japan had renounced offensive war but had not given up its natural right to defend itself from aggression by others. He quickly set to work, over the opposition of the Socialists and a pacifist public, to make the new force as effective as possible.
Obviously 75,000 men, however effective they were, could not defend an island nation one and a half times the size of the United Kingdom. But Yoshida resisted pressure for further rearmament, both before independence in 1951 and after. His reasons were largely economic. “Under the present economic conditions,” he said, “the construction of a single battleship would upset the whole of government finance.”
Truman had assigned John Foster Dulles to work out the details of a peace treaty between Japan and the Allies, and Dulles used his position to try to influence Yoshida to rearm Japan. But when he first mentioned the subject, the Prime Minister replied, “Don’t talk nonsense.” Nonetheless the issue remained alive in the Eisenhower administration, and it remained a concern of Dulles after he became Secretary of State.
Before I left on my 1953 trip, Dulles suggested that I address this sensitive issue publicly in Tokyo to test the reaction in both the U.S. and Japan. In a luncheon speech at the Japanese-American Society on November 19, I pointed out that the situation had become radically and dangerously different from what it had been when the U.S. imposed Article 9 on Japan. Our hopes for a peaceful world, free from the threat of armed conquest, had been shattered by the Soviet Union’s aggressive actions.
Article 9, therefore, had been a well-meaning mistake, I said. “We made a mistake because we misjudged the intentions of the Soviet leaders. . . . We recognize that disarmament under present world conditions by the free nations would inevitably lead to war and, therefore, it is because we want peace and we believe in peace that we ourselves have rearmed since 1946, and that we believe that Japan and other free nations must assume their share of the responsibility of rearming.” The Japanese press gave the speech banner headlines. Not surprisingly, major emphasis was put not on my call for rearmament but on my admission that the U.S. had made a mistake.
Yoshida’s reaction was polite but noncommittal, and he stuck to his position until his retirement in 1954. Since then Japanese defense spending has crept upward, but it still comprises less than one percent of Japan’s gross national product, whereas the U.S. spends six percent and the Soviet Union as much as eighteen percent of its GNP on defense. While the Self-Defense Force has grown substantially in sophistication and more than tripled in size, it is still ridiculously inadequate; Japan, for instance, has two-thirds fewer men in uniform than North Korea.
I believe it is imperative that Japan take on more of the burden for its own defense. However, I cannot fault Yoshida for disagreeing. One of the marks of a good foreign policymaker is the degree to which he obtains the best possible deal for his own country at the least possible cost. By this criterion Yoshida’s was an excellent policy.
Like many of his policies, it was also dangerous for him politically. By opposing large-scale rearmament but supporting and encouraging the Self-Defense Force, Yoshida received none of the political benefits that a pacifist policy would have given him at a time when pacifism was widespread in Japan. At the same time, by putting Japan’s security under the wing of the U.S., he incurred the wrath both of pro-rearmament rightists and of anti-American leftists.
It would have been politically easier for Yoshida to profess some form of pan-Asian neutrality. But he knew neutrality was meaningless for a weak country and reminded those who disagreed of an old Japanese adage: “The frog in the well doesn’t know the dimensions of heaven and earth.”
Yoshida was realistic enough to know that Japan needed protection from its enemies. He was practical enough to know that the Japanese people could not afford to pay the cost of that protection by themselves. And he was shrewd enough to know that the U.S. would pay instead.
Yoshida’s security alliance with the United States became the most divisive foreign policy issue in Japan. Critics said it turned Japan into a virtual U.S. colony. Riots over its renewal in 1960 caused President Eisenhower to cancel a visit to Japan, and it remains a source of controversy twenty years later. Despite the criticism, however, the pact contributed enormously to Japan’s development into an economic superpower.
If he had given in to the simplistic “Yankee go home” jingoism of his opponents and entered what they euphemistically called “an overall peace”—an arrangement that would have included China and the Soviets and deprived Japan of the protection it needed—MacArthur’s Switzerland of the East might have become the Finland of the East, a Communist satellite in fact if not in name. Instead Japan was able to devote itself single-mindedly to creating an economy and a standard of living that are the envy of almost every nation on earth.
Yoshida lived another thirteen years after leaving office in 1954, and he derived enormous satisfaction from seeing his policies bear fruit. His opponents said he would make Japan “the orphan of Asia.” Instead he helped make her a giant.
• • •
One reason his policies did bear fruit was that they were tended from 1957 until 1972 by his successors, first by Nobusuke Kishi and then by Hayato Ikeda and Eisaku Sato, both graduates of the “Yoshida school.” I had the good fortune to know all three and found them to be world statesmen of the first rank. It is a truism of leadership that great leaders rarely groom younger men because they are so captivated by their own accomplishments that they cannot imagine anyone taking their places. Yoshida was a notable exception.
I have often been struck by remarkable similarities between Yoshida and West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer. Both ruled when they were in their seventies. Both courageously opposed the totalitarians who controlled their countries in the 1930s. And both presided over the resurrection of defeated countries and their transformation into economic superpowers. In 1954, on Yoshida’s world tour, the two men met in Bonn. Yoshida admitted to Adenauer that he had always imagined himself engaged in a kind of friendly competition with the German since their circumstances and backgrounds were so similar.
There was one crucial difference between them, however. Yoshida carefully prepared his Finance Minister, Ikeda, to follow in his footsteps. Adenauer treated his equally capable Finance Minister and successor, Ludwig Erhard, so shabbily that Erhard could not control his emotional distress in discussing it with me in 1959.
Yoshida was not necessarily less of an egotist than Adenauer. It is in fact the ultimate in self-gratification for a leader to see his policies continued long after he leaves the stage. The trick is for him not to become convinced that he is the only actor who can play the part. Adenauer fell into that trap. Yoshida gracefully avoided it.
I had known Sato before I became President, and I negotiated extensively with him during my presidency. The most significant outcome of our talks was the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese control in 1972, and even then it seemed that Yoshida was a party to our conversations. Sato mentioned his mentor often. When a Sato emissary came to Washington in advance of our meetings for preliminary talks with Henry Kissinger, he used a pseudonym to enhance security. The name Sato’s envoy chose was “Mr. Yoshida.”
Yoshida remained in touch with MacArthur until the general’s death in 1964. He had hoped to see MacArthur in September 1951, when the U.S.-Japan peace treaty that MacArthur had made possible was signed, but Truman and Acheson spitefully refused to invite the general to the ceremonies at San Francisco. The State Department also told a disappointed Yoshida that it would be “inappropriate” for him to visit MacArthur in New York before returning to Japan.
• • •
When Yoshida made a state visit to Washington in 1954, he became the first Japanese leader since the war to visit the U.S. Senate. As Vice President, I was the Senate’s presiding officer, and I had the distinct privilege of welcoming him. It was a measure of how much progress he and MacArthur had made since the end of the war that I was able to introduce him as “a great friend of the United States and the cause of freedom.” The Senate responded by giving him a standing ovation.
Yoshida left office the following month after a no-confidence vote in the Diet against his fifth government. For a variety of reasons, many of which were beyond Yoshida’s control, his popularity had reached a low point. Some members of his government were implicated in a shipbuilding scandal. Characteristically he was being criticized by some for being an American toady and by others for failing to obtain enough American aid during his visit to Washington. And finally, many conservatives who had been purged by MacArthur were now back in action and angling for power. That he held onto the premiership and accomplished as much as he did for more than a year and a half after the end of the Occupation and the political purges are testaments to his skill and resilience.
Yoshida left office reluctantly, and the circumstances of his departure were messy. He had always been undiplomatically blunt toward those who opposed or displeased him, even when he was a diplomat; once in the 1930s he advised a bothersome superior to either calm down or commit himself to an insane asylum. As Prime Minister, on visits to Japanese zoos he would call the monkeys and penguins by the names of prominent political figures. His freewheeling behavior entertained the Japanese people and helped ease the humiliation of defeat and occupation, but it also bruised the tender egos of his enemies.
They avenged themselves in the end. The late-1954 Diet debate over the no-confidence resolution was brutal. Once Yoshida paused over his notes and said in a moment of confusion, “Ah . . . ah . . . ah.” His opponents yelled back cruelly, “Ah . . . ah . . . ah.” In mid-December, Yoshida’s leftist and conservative opponents joined forces against him and passed the no-confidence measure. It was considered unlikely that he could win yet again at the polls; Yoshida, now seventy-six years old, had finally been beaten.
No Japanese Premier except Sato has matched Yoshida’s seven years and two months in office, and none has had to endure the atmosphere of sweeping, sudden change and political instability in which he governed. Yoshida held power through a military occupation and the brief burst of nationalism that followed it, the Korean War, the dizzying inflation of the late 1940s and the equally dizzying economic surge of the early 1950s, and the establishment of social and governmental reforms that shook Japan to its foundations.
For a while after leaving office he slipped into the obscurity that usually envelops a defeated politician. But his protégés, Sato and Ikeda, made regular trips to Oiso for advice and counsel. He wrote his memoirs and articles and eventually undertook occasional diplomatic missions for his successors. After a few years had passed, the extent of his vast contribution to Japan’s stability and economic vigor began to be appreciated more clearly. By the time of his death, he was a respected elder statesman.
Today, almost thirty years after the end of his career, Yoshida is viewed with renewed respect by a new generation. When Japanese politicians visit me, they often tell me how much they admire not only his accomplishments but also his personal example—his courage, his absolute forthrightness, his willingness to stand up to enormous political pressures in defense of his beliefs and Japan’s interests. Just as de Gaulle and Churchill will live on in the collective memories of their nations, especially in the example they will provide for generation after generation of young people, so Yoshida has taken on new life in Japan.
In 1960, in the midst of my campaign for the presidency, the eighty-two-year-old Yoshida was once again summoned from retirement at Oiso to serve his country. The Japanese government asked him to head a delegation to Washington to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the first Japanese diplomatic mission to Washington. We invited him and Madame Aso to our home. After dinner Yoshida gave me a carving that he said had been specially made for me by a Japanese artist. With the campaign very much on my own mind, I could not help smiling appreciatively when Yoshida mentioned, in a studiedly offhanded way, that the work’s title was “Victory.”
After the election that November he sent me a very gracious note describing the outcome as “sad” and saying that he hoped I would come back to lead again “at home and abroad.” I particularly appreciated it then, because such gestures mean more in defeat than they do in victory, and from him, because it was a gesture he no longer had to make. During his years in office Yoshida had developed into a tough, skilled politician whose enemies accused him of being ruthless and selfish. I knew better, and I cherished the fact that in that difficult moment he showed himself to be a loyal friend.
I saw Yoshida for the last time in 1964 at Oiso, after a meeting scheduled for the spring of that year was delayed by a sadly ironic twist of fate. I was making a tour of the Far East that spring, and Yoshida had invited me to a luncheon at his home. But on April 5, four days before I arrived in Tokyo, MacArthur died, and Yoshida and Madame Aso left immediately for the United States to attend the funeral. The dinner was rescheduled for the following November, when I visited Asia again.
Our forty-mile automobile ride to Oiso, through traffic jams worse than those on the freeways of Los Angeles, was grueling, but the journey was well worth the trouble. Yoshida met me at the door, wearing a kimono. At our previous meetings he had worn western clothes and even shown a particular fondness for high Victorian collars. Seeing him for the first time dressed in traditional Japanese garb reminded me once again of the extent to which this product of Meiji Japan was an amalgam of eastern and western influences. Of all the Japanese leaders I have known, Yoshida was paradoxically the most western and yet the most Japanese. I learned later that, when he was Army chief of staff in the 1930s, MacArthur sometimes wore a kimono in his Washington office.
Yoshida’s home, which had a spectacular view of Mount Fuji, was comfortably large but not ostentatious. It reflected the impeccable taste of Madame Aso, who again served as our hostess. Its decorations and furnishings reflected the usual Japanese eye for proportion and balance, but in Yoshida’s case the balance was between things western and things eastern. Western books stood alongside works of Japanese art. Yoshida slept on a futon mattress rather than a bed, but on the terrace, where dinner was served, he had a western-style table and chairs rather than a low-slung Japanese table. Even the meal he served us combined Japanese and western dishes.
In a conversation that ranged widely over the world scene, Yoshida reflected on his trip to Versailles with Count Makino. In discussing my 1953 statement on rearmament, one of the other guests got the date of it wrong. Before I had a chance to say anything, Yoshida quickly corrected him. I thought to myself that the speech must have made more of an impression on him than he had let on at the time.
He expressed a particular interest in de Gaulle and in my evaluation of the French leader. I told him that I did not wholly support de Gaulle’s international policies, especially his ambivalence toward NATO. I suggested that de Gaulle’s international “high posture,” to use a characteristically Japanese term, was possible because of his domestic successes and his popularity in France. I added that in view of Japan’s economic strength, the Japanese government, like de Gaulle, was in a position to play a “high posture” role in international affairs—provided Japan developed a stronger military capability. I expressed my firm conviction that “Japan must not become an economic giant and remain a military and political pygmy.” As he had in 1953, Yoshida politely but firmly turned my suggestion aside.
In retrospect the most significant subject of our talk over dinner in 1964 was China. It was a conversation we had begun eleven years before, when I first met him in Tokyo. At that time Yoshida, an “old China hand” from his days as a diplomat, told me that he had made a lifelong study of Chinese culture and retained a deep respect for it. He believed that just as no invader had ever been able to conquer China permanently, the invasion of communism would inevitably fail in its attempt to overcome centuries of Confucian influence. Chinese intellectuals, though in temporary eclipse in 1953, would eventually prevail over the Communist ideologues, Yoshida said.
However, Yoshida disagreed with the then-prevalent view that Chiang Kai-shek might still have a role to play on the mainland. Yoshida argued that although Chiang was himself a Confucian scholar, he had irreparably alienated the intellectuals, and that this was politically fatal. On this point he disagreed with Emperor Hirohito, who had still been strongly supportive of Chiang when I saw him during the same visit.
Yoshida’s almost instinctual philosophical affinity with the Chinese impelled him to believe that increased trade between China and the non-Communist nations of Asia would ultimately cause China to throw off communism in favor of free enterprise. Like Eisenhower, he passionately believed that trade between potential enemies could lead to peace. He also felt that China’s intervention in Korea was an aberration that resulted from its concern about a possible threat to its own borders. He believed the Chinese were essentially a peaceful people who would only resist aggression, not initiate it.
His attitude toward Peking led him to hint in 1951, when the U.S.-Japan peace treaty was before the U.S. Senate, that he intended to open relations with the mainland. John Foster Dulles, who had negotiated the treaty, told Yoshida that the Senate might reject it if he recognized the Chinese—who were then fighting Americans in Korea—and the Premier dropped the idea. One of my assignments on my 1953 trip was to reiterate Dulles’s warning. While Yoshida did not disagree with my prediction that there would be a strongly negative U.S. reaction to any move he might make toward the Chinese Communists, it was obvious that I had not shaken his own support of a rapprochement with Peking. Had he not retired in 1954, Japan might well have reopened relations with China in the 1950s rather than the 1970s.
I was therefore not surprised that the Chinese question was still high on Yoshida’s agenda in 1964. Yoshida and his Japanese guests were worried about the opening of diplomatic relations between France and China in January of that year, a move de Gaulle had made without informing the Japanese beforehand. Yoshida asked me whether I thought the United States might do the same thing. When I replied that I could not speak for the Johnson administration, the former Japanese Ambassador to the United States, Koichiro Asakai, said that he had some bitter experiences in Washington when officials announced policy decisions affecting Japan without informing him in advance. He predicted that at some time in the future the U.S. would negotiate directly with Peking without informing Tokyo. I replied—somewhat prophetically, as it turned out—that I could not rule out that possibility.
When we conducted the negotiations that led to the surprise announcement in July 1971 that I would visit China the following year, these discussions had to be kept secret from the Japanese as well as from our other friends throughout the world. Any leak might have torpedoed the initiative. When I made the announcement, it was immediately branded in Japan as the “Nixon shock.” While the U.S. opening to China is often cited as the spark for the Sino-Japanese rapprochement that came in September 1972, the Chinese and the Japanese had actually been trading and conducting informal relations for years. For some time, groups of Japanese, including politicians, had been visiting China. The establishment of official relations between the two countries was less a result of the Nixon shock than it was the culmination of the gradual reconciliation that Yoshida had envisioned two decades before.
Yoshida’s preoccupation with this kind of continuity in government, through which the work begun by one leader can be finished by others, was clear in one poignant moment as he escorted me to the door at the end of my visit. I told him that I looked forward to the day when we would meet again. He laughed and said, “No, I don’t think we will. I am afraid I am too old. But you are a very young man [I was fifty-one at the time]; you can provide leadership in the future.”
Of all the leaders I have met, Yoshida shares with Herbert Hoover the distinction of growing old most gracefully. Part of the reason was that although he was personally out of power, his policies were being continued by men he had prepared for leadership and who still valued his counsel. He was at peace with himself because he was confident that his good works would live after his death.
He died in late 1967 at Oiso, at the age of eighty-nine. Prime Minister Sato was on a state visit to Indonesia when he heard the news. Sato immediately flew home to Japan, went to Oiso, and wept openly at the bed where his mentor lay in state. A few days later Yoshida was given the first state funeral to be held in Japan since World War II.
• • •
In a political sense the last eleven years of MacArthur’s life were wasted. His intellectual powers were undiminished, but in the 1950s and early 1960s, because of a combination of circumstances, they were not put to use as they should have been.
One reason was that he had become tainted by partisan politics. While serving in Japan in 1948, he made a stab at the Republican presidential nomination, but got only a humiliating eleven delegate votes on the first convention ballot. When he returned from Korea in 1951, he addressed Congress and then campaigned against Truman’s Asian policies from one end of the country to the other.
MacArthur openly favored Senator Robert Taft over Eisenhower for the nomination in 1952. He was selected to give the keynote address at the Chicago convention in July, and we in the Eisenhower camp were concerned that his speech might deliver the convention for Taft. The general himself thought the delegates might even turn to him as a dark-horse candidate.
But the speech was a disappointment. It was well written and well delivered, but somehow, as Lincoln might have put it, “it just didn’t scour.” Part of the reason was that the delegates were bone tired by the time he began to speak at 9:30 P.M. They grew more and more distracted as he plodded along. It was almost embarrassing. Instead of giving him the rapt attention he had received at the joint session in 1951, some of the delegates coughed, some wandered around the floor and politicked, and others left for the men’s room. He kept pressing to lift them out of their lethargy, but the chemistry and magic of the “Old soldiers never die” speech were missing. Then he had risen brilliantly to a dramatic occasion. Now the memory of the brilliance remained, but the drama of the occasion could neither be duplicated nor recaptured. The inevitable result was a feeling of anticlimax and letdown. MacArthur, the first-class showman, had made an uncharacteristic mistake: He had tried to top a performance and failed. The speech was the end of his chances as a political candidate.
FDR once said to MacArthur, “Douglas, I think you are our best general, but I believe you would be our worst politician.” He was right. MacArthur was not a good politician, and eventually he realized it. He quotes Roosevelt’s pronouncement himself in his memoirs. His greatest political miscalculation, in fact, was to appear to be interested in politics at all, to attempt personally to convert his enormous prestige into political capital. He should have left the active politicking to those who were willing to act on his behalf.
I believe that Eisenhower wanted to be President as much as MacArthur did, but he was clever enough not to admit it. Though Eisenhower always insisted that he was just an amateur politician, he was in fact a masterly political operator. He instinctively knew that the best way to get the prize was to appear not to be seeking it. When I first met him at the Bohemian Grove in California in July 1950, the business and political heavyweights who were there were all talking about the possibility of his being the Republican candidate in 1952. All, that is, except Eisenhower. When the question came up, he deftly changed the subject to the future of Europe and the Atlantic alliance.
In May 1951 his fellow Kansan, Senator Frank Carlson, insisted that I call on Eisenhower during a trip I was scheduled to make to Europe. He felt sure that the general was going to throw his hat in the ring and he wanted me to support him if he did. I saw Eisenhower for an hour at the Allied military headquarters in Paris. He greeted me cordially. Instead of talking about himself, he complimented me for my fairness in conducting the Alger Hiss investigation and asked for my evaluation of American sentiment toward NATO. He had the rare ability to make his visitors come away thinking they had done well rather than that he had done well. As a result, most left meetings with him, as I did, enthusiastic Eisenhower supporters.
The appearance of letting the office seek him rather than the other way around enhanced his chances of winning the presidency. MacArthur, on the other hand, gave every appearance in 1948 of running for office while on active duty in Japan. The impression that he was eager politically was strengthened by his action after Truman had fired him.
This is not to say that MacArthur would not have made a good President. He had a profound understanding of foreign policy issues. In Japan he demonstrated that he could handle domestic issues, running the gamut from labor relations to educational policy, in an intelligent, evenhanded manner. He was obsessed with maintaining the stability of the currency and with the pursuit of moderate, consistent fiscal policies. In fact he grew more conservative economically as he grew older, a development I also noticed in the careers of Eisenhower and de Gaulle. During the 1950s and early 1960s, when it was clear MacArthur would probably never hold another public office, he often lectured me about balancing the budget, cutting taxes, and going back to the gold standard.
MacArthur’s major problem as President would have been that of adapting to the fact that his power over the government was more circumscribed than his power over troops had been as a general or his power over Japan had been as Supreme Commander. He would have found it difficult to tolerate and then master the seemingly endless stream of petty detail that comes with the presidency. In the U.S. as in Japan, MacArthur would have needed a Yoshida to implement his imaginative and creative policies.
Aside from running up on the shoals of politics, MacArthur was the victim of shifts in popular and military fashions. In World War I he was the doughboys’ hero for his daring exploits in the trenches of France. In World War II, when he was in his sixties, he was “Dugout Doug” in spite of an equally impressive record of bravery.
Between the world wars, the values MacArthur represented—valor, patriotism, love of liberty—had begun to go out of style. They were revived during World War II but weakened once again by Korea and nearly dealt a deathblow by Vietnam. Even during World War II generals like Eisenhower and Bradley—fatherly, unobtrusive, accessible—were more palatable to the intellectual establishment and even to GIs, who were, after all, among the first fully grown products of what was being called the century of the common man. As is often the case, MacArthur’s accomplishments, among them a battle strategy in the Pacific that saved tens of thousands of GIs’ lives, could not outweigh the burden of his image as an aristocratic poseur.
He still managed to strike a chord with the American public, as the deafening welcome he received from coast to coast upon his return from Korea showed. But soon even the public turned from him and elected his rival, Eisenhower, to the office they both coveted. It was a choice of a man who represented unity and moderation over another who was at times blatantly partisan and unfailingly controversial.
• • •
Douglas MacArthur liberated the Philippines, rebuilt Japan, and, at Inchon and after, prevented Communist control of South Korea. He came home a subject of intense controversy and was soon a political exile in his own country. The reason was that few understood Asia, MacArthur, or what one meant to the other. Few understood that MacArthur’s destiny was to protect American interests in the Far East, almost single-handedly, for two decades.
As an admirer of MacArthur, I have never fully understood how a man whose accomplishments were so vast and self-evident could be so unpopular in American intellectual circles. The vicious attacks that plagued MacArthur during most of his career could be explained in part by Lord Blake’s analysis in the epilogue of his classic biography of Disraeli.
He noted that while Disraeli and Gladstone were mortal enemies, they were alike in being subjected to violent and often unfair criticism by many of their contemporaries. He wrote, “The truth surely is that both were extraordinary figures, men of genius, though in widely differing idioms, and that, like most men of genius operating in a parliamentary democracy, they inspired a great deal of dislike and no small degree of distrust among the bustling mediocrities who form the majority of mankind.”
Had MacArthur retired to the Philippines or Japan, where he had lived almost without interruption since 1935, his last years would have been less empty. The Japanese revered him, and those who remember his years as Supreme Commander revere him still. When he made his sentimental journey to the Philippines in 1961, he learned that in the Philippine army his name was called at every muster, and a sergeant answered “Present in spirit!” Many Americans credit MacArthur for avenging the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese, the Filipinos, and the South Koreans saw him not as an avenger but a liberator. He freed the Japanese from totalitarianism and Emperor worship, freed the Filipinos from the Japanese, and freed the South Koreans from the Communists.
MacArthur may have seemed anachronistic to many U.S. political commentators, but throughout his career in Asia he demonstrated extraordinary foresight. At the turn of the century, after his tour of the Far East with his father, he speculated that the Japanese might have hegemonic designs on their neighbors. In the 1930s he warned of the growing Japanese threat to peace in the Pacific. In Japan his progressive reforms surpassed both in scope and in vision the blueprint that had been written for the American Occupation by desk officers in Washington. And in Korea he understood that the Communists were fighting not for South Korea but for control of all Asia.
The common denominator was always Japan. He was either preoccupied by the threat it posed to the Far East or, after the war, preoccupied with the threat others posed to it. During his five years of governing Japan, two seeming paradoxes emerged. First, though a skilled man of war, MacArthur proved to be a committed man of peace. Second, he applied the tools of the absolute autocrat to the task of freeing Japan forever from autocracy.
The first, of course, is not really a paradox. The idea that soldiers and generals by nature promote constant international belligerency is only a bit of philosophical debris from the 1960s. As MacArthur said in his magnificent farewell address at West Point in 1962, “The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
No man in American history has been given absolute power in peacetime. In a democracy power is diffused among different sectors of society to prevent abuses. MacArthur, however, had absolute power in Japan for five years. The real paradox is that true democracy could not have been established there any other way.
One commentator on the Occupation wrote, “MacArthur was in control. Japan would be made a peace-loving, democratic, prosperous, industrial nation if it took violence, tyranny, and economic chaos to do it.” The statement was intended to be facetious, but it was still basically true. The Japanese are quick studies, and they soon learned to mouth, as if by rote, the abstract principles of democracy. It was quite another thing to teach them to believe in democracy in their hearts.
Two hundred and thirty years ago, confronting the thorny question of how just political systems could be established, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote:
Men . . . do not govern themselves by abstract views; one does not make them happy except by forcing them to be, and one has to make them feel happiness in order to make them love it. There is a job for the talents of the hero. . . .
Rousseau’s point was that in the earliest stages of a new society, its values must be imposed from above by some wise and forward-looking hero. In the case of Japan, MacArthur was the hero who made the Japanese feel democracy and therefore love it. Along with Yoshida he made them cherish liberty and therefore want to safeguard it. In fact no figure in modern political history has come as close as MacArthur to being the semimythical being called a lawgiver—a man of such towering political vision that he can single-handedly reinvent a society according to an ideal model.
Like Japan’s own Meiji reformers, he used his privileged position to introduce sweeping political reforms, though he abolished the easily abused absolute power of the Emperor, which the Meiji system depended on. At first he took all of Hirohito’s vast real and spiritual authority on his own shoulders. Then, after cracking the toughest nuts himself—a new constitution and land reform—he gradually began to shift more and more power to Yoshida, the elected representative of the Japanese people. Importantly Yoshida, both before and after the Occupation, was able to modify what MacArthur had set in place. This unique partnership produced modern Japan, a great and free nation that represents the best hope that the rest of Asia may someday share in the heritage of liberty, justice, and prosperity.