Part V, Chapter 34
CHAPTER 34
As he campaigned for the presidency, MacArthur and his allies had stated many times that, excluding former presidents, he was the most qualified man for the job in decades, on the basis that unlike Stevenson or Taft or Eisenhower, he had actually run a country before. Nor had he just helped legislation be passed the way a congressman or state governor did. For six years, Japan had answered to him and him alone, and his experience turning the country from a bombed-out ruin and fanatical military dictatorship, into a prospering democracy could be applied to the United States.
Enough Americans had agreed with that message to vote him into office, and certainly some of the experience would apply in Washington. The men he brought over from Tokyo were also given cabinet positions most similar to their old roles: the Japanese experience had been successful after all, and why change what had worked before?
Unfortunately, not all of the experience in Tokyo applied in Washington. In Tokyo, the only oversight he had ever had was Harry Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who often went ignored anyway, and he had been free to rule almost by decree. Not so here: now he represented just one of the three branches of government. He couldn’t do anything about the Supreme Court, so he didn’t worry about them. The third, Congress, would control a lot of what he could and could not do. If the MacArthur platform was to get written into law, he would need the 83rd Congress on his side.
MacArthur was well aware of Congress’ power: in 1898, he had seen Congress push President McKinley into war with Spain, and then send his own father to the Philippines months later. Twenty years later they had cut the Army’s budget following World War I and tried to reduce the West Point curriculum while he was superintendent there, moves he had bitterly protested. What he did not know was what the 83rd Congress in particular looked like. Some of its members were longtime friends, but they were just a few out of over 500. Fourteen years out of the country had made it difficult to track the careers of senators and representatives, and outside of a few prominent names, he did not know who, or more importantly how many, stood on his side.
So, for one of the rare times in his entire four-year term, he summoned Special Advisor Herbert Hoover to the Oval Office. He hated asking for advice: wasn’t the whole point of being the Boss that people came to you with their questions? Though he sought it reluctantly, he did trust Hoover’s judgement. Hoover was a man he had admired for a long time: if he had to get help from someone, Hoover wouldn’t be too bad.
***
January 29, 1953
“Tell me what I’m dealing with.” MacArthur said. “You know what we campaigned on. Who’s with me in Congress?”
“Depends what you send them.” Hoover said. “A lot of the time, I’d send them a bill, two weeks, maybe two months later, I’d usually be looking at something completely different anyway. When I sent them a request for a tariff bill, I asked for a moderate increase to agricultural tariffs and a cut to industrial tariffs. What I got was the biggest hike since Andrew Jackson was in this office.”
“Suppose we call for a cut to the poll tax then.” MacArthur said. He wanted taxes cut as a general rule, and this one would be a good way to get his civil rights proposals moving.
“Don’t.” Hoover said firmly. Then he repeated the word.
“Don’t. Not until your other bills are through the Senate at least. The South will try to filibuster it - only need thirty-three to maintain one and they’ve got more than twenty guaranteed. Civil rights is going to be a fight no matter what you do, and they’re already unhappy with you just for campaigning on it. Truman tried four years ago, they held his other programs hostage until he gave in.” Hoover explained. “Push for it, certainly, that’s what you were elected to do, but go for labour or the tax cuts first.”
“So who’s on our side with those?” MacArthur asked.
Hoover didn’t offer any names. Instead, he began to describe the layout, as he saw it, of both Houses of Congress. The House of Representatives, he explained, would probably work with MacArthur on anything that had been mentioned in the campaign. Speaker Joe Martin was one of the most loyal MacArthur supporters there were, and while the rest of the GOP wouldn’t necessarily follow him all the time, the President shouldn’t have too many enemies. More than a few of them had been elected to their seats on the back of the former general’s presidential campaign, and hopefully they wouldn’t forget what the President had done for them.
Democratic Leader (he didn’t like the term Minority Leader) Sam Rayburn would also be someone MacArthur could probably count on for support. “That will help,” Hoover pointed out, for the Democrats were only in the minority by a few seats and Republican unity was far from guaranteed. Rayburn was a strong and vocal believer in bipartisan governance. “As long as you don’t try to tear down Democratic accomplishments, he’ll be on your side, and bring a wing of Democrats with him.” Hoover said. “I’m sure he’s also noticed that a few of our campaign promises were things Truman tried to do, and that can’t hurt.”
No, I suppose it can’t. MacArthur thought. He really could have done without the comparison to his predecessor though.
“Where the House will fight you is on those labour laws.” Hoover predicted. “There’s a lot of conservatives there, in both chambers of Congress really, and many of them are proud of Taft-Hartley. Everything else, as long as it doesn’t get too radical, I think the House will back. They passed a civil rights bill a few years ago. The Senate killed it.”
The Senate, by the way Hoover described it, would be the source of a lot of problems in the next four years. Staggered six-year terms meant that hardly any of them owed MacArthur anything for their election. The Senate was also fiercely independent, governed far more by its own traditions than any executive’s wishes, so it would be predisposed to fight anything MacArthur put before it purely on principle - a fight they were likely to win using the power of the filibuster.
Then there was the makeup of the Senate itself. Both party leaders were new to the position: William Knowland for the Republicans and Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democrats, but they had little power on their own. The 48-48 split of seats didn’t matter either: while Vice President Lodge could break ties (about the only role MacArthur would ever give to him during his term), party lines could not be relied on. Indeed, they probably didn’t matter one bit.
What did matter were the conservative and liberal factions. The “conservative coalition” - formed shortly after MacArthur left for Manila - combined Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans to form a bloc that dominated the Senate and had largely done whatever it pleased. “They’re against labour, they’re against the New Deal and the South is prepared to fight to the death against civil rights. I expect you’ll get a tax cut out of them. Everything else?” Hoover shook his head. It wasn’t going to be easy to convince them.
Liberal Democrats, and what had been the Dewey and Eisenhower wing of the GOP, would probably be MacArthur’s strongest base of support. Hoover said there was only one problem with them: “there’s not that many of them.” Thirty or forty senators couldn’t pass anything if they didn’t have some of the others on side.
***
The first major bill to reach the Senate floor would not be about taxes or labour unions or even civil rights (one part of Hoover’s advice which MacArthur took particularly seriously - he would not allow himself to fail like Truman had). It would be, as the President saw it, a bill to restrict MacArthur’s powers on the world stage.
Republican Senator John W. Bricker was the arch-conservative successor to Robert Taft, still embittered by his hero’s defeat in the 1952 National Convention. Although he had voted for the Marshall Plan, he remained a strong opponent to foreign aid and many other forms of international intervention, as well as the United Nations. During the Roosevelt and Truman years, he had seen the executive branch take more and more control over America’s foreign policy, policy that in past decades had been under the purview of the Senate and exemplified by the Yalta Agreement. Yalta itself was no longer an issue, but the “executive overreach” was.
Bricker’s Amendment would require explicit Congressional approval for any treaties or agreements with foreign powers, effectively seizing back the powers that the Senate had given FDR and Truman, and would force MacArthur to have Congress vote on any of the initiatives he wanted to push on the foreign stage. For a president much more interested in foreign policy than domestic concerns, this wasn’t far removed from handing leadership of the nation over to the successor of his campaign nemesis. MacArthur was furious, so he did what he had always done best: he went to the press.
“The proposal put forward to the Senate yesterday morning by Senator Bricker of Ohio represents one of the most irresponsible pieces of legislation to ever be put forward to our government. Instead of allowing for strong and decisive action during the times that such action is needed most, Senator Bricker believes that even the most urgent of issues be put forward into a lengthy debate before any action is permitted to be taken. I have always, and will always, affirm my belief that Congress be consulted on decisions of foreign policy. That has never been in question. It is of the utmost importance however, that in times of war and diplomatic dispute, that swift action not be delayed. The first days of the Korean War were times of great enemy success, where delay could not be afforded. It was not afforded, and the rapid application of General Patton and his forces allowed for that enemy success to be turned into the most decisive rout of our times. I must ask, where would our Korean allies be today had decisive action not been taken, but entirely under Communist control? That is the danger that this bill represents. It is a danger that this country can not afford.”
While the Saturday Evening Post and New York Times could, and did, get the public on MacArthur’s side, they couldn’t do much to influence Congress. When Vice President Lodge gave MacArthur a list of how he expected the congressmen to vote, there was good cause for the President to be concerned. A handful of liberal Republicans, as well as Knowland and other MacArthur admirers, would vote ‘nay’. That still left almost seventy senators for the bill, and against him. MacArthur’s response was a quick order to Almond: “Get me Nixon”.
Richard Nixon had been going out of his way to prove his loyalty to MacArthur ever since they first met late in the election campaign. No doubt part of that was good politics: if Nixon distinguished himself under MacArthur, he could use that image to help him should he ever try to run for office in the future, but part may also have been a desire for acceptance by the former Senator, who had grown up in a poor family. Besides, in an administration where sycophancy counted more than official titles, what better way was there to rise up the ranks?
MacArthur had noticed Nixon’s loyalty, but for this issue loyalty wouldn’t matter so much more as Nixon’s previous job. A month earlier, Nixon had been a Senator, and Nixon would therefore know which strings to pull to get the Bricker Amendment “annihilated,” as MacArthur insisted. Nixon was told of the urgency of the matter, and knew immediately what needed to be done. “Sir, I’ll talk to LBJ” he said.
Lyndon Johnson had his own reasons for sabotaging the Bricker Amendment, and had begun working to defeat it even before he received a call from Nixon. Johnson was looking to advance his own power, and in a 48-48 Senate, the best way he could do that was to advance Democratic power as well. MacArthur was a notably popular President among the public (at least outside of the South), but here his own party had turned against him after less than a month in office. Therefore, if Johnson could make the Democrats look like the party that was helping MacArthur while the Republicans fought him, he could improve Democratic chances in 1954.
Nixon thought Johnson could help him for another reason altogether: in the 82nd Congress, the Senate had been stuck in its old ways and thus particularly ineffective at getting much passed, but over the last few weeks Johnson had ascended to the party leadership and radically reformed a Senate that had always been extremely resistant to reform. Instead of continuing the old tradition of giving Committee positions to senators with the greatest seniority, Johnson had convinced dozens to give up their positions in various Committees so that younger, more capable senators took their place. Johnson had gotten more done in a few weeks than the previous Democrats had managed in years, so Nixon was sure that if Johnson was on side enough Democrats soon would be. He would need Democrats too: with the conservative Republicans following Bricker, there wouldn’t be enough votes to block the bill with the GOP alone.
Nixon’s faith in Johnson proved well placed: when the call for votes was made three weeks later, Bricker’s Amendment fell just one vote short of passing (something Johnson had ensured specifically to ensure he got the most credit possible). MacArthur, finally, could focus not on leftover drama from the Roosevelt days, but on his own policies, which would include foreign matters. Better yet, the ‘Bataan Gang’ had a new member.
- BNC
As he campaigned for the presidency, MacArthur and his allies had stated many times that, excluding former presidents, he was the most qualified man for the job in decades, on the basis that unlike Stevenson or Taft or Eisenhower, he had actually run a country before. Nor had he just helped legislation be passed the way a congressman or state governor did. For six years, Japan had answered to him and him alone, and his experience turning the country from a bombed-out ruin and fanatical military dictatorship, into a prospering democracy could be applied to the United States.
Enough Americans had agreed with that message to vote him into office, and certainly some of the experience would apply in Washington. The men he brought over from Tokyo were also given cabinet positions most similar to their old roles: the Japanese experience had been successful after all, and why change what had worked before?
Unfortunately, not all of the experience in Tokyo applied in Washington. In Tokyo, the only oversight he had ever had was Harry Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who often went ignored anyway, and he had been free to rule almost by decree. Not so here: now he represented just one of the three branches of government. He couldn’t do anything about the Supreme Court, so he didn’t worry about them. The third, Congress, would control a lot of what he could and could not do. If the MacArthur platform was to get written into law, he would need the 83rd Congress on his side.
MacArthur was well aware of Congress’ power: in 1898, he had seen Congress push President McKinley into war with Spain, and then send his own father to the Philippines months later. Twenty years later they had cut the Army’s budget following World War I and tried to reduce the West Point curriculum while he was superintendent there, moves he had bitterly protested. What he did not know was what the 83rd Congress in particular looked like. Some of its members were longtime friends, but they were just a few out of over 500. Fourteen years out of the country had made it difficult to track the careers of senators and representatives, and outside of a few prominent names, he did not know who, or more importantly how many, stood on his side.
So, for one of the rare times in his entire four-year term, he summoned Special Advisor Herbert Hoover to the Oval Office. He hated asking for advice: wasn’t the whole point of being the Boss that people came to you with their questions? Though he sought it reluctantly, he did trust Hoover’s judgement. Hoover was a man he had admired for a long time: if he had to get help from someone, Hoover wouldn’t be too bad.
***
January 29, 1953
“Tell me what I’m dealing with.” MacArthur said. “You know what we campaigned on. Who’s with me in Congress?”
“Depends what you send them.” Hoover said. “A lot of the time, I’d send them a bill, two weeks, maybe two months later, I’d usually be looking at something completely different anyway. When I sent them a request for a tariff bill, I asked for a moderate increase to agricultural tariffs and a cut to industrial tariffs. What I got was the biggest hike since Andrew Jackson was in this office.”
“Suppose we call for a cut to the poll tax then.” MacArthur said. He wanted taxes cut as a general rule, and this one would be a good way to get his civil rights proposals moving.
“Don’t.” Hoover said firmly. Then he repeated the word.
“Don’t. Not until your other bills are through the Senate at least. The South will try to filibuster it - only need thirty-three to maintain one and they’ve got more than twenty guaranteed. Civil rights is going to be a fight no matter what you do, and they’re already unhappy with you just for campaigning on it. Truman tried four years ago, they held his other programs hostage until he gave in.” Hoover explained. “Push for it, certainly, that’s what you were elected to do, but go for labour or the tax cuts first.”
“So who’s on our side with those?” MacArthur asked.
Hoover didn’t offer any names. Instead, he began to describe the layout, as he saw it, of both Houses of Congress. The House of Representatives, he explained, would probably work with MacArthur on anything that had been mentioned in the campaign. Speaker Joe Martin was one of the most loyal MacArthur supporters there were, and while the rest of the GOP wouldn’t necessarily follow him all the time, the President shouldn’t have too many enemies. More than a few of them had been elected to their seats on the back of the former general’s presidential campaign, and hopefully they wouldn’t forget what the President had done for them.
Democratic Leader (he didn’t like the term Minority Leader) Sam Rayburn would also be someone MacArthur could probably count on for support. “That will help,” Hoover pointed out, for the Democrats were only in the minority by a few seats and Republican unity was far from guaranteed. Rayburn was a strong and vocal believer in bipartisan governance. “As long as you don’t try to tear down Democratic accomplishments, he’ll be on your side, and bring a wing of Democrats with him.” Hoover said. “I’m sure he’s also noticed that a few of our campaign promises were things Truman tried to do, and that can’t hurt.”
No, I suppose it can’t. MacArthur thought. He really could have done without the comparison to his predecessor though.
“Where the House will fight you is on those labour laws.” Hoover predicted. “There’s a lot of conservatives there, in both chambers of Congress really, and many of them are proud of Taft-Hartley. Everything else, as long as it doesn’t get too radical, I think the House will back. They passed a civil rights bill a few years ago. The Senate killed it.”
The Senate, by the way Hoover described it, would be the source of a lot of problems in the next four years. Staggered six-year terms meant that hardly any of them owed MacArthur anything for their election. The Senate was also fiercely independent, governed far more by its own traditions than any executive’s wishes, so it would be predisposed to fight anything MacArthur put before it purely on principle - a fight they were likely to win using the power of the filibuster.
Then there was the makeup of the Senate itself. Both party leaders were new to the position: William Knowland for the Republicans and Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democrats, but they had little power on their own. The 48-48 split of seats didn’t matter either: while Vice President Lodge could break ties (about the only role MacArthur would ever give to him during his term), party lines could not be relied on. Indeed, they probably didn’t matter one bit.
What did matter were the conservative and liberal factions. The “conservative coalition” - formed shortly after MacArthur left for Manila - combined Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans to form a bloc that dominated the Senate and had largely done whatever it pleased. “They’re against labour, they’re against the New Deal and the South is prepared to fight to the death against civil rights. I expect you’ll get a tax cut out of them. Everything else?” Hoover shook his head. It wasn’t going to be easy to convince them.
Liberal Democrats, and what had been the Dewey and Eisenhower wing of the GOP, would probably be MacArthur’s strongest base of support. Hoover said there was only one problem with them: “there’s not that many of them.” Thirty or forty senators couldn’t pass anything if they didn’t have some of the others on side.
***
The first major bill to reach the Senate floor would not be about taxes or labour unions or even civil rights (one part of Hoover’s advice which MacArthur took particularly seriously - he would not allow himself to fail like Truman had). It would be, as the President saw it, a bill to restrict MacArthur’s powers on the world stage.
Republican Senator John W. Bricker was the arch-conservative successor to Robert Taft, still embittered by his hero’s defeat in the 1952 National Convention. Although he had voted for the Marshall Plan, he remained a strong opponent to foreign aid and many other forms of international intervention, as well as the United Nations. During the Roosevelt and Truman years, he had seen the executive branch take more and more control over America’s foreign policy, policy that in past decades had been under the purview of the Senate and exemplified by the Yalta Agreement. Yalta itself was no longer an issue, but the “executive overreach” was.
Bricker’s Amendment would require explicit Congressional approval for any treaties or agreements with foreign powers, effectively seizing back the powers that the Senate had given FDR and Truman, and would force MacArthur to have Congress vote on any of the initiatives he wanted to push on the foreign stage. For a president much more interested in foreign policy than domestic concerns, this wasn’t far removed from handing leadership of the nation over to the successor of his campaign nemesis. MacArthur was furious, so he did what he had always done best: he went to the press.
“The proposal put forward to the Senate yesterday morning by Senator Bricker of Ohio represents one of the most irresponsible pieces of legislation to ever be put forward to our government. Instead of allowing for strong and decisive action during the times that such action is needed most, Senator Bricker believes that even the most urgent of issues be put forward into a lengthy debate before any action is permitted to be taken. I have always, and will always, affirm my belief that Congress be consulted on decisions of foreign policy. That has never been in question. It is of the utmost importance however, that in times of war and diplomatic dispute, that swift action not be delayed. The first days of the Korean War were times of great enemy success, where delay could not be afforded. It was not afforded, and the rapid application of General Patton and his forces allowed for that enemy success to be turned into the most decisive rout of our times. I must ask, where would our Korean allies be today had decisive action not been taken, but entirely under Communist control? That is the danger that this bill represents. It is a danger that this country can not afford.”
While the Saturday Evening Post and New York Times could, and did, get the public on MacArthur’s side, they couldn’t do much to influence Congress. When Vice President Lodge gave MacArthur a list of how he expected the congressmen to vote, there was good cause for the President to be concerned. A handful of liberal Republicans, as well as Knowland and other MacArthur admirers, would vote ‘nay’. That still left almost seventy senators for the bill, and against him. MacArthur’s response was a quick order to Almond: “Get me Nixon”.
Richard Nixon had been going out of his way to prove his loyalty to MacArthur ever since they first met late in the election campaign. No doubt part of that was good politics: if Nixon distinguished himself under MacArthur, he could use that image to help him should he ever try to run for office in the future, but part may also have been a desire for acceptance by the former Senator, who had grown up in a poor family. Besides, in an administration where sycophancy counted more than official titles, what better way was there to rise up the ranks?
MacArthur had noticed Nixon’s loyalty, but for this issue loyalty wouldn’t matter so much more as Nixon’s previous job. A month earlier, Nixon had been a Senator, and Nixon would therefore know which strings to pull to get the Bricker Amendment “annihilated,” as MacArthur insisted. Nixon was told of the urgency of the matter, and knew immediately what needed to be done. “Sir, I’ll talk to LBJ” he said.
Lyndon Johnson had his own reasons for sabotaging the Bricker Amendment, and had begun working to defeat it even before he received a call from Nixon. Johnson was looking to advance his own power, and in a 48-48 Senate, the best way he could do that was to advance Democratic power as well. MacArthur was a notably popular President among the public (at least outside of the South), but here his own party had turned against him after less than a month in office. Therefore, if Johnson could make the Democrats look like the party that was helping MacArthur while the Republicans fought him, he could improve Democratic chances in 1954.
Nixon thought Johnson could help him for another reason altogether: in the 82nd Congress, the Senate had been stuck in its old ways and thus particularly ineffective at getting much passed, but over the last few weeks Johnson had ascended to the party leadership and radically reformed a Senate that had always been extremely resistant to reform. Instead of continuing the old tradition of giving Committee positions to senators with the greatest seniority, Johnson had convinced dozens to give up their positions in various Committees so that younger, more capable senators took their place. Johnson had gotten more done in a few weeks than the previous Democrats had managed in years, so Nixon was sure that if Johnson was on side enough Democrats soon would be. He would need Democrats too: with the conservative Republicans following Bricker, there wouldn’t be enough votes to block the bill with the GOP alone.
Nixon’s faith in Johnson proved well placed: when the call for votes was made three weeks later, Bricker’s Amendment fell just one vote short of passing (something Johnson had ensured specifically to ensure he got the most credit possible). MacArthur, finally, could focus not on leftover drama from the Roosevelt days, but on his own policies, which would include foreign matters. Better yet, the ‘Bataan Gang’ had a new member.
- BNC
