He leaned on JFK to stay out of Vietnam. Had Kennedy survived, might history have been different? On April 28, 1961—a decade after General Douglas MacArthur was fired for defying Harry Truman on Korea—the controversial commander hosted President John F. Kennedy at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where MacArthur and his wife lived in a suite on the 37th floor. The contrast between the two could not have been more obvious: MacArthur, then in his early eighties, was mottled, frail, and walked with a slight stoop, while the newly inaugurated Kennedy was young, fit, and vibrant. The two sequestered themselves in MacArthur’s suite, then posed for photographers, the young president obviously proud to appear with the aging legend.
Fortunately for historians, Kennedy recorded notes on his Waldorf Astoria discussion, committing MacArthur’s advice to a personal memorandum that he later referred to in White House policy discussions. The meeting itself was the subject of news stories and featured on national newscasts that same day. Later, the meeting provided grist for two generations of Kennedy-besotted commenters who debated whether the young president, had he not been assassinated in Dallas, might have recoiled from committing tens of thousands of U.S. troops to a winless war in Southeast Asia—a course of action taken by Lyndon Johnson, his successor.
It turns out that Kennedy’s memo of the Waldorf Astoria meeting (now at Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum) is crucial for historians for a number of other reasons. It offers not only a glimpse of how the young president intended to navigate the treacherous waters of the Cold War, but suggests how one of America’s most celebrated military officers viewed what might be called the grand strategy of the American Republic: that is, whether and how the U.S. might win its dangerous struggle against the Soviet Union. Finally, the Waldorf Astoria meeting tells us how MacArthur’s most famous warning—to “never fight a land war in Asia”—has come down to us, what he meant by it, and whether, in an age of American troop deployments in at least 133 countries, it retains its meaning.
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Kennedy’s April 1961 meeting with MacArthur surprised the president’s top aides, many of whom openly disliked the aging warrior. But Kennedy, who’d served as a patrol boat skipper in the Pacific in World War II where MacArthur had commanded, admired him. “He was Kennedy’s kind of hero: valiant, a patrician, proud of his machismo, and a lover of glory,” MacArthur biographer William Manchester wrote in American Caesar. As crucially, Kennedy was as politically embattled then as MacArthur had been 10 years earlier and was intent on getting advice from the general on the worsening international situation. Just the week before, the new president had been humiliated when a group of U.S.-supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles were defeated after invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy was almost chagrined when he mentioned the humiliation, and MacArthur’s response was surprisingly blunt.
The failed invasion was a problem for the young president, he said, but he didn’t think that Kennedy was solely to blame. He faulted Dwight Eisenhower for promoting the invasion and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for supporting it: they should have known better, he suggested. He added that many of them, in his view, had been promoted beyond their competence. Eisenhower and the JCS had set Kennedy up, MacArthur implied: “The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have moved into the chicken house.”
Kennedy appreciated MacArthur’s soothing judgment on Cuba (and would soon change the military’s top leadership—perhaps in keeping with MacArthur’s views), but then shifted the subject to Laos and Vietnam, where communist insurgencies were gaining strength. The Congress, he added, was pressuring him to deploy U.S. troops in response. MacArthur disagreed vehemently: “Anyone wanting to commit ground troops to Asia should have his head examined,” he said. That same day, Kennedy memorialized what MacArthur told him: “MacArthur believes it would be a mistake to fight in Laos,” he wrote in a memorandum of the meeting, adding, “He thinks our line should be Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines.” MacArthur’s warning about fighting in Asia impressed Kennedy, who repeated it in the months ahead and especially whenever military leaders urged him to take action. “Well now,” the young president would say in his lilting New England twang, “you gentlemen, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I’ll be convinced.” So it is that MacArthur’s warning (which has come down to us as “never get involved in a land war in Asia”), entered American lore as a kind of Nicene Creed of military wisdom—unquestioned, repeated, fundamental.
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In the years that followed, historians concluded that MacArthur’s advice was the result of his experience in South Korea, where he’d served as U.S. commander after it was invaded by North Korea in 1950. MacArthur had performed brilliantly, but then, with victory in sight, the Chinese intervened, driving south across the Yalu River and overwhelming his forces. MacArthur was embarrassed; he didn’t believe the Chinese would intervene and was caught flat-footed when they did. Outnumbered, MacArthur proposed a menu of military responses: bombing military bases in China, using Chinese Nationalist troops based in Taiwan to help in the fight, imposing an economic and naval blockade on the Chinese mainland, and even planting nuclear waste along the North Korean/Chinese border. Each of MacArthur’s suggestions were designed to cut off North Korea’s forces from their Chinese allies—to isolate the battlefield. But President Truman and the JCS disagreed, fearing that what MacArthur proposed would widen the war.
When MacArthur’s recommendations were made public, he was labeled a warmonger, the primary reason (it is widely believed) that Truman dismissed him. In fact, what actually got MacArthur in trouble was the publication of letters to Massachusetts Republican Congressman Joseph W. Martin, Jr. calling into question Truman’s leadership, an action that was as close to insubordination as any officer can get. Despite these legendary missteps, a number of historians subsequently believed that while MacArthur was wrong to question Truman, his military thinking was sound: the U.S. failure to isolate the Korean battlefield spelled the difference between an American victory and a bloody stalemate.
In fact, however, the lesson that MacArthur had learned about fighting a land war in Asia wasn’t the result of his experience in Korea, but of his experience fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. “You can certainly make that argument,” historian and author Rana Mitter told this writer in a wide-ranging telephone interview, “because at the time the Japanese were fighting the Americans in the Pacific, they were also fighting the Chinese on the Asian mainland. The U.S. was desperate to keep China in the fight because their armies were tying down hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops who might have been used against the Americans.”
Mitter, the author of the aptly named Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945, is among a new class of historians (a list that includes Deng Xiaoping biographer Ezra Vogel, Richard Bernstein, Frank Dikotter, John Pomfret, and Jay Taylor—who penned a brilliant treatment of Chiang Kai-shek) who focus on what is now called the Second Sino-Japanese War, which killed upwards of four million Chinese soldiers and 11 million Chinese civilians. It’s a staggering number, particularly when compared to America’s military losses in the Pacific—some 65,000 soldiers, sailors, and Marines. What Mitter and his colleagues have emphasized is that Japan, like the Germans in Europe, was fighting a two-front war, which made an Allied victory a near certainty. Mitter points out that while the Japanese won battle after battle in China, they were never able to match China’s numbers—a preview of what MacArthur faced in Korea.
The new thinking on China by these historians is seminal: Mitter argues that it is time to view America’s war with Japan as a kind of mirror of the U.S. war in Europe—and thus acknowledge that China’s fight against Japan on the Chinese mainland made a U.S. victory in the vast reaches of the Pacific possible. “The Japanese believed that at some point the Chinese would surrender,” Mitter says, “but they never did. They just kept coming.” It was this, Japan’s struggle to overcome the terrible arithmetic of battle in China, that MacArthur told Kennedy the U.S. faced in Southeast Asia. The U.S., he implied, could never match the number of soldiers China or Russia could put on the ground and the U.S. could never eliminate the sanctuaries where men and supplies could be husbanded to fight relentless, bloody, and endless conflicts.
Never get involved in a land war in Asia, MacArthur had told Kennedy, because if you do, you will be repeating the same mistake the Japanese made in World War II—deploying millions of soldiers in a futile attempt to win a conflict that cannot be won.
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