Threnody & Thunder

In dank, dark weather, Douglas Mac-Arthur's body arrived in Manhattan.

There, in Park Avenue's 7th Regiment Armory, mourners moved past him at a rate of some 3,000 an hour. Next morning, a cortege placed the plain, steel Army casket aboard a train that took MacArthur, his widow Jean and son Arthur, 26, to Washington. It was raining as the procession headed slowly toward the Capitol, but tens of thousands lined the streets. In the rotunda President Johnson, his face working with emotion, placed a wreath at the casket's head. A dirge sounded as a military honor guard took its post.

But, already, behind the threnody was heard the thunder of controversy that had accompanied MacArthur throughout so much of his lifetime. Appearing in print were the reports of two decade-old, off-the-record interviews with MacArthur. One, by Scripps-Howard Reporter Jim Lucas, was published in the form of a memo sent by Lucas to his bosses at the time. The other appeared as a reminiscence by Hearst's Bob Considine. Both portrayed MacArthur as an embittered man who had held the Communists "in the palm of my hand," only to be "betrayed" by "those fools in Washington" and the British government.

Perfidy. According to Lucas, Mac-Arthur said that during the Korean War "every message he sent to Washington and every message sent by Washington to him was shown to the British by the State Department." Within 48 hours, the messages were "relayed by the British, either through India or through the Russian Embassy in London, to the Chinese Communists." Thus, said Lucas, the Chinese Communists "knew in advance every step he proposed to take," and, in fact, entered the Korean conflict only "after being assured by the British that MacArthur would be ham strung and could not effectively oppose them." MacArthur had long since made similar charges. In 1956, he publicly charged that British Spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, who had defected to Moscow five years earlier, had been part of the pipeline to the Communists.

Both Lucas and Considine reported that MacArthur was disappointed in Dwight Eisenhower, whom he described as "once a man of integrity." General George Marshall, who was Secretary of Defense during the Korean War, was "the errand boy of the State Department." General Matthew Ridgway, who took over command of United Nations forces after MacArthur's dismissal, was a "chameleon," who "did a complete flip-flop in 24 hours" when he discovered that Washington opposed Mac-Arthur's war strategy. General Maxwell Taylor was "an ambitious man who will never do anything to jeopardize his career."

By the Lucas account, MacArthur had a grudging respect for Harry Truman. The President had been in Inde pendence, Mo., when the Korean War started, recalled MacArthur. Truman "reacted instinctively, like the gutter fighter he is--and you've got to admire him." But once Truman got back to Washington, "Dean Acheson brought him back under control." All in all, MacArthur said, Truman was "a man of raw courage and guts--the little bastard honestly believes he is a patriot."

Plan for Victory. To both Lucas and Considine, MacArthur disclosed a plan for winning the Korean War--a plan that the "Anglo-Saxonphiles" stubbornly and successfully opposed. "I could have won the war in Korea in a maxi mum of ten days," he told Considine, "with considerably fewer casualties than were suffered during the so-called truce period, and it would have altered the course of history." The plan called for an air strike with "between 30 and 50" atomic bombs just north of the Yalu River (sec map). This would have wiped out the enemy's air capability. Then, using 500,000 Chinese Nationalist troops "sweetened by two U.S. Marine divisions," MacArthur would have landed on both the east and west sides of the Korean peninsula at the North Korean border, thus trapping the Chinese Communist armies that were storming to the south. "Now, the Eighth Army, spread along the 38th Parallel, would have put pressure on the enemy from the south. The joined amphibious forces would press down from the north. The enemy would have been starved out within ten days."

To prevent Communist reinforcements from pouring down over the Yalu, MacArthur wanted to lay down a five-mile-wide belt of radioactive co balt at the border. Said he: "It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes. It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north. The enemy could not have marched across that radiated belt."

In that, MacArthur was reflecting an idea that was publicly discussed as early as 1951. Tennessee's Democratic Sen ator Albert Gore, then a Congressman and member of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee, had read a study of radiological warfare, issued a statement suggesting that the U.S. could sow a sanitized zone of radioactive material across the Korean neck. Says he today: "It was thoroughly panned by scientific editorial writers." In any event, explains University of California Physicist Luis Alvarez, MacArthur was in error, since the half-life of radioactive cobalt is only 5.25 years, and the material could not be distributed from trucks. Says Alvarez: "You would have to have air dropped it, like leaflets, from a plane."

Finally, wrote Considine, General MacArthur was grieved because, in 1952, President-Elect Eisenhower refused to accept a MacArthur plan to end the entire cold war. Precisely what the plan was, MacArthur did not disclose to Considine. One version of the plan came from South Carolina's Democratic Congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn, who said last week that he heard it ex plained by MacArthur in 1956. Mac-Arthur, said Dorn, urged Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles to threaten Rus sia with complete rearmament of Germany and Japan, "possibly including nuclear power," unless Russia agreed to live up to its Yalta and Potsdam promises to allow political self-determination by the peoples of Eastern Europe.

"Goodbye." Whatever the plan, Mac-Arthur tried it on Ike, who seemed to like the idea. But, MacArthur told Considine, it was dashed by the "cool, calculating voice of the lawyer"--John Foster Dulles. MacArthur pleaded with Ike, declared that he had the "greatest opportunity for good since the birth of Jesus Christ, the power to make the greatest impression since the Crucifixion. You cannot fail to be remembered in history as a messiah. Yours is a messianic mission. Believe me! Your name will be called blessed." When Ike, at Dulles' urging, turned him down, Mac-Arthur said: "Goodbye. God bless you."

The Lucas and Considine reports aroused predictable responses. The British denied all accusations of perfidy. Truman and Eisenhower refused to comment. A longtime MacArthur aide, Major General Courtney Whitney, called Lucas' piece mostly "fantasy" and "fictional" nonsense. Lucas replied by calling Whitney a "liar."

The unseemly squabble continued even as the body of General MacArthur moved toward its final resting place in Norfolk, Va., where his mother was born. There, city fathers had restored a 114-year-old former courthouse and designated it the MacArthur Memorial. The walls were inscribed with passages from famed MacArthur speeches. Family and friends watched in silence as the casket was slowly placed in the cool crypt beneath the rotunda. And then the tomb was sealed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.