Book Review: Truman and MacArthur

Parameters

Truman and MacArthur: Policy, Politics, and the Hunger for Honor and Renown. By Michael D. Pearlman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. $29.95. Reviewed by Dr. Thomas Bruscino, Assistant Professor, School of Advanced Military Studies, US Army Command and General Staff College.

It is best to start with what Truman and MacArthur is not. It is not a dual biography of President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, although there is plenty of material on both men. Nor is it a book on combat operations in the Korean War, although the consequences of battlefield actions have impact throughout. Instead, this book is something of a rarity among academic publications these days: great man history, history from above. Truman and MacArthur is a reminder of just how compelling such history can be-especially in the hands of someone who knows what he is about. Michael Pearlman certainly fits the description.

Pearlman, a former professor at the US Army Command and General Staff College, is well-suited to write this story; indeed, it is a case study in detail of the argument presented in his earlier work, Warmaking and American Democracy, on the pell-mell and often incoherent nature of policy- and strategy-making in the United States. As such, this is not the stereotypical great man history, the story of the Korean War told through the lens of a few seemingly all-powerful puppet masters. The full ambiguity of the intersections of personalities, politics, foreign policy, national military strategy, and theater strategy is on display. The familiar names-Truman, MacArthur, Mao Tse-tung, Josef Stalin, Kim Il-sung, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Matthew Ridgway, Dwight Eisenhower-are all here, but so too are Chiang Kai-shek, Edward Almond, Arthur Vandenberg, Robert Taft, Richard Russell, Frank Lowe, Averill Harriman, James Reston, Walter Lippmann, Omar Bradley, Joe Collins, George C. Marshall, Forrest Sherman, Joe Martin, Sun Li-jen, Frank Pace, Charles Willoughby, and Joseph McCarthy, to name just a few. These individuals, their constituencies, and their organizations (to include the State Department, Department of Defense, Army, Navy, Air Force, Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Council, Far Eastern Command, and so on) all have a voice. Simple this story most assuredly is not; no one or two actors are calling the shots. Call it, to coin a phrase, "new great man history," describing the way great men make decisions while being pushed and pulled by myriad forces from above and below.

As such, Pearlman's account defies straightforward summary. He covers all of the narrative high points of the origins, conduct, and quasi-conclusion of the Korean War, but in his telling none of those points follows a simple chain of causality. For example, he is not interested in affixing blame to anyone in particular for the start of the war. Instead, it appears that all sides, dealing with their internal competing interests and perceptions of the other actors, essentially stumbled into the fight. Likewise, the prosecution of the war did not follow any master script.

The vagaries of policymaking are even more important to the story of Truman and MacArthur. There was some flexibility on policy-i.e., preserving South Korea vs. uniting the two Koreas-as long as the war remained on the Korean Peninsula. But despite MacArthur's fervent desire, and the desire of some of his Republican backers in the United States, that flexibility did not extend to the policy decision of whether to take the war to mainland China. The general had always believed in using the Taiwanese to attack the mainland, but once the Chinese entered the war on the peninsula, he repeatedly and publicly insisted that military strategy should guide policy. Over time, such behavior from even the most respected of generals became too much for Truman, and the President was forced to relieve MacArthur. The removal of the general all but ended that policy dilemma, but did not resolve the problem of the stalemated war in Korea, the true source of Truman's historically low popularity. Nor did Dwight Eisenhower come to office with any brilliant policy solutions; rather, he was bailed out by competing interests entirely beyond his power. The Chinese lacked resources of their own, and the Soviets withdrew their support for them following Stalin's death and the realization among Soviet successors that supplying the Chinese war effort was crippling their economy. The ceasefire followed, but as with everything else in Pearlman's account, it came about more from an almost accidental confluence of historical circumstances than the coordinated actions of any particular individual or group.

In all of this, perhaps, Pearlman goes too far. His argument is well-taken-there is no doubt that the pluralistic American system does not lend itself to easy choices. Competing interest groups and divergent personalities, not to mention uncooperative enemies, make it well nigh impossible to craft consensus policies and strategies. But American policy- and strategy-making is not nearly as incoherent as it may seem. There are certain traditions and principles for which the United States almost always stands. For every era there are general and conditional policies that garner enough backing as to approach consensus (without ever quite getting there). Communism was always anathema to everything America stood for, but if the cost of defeating it meant the destruction of the whole world, then there was no point. The Korean War, whatever else came into play, was always about containing communism without starting World War III, nuclear or not. It was not easy, and it certainly got messy, but the underlying logic always held true.

To preserve the American system, those traditions, principles, and the general and conditional policies must be good enough, despite the noise generated by all the voices that have a say. The measure of American military strategymakers is not whether they can bring order to the chaos, it is how well they find the tune playing beneath the cacophony. The lesson of the Korea War, the lesson of Truman and MacArthur, is that it has always been so.

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