CHAPTER 27
The beginning of MacArthur’s 1952 campaign for president has often been labelled as a better-managed restart of his 1948 campaign. In 1948, despite MacArthur not being in the country, he had allowed – some would say encouraged – his supporters to campaign for him in Wisconsin, and the result was a narrow defeat in the primary held in that state. Failure had spelt the end for his campaign then, and if he lost his home state a second time without a strong showing elsewhere, it doubtless would again. Frederick Ayer Jr and Phil LaFollette thought that a five point difference could easily be made up by the stunning victory in Korea and having MacArthur physically on the campaign trail, but there was no doubt that their opponents would be throwing everything they had into the fight too.
As in 1948, MacArthur’s main rival in the Badger State would be Harold Stassen of nearby Minnesota. Stassen had run for president twice before, and was no stranger to the campaign trail. He was young and energetic, and had been a popular Governor. On paper, he had the makings of a strong candidate – far stronger than Harry Truman might have been (“We won’t be up against Truman, but whoever the Democrats pick will have to carry his baggage” in the words of LaFollette). But if MacArthur could beat him, the path to the White House would get that much easier.
Like MacArthur, Stassen also had a collection of supporters waiting for him to announce his candidacy, and no small number of them were backing him just to oppose those who had lined up behind MacArthur. Whoever LaFollette supported, Thomas Coleman (who had his own formidable political machine) would oppose. Coleman had supported Stassen in 1948, and despite being closer to the more conservative MacArthur in ideology, he would back Stassen again. Ayer and LaFollette weren’t concerned: they’d come close to beating Coleman before, and this time they had a far better campaign (it didn’t hurt that MacArthur’s name alone was enough to pull in millions of dollars of donations from across the country).
What LaFollette hadn’t counted on was that Stassen too had an ace up his sleeve: ‘Tail-Gunner Joe’.
Senator Joseph McCarthy had been Stassen’s campaign manager in 1948, and by all accounts he had done a good job: Stassen had taken four of the twelve state primaries. He had also issued a public letter to voters attacking MacArthur’s own suitability for the presidency, saying that at sixty-seven he was too old for the job and ready for “a well-deserved hero’s retirement”. MacArthur was now 71, not 67, making McCarthy’s age arguments all the more credible, and Ayer would eventually convince MacArthur to announce that he would choose a younger man to be vice-president to allay the public’s fears. Who that would be would not be decided for some time to come: there were more pressing matters to attend to. Actually winning the nomination, for one.
What concerned the MacArthur campaign the most was that McCarthy was a far more dangerous opponent now than he had been four years prior. In 1948, he had been a little known senator. By the dawn of 1952, he had made himself a name as America’s fiercest critic of communists, famous for his accusatory behaviour (many times with flimsy evidence at best), and he was considered one of the most powerful men in the Senate. In the 1950 midterms, he had backed a range of Republican candidates, most of whom won their seats, while men who he had opposed tended to lose their elections.
MacArthur also sensed that McCarthy put his campaign in a difficult spot. Several of his most important supporters, Senator Kenneth Wherry at the top of the list, were also avid McCarthyists, and doing anything that could be construed as denouncing McCarthy risked losing their support. Yet if nothing was done, McCarthy would effectively have free reign to trample all over MacArthur’s campaign, with either fact or more likely falsehood.
“Fortunately, Joe has a lot of enemies. Maybe he’ll make a mistake.” Pat Echols said one day.
Enter General Patton.
By the December of 1951, Patton had spent nearly a year in retirement since he left Korea, and had enjoyed very little of it. Convinced that Truman had led the top brass of the Army to ‘betray’ him before he could die the glorious death of a warrior, he had fallen into a deep depression, leading to his behaviour becoming increasingly unpredictable. His strict physical regimen, which had kept him in impeccable shape in spite of many injuries over the years, was let go in favour of a newfound drinking habit, and the few people he was still close with noticed he smoked and cursed far more than he had in the past.
Holding a vendetta against just about every high-ranking officer in the Army and the Truman administration, he had also taken to publicly criticising them both in the papers (where his language remained respectable enough) and in speeches across southern California. CBS attempted to put him on TV once in March 1951, only for the program to be scrapped before ever being put to air due to Patton’s language. Then in May, Patton decided to level his criticism at Eisenhower, one of few generals more popular than himself, and when Eisenhower delivered a calm but brilliant rebuke of Patton’s statements (which amounted to calling “Ike” a coward for not invading the Soviet Union), most of Patton’s followers abandoned him. His speeches would attract smaller and smaller crowds, attending more for entertainment than anything else.
Then Joseph McCarthy made the worst decision of his career. He attempted to smear George C. Marshall.
McCarthy and Marshall had despised each other for a while, but it was not until the dying days of the Korean War that McCarthy launched his first attack on Marshall. Unlike most of the senator’s bluster-ridden statements, this one had competed with the end of the war for headlines, and few outside the Senate paid it any attention. McCarthy then seems to have become distracted with other targets, as his next attack on Marshall would not come until October. When it did come, it was furious: Marshall had “conspired” with the Soviets at Yalta to give the Red Army control of half of Europe; Marshall had “sabotaged” an aid bill to China, allowing Chiang to fall; Marshall had “invited” the communists into Korea, and then he had failed to drive them out quickly enough, costing hundreds more American lives. All in all, Marshall was to blame for every diplomatic or military failure of the last eight years.
Patton, who counted Marshall as one of his two remaining friends in anything resembling a high place (MacArthur being the other), was outraged. Within twenty-four hours of McCarthy’s attack, Patton managed to convince the ABC to air him on the radio, where he delivered a sweeping criticism of McCarthy, calling him “dishonourable”, “pathetic”, and a “stain upon the Senate”. The media immediately caught on to what was sure to be a popular story: few people had dared challenge McCarthy so directly before, and even fewer had come out of it looking good. McCarthy would accuse them of being part of a communist plot or conspiracy, or even declare them to be out-and-out Red, and their reputation would be in ashes before the week was out.
Patton wasn’t fazed. He had given up caring about his reputation somewhere south of the Yalu River, and his anti-communist credentials were second to none. He had the scars and the limp to prove it. With no prospect of another war on the horizon, Patton was also looking for a fight. So all throughout November, Patton attacked McCarthy in the press, and the senator, predictably, retaliated, until on January 10th, 1952, the New York Times published the most famous headline since Dewey “defeated” Truman.
‘McCARTHY LABELS PATTON A COMMUNIST AGENT!’
He had taken the bait.
Patton had expected that reaction for weeks, and now that he had it, he was quick to seize the opportunity to humiliate his rival. McCarthy had made a habit of investigating supposed communists, not in a court, but on the floor of the Senate, where he was surrounded by all of his cronies and few of his opponents. There was no impartial jury to worry about, so McCarthy could use as many of his lies as he saw fit without fear of being called out, making it the perfect kangaroo court. Despite this, Patton publicly dared him to ‘investigate’ his communist links, and McCarthy was more than happy to oblige.
As he had when McCarthy attacked Marshall, Patton went to the ABC, suggesting that the ‘trial’ be filmed and broadcast on TV, live for much of the East Coast. They expressed concern about the language he was likely to use, to which Patton replied “the hell with it. Unless Stalin starts a war or something, this is going to be the biggest show until the election. Just put a warning up at the start to settle the old ladies. I’m going to ruin the son of a bitch, and the best way to do so is to let the whole country see him for the crook he is.” The ABC agreed, but decided against a live airing, instead choosing to edit out Patton’s profanities and showing it the following day.
***
January 29, 1952
As he sat in front of the ABC microphone and stared at that son of a bitch senator on the other side of the room, George Patton’s mind went back to that day he had spent at the Yalu River. Despite his best efforts to persuade them, the gods of war had not taken him. His place in Valhalla was waiting – he was certain of it – but the valkyries had not come. In all those miserable days since, he had come up with exactly one reason why they had not: there was at least one battle left to fight. Perhaps this was it. Such a shame they wouldn’t let him bring his six-shooters here…
‘Tail-Gunner Joe’, as it turned out, was a coward of the highest order. Someone, Patton didn’t care who, had dug up an old story where McCarthy claimed to have suffered a war wound in a plane crash during World War II. Turned out the yellow bastard had busted his leg doing something stupid when his ship crossed the Equator for the first time.
“How the hell do you think I got this?” Patton had asked, lifting the leg of his pants to show where a pair of bullets had briefly been in 1950 (as well as an old wound from the Great War). “All you do, all you have ever done, is lie about where the damn communists are. You don’t know the slightest goddamned bit about where the hell they are. They’re not in the State Department. George Marshall’s a hero, not a Red. They’re not in Hollywood. They’re on the goddamned Yalu River and in Moscow. And if you had any guts at all, you’d have joined the Marines and fought under me in Korea. You call yourself a military hero. You’re not. The real heroes are those brave sons of bitches we couldn’t bring back home!”
“I served my country!” McCarthy blasted back.
“You don’t know the first thing about service! I was serving this country – actually serving, not your shit of an excuse for it, while you were still pissing your short pants.” Patton shouted back. “Serving means actually going out and shooting the Nazi and communist sons of bitches and putting your own damned dick on the line. All you did was sit aboard a ship getting drunk on watch and then pissed off as quick as you possibly could. That’s not service, that’s goddamned yellow cowardice!”
Patton heard a gavel banging in the background. Someone of importance, doubtless one of McCarthy’s goons, wanted him to shut up. He ignored it.
“This investigation is a farce. Your committee couldn’t find evidence of prostitution if you sent a hundred men into a whorehouse. If it were anything else, I wouldn’t be here. I got shot telling Harry Truman to go to war with the Red sons of bitches. Isn’t it obvious that I’m about as likely to be a Red as Stalin is to sing Yankee Doodle? There’s one less communist country in the world today than there was a year and a half ago, and they're gone because of the army that I led to battle them. Where the hell were you last year? I sure didn’t see you in Korea.”
Then Patton pulled out some photos he had been given all the way back in 1945. “Senator, I think it is about time you showed some damned respect to the brave men who give their lives to their country, instead of spitting on their faces.”
The photos, as he would later explain for the cameras, were from the Malmedy massacre during the Battle of the Bulge. Those weren’t his men – they had belonged to the First Army – but he had seen some of the sites himself. McCarthy was on record calling for the commutation of the death sentences for the SS bastards behind it.
Two weeks later, Patton would be told that it was the ABC’s most-watched program of all time, a record that would take years to be broken. He didn’t care about that. What he did care about was victory, and he had scored a big one. McCarthy’s reputation was in tatters.
- BNC
