He leaned on JFK to stay out of
Vietnam. Had Kennedy survived, might history have been different?
On
April 28, 1961—a decade after General Douglas MacArthur was fired for defying
Harry Truman on Korea—the controversial commander hosted President John F.
Kennedy at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where MacArthur and his wife lived
in a suite on the 37th floor. The contrast between the two could not have been
more obvious: MacArthur, then in his early eighties, was mottled, frail, and
walked with a slight stoop, while the newly inaugurated Kennedy was young, fit,
and vibrant. The two sequestered themselves in MacArthur’s suite, then posed
for photographers, the young president obviously proud to appear with the aging
legend.
Fortunately
for historians, Kennedy recorded notes on his Waldorf Astoria discussion,
committing MacArthur’s advice to a personal memorandum that he later referred
to in White House policy discussions. The meeting itself was the subject of
news stories and featured on national newscasts that same day. Later, the
meeting provided grist for two generations of Kennedy-besotted commenters who
debated whether the young president, had he not been assassinated in Dallas,
might have recoiled from committing tens of thousands of U.S. troops to a
winless war in Southeast Asia—a course of action taken by Lyndon Johnson, his
successor.
It
turns out that Kennedy’s memo of the Waldorf Astoria meeting (now at Boston’s
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum) is crucial for historians
for a number of other reasons. It offers not only a glimpse of how the young
president intended to navigate the treacherous waters of the Cold War, but
suggests how one of America’s most celebrated military officers viewed what
might be called the grand strategy of the American Republic: that is, whether
and how the U.S. might win its dangerous struggle against the Soviet Union.
Finally, the Waldorf Astoria meeting tells us how MacArthur’s most famous
warning—to “never fight a land war in Asia”—has come down to us, what he meant
by it, and whether, in an age of American troop deployments in at least 133
countries, it retains its meaning.
♦♦♦
Kennedy’s
April 1961 meeting with MacArthur surprised the president’s top aides, many of
whom openly disliked the aging warrior. But Kennedy, who’d served as a patrol
boat skipper in the Pacific in World War II where MacArthur had commanded,
admired him. “He was Kennedy’s kind of hero: valiant, a patrician, proud of his
machismo, and a lover of glory,” MacArthur biographer William Manchester wrote
in American Caesar. As crucially, Kennedy was as politically
embattled then as MacArthur had been 10 years earlier and was intent on getting
advice from the general on the worsening international situation. Just the week
before, the new president had been humiliated when a group of U.S.-supported
anti-Castro Cuban exiles were defeated after invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
Kennedy was almost chagrined when he mentioned the humiliation, and MacArthur’s
response was surprisingly blunt.
The
failed invasion was a problem for the young president, he said, but he didn’t
think that Kennedy was solely to blame. He faulted Dwight Eisenhower for
promoting the invasion and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for supporting it: they
should have known better, he suggested. He added that many of them, in his
view, had been promoted beyond their competence. Eisenhower and the JCS had set
Kennedy up, MacArthur implied: “The chickens are coming home to roost, and you
happen to have moved into the chicken house.”
Kennedy
appreciated MacArthur’s soothing judgment on Cuba (and would soon change the
military’s top leadership—perhaps in keeping with MacArthur’s views), but then
shifted the subject to Laos and Vietnam, where communist insurgencies were
gaining strength. The Congress, he added, was pressuring him to deploy U.S.
troops in response. MacArthur disagreed vehemently: “Anyone wanting to commit
ground troops to Asia should have his head examined,” he said. That same day,
Kennedy memorialized what MacArthur told him: “MacArthur believes it would be a
mistake to fight in Laos,” he wrote in a memorandum of the meeting, adding, “He
thinks our line should be Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines.” MacArthur’s
warning about fighting in Asia impressed Kennedy, who repeated it in the months
ahead and especially whenever military leaders urged him to take action. “Well
now,” the young president would say in his lilting New England twang, “you
gentlemen, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I’ll be convinced.”
So it is that MacArthur’s warning (which has come down to us as “never get
involved in a land war in Asia”), entered American lore as a kind of Nicene
Creed of military wisdom—unquestioned, repeated, fundamental.
In
the years that followed, historians concluded that MacArthur’s advice was the
result of his experience in South Korea, where he’d served as U.S. commander
after it was invaded by North Korea in 1950. MacArthur had performed
brilliantly, but then, with victory in sight, the Chinese intervened, driving
south across the Yalu River and overwhelming his forces. MacArthur was embarrassed;
he didn’t believe the Chinese would intervene and was caught flat-footed when
they did. Outnumbered, MacArthur proposed a menu of military responses: bombing
military bases in China, using Chinese Nationalist troops based in Taiwan to
help in the fight, imposing an economic and naval blockade on the Chinese
mainland, and even planting nuclear waste along the North Korean/Chinese
border. Each of MacArthur’s suggestions were designed to cut off North Korea’s
forces from their Chinese allies—to isolate the battlefield. But President
Truman and the JCS disagreed, fearing that what MacArthur proposed would widen
the war.
When
MacArthur’s recommendations were made public, he was labeled a warmonger, the
primary reason (it is widely believed) that Truman dismissed him. In fact, what
actually got MacArthur in trouble was the publication of letters to
Massachusetts Republican Congressman Joseph W. Martin, Jr. calling into
question Truman’s leadership, an action that was as close to insubordination as
any officer can get. Despite these legendary missteps, a number of historians
subsequently believed that while MacArthur was wrong to question Truman, his
military thinking was sound: the U.S. failure to isolate the Korean battlefield
spelled the difference between an American victory and a bloody stalemate.
In
fact, however, the lesson that MacArthur had learned about fighting a land war
in Asia wasn’t the result of his experience in Korea, but of his experience
fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. “You can certainly
make that argument,” historian and author Rana Mitter told this writer in a
wide-ranging telephone interview, “because at the time the Japanese were
fighting the Americans in the Pacific, they were also fighting the Chinese on the
Asian mainland. The U.S. was desperate to keep China in the fight because their
armies were tying down hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops who might have
been used against the Americans.”
Mitter,
the author of the aptly named Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II,
1937-1945, is among a new class of historians (a list that includes Deng
Xiaoping biographer Ezra Vogel, Richard Bernstein, Frank Dikotter, John
Pomfret, and Jay Taylor—who penned a brilliant treatment of Chiang Kai-shek)
who focus on what is now called the Second Sino-Japanese War, which killed
upwards of four million Chinese soldiers and 11 million Chinese civilians. It’s
a staggering number, particularly when compared to America’s military losses in
the Pacific—some 65,000 soldiers, sailors, and Marines. What Mitter and his
colleagues have emphasized is that Japan, like the Germans in Europe, was
fighting a two-front war, which made an Allied victory a near certainty. Mitter
points out that while the Japanese won battle after battle in China, they were
never able to match China’s numbers—a preview of what MacArthur faced in Korea.
The
new thinking on China by these historians is seminal: Mitter argues that it is
time to view America’s war with Japan as a kind of mirror of the U.S. war in
Europe—and thus acknowledge that China’s fight against Japan on the Chinese
mainland made a U.S. victory in the vast reaches of the Pacific possible. “The
Japanese believed that at some point the Chinese would surrender,” Mitter says,
“but they never did. They just kept coming.” It was this, Japan’s struggle to
overcome the terrible arithmetic of battle in China, that MacArthur told
Kennedy the U.S. faced in Southeast Asia. The U.S., he implied, could never
match the number of soldiers China or Russia could put on the ground and the
U.S. could never eliminate the sanctuaries where men and supplies could be
husbanded to fight relentless, bloody, and endless conflicts.
Never
get involved in a land war in Asia, MacArthur had told Kennedy, because if you
do, you will be repeating the same mistake the Japanese made in World War
II—deploying millions of soldiers in a futile attempt to win a conflict that
cannot be won.
♦♦♦
The
success of the Waldorf Astoria meeting sealed Kennedy’s relationship with
MacArthur. “I could not drag them apart,” White House aide Kenneth O’Donnell
said. But there was a note of chagrin in his voice, for O’Donnell was among
those Kennedy partisans who disliked the general, believing him to be an
ultra-conservative. Despite this, Kennedy insisted that, in the wake of their
Waldorf Astoria meeting, MacArthur be invited to the White House. And so it was
that on July 20, 1961, just four months after Kennedy’s meeting him in New
York, MacArthur showed up for a lunch with the president and a gathering of
high-powered guests. Among the attendees were Lyndon Johnson, Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, Senators Leverett Saltonstall and John Stennis, and Congressmen
Walter Judd. The military was represented by General Clyde D. Eddleman, the
vice chief of staff of the Army. After the lunch, Kennedy and MacArthur met in
the Oval Office for what turned into a three-hour marathon discussion which, as
O’Donnell tells us, wreaked havoc on the president’s schedule.
In
the meeting’s wake, O’Donnell says, Kennedy “regaled” his staff with MacArthur
stories and MacArthur advice, which included yet another admonition that
Kennedy not send troops to Vietnam, as the U.S. would be “outnumbered on every
side.” Domestic problems, MacArthur advised Kennedy, should be a higher priority.
“MacArthur implored the President to avoid a U.S. military build-up in Vietnam,
or any other part of the Asian mainland,” O’Donnell later wrote, “because he
felt that the domino theory was ridiculous in a nuclear age.” When MacArthur
exited the White House, he was met by a gaggle of reporters, and so, since he
rarely missed such an opportunity, he gave an impromptu press conference.
MacArthur had high praise for Kennedy, betraying an unusual sense of humor: “He
seemed to be in excellent health and excellent spirits,” he said, “and has
changed little since he was one of my PT boat commanders in the Pacific War—and
he was a good one too, a brave and resourceful young naval officer. Judging
from the luncheon served me today, he’s living higher now.”
So
historians are left to speculate on the details of what Kennedy and MacArthur
talked of on that steamy July day, or how the two were expanding on the views
they had first broached at the Waldorf Astoria. For that, historians must turn
to a third (and final) meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur on August 16,
1962—more than one year after the White House luncheon. This one was unplanned;
MacArthur was in Washington at the invitation of members of Congress, but since
he was available, Kennedy invited him to the Oval Office for a talk. Much had
changed in the previous year: the Laos mini-crisis had been resolved, with the
U.S. and Soviet Union agreeing to the seating of a coalition government there.
But the situation in South Vietnam had gotten worse—with mounting pressures on
the Saigon government from a well-armed rural-based insurgency. Faced with the
burgeoning crisis, Kennedy was once again under pressure to increase U.S. troop
commitments.
♦♦♦
This
third Kennedy-MacArthur talk was wide-ranging, off-the-cuff, and personable.
But unlike the previous two meetings, it was recorded by a recently installed
White House taping system, which provided a treasure trove of first-person
information for later historians. From the perspective of 2018, the
Kennedy-MacArthur discussion is crucial to understanding how these two men
viewed American power. In a sense, their exchange laid out a framework for a
U.S. grand strategy based on air and sea power, derived from their personal
experiences—and from their understanding of the costs of war.
MacArthur
could be pompous, egocentric, and narrow-minded, but he could also be winsome,
warm, and sympathetic, taking the measure of his audience and calculating how
best to win them over. So it was when he met with Kennedy in the Oval Office on
the morning of August 16. He opened the discussion by deriding the press, a
sure winner with the young president, whose leadership had been the subject of
hair-singeing opinion pieces in the nation’s most widely read newspapers.
“Don’t worry about these smart alec columnists, they’re the biggest bunch of
prima donnas the world has ever seen,” MacArthur told Kennedy as the two took
their seats—and Kennedy agreed. “Second guessers,” he said. The two then
engaged in an animated conversation about the 1964 election, which MacArthur
predicted would result in Kennedy’s reelection—“by an avalanche.” Inevitably,
their discussion turned to the worrisome situation in Southeast Asia.
“Your
business, since I talked with you on the Far East, you’ve done well,” MacArthur
said, citing Kennedy’s successful effort to negotiate a coalition government
for Laos. “You’ve fenced and you’ve parried and haven’t brought on any
conflagration. You’ve held your own.” But MacArthur then critiqued the
administration’s international strategy as lacking vision. “I’d say the
initiative that we should apply strategically and militarily,” he allowed, “is
lacking in at least one way…it lacks a mission and allows the enemy to
concentrate where he wishes.” What MacArthur was talking about was shaping what
military analysts call a national grand strategy, leveraging the country’s most
important assets against an array of enemies. Here, for one of the few times in
our nation’s history, was a senior military leader talking about the causes,
conduct, and consequences of war; not, that is, about the movements of troops
or the deployment of military assets, but the conditions under which the
American Republic would defend itself—and how.
At
the heart of the August 16 discussion is MacArthur’s view that America’s
greatest asset is its economy. America’s adversaries, on the other hand, had
always struggled (and failed) to match its economic output, and particularly
its agricultural output. “The Achilles heel of the Russians and Chinese,” he
said, “is food.” In this sense, MacArthur is a stand-in for nearly every senior
officer of his generation who looked on America’s industrial and agricultural
assets as its strength. Nothing else mattered. Put another way, while Russia’s
“strategic depth” is its geography and China’s strategic depth is its mass of
people, America’s strategic depth is its economy. To destroy America, you must
destroy its economy. No one ever had. For MacArthur this was Japan’s fatal
mistake: the Japanese military believed that in attacking Pearl Harbor, they
had knocked out American naval capabilities. In fact, the Japanese bombed the
wrong place—to destroy America’s naval capacity, the Japanese would have needed
to destroy the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Put another way, MacArthur’s bedrock belief
was that the turning point in the Pacific was Japan’s decision to go to war in
the first place. After Pearl Harbor, Japan couldn’t win.
All
of this, and more, is packed into MacArthur’s short, staccato sentences to
Kennedy. We do not know if the young president thought his mentor was right in
his judgments, but it’s hard to imagine he would have disagreed. Having laid
the groundwork, MacArthur then shifted gears, focusing on America’s strength at
sea, a surprising viewpoint from one of the most celebrated Army officers in
the service’s history. MacArthur was an Army partisan, and always had been (he
had fought the Navy’s leadership in the Pacific War with nearly the same
intensity as he had the Japanese), but the August meeting shows he was
thoughtful when it came to how America should face its enemies. “The greatest
weapon of war is the blockade,” he told Kennedy. “If war comes, that is the
weapon we should use.”
MacArthur
then added that, while the Russians and Chinese could always outnumber the
Americans on the ground and even in the air, easily deploying more troops and
aircraft in any stand-off, that wasn’t true when it came to the world’s oceans.
“The sea, beyond question, is ours,” he said, “and that’s the key to the
blockade. Missiles and air will neutralize each other. In the last analysis,
the difference will be the Navy.” After a moment’s hesitation, MacArthur capped
his views by citing his own experience against the Japanese in the Pacific and
against the Chinese on the Korean peninsula. “I had command of the sea and
air,” he said, “but on the ground I was hopelessly outnumbered.” Kennedy
remained silent, but it is clear from the resulting conversation that he not
only understood MacArthur’s points, he embraced them. We know that to be true
because two months after speaking with MacArthur, Kennedy faced down the Soviet
Union when they deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba. Pushed by his military
commanders to bomb Cuban missile sites, to gather military units for an
invasion—to even contemplate the use of nuclear weapons—Kennedy decided
otherwise. He chose instead a naval blockade. It was a brilliant choice, though
not simply because it worked: the Russians couldn’t match the U.S. Navy, not
anywhere, and particularly not in the Caribbean.
♦♦♦
What
is surprising about the MacArthur-Kennedy discussions is not that they actually
took place, but that they have been so long ignored. The reason for that might
seem obvious: the two are poorly matched. MacArthur was a Midwesterner and a
Protestant, with a family history of military service, while Kennedy was a New
Englander, born a Roman Catholic in a family of enormous affluence. But while
the two came from different backgrounds and had different political tendencies
(MacArthur was a conservative and a Republican—Kennedy, manifestly, was not),
they had the same war in common, which made all the difference.
Which
is what made their three discussions, ranging over two years, so critical. In
effect, what MacArthur and Kennedy detailed in their three talks was a grand
strategy of the American Republic—a way of understanding not simply how the
U.S. should fight, but when and where. So it is that “never get involved in a
land war in Asia” is as indelibly tied to MacArthur as the term
“military-industrial complex” is to Eisenhower. Ironically (for MacArthur
disliked Eisenhower intensely), both MacArthur and Eisenhower believed that the
U.S. could maintain its military dominance, but not at the cost of weakening
its economy. For both men, stripping America’s economic strength to the point
of financial insolvency was a sure guarantee of military defeat.
Of
course, senior military officers regularly (though privately) scorn the idea of
shaping (much less detailing) a grand strategy. Their intuitions reflect
American military history. George Washington’s grand strategy was simply to
ensure that the Continental Army survived. So long as it did, the Revolution
remained alive. Ulysses S. Grant’s grand strategy during the Civil War was as
straightforward, if only slightly grander: destroy Lee’s army and you destroy
the rebellion, he told Lincoln. The war under his command would be bloody and
relentless—a 24-hour affair without pause or let-up. But it was General William
Tecumseh Sherman who put his finger on it, issuing a warning to the South that
would, in time, become the foundation for an American grand strategy. Who won
the war, he suggested, would have nothing to do with fighting prowess, but with
resources. “The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car,” he
told Southerners, “hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make.”
It
was only after World War I that military thinking about what constituted a
grand strategy began to emerge—and it reflected the insight of Sherman. The
introduction of America’s doughboys on the side of the Entente in 1917 changed
the calculus on the Western Front, but it wouldn’t have mattered at all had
they been unable to get there. Just as crucially, the arrival of American
divisions was accompanied by shiploads of more and better weapons, as America
started to shift towards what it would become in World War II: an arsenal of
democracy. The marriage of these two ideas, of overwhelming and relentless
force (the crueler war is, Sherman said, the sooner it will be over) with
overwhelming industrial production (the U.S. produced 4,000 long-range bombers
in World War II—the Germans and Japanese together produced zero), became the
foundation for America’s grand strategy, even as that strategy remained
unstated.
The
lesson thus learned is obvious for anyone debating the rationale for increased
American deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—where America’s industrial
might is checked by the sheer enormity of the geography and overwhelming
numbers and munitions have little effect on the enemy. Indeed, MacArthur,
Kennedy, and Eisenhower, the acknowledged leaders of “the greatest generation,”
would look skeptically on a foreign policy that features endless and costly wars
in faraway lands. It is not simply that if these men were alive today they
would withdraw America’s military from the Middle East; had they been alive and
in a position to do so, they would not have deployed them to begin with. But
even if they had—to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, for example—the deployment
would have been Shermanesque: short, but overwhelmingly violent.
Dwight
Eisenhower’s military mentor, World War I General Fox Conner, put it best when
tutoring Ike in the early 1920s, authoring a tryptic of lessons that have stood
the test of time. The U.S., he said, should never fight unless it absolutely
had to, should never fight alone, and, most importantly, should never fight for
long. To these lessons we can add a fourth, which Eisenhower would have
endorsed: never fight a land war in Asia.
Mark Perry is the author of The Most Dangerous Man in America and The Pentagon’s Wars. Follow
him on Twitter @markperrydc.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/macarthurs-last-stand-against-a-winless-war/
