CHAPTER 36
The Glasgow Conference of 1953 would be only the first of four major international meetings MacArthur attended that year. Long before becoming president, he had resolved to conduct all important foreign policy personally, unlike Truman who had let the State Department handle it. MacArthur’s relationship with State had been frosty for years, and aside from a weekly report from Henry Luce, he paid them little attention. His subordinates in Washington could handle routine matters of governing the country. He would use his own time on things that were much more important.
Winston Churchill had been keen on having a conference between the leaders of Great Britain, France and the United States ever since Stalin’s death to determine how the great powers would handle the change in Soviet leadership. For one reason or another, past attempts had been postponed, and only in the last few months had Malenkov’s grip on the Soviet government become strong enough that he wouldn’t be soon replaced. Now, with changes in leadership unlikely in the immediate future, Churchill thought the time was ripe. He proposed a meeting in Bermuda, MacArthur suggested somewhere in Scotland instead. “The MacArthurs are of Scottish descent, and I’ve never seen the place” was the explanation he gave to the press.
MacArthur’s chief aim at Glasgow was to convince Churchill and French Prime Minister Rene Mayer to support his efforts to reunify and neutralise Germany in line with the Stalin Note. As he had with his Defence team in Washington, he gave a grand speech about the danger that a divided Germany posed to world peace.
“As long as Germany remains divided, the only outcome we can expect is for the country to remain a flashpoint of continual tension. No people will long tolerate the division imposed by an arbitrary line on a map. Just as the people of Korea sought unification by force, the people of Germany too will insist upon the end of their separation, using the force of arms if no other option is left for them. This is a situation the communists too will exploit, a way to export their destructive ideology into the minds of the German people.
“The solution that we must take is to put the cork in the bottle, to keep apart the arms of the East and the West. The communist offer is for a free Germany, one that will be far more inclined to share our values than theirs. Instead of representing a dagger pointing at the heart of Europe, the German people would become your shield. Let us grant them peace, rather than watch the flames of unity turn Europe ablaze.”
Churchill, long impressed with MacArthur and seeking to revive the “special relationship” that had somewhat soured under Truman, was quick to agree. He, like MacArthur, sought to reduce the threat of a devastating atomic war as much as possible, and believed that could be best done with some sort of agreement with Malenkov. The Stalin Note proposal was generous too, with unified Germany to be a democratic state whose elections would be supervised by the four powers. Freedoms of speech and the press would be guaranteed, and the only requirement Stalin had made was that Germany play no part in any military alliances, which would include NATO and the European Defence Community. Churchill believed the EDC would prove an unsuccessful effort with or without Germany, and the Red Army would be required to leave East German soil, so he had little reason to object.
One concession Churchill did seek from MacArthur was America’s support for Britain’s position in the long-running Abadan Crisis in Iran. Two years earlier, the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s assets within his country, worth millions of pounds and a considerable amount of prestige to the British. The British had retaliated with a blockade of the country, forbidding other countries from buying the seized Iranian oil. Mossadegh had been elected democratically, but in recent months was ruling more often than not by decree, and the British believed he was acting under Soviet influence. MI6 had been considering a coup d’etat to remove Mossadegh from power, but Churchill believed it would be best if America gave the operation its support.
MacArthur had not paid much attention to Iran since becoming President, and he had never visited the country the way he had Indochina. Willoughby had mentioned the CIA’s (so far quite limited) involvement in Iran, but America didn’t have much influence in the country. What America did have was a 50/50 stake in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, and any move he made in Iran could have effects there. The threat of Soviet influence was also too great to ignore: if Iran fell to the communists, what could that be but the first step in their effort to control Africa and the Middle East?
Normally, he would have been opposed to launching a coup. Not only did it go against the principle of self-determination, but he knew that as soon as the new regime’s financial and especially military backing was taken away, some native movement would quickly rise up to replace it. He had seen first-hand the reaction most people had to a foreign occupation, his first combat action was against a pair of Filipino bandits in 1903. His democratisation of Japan had only worked because the Japanese themselves had led the majority of the effort. In Iran, none of that applied. Mossadegh was unpopular, and a pathetic excuse for a democratic leader besides. Moreover, the plan Churchill described consisted mostly of bribing Iranian officials to overthrow their own government. Finally, if he supported Churchill here, he could be sure Churchill would help him get Germany reunified.
Prime Minister Mayer, who could only listen to MacArthur’s dramatics with the help of Charles Willoughby acting as translator, was not so easily convinced. France, he protested, had been attempting to bring West Germany into the broader economy of Western Europe, efforts that would be undone if a deal was made with Malenkov. Nor could France afford the danger posed by a resurgent Germany in a future war: three times in the past eighty years Germany had invaded, and three times France had lost a generation of men. MacArthur would privately wonder whether the French would rather lose a generation of men to the communists, but hoping to bring the French to his side, he offered Prime Minister Mayer the construction of additional air bases in France that could be used to host B-52s, and promised that French interests would not be ignored in the meeting with Malenkov.
Nor would NATO be weakened if Germany, or even West Germany, was left out of the organisation. Whatever place France proposed to give them, MacArthur suggested be given to Spain instead.
MacArthur had had little to do with Spain in the past: he had been studying to enter West Point when his father travelled to the Philippines in 1898, and as Spain had been neutral in both world wars, they had factored little in his subsequent military career. Truman’s distrust of Franco, stemming from Franco’s tacit support for the Axis, had similarly cut them out of most discussions about the Cold War: even now, the Spanish had been barred from the UN, NATO and a range of other organisations. Relations had improved somewhat during Truman’s second term - Franco was a staunch anti-communist after all, but they were hardly what one might consider good. MacArthur sought to change that.
Most of MacArthur’s Spanish policy came from the German-born Willoughby, who had met Franco in the 1920s and considered him the “second greatest general in the world”. Willoughby had been passionately pushing for Franco to be included in the western alliance, and soon convinced the President to travel to Madrid. Before MacArthur left Washington, he instructed Eisenhower to begin facilitating Spain’s membership into the UN: with Stalin dead and Malenkov less hostile than his predecessor, the Soviet veto had ceased to be an obstacle.
Franco, too, was keen to meet MacArthur and end Spain’s isolation in the world. The two men, both former generals, quickly established a strong relationship. MacArthur expressed his desire to bring Spain into NATO and to use the country as a site for more air bases, while Franco sought American loans and economic aid. NATO membership would depend on the other member states, and Belgium in particular expressed hesitation about Spanish entry due to Franco’s undemocratic government, but an agreement concerning just Spain and the United States was easily reached. Congress would have to approve the deal, of course, but MacArthur doubted they would offer much opposition. Most of them had been complaining that Truman didn’t do enough to bring Spain on side.
Where MacArthur was perfectly willing to ignore French interests was in Indochina. In a move that nearly derailed the entire Glasgow Conference (and ensured Mayer would only give the resulting agreement to meet with Malenkov begrudging approval), MacArthur declared that he would be cutting all aid to the French war effort almost immediately, a sum that had come to around a billion dollars a year. The only concession he was willing to commit on this matter was to give American assistance to any French efforts to evacuate their troops, and to offer to mediate the peace conference with the rebel groups.
As he did so, MacArthur claimed that Congress was forcing his hand by cutting the foreign aid budget (while neglecting to mention the tax cuts that had made that budget cut a priority). Mayer would soon explain to the French press his own interpretation: “President MacArthur is under the impression that, because he travelled to that part of the world once almost fifty years ago, he now knows what the people there want, and I’m not even sure if he ever set foot in Indochina itself.”
Once MacArthur decided that the French would have to leave, there was little Mayer could do but accept the President’s paltry concessions. American aid was paying for just about all of the war effort, and using the French treasury to make up the difference would quickly bankrupt a country that was still recovering from World War II. As he agreed to MacArthur’s offer to mediate the agreement, Mayer knew he had very likely committed political suicide: the Fourth Republic had already gone through ten different prime ministers, and they would not need long to find an eleventh.
The Geneva Conference, which began on July 13th, would soon prove to be far from the honourable withdrawal that MacArthur had envisioned it become. Mayer’s government had survived long enough for him to send an ambassador to represent France, although the prime minister refused to attend himself. The French-backed State of Vietnam led by Emperor Bao Dai also sent a representative, as did the UK. On the communist side, the Vietminh sent a delegation to represent the armies that occupied most of the colony, while both the USSR and Communist China also ensured their voices were heard.
The Vietminh offered no objections to MacArthur’s proposal that French forces, including POWs and any French civilians who wished to return to France, be permitted to withdraw undisturbed, and all powers believed that the end of September would be sufficient time for this to be achieved. The creation of the neutral states of Laos and Cambodia was similarly uncontroversial, and having secured these agreements, MacArthur flew back to Washington. He had accomplished what he sought out to do.
The Vietminh had not. French withdrawal, to them, meant total withdrawal from all of Vietnam, including the disbanding of what they considered to be a puppet government. That ‘puppet government’s representatives, who had over 100,000 Vietnamese fighting on their behalf for a non-communist Vietnamese State, fervently disagreed and demanded that France be allowed to turn over its weapons to its forces instead.
In an effort to prevent a civil war breaking out in the former colony, the Chinese proposed a partition of the country into North and South, divided at the 17th parallel, with French weapons being handed to whichever government would control the local area. Henry Luce, who had taken over from MacArthur as America’s representative, expressed his government’s opposition to a partition: MacArthur was working to end the partition of divided countries, not create new ones, and Korea was proof that partition just meant a delayed war.
The alternative to delayed war soon proved to be immediate war, as negotiations broke down following the French decision to surrender their weapons to the non-communist armies. The Vietminh were the first to walk out of the conference, with one ambassador saying “let them go, we can win without those guns.” The borders with Laos and Cambodia had been (mostly) agreed upon, those between the two Vietnamese governments would be wherever the armies stood.
MacArthur remained unwilling to intervene militarily in the Vietnamese affair, knowing that if he gave his support to one side and then they lost anyway, future negotiations would become much more complicated. “We shall wait for a winner” was the policy he gave his State Department.
- BNC
