Patton in Korea/MacArthur in the White House

[kent]

time line is very good, however I have to wonder how Mac can be a good leader while surrounding himself with yes men. Never hearing the true feelings that was what caused the WW2 problems and Korea nobody telling the bad news only wishful thinking......

 

[Bob in Pittsburgh]

time line is very good, however I have to wonder how Mac can be a good leader while surrounding himself with yes men. Never hearing the true feelings that was what caused the WW2 problems and Korea nobody telling the bad news only wishful thinking......

Well the one thing that has never been lacking is criticism of the sitting President by the opposition party and the press. Whether MacArthur would ever listen to it is another question to which my answer is a resounding No.

 

[bguy]

Well the one thing that has never been lacking is criticism of the sitting President by the opposition party and the press. Whether MacArthur would ever listen to it is another question to which my answer is a resounding No.

Not just from the opposition party either. William Knowland, the Republican Senate Leader, was known for being a stubborn man of principle, and he was not afraid to go against his own political allies if he thought they were wrong. During the 80th Congress when Knowland had just been in Senate two years, he faced down the Republican senate leader Robert Taft himself over what to do with 6 billion dollars in budget cuts (Taft wanted the savings to go to tax cuts while Knowland wanted half the money to go to debt reduction) and Knowland wrangled up enough votes to force Taft to acquiesce to his position. Eisenhower was said to dread meetings with Knowland because of how often Knowland disagreed with him and on at least one occasion gave a major speech from the Senate floor criticizing Eisenhower's foreign policy. (There's a whole chapter in the Knowland biography "One Step from the White House" called "Standing Up to Ike" because of how often he went against the president.) Thus Knowland will have absolutely no problem opposing MacArthur if he dislikes something MacArthur is doing.

Knowland was also rather sensitive to snubs. He once threated to resign as Senate Majority Leader when the Eisenhower Administration sent a report on Joe McCarthy over to 18 senators and accidentally forgot to send a copy to him. (It took Eisenhower apologizing to him to calm him down on that occasion.) As such Knowland is likely to respond very poorly to heavy handed treatment from the administration (and especially if he is not even permitted to speak to MacArthur when he wants to.)

I also doubt the Republican House of Representatives (which is probably much more conservative than the Senate) is going to think much of MacArthur's plans to revise Taft-Hartley either, so MacArthur can expect a lot of difficulties on that front as well. (And especially if Almond rigorously controls access to the president as that removes one of a president's strongest tools for persuading recalcitrant congressmen, the White House meeting, from MacArthur's arsenal.)

 

[BiteNibbleChomp]

Since John Foster Dulles has been shuffled off to the sidelines, will his brother Allen suffer the same fate? Allen was Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952, and of course became Director after Eisenhower was elected. Now thay Willoughby has the top job at CIA, what will become of his deputy?

Allen is still around for now. Mac wasn't petty enough to clean out someone just because he didn't like their brother. Willoughby isn't listening to him much though.

It's not the personnel (though I have doubts about some) it is thing like "No criticism of the President was to ever reach his ears.", freezing out his cabinet and the complete lack of any discussion or feedback. Deliberately creating an environment where no-one can question the President or even give him bad news. Frankly that alone ensures a disaster at somepoint. And because MacArthur will never accept any responsibility ("The Buck Stops Somewhere Else") he will just blame someone else, probably a civilian, but keep the same broken system until the next disaster. And the next. And the next.

MacArthur received bad news just fine - only it was always framed as something more like, "Sir, you're not gonna like this one". It's more a case of, once he had decided on something he was going to do, his mind couldn't be changed, rather than "la la la I can't hear you".
The system I described Mac using is pretty much exactly how he ran Tokyo for 6 years, and say what you will about him, but it didn't result in a crisis. Most people would say Mac was more successful there than anywhere else.

This is a brilliant analysis which made me re-think how I view Mac. Never really thought of 1898 as a major turning point with regards to the USA's imperial mindset (I personally see the Mexican War as the real turning point, the first time the States projected power against a foreign country and annexed a large swathe of foreign territory by the sword), but I see where you're coming from. Bravo BNC!

Thanks mate
Re the Mexican War, apart from the physical acquisition of California I've never been able to see it as a particularly significant event on its own - Manifest Destiny and whatnot were active political forces at least as early as the 1820s, arguably going all the way back to the Revolution, and they didn't exactly disappear once the US border was on the Pacific either... the country spent the next forty years fighting the natives all across the West. Texas too was probably inevitable a decade or more before it happened - Mexico was never going to tolerate American settlers filling the place up but there was nothing they could do to stop them. To me the war was more of a symptom of existing causes than a cause for a paradigm shift in its own right.
1898... if the Maine doesn't blow up, at most I think the US would make an effort to get a liberated Cuba on side (the Cubans had basically won that war before the US got involved), but there wasn't any pre-existing stomach for taking over the rest of the Spanish Empire (except for "that'd be nice"). No-one could have predicted things would turn out the way they did in say 1894, but there's cause to believe that they could have foreseen a Pacific border in 1840.

Oh yeah.

Nixon once calling in Hoover to put some reins on him, and Hoover left happy as a clam while Nixon was dead white.

And that was Nixon of all people.

I have zero doubt that Hoover was able to scare the hell out of most people. I just think that if there was one person in the world who would stare him down it was MacArthur. The guy won SEVEN Silver Stars for bravery in WWI. He'd seen worse.
(Out of interest, did Nixon actually see combat when he was in the Navy? Going off Wiki it seems like he just did logistics work)

Aww, and not have people's heads pop when he picks Henry Wallace for SecAg?

Judging by the last few pages, I think heads are popping without throwing Wallace into the mix

Well it is your story and you are free to tell it however you want to. In my opinion he was wrong a lot more than he was right.

I was referring specifically to his take on the Cold War with that statement - my take on reading Reminiscences was that he did quite accurately predict a lot of things about the Cold War (and even the rise of China, which is still relevant today). If you disagree, oh well

Oh, I relish the idea of Richard Nixon putting J Edgar Hoover into his place as AG...

All of a sudden, Ruthless Bobby seems like a less extreme idea.

Yeah, thanks whoever it was who first mentioned Nixon as AG. I'm going to have a lot of fun with that idea!

I think the title should be "Patton in Korea/MacArthur in the White House." Better symmetry.

Yeah, why not

- BNC

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth]

Thanks mate
Re the Mexican War, apart from the physical acquisition of California I've never been able to see it as a particularly significant event on its own - Manifest Destiny and whatnot were active political forces at least as early as the 1820s, arguably going all the way back to the Revolution, and they didn't exactly disappear once the US border was on the Pacific either... the country spent the next forty years fighting the natives all across the West. Texas too was probably inevitable a decade or more before it happened - Mexico was never going to tolerate American settlers filling the place up but there was nothing they could do to stop them. To me the war was more of a symptom of existing causes than a cause for a paradigm shift in its own right.
1898... if the Maine doesn't blow up, at most I think the US would make an effort to get a liberated Cuba on side (the Cubans had basically won that war before the US got involved), but there wasn't any pre-existing stomach for taking over the rest of the Spanish Empire (except for "that'd be nice"). No-one could have predicted things would turn out the way they did in say 1894, but there's cause to believe that they could have foreseen a Pacific border in 1840.


- BNC

Anything for you!
And I take your points about Mexico 48 versus Spain 98.

 

[BiteNibbleChomp]

It'll be very interesting to see how President Mac handles military reform; I've always been curious if Draft reform could have occurred before Vietnam. Would offering alternatives like the Civilian Conservation Corps and future Peace Corps be feasible for nation service?

If anything Mac would want to expand the Draft, not cut it. One of his biggest gripes (and this came up in 1919 as well as 1945) was that he didn't want the Army to be downsized - especially the Officers.

Then what did he want to do? The war could hardly have been won without them

- Naval blockade of China
- Ground offensive to retake Seoul (basically what happened IOTL)
- An amphibious landing in NK. "It would be something like Inchon, but on a much larger scale".
All of these are mentioned between p378-84 of Reminiscences, framed to be around Jan/Feb 1951. No mention of nukes anywhere within that plan.

Not exactly, as thats very misleading. A decade after the war I believe is when MacArthurs said the US should've used nukes in the Korean War. Which is when he had the advantage of hindsight. Using that hindsight, he is correct in that at the start of the conflict, the US would've been able to use nukes without the threat of retaliation, as the USSR only had around 5 in total at the time, and im not sure how many of those were even deployable as bombs. With that in mind, the US could have likely easily won the war with nukes. However at the time far less knowledge was available and the fact that MacArthur didn't advocate the use of nukes during the war shows that he wasn't the kind to act rashly without the full information as you keep claiming.

Outside of the conventional methods of war, one of the more strange ideas proposed during the war was to spread a belt of radioactive cobalt along the Chinese border to prevent Chinese soldiers from crossing into Korea. I'm no expert on radioactive cobalt so it sounds pretty crazy to me, but I can't speak on if it could work or not.

I believe his first mention of the "glass the Yalu" idea was actually his Dec 1952 memo to Ike (which was a case of Mac: "hey Ike, I had a plan to win the war!", Ike: "Oh ok, show me", Mac: "...um..." <proceeds to come up with something absurd to save face>), and then he quotes the memo in his memoirs in 1964. It is still long after he was in any position to actually use them.

MacArthur presidency? Oh boy!

Enjoy the ride

time line is very good, however I have to wonder how Mac can be a good leader while surrounding himself with yes men. Never hearing the true feelings that was what caused the WW2 problems and Korea nobody telling the bad news only wishful thinking......

Mac's not to blame for the start of Korea. It wasn't even under his authority until a few days after the war broke out.
The Philippines... yeah that was pretty dumb.

Not just from the opposition party either. William Knowland, the Republican Senate Leader, was known for being a stubborn man of principle, and he was not afraid to go against his own political allies if he thought they were wrong. During the 80th Congress when Knowland had just been in Senate two years, he faced down the Republican senate leader Robert Taft himself over what to do with 6 billion dollars in budget cuts (Taft wanted the savings to go to tax cuts while Knowland wanted half the money to go to debt reduction) and Knowland wrangled up enough votes to force Taft to acquiesce to his position. Eisenhower was said to dread meetings with Knowland because of how often Knowland disagreed with him and on at least one occasion gave a major speech from the Senate floor criticizing Eisenhower's foreign policy. (There's a whole chapter in the Knowland biography "One Step from the White House" called "Standing Up to Ike" because of how often he went against the president.) Thus Knowland will have absolutely no problem opposing MacArthur if he dislikes something MacArthur is doing.

Knowland was also rather sensitive to snubs. He once threated to resign as Senate Majority Leader when the Eisenhower Administration sent a report on Joe McCarthy over to 18 senators and accidentally forgot to send a copy to him. (It took Eisenhower apologizing to him to calm him down on that occasion.) As such Knowland is likely to respond very poorly to heavy handed treatment from the administration (and especially if he is not even permitted to speak to MacArthur when he wants to.)

I also doubt the Republican House of Representatives (which is probably much more conservative than the Senate) is going to think much of MacArthur's plans to revise Taft-Hartley either, so MacArthur can expect a lot of difficulties on that front as well. (And especially if Almond rigorously controls access to the president as that removes one of a president's strongest tools for persuading recalcitrant congressmen, the White House meeting, from MacArthur's arsenal.)

Very interesting... I haven't read all that much about Knowland but what I have read has described him as another one of those folks who thought Mac walked on water, looks like I'll have to rethink that a little bit
Almond wouldn't dare stop MacArthur from meeting whoever he wants - he just keeps the people MacArthur doesn't want to deal with out.

- BNC

 

[bguy]

Very interesting... I haven't read all that much about Knowland but what I have read has described him as another one of those folks who thought Mac walked on water, looks like I'll have to rethink that a little bit

Knowland did admire MacArthur a great deal. (In December 1949 Knowland wanted MacArthur to be appointed High Commissioner for Asia as a last ditch effort to try and salvage the situation in China, and he fully supported MacArthur when Truman fired him.) And they would be mostly in accord on foreign policy where Knowland shared MacArthur's strong anti-communism and emphasis on Asia. Knowland would also likely support a MacArthur push on civil rights. (Though that's a little tricker to say for sure as Knowland was kind of all over the map on civil rights. He disliked the Brown decision and initially opposed Eisenhower's civil rights bill but then changed his mind and became one of the bill's strongest supporters.) But if MacArthur is serious about pushing labor reform then they will definitely clash over that as Knowland was pretty hostile to organized labor throughout his career (he had mused in the Senate that it might be necessary to make the big unions subject to anti-trust laws and tried to get a "Bill of Rights" for employees enacted that would have greatly reduced the power of union leaders over their members), and he was also a big supporter of right to work laws (with him making the enactment of a right to work law in California the centerpiece of his campaign for Governor.)

 

[Kennedy Forever]

Knowland did admire MacArthur a great deal. (In December 1949 Knowland wanted MacArthur to be appointed High Commissioner for Asia as a last ditch effort to try and salvage the situation in China, and he fully supported MacArthur when Truman fired him.) And they would be mostly in accord on foreign policy where Knowland shared MacArthur's strong anti-communism and emphasis on Asia. Knowland would also likely support a MacArthur push on civil rights. (Though that's a little tricker to say for sure as Knowland was kind of all over the map on civil rights. He disliked the Brown decision and initially opposed Eisenhower's civil rights bill but then changed his mind and became one of the bill's strongest supporters.) But if MacArthur is serious about pushing labor reform then they will definitely clash over that as Knowland was pretty hostile to organized labor throughout his career (he had mused in the Senate that it might be necessary to make the big unions subject to anti-trust laws and tried to get a "Bill of Rights" for employees enacted that would have greatly reduced the power of union leaders over their members), and he was also a big supporter of right to work laws (with him making the enactment of a right to work law in California the centerpiece of his campaign for Governor.)

Wow Knowland sounds like a really interesting figure

 

[Wolf of Badenoch]

CHAPTER 32
So this is how my legacy comes to an end. Truman thought. God help us.

END OF PART IV

With Willoughby in a senior CIA slot, that organisation is going to be even more dysfunctional than it was IRL.

- BNC

 

[farmerted555]

I suspect J. Edna Hoover will make a mistake at some point during the MacArthur administration.

 

[Drizzt]

tried to get a "Bill of Rights" for employees enacted that would have greatly reduced the power of union leaders over their members), and he was also a big supporter of right to work laws (with him making the enactment of a right to work law in California the centerpiece of his campaign for Governor.)

Comparing OTL present day US and Europe, both those things would make for much stronger Unions in the long run.
Would make for some interesting history book entries: MacArthur (who would end up getting the credit rather than Knowland) the Anti-Communist Crusader, who also saved the American Labor Unions from their most dangerous enemy: Themselves.

 

[Adrien_skywalker]

Nice title change. Would have liked to see an obituary for Patton though.

 

[Pax Americana]

Comparing OTL present day US and Europe, both those things would make for much stronger Unions in the long run.
Would make for some interesting history book entries: MacArthur (who would end up getting the credit rather than Knowland) the Anti-Communist Crusader, who also saved the American Labor Unions from their most dangerous enemy: Themselves.

How would right to work laws strengthen Unions? You know they don't actually give a right to work, right?

 

[marathag]

How would right to work laws strengthen Unions? You know they don't actually give a right to work, right?

People wanting to join a Union, rather than be required to join.

 

[Drizzt]

How would right to work laws strengthen Unions? You know they don't actually give a right to work, right?

Because no one is a saint when handling power without any controls. Including organized labour. Allowing union members to effectively vote with their feet and hurt the leadership in their wallets by doing so is required as a last resort if the leadership is too powerful to be removed and practically owns the elections.
As I wrote: Just look at how strong unions are still in the private sector in present day OTL Europe.

 

[Pax Americana]

Because no one is a saint when handling power without any controls. Including organized labour. Allowing union members to effectively vote with their feet and hurt the leadership in their wallets by doing so is required as a last resort if the leadership is too powerful to be removed and practically owns the elections.
As I wrote: Just look at how strong unions are still in the private sector in present day OTL Europe.

But Right to Work laws are specifically designed to weaken Unions, and that's exactly what they do. Just compare the Florida Teacher's Union to the one in California and you'll see which is more powerful.

 

[Pax Americana]

People wanting to join a Union, rather than be required to join.

Yes, that's what a right to work law is

 

[Bbone91]

I think we’re veering sharply off into current politics guys, maybe throttle back before the bear gets here?

 

[BiteNibbleChomp]

Knowland did admire MacArthur a great deal. (In December 1949 Knowland wanted MacArthur to be appointed High Commissioner for Asia as a last ditch effort to try and salvage the situation in China, and he fully supported MacArthur when Truman fired him.) And they would be mostly in accord on foreign policy where Knowland shared MacArthur's strong anti-communism and emphasis on Asia. Knowland would also likely support a MacArthur push on civil rights. (Though that's a little tricker to say for sure as Knowland was kind of all over the map on civil rights. He disliked the Brown decision and initially opposed Eisenhower's civil rights bill but then changed his mind and became one of the bill's strongest supporters.) But if MacArthur is serious about pushing labor reform then they will definitely clash over that as Knowland was pretty hostile to organized labor throughout his career (he had mused in the Senate that it might be necessary to make the big unions subject to anti-trust laws and tried to get a "Bill of Rights" for employees enacted that would have greatly reduced the power of union leaders over their members), and he was also a big supporter of right to work laws (with him making the enactment of a right to work law in California the centerpiece of his campaign for Governor.)

Thanks for the info!

I suspect J. Edna Hoover will make a mistake at some point during the MacArthur administration.

Some would say he's already committed the cardinal sin of getting on Mac's bad side.

I think we’re veering sharply off into current politics guys, maybe throttle back before the bear gets here?

Agreed

- BNC

 

[farmerted555]

Agreed

Same here. I don't want to incur the wrath of The Bear,