Truman will always be associated with Korea (1950-53), called by some the "forgotten war," and with MacArthur. Korea did not capture the nation's attention as had World War II, nor did it arouse controversy as did Vietnam. Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) transcends his involvement in Korea, but the man is as close to a myth as any American. His legions (an appropriate Roman word) of followers revere his memory and despise the fact that the Missouri haberdasher sent the "old soldier" into retirement in such ignominious fashion.

They called him the American Caesar. His military service started in the 19th Century. His place in history often seemed to be as important to him as winning the war. George Patton had been promised by FDR a command in the Pacific once hostilities ceased in Europe. When Roosevelt died and the guns went silent there, Patton was asked about that promise.

"Doug MacArthur doesn't want me around," Patton told the press. Indeed, MacArthur turned down the services of the greatest field tactician this nation ever produced because he would steal some of his thunder. MacArthur was the son of another famous soldier, Arthur MacArthur II, who led troops in the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and in the Philippines. His family was politically well connected, and his mother was also ambitious for him. MacArthur entered the United States Military Academy at West Point and graduated at the head of his class in 1903.

MacArthur commanded combat troops in World War I, earning honors for bravery and leadership. After the war he served as superintendent of West Point, as Army Chief of Staff under Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, and as military adviser to the new Philippine Commonwealth. He retired from the U.S. Army in 1937, but went back to active duty after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As Commander of U.S. troops in the southwestern Pacific, he conducted the drive to defeat Japan in their quest for Asian Pacific domination. At the end of the war he headed the military occupation of Japan.

By the time General MacArthur organized troops and supplies after the North Koreans attacked in June, 1950, South Korean forces were in the far southern tip of the Korean peninsula. MacArthur's Inchon landing turned everything around, and put U.S. forces far behind enemy lines. The North Koreans were routed nearly to China. China, fearing invasion by the approaching Americans, launched a full-blown counter-attack. The entrance of Red China, newly allied with the Soviet Union, and the advent of atomic weaponry, forced Truman into a stalemate at the 38th parallel.

Truman would not accept MacArthur's urgings to carry the war into China. MacArthur's dissatisfaction was made public and a power struggle culminated in the April, 1951 dismissal of MacArthur for insubordination. It was the most serious wedge between civilian and military authority since the Civil War, if not ever, and posed potential Constitutional issues.

MacArthur returned home a hero. Most historians have since determined that Truman was in the right, and that his fears of World War III were not unfounded. While this issue has been debated over and over, no true answer, even in now-opened Soviet archives, provides an answer to this what-if. The determination that one makes on this question also affects the historical view of Vietnam. If Pyongyang could have been invaded, captured, conquered, and occupied, as Japan had been, then Hanoi could have been subjected to the same thing. If The Americans had come out of Korea with "total victory," then Vietnam would not have occurred. If Truman was right, and full-scale war in enemy territory would have escalated into global war, then the Vietnam strategy under the Nixon-Kissinger plan is roughly the best this country could hope for. The lessons of Korea, however, did not seem to resonate in early military decisions regarding Southeast Asia. Korea dragged on until an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, which ended the fighting and created a demilitarized zone between the North and South.

MacArthur was brilliant and brave; arrogant and self-promoting. It has been said he had little tolerance for criticism, but his Americanism tempers this statement.  Arthur MacArthur had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. His son inherited his

legendary conceit and flamboyant persona. In answering a question from a woman admirer of MacArthur whether Dwight D. Eisenhower had met MacArthur, Eisenhower remarked, "Not only have I met him, ma'am; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines." MacArthur was a showman who never met a newsreel camera he did not like. Ike was right. MacArthur was a method actor, who might as well have stood up in staff meetings and announced, "Friends, officers, Americans." He suffered his share of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

MacArthur's "island-hopping" strategy against Japan was a grand success. After the war, he was instrumental in reshaping the Japanese nation's political structure, its economic life, and even the Japanese people's relationship with their own Emperor. For all of his medals and brilliant military tactics, his deft political handling of Japan and Hirohito may be his greatest contribution. He had learned from the mistakes of Napoleon and the Versailles Treaty, from the wise actions of Abe Lincoln, and Churchill's counsel to be "magnanimous." He allowed Hirohito to "save face," while not placing him in a position of real authority. The kindness and decency of the American soldiers operating under the MacArthur plan helped create an atmosphere in Japan that gave the population reason to live and move on. In short order, all things about American culture became wildly popular in post-war Japan. MacArthur redeemed the brutally cruel Japanese. He was revered as a Christ-like figure. This analogy is not an exaggeration. He helped a country and its people to save its soul. The Japanese also loved baseball. They became fanatical devotees of the most American of games.

MacArthur had agreed that Korea and Manchuria might have to be "sacrificed" in order to draw Soviet participation in the war with Japan. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, MacArthur supported the division of the Korean peninsula into two occupational zones. He designated General John Hodge as head of the U.S Military Government in Korea, appointing him to command the USMGIK because Hodge's XXIV Corps was in Okinawa at the time. Koreans residing in the occupied zone were told that the goals of the USMGIK were to accept the surrender of the Japanese and to maintain religious and personal freedoms. National independence would be accorded them "in due course."

Thus, the Republic of Korea was created in the South, with President Syngman Rhee appointed to head the Seoul government. 

"If Korea should ever be attacked by the Communists," MacArthur told Rhee, "I shall defend it as I would California." The U.S. began a de-militarization withdrawal, and in the corridors of Washington, Korea was not considered vital to American interests. In private, MacArthur concurred.

"Anyone who commits the American Army in the Asian mainland should have his head examined," MacArthur said to a reporter in 1949. At a press conference in January of 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson clearly stated, in no uncertain terms, that Korea lay outside the U.S. Defense perimeter and consequently did not constitute a national interest. Five and a half months later, war broke out in Korea.

When it looked as if the North Korean Army would unify Korea under Communism, MacArthur was sent to Korea in a "last-ditch" defense of the "Pusan Perimeter." The United Nations backed the U.S. in its defense of South Korea. MacArthur was appointed as the Supreme Commander of all U.N Forces in the region. He was given a mandate by the U.N. to drive the invaders north of the 38th parallel. After Inchon, the North Koreans retreated in rout. President Truman was assured by MacArthur that the Chinese would not intervene.

There is "very little" chance of that occurring, he told the President. On October 25, the People's Liberation Army of China attacked, dealing heavy losses to the U.N. Force and causing a costly retreat southward. MacArthur described the Korean War as "an entirely new war" now. With his background and experience he no doubt concluded that he and he alone was the one man who knew how to handle the situation. After all, he had boldly stated that he was destined to save the world for Christendom.

It is probably too simplistic to state that MacArthur was a 19th Century man confronted with 20th Century, and possibly 21st Century, weapons and geo-politics. The events of 1945-50 had seen the advent, use and spread of atomic bombs, and the creation of jet aircraft. While all of this obviously occurred in the 20th Century, the suddenness of technological advancement and the severity these events had on events meant a change so tremendous that it was as if 50 years had passed and a new century was upon these old practitioners of war and politics.

Truman, the Missouri haberdasher; MacArthur, the son of a Civil War hero whose romantic view of service was envisioned by the "plains of West Point;" Mao, the man of rural China; and Stalin, the Georgian peasant. They were now operating in the world of Robert Oppenheimer and Werner von Braun, who were carrying on the work of Albert Einstein.

Clemenceau had said, "war is too important to be left to the generals." Now it appeared that it was too important to be left up to any one President, premier or general. The scientists were the new gods of geo-politics. Oppenheimer, the University of California-Berkeley professor, was far too liberal for the liking of his Federal handlers, but he was too valuable to be let go. He was handled with "kid gloves." Knowing what he had unleashed on the world in the creation of the A-bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer eventually took it upon himself to share atomic secrets with Soviet scientists. This was not because he was a traitor to America, but because he felt that if the whole world had the bomb, nobody would be willing to use it.

Oppenheimer's premise mirrored the deterrence policy that became the cornerstone of nuclear politics. His politics mirrored Left wing world politics, which never wanted America to hold all the cards. Had the U.S. been able to maintain sole use of these weapons, Korea and Vietnam might not have happened. The West would have won the Cold War much earlier, saving millions of enslaved lives in the process.    

MacArthur was not a proponent of atomic bombs, which offended his sense of battlefield decorum, but he had learned to love the concept of "total victory." If he had the A-bomb, he always possessed this advantage. Patton had shown outright disdain for the "secret weapons" that Hitler boasted of, and Truman used, deriding them as "push button weapons" that pitted faceless foes against each other from great distances with no "confirmation" or "glory."

"Just those who are left alive, and those who are left…dead," he said. "I'm glad I won't live to see them." He saw two of them, but he did not live much beyond that. 

As the U.N. Forces neared the 38th parallel, MacArthur suggested that the solution in Korea was to bring war to China itself. President Truman may not have truly felt that such a widening of the war could induce an atomic reaction, although the Soviets had exploded their first A-bomb in 1949 (Mao exploded China's first in 1964). But he did fear the potential of it getting out of control. Five years after the worst conflagration in history, events were moving too fast for his liking: Two world wars within 21 years of each other, a Holocaust, new weapons of mass destruction, Communism replacing Nazism as an even bigger threat. Whether Truman recognized that dark forces were creating geo-political irony (a global war over a peace of real estate that Acheson had not even included on the "protected" list) may not have entered into the Missourian's "show me" mind. MacArthur's grand view of the world and himself as its savior might have brought about such considerations. The general may have believed that perhaps Armageddon was a battle that he could win "to make the world safe for Christendom."

When it was all said and done, MacArthur was not allowed to ride into Valhalla. Instead, he rode into Washington, where he addressed a joint session of Congress in April, 1951, and proclaimed famously that "old soldiers never die; they just fade away."

            On May 12, 1962, MacArthur addressed the Corps of Cadets at West Point. His moving tribute echoed his love for the "long, gray line."

"The shadows are lengthening for me," he concluded. "The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished - tone and tints. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen, then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, honor, country.

"Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the corps, and the corps, and the corps.

"I bid you farewell."

Melodramatic, yes, but I challenge anybody to imagine the old soldier addressing the West Pointers, many of whom would see service in Vietnam, and not fight back at least the first vestige of a tear for the nostalgic memory and idea of a man like General Douglas MacArthur. One thing is for certain. That is this country is fortunate beyond all comprehension that men like MacArthur are on our side.