GABRIELA VANAKEN: My name
is Gabriella VanAken, and I'm a senior biochemistry
major here at Hillsdale. I'm honored to introduce our
speaker for today, Dr. Arthur Herman. Dr. Herman is a senior fellow
at the Hudson Institute and director of its
Quantum Alliance Initiative where he works on quantum
computing and related quantum information technology. He received his PhD in
history from the John Hopkins University. Dr. Herman has been a
professor of history at Georgetown University,
Catholic University, George Mason University, and
the University of the South. He writes regularly for
Commentary, Foreign Policy, The American Interest,
Mosaic, Nikkei Asian Review, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author
of several books, including Gandhi and Churchill-- The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed
An Empire and Forged Our Age, which was a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, 1917, Lenin, Wilson, and
the Birth of the New World Disorder, and
Douglas MacArthur-- American Warrior. Please join me in welcoming
Dr. Arthur Herman. [APPLAUSE] ARTHUR HERMAN: Well, thank
you very much for a very sweet introduction. And hi, how are you? It's been a great
session, don't you think? The lectures have been great. The lectures have
been wonderful, the food and the drink has been
excellent, and it has been, I think, a really wonderful tour
of America's leading military heroes. And I know that we're--
all of us-- very, very grateful that Alan Guelzo
was able to finish his speech from last night. [APPLAUSE] You gave us a bit of a scare
there, my friend, last night, but it's really great to
have Alan back with us and up and operating. What I'm going to be doing-- and what's going to
happen today and tonight-- is we are now going
to nudge you none too gently into
the 20th century, into the violent century,
the most violent century probably in human history. And we'll be talking
about two figures. I will be talking about one,
and then Victor Davis Hanson we'll be talking about another
who spring out of that century and out of the conflicts
that are involved. But I think what you'll
see-- and I will certainly say this for the person
I'll be talking about, Douglas MacArthur--
is you will definitely see traces of that
earlier century, of a more courteous age, of
an age which place values on things such as honor,
courage, dedication to duty, and dedication to
country and God that reflect those earlier
traditions in ways that are really quite striking and
quite amazing to think about. So I'm going to talk
about Douglas MacArthur, the subject of my 2016 book. And what I want to
do is to start out with understanding
just, shall we say, a quick overview
of his biography and of the remarkable
man that he was. But, as always,
when we're talking about the character of
any person, of any man, the place to start
is with the father. And you're not going to
understand Douglas MacArthur, the man, unless you understand
Arthur MacArthur, the father. Here he is. Every time I see this picture
of him in his tennis uniform, first, you think like it's a
kid dressed up for a military. What happened there? [INAUDIBLE] You think it's a kid dressed
up for a Halloween costume or for a costume ball. And that is until you look
into the eyes and the mouth of the man that's
standing there, this 16-year-old here who has
enlisted in the 24th Wisconsin regiment and who quickly rises
from basically an adjutant role to, finally, by the
end of his service during the Civil
War to full Colonel. It's a service which earns
him two serious wounds, earns him the Medal of Honor
at the siege of Chattanooga with the taking of Lookout
Mountain in which he leads his regiment, the 24th
Wisconsin, up the mountain, carrying his regimental flag. And it's said that what he cried
out is leading his troops up-- on Wisconsin became
the state motto. And I know there is some
of you here from Wisconsin. So that's definitely
information that you're going to want to write
down and take note of. But a man whose bravery under
fire, whose skill and command, and whose leadership
in battle was such that by the end of the war,
he had risen to full Colonel, even though he was still
not old enough to vote. Against all family advice, he
decided to remain in the Army at the war's end, even
as the nation demobilized and the number of position
and posts in which to serve in the US Army
drastically diminished. So he ended up taking
himself and his family-- his wife, who was
actually a southern lady, a kind of real-life
version of Scarlett O'Hara, in many ways, who became
known by her family nickname of Pinky. It will be very important
to the formation. Why does this keep
bumping up one slide more? That's not what I want. Oh, there we go. Where was I? Oh, yeah, talking
about the family-- to a series of
remote Army outposts. In fact, the life that you see
of your average US Army cavalry or infantry captain on the
frontier in the John Ford movies, that was Arthur
MacArthur's life. That was the life he
led in 1870s and 1880s. It's the life into which Douglas
MacArthur was born in an Army barracks in Arkansas
and the life that he would dedicate himself
to for the rest of his-- until the very end
of his life here because he very quickly followed
in his father's footsteps, his revered father's
footsteps, into the Army. He would go to West Point,
where he was heavily involved in both
athletics and academics. We see him here as manager
of the Harvard football team. That's him. Why does it do that, guys? I don't want to move-- I want to stay at the one
slide till I'm ready to go. If there's a way to fix
that, that'd be great. [LAUGHTER] Even better. Do we lose it altogether,
or are we coming back? Anyway, his time at
West Point with such that he was, without doubt,
the most accomplished graduate of West Point since
Robert E. Lee. The academic records
that he scored would stand as records
for years and decades to come in the course of that. Then when we get our
pictures back, what we'll do is we'll see him as he makes
his move into active service during the First World War. And it's during
that active service that he will be awarded no
less than seven silver stars in action in combat
there and will rise to the rank of Brigadier
General, the youngest Brigadier General
in the US Army, and eventually even to
Major General in spite of a long-standing
record of insubordination and disobedience to orders to
superiors, which he establishes first during the First
World War and then goes on to become part of his
pattern of life going out. We can talk more about
that a little bit. Then after World War I, he's
asked to take over his alma mater, West Point, where
he becomes the youngest superintendent of West Point
in its history and carries out a series of reforms of
the curriculum to update the institution from its
19th-century roots and from a curriculum that Robert
E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant would have recognized
to one that it's now going to include-- there we are-- there he is getting his
Distinguished Service Cross from General Pershing. They didn't get along. There were constant
conflicts between them. Pershing was also competing
for the affections of the woman that MacArthur would
eventually marry. That added an extra shall we say
juicy dimension to the rivalry between the two men. But even Pershing, for all
of his dislike for what he saw as MacArthur's arrogance,
for his affected airs, for his inability it seems to
straightforwardly follow orders that he were given
had to admit he was a first-rate officer
and a first-rate commander and one of the bravest
men many ever met. A testimony, by the way, which
he shared with General George Patton when Patton got to know
him in the First World War and saw him under action, wrote
back to his family and said, this is the bravest
man I've ever seen in my life, Douglas MacArthur. So there he is as
superintendent at West Point, then after that goes on to a
series of other military posts, and takes off time in 1928 to
become president of the Olympic Committee and takes the
American Olympic team to the Olympic games
in the Netherlands. This was a landmark event in
the history of the Olympics, by the way, because it really
was Douglas MacArthur who created the modern
American Olympic Committee and effort in it. He was determined that
in the course of what happened in those games that
the United States would come out ahead and take the lead in it. And so he took a personal
interest in everything that happened and unfolded
in the course of the games. His motto that he gave to his
coaches and to the participants all the way through is,
Americans never quit. This is a show of
who we are, what happens in the Olympic
games, and how many medals we carried away. And, in fact, they carried
away a record number of medals, 24 of
them, more, in fact, gold medals, more gold medals
than the next two countries combined, Germany and Finland. They set 17 Olympic
records at the 1928 games, American athletes did,
and seven world records. And American Olympic effort
would never be the same again. He set a standard for what
American Olympic performance and American sports, in
general, would have to achieve. There was embodied
in American sports an aspect of American
character that was expressed through
winning and through competing at the highest possible level. It's one of the aspects
of Douglas MacArthur that he brings to the cultural
table of the United States, as well as to his
military career. Then comes an outbreak
in World War II, when he is in the Philippines,
commanding US forces there after being
bottlenecked there by the surprise Japanese
attack and making a dramatic escape
from Corregidor to Australia to regroup and to
rearm the United States to take back the Philippines
and the other parts of the Southwest Pacific
theater which he's engaged in. He manages in 1944 to
fulfill his promise that he made to the Filipinos
before he left Corregidor. I shall return. And he does return
in October 1944 with a dramatic landing
at late day near Tacloban on the eastern coast. And he makes this dramatic
radio announcement to the citizens
of the Philippines that he has returned and that a
time has come for them to rally against their Japanese occupiers
and that freedom has finally come. The 4,000-mile trek of return
back to the Philippines and then to push on
to Japan is complete. Then after Japan's surrender,
he will again participate in one of the major events-- starting points of
the postwar world when he arrives
at Atzugi Airport in order to receive
the Japanese surrender. And this moment became one
of the most important really for the development of the
American occupation in Japan in the entire post-war period
because, as you can see as MacArthur descends down the
staircase here from the plane-- from his private
plane, which the baton which he had arrived
from the Philippines. He arrived unarmed
carrying no sidearms and insisted that everyone in
his party carry no sidearms. This was at a time
when there was still enormous fear about
Japanese snipers at large in the country. He was even warned not
to land at Atzugi at all without a massive armed escort. They said, do you
realize there is a training camp for banzai
pilots here at Atzugi? We've got 8,000
banzai pilots here who are just
waiting for a chance to get their hands on
you if they possibly can. You're crazy to come here. You're crazy at
least not to come without a massive military
escort in the process. He said, no, we're
going to go do it. We're going to go
unarmed in the process. It was part of the step, part
of the psychological operation that MacArthur was
engaged in post-war Japan to make the Japanese realize
that the United States was there not as occupiers,
but as partners in building a new Japan
and a new partnership in Asia, which was,
of course, very much reflected also in the major
ceremony, which took place at the signing of the
surrender terms for Japan and for the Allied
nations, which MacArthur presided over and
announced over worldwide hookup on radio. And when the signing of
the treaty was completed, MacArthur was able to announce
that the hostilities have ceased, not that the
Japanese have surrendered. But hostilities have ceased. All of the Japanese delegates at
the signing recognized at once. It was translated to what he
was saying what it really meant. And that was again that
this was a celebration not of Japan's surrender and
humiliation, but of a new era-- new era for Asia,
a new era for Japan and a new set of
relationships for US and Japan partnership in the
future, which is really what MacArthur's role
as then overseeing the occupation of
Japan really involved. Well, the story doesn't end
there because five years-- less than five
years-- after the end of the war, North Korean
forces invade South Korea on the 25th of June 1950. And MacArthur is put
in the role of trying to reverse this
desperate situation and to prevent
catastrophe and the loss of the entire Korean
peninsula to the communists. And so he conceives this plan-- this brilliant
plan-- of a surprise amphibious landing at Inchon,
which all of the experts says it will not work. This is not going to happen. You understand
everything is against you in carrying this kind of
thing out-- the meteorological conditions, the tides. It simply is not
going to succeed. And he goes ahead and
goes ahead and does it, despite even objections from
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He persuades them
that he knows what he's doing, that
destiny will not let him fail at this endeavor. And so in September of 1950,
he leads the amphibious landing at Inchon, and it completely
reverses the course of the war and enables the
Allied forces, the UN forces not only to recapture
Seoul, the capital of South Korea, but also to capture
Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and to bring
the possibility of the unification of
Korea into as close to reality as it has ever been. So that's the man. That's a hell of a record. That's a hell of a resume
when you think about it-- a leader, a war commander, a
general in three world wars-- World War I and Korea
and the Cold War-- a man whose military record
is one that involves not only enormous bravery and
courage under fire, but also includes
one of the most important strategic
operations ever conducted by an American
military commander, the landing at Inchon. And you can include other
of his decisions made during the war in
the Pacific as also fitting into the operations
of a true strategic genius, I think, in the carrying
out of his war record and of his war accomplishments. So I should be done. I mean, that takes
care of the whole case. But there is a problem here. And the problem is that when
we look at Douglas MacArthur's record in that way and we lay
it out decade by decade war by war, it's hugely impressive. It's stellar. So why is Douglas MacArthur's
reputation so lousy? Why is it that for decades,
he's been looked down upon? He's been derided,
been traduced, been subjected to any
number of types of attacks and of slurs on
his character, even on his own physical bravery. Many stories, for
example, rumors that go around about his
escape from Corregidor was a means by which he was able
to avoid the possibility of-- abandon his troops and fled
out of fear of physical danger, the idea promoted by a
contemporary historian, by the way, that,
in fact, that he bribed the president
of the Philippines in order to made them pay
a bribe in order to escape from Corregidor himself. I've heard one story-- I was told this when I was
working in the MacArthur archives in Norfolk, Virginia-- that he chose the place
for the landing at Leyte in the liberation
of the Philippines at Tacloban because his
mistress had a house there. And that this was, in fact,
why he chose the landing. Douglas MacArthur
didn't have a mistress. There never was a mistress. It's a completely made-up
story, and yet people make these kinds of
stories up all the time. And even that photograph
that I started with of his landing at Leyte
there, even the stories that, in fact, that
was all staged, that was rehearsed, or even done
on and filmed on a safe beach somewhere, even before he
arrived in the Philippines, and so on. It's not true. It's not true. What the film showed and
what the photographs show is what really happened. The damn amphibious vehicle
got stuck on a sandbar, and they had to get off
and water up to their hips and jump out. MacArthur had done it
before in other landings in the southwest Pacific too. It was nothing new for him. But given the fact that
this was taking place while the beach was
still under fire and where snipers were still
100 yards away, taking potshots at anything that
moved on the beach, it was, again, a story
almost too good to be true. And I think that's true of
a lot of MacArthur's career. It's almost too good to be true. And I think that's one
reason why, in many ways, the efforts to
denigrate his career and to smear his
character tend to stick because he does seem
to be almost too good to be true as a figure. So what I want to do is I want
to spend some time talking a little bit about why I think
Douglas MacArthur has been treated as
discourtesly as he has and why that stands out, in many
ways, as a part of his career, compared to his other
generals in World War II. I mean, look at Patton-- Patton gets a great movie with
George C. Scott and a fantastic soundtrack with it too
and George Marshall, who's also revered as a sort
of demigod, in many ways, as a general, and
Eisenhower who, again, treated with reverence
and with enormous respect, even by Hollywood. I mean, if anybody had seen the
Tom Selleck portrayal of Dwight Eisenhower in the days
leading up to D-day-- it's a wonderful
movie, by the way-- but it's a great
portrayal of Eisenhower as being a man to be
admired, a man dealing with difficult situations. And what does MacArthur get? He gets a movie. He's portrayed by Gregory Peck. It's a terrible movie
if you've ever seen it. It's based on the William
Manchester book, which has enormous biography,
which has enormous flaws and many problems. In fact, one of
the reasons I wrote the book was because I got
impatient with the Manchester book and its treatment
of MacArthur, especially in the
later years here. And the soundtrack
is hideous as well-- just not up to standards. So why? Why does all this happen? Well, let me give
you what I think are some answers for this. The first is that
he is a man who lived on the edge of the
unconventional in everything that he did. Everything he did was a slap
in the face to the commonplace and to the standard
way of operating, including in his own
military service. And when we think
of him, there he is with his trademark
pipe and hat with a gold braid, which
he had designed himself while he was field marshal of
the Philippine land forces. If we actually turn the clock
back about 30 years to 1914, when he was a part of the
Army landings at Vera Cruz, he's already there. That's him. That's him. He's got the even got the
corncob pipe at this point as a young lieutenant. And there he is with
his letter sweater from West Point
and his suspenders and the tie around
his neck and so on. That is not standard
US Army uniform-- just want to let you know. And it's at the same
time, it's by the way, at that same expedition
that he's there that he performs one of
his most amazing feats and exploits of bravery,
venturing into in enemy territory in order to
make a reconnaissance about the railroad stock that
the Mexican Army had on hand that had to be blown up
that was clearly recommended for a medal of honor. There was no doubt about it. But there's also no doubt
that this guy, this kid is someone who is not going
to get a medal of honor, not when you act like this,
not when you behave like that. Even if you're Arthur
MacArthur's son, still, there are limits to what
we're going to put up with. And it was just something
about Douglas MacArthur that grated on
conventional minds and the standard-issue military
might, and that never changed. That was going to be true in
World War I, for example too. There he is, by the way, second
figure on the left in combat and going over the
top in trench warfare. He never wore a helmet. No one could get him
to wear a helmet. He was always wearing
that strange forage cap of his, which was
actually Army regulation cap from which he had pulled
out the iron brace from inside-- the one that keeps it erect-- so it had that sort of
crushed, flattened look that went with it. Probably picked that up from
some of the Royal Flying corps officers who had a sort
of a casual dashing look to it, at the same time. The young American aviator
by the name of Billy Mitchell came by to see him and
saw the cap and said, I want one of those too. So he pulled out the iron
brace from his cap as well. And it became, again, sort of
the standard look for our Army aviators right through
to World War II. If you look at that
hat and associate it with the cockpit on
a B-17, for example, you've got yourself a
scene from 12 o'clock high. That's where that
hat and that's where that costume came through-- from Douglas MacArthur
via Billy Mitchell. But everything about him in
that-- he's a staff officer, but he goes over the top-- goes over the top with
the regular troops because he says he
needs to see what's really happening on the ground. He can't learn what's
really taking place in the fighting and the terrain. If he's going to stay
back at headquarters, he's got to be in the front
but doesn't wear a helmet, doesn't carry a weapon, no
sidearm, couldn't be bothered. He says, why do I want
something like that? Just get in the way. He doesn't carry a
gas mask bag either. And, in fact, he's
going to be very badly gassed during the fighting
in the Argonne forest as a result of that-- pays
for that little quirk of his. But this is the Douglas
MacArthur who evolves. This is one who is constantly
defying the standard-issue view of how he should act
and how he should behave under all circumstances. And the iconic Douglas MacArthur
that we know from World War II and from Korea is
really a man who is the product of that
unconventionality. The second reason I think why
MacArthur's reputation is not perhaps as high as it is-- and it's not unexpected,
given the fact that he is someone who defies
the conventional and everything else-- is the fact that he never
hesitates to tell superiors what he really thinks of them. And this is going to get
you in trouble, by the way, including in institutions
like the United States Army if you do that. But, again, it's an
irrepressible part of MacArthur's ways of doing
things, starting with General Pershing during World
War I and then continuing on when he becomes chief
of staff for the US Army under Franklin Roosevelt. And
you have this picture of them here, and they're sort
of looking very chummy and sharing a jovial moment. There weren't a lot of
those between Roosevelt and MacArthur. MacArthur all through
the 1920s and 1930s was absolutely convinced
that the United States military budget had been cut too
much, that it had been sliced to the bone and then some,
and he has constant battles, both with Congress and with
the White House about ways in which to raise the Army
budgets and authorizations for funds, after
one particularly bruising confrontation with
Roosevelt in the White House. In fact, MacArthur, when he
stepped out onto the White House steps, threw up. The tension had been so
bad that he basically lost it afterwards. And, of course, he lost
more battles than he won. But the sort of
bruising contests that he was engaged in
with regard with regard to Franklin Roosevelt
was one of the reasons-- it's not the primary reason--
and one of the reasons why Roosevelt felt
free to call him the most dangerous man in
America, along with Huey Long. And it was also one reason why
Roosevelt encouraged MacArthur to take up the post of commander
in chief of Philippine forces and to go to the Philippines and
resign his commission in the US Army in order to take up
that post in the country that his father,
Arthur MacArthur, had helped to liberate and to
restructure after the Spanish American War and in which
he had served for many years as a young officer and
then as a major general. That kind of confrontation with
superiors would continue during World War II where he and
Roosevelt again had constant bruising battles over
the course of the war, about whether the war
should be focused on Europe, as opposed to being
focused in Asia, contests about what part of
the Pacific War it should be focused on as well because the
Navy had pushing on-- you can see on the right
there, Admiral Nimitz-- had their own conception of how
to win the war in the Pacific and the direction
in which US forces and US resources
should be committed. And MacArthur had
very different ideas about the way in which the
war should be conducted, that it should be
one that conducted through the southwest
Pacific to final liberation of the Philippines and
then use the Philippines as a springboard for the
ultimate invasion of Japan whereas Nimitz and the
Air Force and the Navy saw a push through the Central
Pacific that would finish up in Formosa, Taiwan. And then that would
become the base for eventual invasion of Japan. In the end, MacArthur never
won his contest with Nimitz, but he was able to ensure that
both thrusts into the Pacific received equal time--
or close to equal time and equal commitment. And that when the two arms
of US effort in the Pacific met that he would assume
supreme command of the forces as they assembled together for
the final approach on Japan. So you see the Douglas
MacArthur who would ultimately confront Harry Truman over the
conduct of the war in Korea-- I'm going to say a little
bit more about that in detail in a little bit-- that that Douglas
MacArthur is one who had already been schooled
in this approach to dealing with superiors. And that is that if you know
you're right, tell them so. And if you know they're wrong,
then definitely tell them so. Whether it's a general or
whether it's a president, you have the privilege
and the responsibility to point out their mistakes and
to tell them why you are right and why they are wrong. And that ultimate
confrontation then in February of 1951 between
Truman and MacArthur has this long buildup-- a long pattern of behavior
on the part of MacArthur, that as I said,
what's amazing is when you think about
someone who takes that kind of truculent
attitude with regards to his bosses and
his superiors, it's amazing he had the career he
did under those circumstances. I think it's proof of the
degree to which even those who thoroughly dislike Douglas
MacArthur had to respect him, if not actually
fear him, and were able to give him the
promotions and give him the responsibilities of
command that they knew, really against their will, that
he was capable of fulfilling. Now that landing at Inchon-- the landing at
Inchon, that was again the final result of
confrontation with the White House, with Truman's senior
advisors with the Joint Chiefs of Staff here really
brings us then to where Douglas MacArthur's
ability to defy criticism and to prevail really
reached its height because of the landing of Inchon is it
led to the occupation of Seoul and then to the
liberation of Pyongyang were really the result of
that final strategic move. I just put this slide up
there because I love it. It doesn't really have any
business doing it in this. But it's a wonderful
photograph of this squad of Marines in the process
of retaking Seoul. That is an action
photograph, let me tell you, these guys looking for looking
for North Korean snipers as they're going
through the operations to free Seoul from
the communists-- love that picture. Now to the third reason why
Douglas MacArthur I think has been treated badly by
historians and by posterity, particularly posterity
on the left side of the political aisle. And that is his
fierce anticommunism. No doubt about that--
this played a big role in seeing Douglas MacArthur
in a very different light than other military
figures of the 20th century who have not been so
strident and have not been so forthright in their
detestation of communism in all of its works. It was that hatred of
communism, for example, that led him to take the
very strong line with regard to the Bonus Army marchers when
they descended on Washington in 1932 and his decision
that they would simply not be allowed to stay and they
had to go, in large part, because he feared, as
I explain in the book with some justification,
that the Bonus Army marchers actually had been
infiltrated by elements of the Communist Party of
the United States of America who saw that mass occupation
of the nation's capital as a prelude to
possible revolution, certainly to large-scale
street violence, not just in Washington,
but around the country. And so as for this
reason that MacArthur believed that even though
the Bonus marchers' cause may possibly have been just
that their methods were unjust and wrong and
that they therefore had to be forced
out of their camps that they had pitched
on the National Mall. Now it has to be said--
and if you read my book, you'll get the
details about this-- that the violence
that was involved, the shooting and killing
of Bonus marchers and so on was not by
MacArthur or by his troops. It was by the DC police. If any force was really out
of control in the Bonus march confrontation, it
was the DC police. It was left to
MacArthur and the Army to pick up the pieces from
the mess and the debacle that they had caused. But it was a violent
confrontation. It was one that ruined the
reputation of the Hoover administration who
the White House had given the final order to
evict the Bonus Army marchers. And it almost certainly was the
final straw for finishing off any chance of Hoover
being re-elected in 1932, not just the
Depression, but also the debacle of the
Bonus march and the way in which it was put out. But MacArthur's
anti-communist statements regarding the Bonus
marchers would come to haunt him in
the leftist press. And they very quickly
made him the key villain in the whole story
of the Bonus march. There were even
stories that circulated in the Daily Worker-- of all
places, the communist Daily Worker-- that MacArthur
had led the charge against the unarmed Bonus
marchers on a white horse here in this marvelous cavalry
charge, all made up, of course. There's no truth
to it whatsoever. But it made him an easy
target and a favorite target for the leftist press. That was going to get worse,
of course, after his dismissal by Harry Truman in 1951
because of their disagreements on the policy in the
conduct of the war in Korea. And his speech to the
joint session of Congress when he returned to the
United States to rapturous crowds of millions of people in
every city that he and his wife stopped in on the way back
on the way to Washington. And that speech to
the joint session of Congress, the famous one that
ends "old soldiers never die," that speech contained a
strong anti-communist message and made it clear that the
Truman administration's policy was inadequate for keeping
the forces of communism from being on the march in Asia. And, again, it also
helped to make then MacArthur a favorite
target on the liberal press and liberal media and
defenders of Truman as being someone whose dismissal
was not just a matter of result of disagreements over policy
in how to conduct war in Korea, but had been a gross
violation of the separation between military
and civilian command of the armed forces here,
almost to the point of treating MacArthur as if he
had almost staged a kind of coup against the
government by his refusal and by his public pronouncements
about the Truman policy on the war in Korea. The Republican Congress that
took up the investigation into MacArthur's firing
probably didn't help the case very much because instead of
concentrating their efforts on the merits and demerits
for MacArthur's dismissal, were obsessed with
the idea that there were secret communists
in the Truman White House who had engineered this thing
at the behest of Moscow. There simply was no evidence
to support such claims. But it did a lot to dissipate
the energies and the focus of those hearings on
MacArthur's dismissal and again helped to
make the Truman forces and those supporters seem
more right than wrong in the course of the discussion. And just that fact then led
to the other major factor in the turning of the nation's
view about Douglas MacArthur because it became an industry,
especially for historians linked to Democrat party and
to the Truman administration, people like Arthur Schlesinger,
for example, to suggest that what they saw as
MacArthur's disastrous policy in Korea, which had
led to his dismissal is the charge, that
that had a long history of military failures,
stretching all the way back to the Philippines when
he had been caught flat footed by the Japanese
attack on December 7-- time to occur at the same time
as the attack on Pearl Harbor. And that a series of major
mistakes by MacArthur had led to the failure and the
collapse of American resistance in the Philippines of
a disgraceful episode in America's military history,
which MacArthur had fled from by escaping
from Corregidor, overlooking the fact that
MacArthur, as I explained in my book, had quite set for
himself the idea that he was going to die at Corregidor,
die with the rest of his troops and that it was
Roosevelt's order that he leave the Philippines
and go to Australia to assume command of American forces
to relieve the Philippines. It was that direct order
which he at the end decided he could not disobey
and that led him to lead himself and his family and his staff
to leave the island fortress. And, of course, what's easy
to forget is that the missteps and the failures that had taken
place in the Philippines were also then matched from the
point of the [? liberal ?] [? trends ?] by what had
happened in the Korea where it was argued MacArthur had failed
to understand the dangers that [? we ?] run by having US
forces advance as far north as the Yalu River
and that China-- the communist China--
then in reaction to that American thrust
then poured troops across the border, catching
MacArthur's forces by surprise and triggering a massive
panicked retreat to the south, to the far southern
end of the peninsula and leading to such
military disasters as the entrapment at
[? Chu Sin ?] at the reservoir there and the long, bloody
retreat from out of North Korea into the south. Here all of this-- get more examples, historians
and biographers would claim and critics would claim-- just one more example
of MacArthur's flawed military
judgment and inability to learn from his own mistakes. Of course, what
this overlooked was, number one, in the
case of the Philippines that MacArthur did actually
get to the Philippines, did actually muster
together American forces and Australian forces to
begin the process of pushing the Japanese out of
the South Pacific, starting in New Guinea. And MacArthur,
what MacArthur was able to do was to do
this by pressing forward with a new way of thinking
about military warfare, and that was as what we would
call today combined arms operations, involving forces
at sea, forces at land and forces in the air,
a series of surprise amphibious landings
backed by airpower that would enable
the US to turn what would seem to be an
insuperable obstacle to coherent military operations,
this vast archipelago spread out across all of these,
this vast stretch of ocean, and to turn what would seem to
be a disadvantage for US forces into an advantage, that you could strike where
the Japanese least expected it and could overwhelm the
Japanese garrisons and islands one by one, a strategy that
became known as island hopping. And in the process,
by doing so, MacArthur not only found a way in
which he could defeat the Japanese piecemeal in
ways that they could not keep up with and could not
reinforce their positions. But at the same
time, he found a way in which to save American lives. That the amphibious landings,
catching the enemies in the rear when
they least expected it was actually a way in which
you kept casualties down, compared to the full
frontal assaults that places like Tarawa and
later at Iwo Jima and then later at Okinawa. And we have to say
one of the reasons why MacArthur was so
well liked by his troops and by his junior officers was
he kept him alive at a time when many of their fellow
Marines or many Army fellow Army officers and
soldiers were being killed in large numbers in the Central
Pacific campaigns here-- highly successful
operational strategy that also turned
into one that could be used to reduce American
casualties while accelerating Japanese ones. And then, of course,
that also set the stage-- that campaign in the
Pacific and the route that he had taken
in order to get there with the liberation
of the Philippines, first and foremost in his mind-- also set the stage
for the next stage, which was the occupation
and liberation of Japan, for giving Japan a new reason
for life as a civilized community, and this photograph--
the photograph of MacArthur in his basically Army fatigues-- by the way, the
uniform he always wore without decorations,
with just a mark, just the insignia of
his rank, standing next to the Emperor
Hirohito, a god to his people before and during the war,
sent shockwaves across Japan when that photograph appeared. It was as shocking as it would
be to see an American president standing next to a Martian,
which is, in effect, what Americans were from the point
of view of the Japanese. So remote was their culture,
so remote was their country and values here. It was a real signal
that a new era has come, for better or
for worse, for Japan. You better get used to it
because the emperor has already gotten used to it and realized
this is the new existence. This is the new Japan of
which I'm going to be part. And within two years,
the Japanese people came to realize that MacArthur,
far from being a conqueror, was, in fact, a
liberator, that he was a man who had brought
a new era to Japan and a new era for Asia as
a whole in the process. And when you go to Tokyo and
you go to [INAUDIBLE] insurance building, which is where
he was headquartered-- the old insurance building
is gone, of course. It's the modern one. Up in the floor,
they have preserved and have reconstructed
MacArthur's office there-- really a tribute
to a figure who is, I would say, much
more a hero in Japan than he is here,
really, in many ways, just as he is as
much more of a hero in Korea because
of his liberation of Seoul during the Korean
War than he is here as well. It's ironic. It's ironic-- an
American general who was celebrated
more by foreigners to appreciate what he did
than he is by Americans. And what I also
have to say about him too is that,
in those years, we come to realize that the
person who really made all of this possible for MacArthur,
who really held him together for all those years of
strife and of tension was his wife, Jean
MacArthur, amazing woman from Murfreesboro, Tennessee,
his second wife and the one with whom he finally found
domestic peace and domestic support all through his career. She is, I think, one of the
key factors in how MacArthur was able to function with that
degree of confidence and skill through, say, all the ups
and downs of the career that went with it. And when I wrote
the biography, I had the privilege of
being the first historian to use her oral biography in the
archives as part of the book. It was new material-- brand
new unreleased material, which I was able to
incorporate into the biography. And it was a real
privilege to be able to work through
that material and to integrate it into it. Now [? I should ?] say a final
word about the other aspect of Douglas MacArthur
that makes him, I think, also unique among
American generals perhaps and also certainly among
American political figures. And that was the
degree of vision that he brought to his
work and to his value. He thought of himself not simply
as a general in military terms, but generals in the
broadest strategic terms at the same time here. And what I have to say is
that, in many ways MacArthur, when we look at
his career, we look at the way in which he
envisioned himself acting on the world stage, which he
became accustomed to at a very young age with his experience
during the First World War and after that in
many ways he was a person who saw the
future more clearly than he saw the present. And that's a quality, I
think, that historians can come to recognize that
perhaps sometimes escapes contemporaries. And I think the best
example of this in many ways is the way in which he came to
understand the forces at work in dynamics in
world politics that were at work in the Korean War. For Truman and his
policymakers, the Korean War was very much seen
through the prism of the conflict between the
free world and the communism-- not surprisingly,
not surprisingly. That's absolutely
part of the story. There's no doubt about that. But MacArthur saw it in a
slightly different regard. And it was regarded that he
supplied to General Marshall when Marshall in the fall
of 1950 when it became clear that Chinese were now pouring
across the border that entered into this conflict when
Marshall wrote to him and sort of said, what do you
think the Chinese are up to? And so MacArthur
told him in a cable-- the cable, which I found
in the MacArthur archives. It's not been published
before but which I talk about in the book. And here's what he says
about the Chinese entrance into the war in Korea. He says, there are
activities in Korea throughout have been
offensive, never defensive-- blows away the whole argument
that the reason the Chinese had entered the conflict was
because the Americans got too close to the Yalu River. And now, by the
way, subsequently looking through
Chinese archives, we know that this was true. Mao was preparing for
this war the moment the very first American troops
arrived in the Korean peninsula in August of 1950. He was ready to
go to war already because he saw this as a
huge opportunity for China and for what China was
going to accomplish. So what is on display
in Korea, MacArthur wrote, is a Chinese
nationalism of increasingly dominant regressive
tendencies that was spawned 50 years before
during the Boxer Rebellion and has been brought to
its greatest fruition under the present Mao regime. The result, he said,
has been the creation of a new and dominant
power in Asia, which for its own purposes is
Allied with the Soviet Union but which in its own
concepts and methods has become increasingly
and aggressively imperialistic with
a lust for expansion and for increased power. He said, it's true that China's
aims are now currently aligned with that of the Soviet
Union, but the aggression shown in Korea, as well
as Indo China and Tibet, says that Peking was
following its own line of expansionist conquest. On the one hand, it showed the
Chinese were not automatically Soviet satellites, as so many
in the Truman administration had assumed. On the other hand,
MacArthur wrote, when they reach the fullness
of their military potential. I dread to think
what may happen. Now, I don't think you can find
anyone in American politics anywhere in 1950 who
would be able to see with such prescience the
conflict in which we live today and be aware of how
aware it was coming and how it was
coming about here. And in fact, when we think
about it in that light, we can see that even now
today, China's first island chain strategy that it
has developed as a means by which to break out
from the Eurasian landmass and to become a dominant
player in world politics. The first island chain
that we can see here extending from Japan all the
way down to the northern Borneo, the Philippines, the second
island chain that extend out as far as Guam to New Guinea. Their whole idea of the
island chain strategy, they stole from MacArthur. He was the one who developed
that during the Korean War, that the way in which
to contain China was by a strong US presence
and a string of bases that would hold together what he
called the first island chain. And what the Chinese
simply did was to steal MacArthur's
terminology and his strategy and turn it inside out. Instead of the first island
chain being a way in which to [? him ?] China in contain
it, becomes a way for China to break out and to become the
dominant power in the region and the area here. And that same strategy,
those elements that have gone on to the
rise of contemporary China-- the rise of China
which envisaged itself not only as a great land power,
but now as a great maritime power with a Navy able to rival
that of the United States, the Navy ready to displace
American presence, not just in the South China
Sea and the East China Sea, but across the Pacific here. And even the rise of China
as a major technological and high-tech power, how
it envisions itself as a power in terms
of the development of artificial intelligence,
of becoming the world's leading AI-driven
country by 2025 as part of their overall plans. Their plans and quantum
technology and quantum computing, which I know
a lot about these days, as a matter of fact, all of
these things are, in effect, previewed and predicted in
MacArthur's memo from October 1950 here, and I think that
strategic vision and ability to contain to encapsulate
and understand that strategic vision. here is, I think, what puts
MacArthur in a class by himself here. And just as I think
MacArthur clearly saw the forces at work, the
correlation of forces at work, in the conflict
in Korea, I think he is a figure who if
he were with us today, here today, would understand the
correlations of forces at work today in terms of the
competition between the US and China. I think we miss him
more than we realize. And we miss his vision perhaps
more than we can contemplate. But the historical
record is clear. The man stands above the critics
and above the detractors. His record stands I think
as one which reaches, in terms of its global
reach, surpasses that of any other
American statesman, let alone American general. And I think it's one why
he very much believes belongs in the select company
of great American generals and leaders that we've been
talking about all week. I'm actually done. So we're all set to go. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] So we want to clear some
time for some questions, and I'm happy to field them. I think what you have to do
is they want you to go up to the people holding-- the
students holding a microphone, and then you can
shoot away, fire away. SPEAKER: Thank you, Dr. Herman. Just a quick announcement-- Dr. Herman will be signing
a copy of his book, Douglas MacArthur-- American Warrior in the Searle
lobby immediately following the lecture. And we now have time
for a few questions. So if you please step forward. ARTHUR HERMAN: I'm not going
to leave you with this slide, by the way. Let's get the man himself
up there, shall we? Much better, much better. AUDIENCE: Good afternoon, sir. Thank you very
much for your time coming out here to
Hillsdale today. I greatly enjoyed your lecture. ARTHUR HERMAN: Thank you. AUDIENCE: I did have a
question about a comment made regarding the William Manchester
biography on American Caesar. Manchester, in that
book, specifically makes a comment about his
relationship with the Marine Corps during the
Pacific campaign. And correct me if I'm
wrong on the account. I believe Manchester makes the
comment that MacArthur omitted Marines from unit citations
that were under his command during the Pacific campaign,
specifically making the comment and I quote, "they had
their Belleau Wood." Would you be able
to confirm or debunk if there is any truth
in that and provide any further comment on his
relationship with the Marines? ARTHUR HERMAN: No, I
don't think that that's there's any kind of great
accuracy to that at all. I think that the difficulties
with the Marines that he had-- and they carried out a number
of important and really quite brutal operations, particularly
at Cape Gloucester-- really had to do with
disagreements between MacArthur and the Marine commanders. He's an Army guy. What do you want? The US Army was his service-- in his mind the service
to be supported. The Marines were, from that
point of view, of course, not as important in
the overall story. I think the other problem that
he had with the Marines too is that is that so much of
the resources that he did he believed he should have
had from the Marine Corps was all diverted into
the Central Pacific and was sent away there. I also don't necessarily trust
Manchester's account of this. Manchester himself
was a US Marine. So I'm sorry. I think he carries a
certain amount of bias in that regard in terms of
the development between it. You just saw my
picture of the man. He's going to have abrasive
relations with everyone. If you were to turn
to the accounts, as I do in my biography,
of Australian commanders in dealing with him too, they
were very, very, very, very friction-bound in the
dealings [? with it. ?] The Australians too often
complained about the fact that MacArthur took
away their autonomy, threw them away in
sideshow operations, didn't get their share of
declarations, and so on. It's interesting
how that constantly pops up in the case of
MacArthur that there's so much controversy surrounding
the issues about decorations and things like that. But the Manchester
biography, that's one of the reasons why
I wanted to replace it and to supplant it. The other reasons,
I think the chapters that he has on the
Korean War there are really inadequate as
well as totally misguided. There's a reason for
that, by the way. And that is that the masterful
biography, the biography of MacArthur, the
three-volume one by D. Clayton James, the third volume,
which is on Korea, hadn't been finished by the
time Manchester got started on his biography, wasn't done. So he didn't have
that to lean on in terms of his discussion
about documentation and about the overall
course of the war. He was sort of left
to his own devices. And I'm afraid his
own devices were not really adequate to the job
when it came to writing about MacArthur, just my view. Sir, what else? SPEAKER: We have time
for one more question. ARTHUR HERMAN: Just one more? SPEAKER: We have
time for two more. ARTHUR HERMAN: How about that? Give me another
[? turn then-- ?] yeah, please. SPEAKER: I was interested
in your comment about his ability to
see into the future. My father flew
B-29s in the Pacific during World War II as a
member of the First Photo Reconnaissance Squadron. And he always told
me that he thought MacArthur had great foresight
because, at the end of the war, before they were
allowed to come home, they were ordered to fly
mapping grids over all of Korea to map all of Korea. And I was wondering if
you would comment on whether you thought even
at that point in time that MacArthur was foreseeing
that there was going to be great trouble
there because that's what my father always thought? ARTHUR HERMAN: Well,
that's very interesting. I don't know. I couldn't tell you if that
orders were coming directly from MacArthur himself. You have to understand
that Korea was outside of his perimeter
of responsibility when he was supreme
commander and then afterwards as head of the Allied
occupation forces in Japan. The State Department
was in charge. Most people don't realize that. State Department was in
charge of postwar Korea, not MacArthur or the US Army. There was a military
mission there, but it was subordinate
to the State Department's responsibility. I'll tell you this-- and this perhaps is collateral
for your father's theory-- if MacArthur had been placed
in command of Korea as well as Japan, if it had
been incorporated into his Area Of
Responsibilities, his AOR, maybe the Korean
War may never have happened. It's quite possible
that he may have been able to take steps
that would have made a North Korean attack less
likely and certainly less devastating than
it actually was. AUDIENCE: On Okinawa? ARTHUR HERMAN: Yeah. Yeah, there he would have
been in MacArthur's AOR. There's no doubt about that. AUDIENCE: Thanks. AUDIENCE: Yes, sir. I was wondering if you
could talk on the perceived instability by the Joint
Chiefs of Staff in Washington on MacArthur towards the
end of the Korean War and on top of that, some
interviews that he gave after the war in the
mid-1950s about how he claimed his plan was to beat
back China by using up to 30 to 50 nuclear weapons
in the actual conflict that proceeded in China
and some weird talk that he gave about possibly
contaminating the land area to prevent the ease of
movement by the Chinese Army. And I was wondering
if you could talk about that kind of mentality? Because I think that's
why a lot of people look pretty unfavorably on him
towards the end of his career. ARTHUR HERMAN:
Yeah, that's right. I think there's also a
lot of misunderstanding surrounding that. So I'm glad you
asked the question. I can somewhat set the
record straight on that. The issue of the use of nuclear
weapons in the Korean conflict, we don't really know what
MacArthur's plan was while he was commander of UN forces. He had put that on the
table as an option, but it was an
option that already existed in which the
Joint Chiefs of Staff had already prepared for. Everyone understood
that nuclear weapons were a devastating weapon. The idea of using
nuclear weapons to attack Chinese cities
had absolutely no appeal for MacArthur. What was the point? The point of it
was that you would use nuclear weapons to create-- I'm going to use the
French, [FRENCH],, an impenetrable barrier in
which Chinese reinforcements for their forces in Korea
could not get through. That was part of standard
Joint Chiefs doctrine. Everybody had talked about
this as a possibility and the use of this. And MacArthur thought
that this could possibly be an option in that conflict. And the Joint Chiefs agreed. One of the declassified
documents that I got to see was one that involved
the actual flying out of components for an
atomic bomb to Tian Yang before MacArthur was fired
for that very possibility of the use of nuclear
weapons against China. Five years after Hiroshima
and Nagasaki of an event, which was seen as
having decisively knocked Japan out of
the war, it seemed to be not the great
horrific weapon that it's come to be
in modern imaginations. In 1950, it seemed a
decisive weapon of war. So you contemplated that. You contemplate that as a
battlefield theater weapon-- nothing unusual about that. So MacArthur's firing,
it wasn't for threatening to use nuclear weapons. Everybody accepted that. That would have been fair game. It wasn't really even for any
for disagreeing, disobeying orders, or anything like that. It was for a letter they had
sent to the Republican Speaker of the House, Joe
Martin, complaining about the failure of the
Truman administration to fully support
his policy in Korea, which was to push the
Chinese back to the border, to push them out of
North Korea altogether. Martin read the letter
without MacArthur's knowledge on the Florida house. And for MacArthur
and his advisors, that was the last straw. He had already made statements,
pronouncements to the press, talking complaining bitterly
about the way the Truman administration
had held him back, and had stayed his hand
in operations in Korea. And so the feeling was
that this constituted a form of insubordination
that they were simply we're not going to tolerate. And so he was gone. Was it insubordination? I conclude in the
book that it was. And I conclude in the
book in the final analysis that probably MacArthur
deserved to be fired. I think he knew he
was going to be fired. That's one of the reasons why
he wrote the letter to Martin. He knew it was coming. But it had nothing to
do with nuclear weapons, and nothing to do with
quote "widening the war, in that sense." It had to do with
instead of the fear that a renewed push
to the Chinese border would simply bring more Chinese
troops into the conflict. I don't know if
that's actually true. The Chinese were fully
committed into the war already, and MacArthur and
Ridgway's forces had devastated the
Chinese forces, perhaps as much as a
million Chinese volunteers-- Chinese troops have been killed
pushing back up through South Korea, up to the 30th parallel. It had been a massive slaughter. Mao really didn't have the
kinds of effective reserves to commit to a conflict
of this kind here as well. Ridgway agreed, by the
way with MacArthur. Ridgway agreed with MacArthur. That was how he envisioned
the campaign-- continue and a push all the way up
beyond the 30th parallel up to the Chinese-North Korean
border, reunify the peninsula. That was his view. And the Truman admission says
that's not going to happen. Our allies won't support it. We're stopping at
the 38th parallel. Ridgway said, that's fine. But Ridgway never
gets a reputation for being a warmonger--
quite the opposite. He is seen wrongly, as
the man who picked up the pieces that
MacArthur had left on the ground after the
Chinese attack here. I got a lot more
to say about this, but we've got more questions. SPEAKER: Actually, we don't have
time for any more questions-- ARTHUR HERMAN: Yeah, I would. I would. SPEAKER: --But
please give a round of applause for Dr. Herman. Thank you so much. [APPLAUSE]
