What interests me the most is the final period of his life, after Truman recalled him to the States on April 11, 1951. Truman's action was hugely unpopular with the American public. Letters and telegrams to the White House ran twenty to one against Truman. Interestingly, however, a survey of journalists covering the story found that more than six to one thought that the president's action was justified. In other words, those who knew the most about the situation and understood the reasons for the firing, approved of it. Truman's approval rating, however, plunged to a low of 23%, and remained very low throughout the remainder of his presidency.
Upon his return to this country, MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress. He was interrupted by applause 30 times in his 34-minute address. One representative shouted out, "We heard God speak here today. God in the flesh, the voice of God!" "Life" magazine reported that the audience was "magnetized by the vibrant voice, the dramatic rhetoric and the Olympian personality of the most controversial military hero of our times". Manchester says he was "lucid, forceful, dignified, and eloquent; though he clearly thought his message urgent, his delivery was unhurried and rhythmic. All his life had been a preparation for this moment."
What followed was a joint inquiry by the Senate Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees, beginning on May 3, 1951. The most significant exchange during these hearings occurred when a Senator asked MacArthur a question about how we would go about winning a world war. The general replied "That doesn't happen to be my responsibility, Senator. My responsibilites were in the Pacific." This exposed the weakness in MacArthur's diffferences with the Truman administration. Here MacArthur is admitting that it is up to the president, his cabinet, and the Joint Chiefs to determine overall U.S. foreign policy. Ignoring this reality is what got MacArthur fired.
Following MacArthur's testimony, the administration took seven weeks to methodically rebut MacArthur's position. Manchester says that "One by one, officers who admired MacArthur seated themselves before the Senators and sadly rejected his program for victory." The author goes on to state that "Against this array of fact and expertise, the general's Republican defenders had little to offer but a welter of party loyalty and conservative intuition."
After the hearings, MacArthur spent a full year "crisscrossing the U.S. in a one-man drive to arouse the country to what he regarded as its peril." But the result of all this speech-making was quite instructive. What happened was that MacArthur's star gradually dimmed, as people got tired of his constant bad-mouthing of Truman and the Truman administration. People were interested in the future, while all MacArthur was doing was re-litigating past grievances. Manchester says that "each time he took a swipe at Truman he descended a little". The crowds gradually dwindled, civic leaders started walking out of his speeches, and local leaders started calling him a "demagogue".
After the 1952 election, President-elect Eisenhower met with MacArthur to hear his views. Ike heard him out, but ignored the advice, which Manchester says was "as unwelcome to the new administration as it had been to the old. Dulles, like Acheson, was a believer in limited wars. The old General, one feels, had become an embarrassment to the leaders of both parties, an unwelcome reminder of the gallant past, now lost forever, in which intolerable differences between great nations could be resolved by the sword".
MacArthur lived out his life in a New York hotel, and was never again a force in American political life. Before his death in 1964, he met with first Kennedy and later with Johnson, warning them both to stay out of Indochina. This advice should have been listened to, as MacArthur was the foremost U.S. expert on the Oriental mind, but instead it was ignored.
MacArthur gets very high marks for rebuilding Japan during the five years he was in charge of the occupation. He was extremely popular in Japan; after his recall, Japan's foreign minister said that MacArthur's accomoplishments during the occupation were "one of the marvels of history. It is he who has salvaged our nation from post-surrender confusion and prostration, and steered the country on the road to reconstruction. It is he who has firmly planted democracy in all segments of our society. It is he who has paved the way for a peace settlement. No wonder he is looked upon by all our people with the profoundest veneration and affection. I have no words to convey the regret of our naton to see him leave."
The two great Tokyo daily newspapers joined in the praise. One said that "MacArthur's dismissal is the greatest shock since the end of the war. He dealt with the Japanese people not as a conqueror but a great reformer. He was a noble political missionary. What he gave us was not material aid and democratic reform alone, but a new way of life, the freedom and dignity of the individual. The other paper wrote that "Japan's recovery must be attributed solely to his guidance. We feel as if we had lost a kind and loving father."
I think that part of why MacArthur's star faded so precipitously during 1952 is that his speeches, increaingly consisting of deranged right-wing rants, were so clearly at odds with his humane and tolerant approach to the administration of Japan. The American electorate may not be very sohisticated or knowledgeable, but people can spot a phony when they see one. MacArthur's experience is eerily similar to Trump's in this regard, as Trump was a pro-choice Democrat before he got into politics and started posturing as an anti-abortion, right-wing demagogue. Trump is known to have contributed seven times to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaigns, and twice to Kamala Harris's Senate campaign.
A clear example of MacArthur's fall from grace was the spectacular failure of his keynote address at the 1952 Republican convention. Manchester says that it was "probably the worst speech of his career--banal and strident in content, wretchedly delivered, a bungling of his chance to become a dark horse...Halfway through the delegates began babbling so loudly among themselves that he could scarcely be heard." C. L. Sulzberger wrote that "He said nothing but sheer baloney. One could feel the electricity gradually running out of the room. I think he cooked his own goose and didn't do much to help Taft."
Sarah Palin is a recent example of someone whose star once burned bright, but who has since faded into insignificance. After her defeat in the 2008 VP election, she resigned her governorship the next year, citing a slew of ethical complaints against her. She tried her hand as a FOX analyst, but got cut loose at the end of her contract period, as the network came to realize that she had nothing worthwhile to say.
In 2017 Palin filed a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times for accusing her of "political incitement" in the run-up to the 2011 shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The case finally came to trial earlier this year, and the jury unanimously found against her. Her case was so weak that the Judge announced he was going to dismiss it, regardless of how the jury found.
This year Palin ran for Congress from Alaska, and couldn't even defeat a Democrat! In bright red Alaska! The man hired to prep Palin for her VP debate with Joe Biden in 2008 was recently interviewed on one of the news networks. He said that when he asked Palin what her position on NATO was, she responded, "What's NATO?"! This is beyond bizarre.
Another example of a star who will be fading fast is the attractive and charismatic former TV anchor, Kari Lake, who narrowly lost her Arizona Governor's race. She is a rabid election-denier, and in recent speeches has mercilessly trashed the memory of John McCain. And now she has filed a lawsuit asking the court system to throw out the election results! Just totally absurd. I predict her star will fade like the other examples mentioned.
All of the four examples discussed--MacArthur, Trump, Palin, and Lake--are characterized by focusing almost exclusively on what they are against, rather than what they are for. This can be said to be true of the GOP in general these days. It is hard to say what today's Republican party is for (they didn't even bother to adopt a platform in the last election!). We know what they are against, but not what they are for. The electorate will soon come to recognize the lack of any positive substance in today's GOP.
Ranked choice voting worked well in the aforementioned Alaska Congressional race, and should be adopted everywhere as a way to mdoerate our politics and keep the extremists and demogogues out of office. The same holds for open primaries; extremists could be kept out of general elections if states would adopt open primaries. But even liberal Oregon defeated this proposal when it was on the ballot a few years ago. Sadly. it seems that progressives are as determined to hang onto their power as right-wingers are.
I continue to believe that what happened to MacArthur in his later years will be a model for what will happen to Trump, whose speeches during the recent mid-term campaign were filled with airing his personal grievances, rather than offering any coherent vision for the future. Trump would appear at rallies in support of a local candidate, but then would spend most of his speeches talking about himself, not the candidate he was ostensibly there to support.
An election is about the future, not the past, and the voters will, in my opinion, ultimately reject Trump and choose to move forward into the future with new leadership. Already there are signs of this rejection. Florida governor Ron DeSantis won his race for re-election by 20 points, an amazing margin given that his opponent was the highly-respected former governor, Charlie Crist. Recent surveys show that GOP voters already prefer DeSantis to Trump for their presidential candidate in 2024. Other potential candidates are also positioning themselves to oppose Trump, including Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, and Mike Pompeo.
