All solid points, I'm convinced. Though I still can see him as VP, what with him being one of the top red baiters.
Patton in Korea/MacArthur in the White House
- Thread starter BiteNibbleChomp
- Start date
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A question in a Mac Arthur administration who would be selected as Sec. Def? Could be a former US Army Officer or rather would be selected an civilian/politician?
I am interested to see which of his inner circle from the army gets selected for positions in his administration. Surely he'll bring some of them along.
The thought of Charles Willoughby being apppointed Director of Central Intelligence in this TL makes me feel ill.
I could definitely see Nixon as President Douglas McCarthy's Attorney General and I agree with the rest that it would be a stepping stone for a foreign policy role later on
Knowland was one of Mac's biggest supporters, I can see Mac wanting him to keep the Majority Leader spot so he has a reliable ally in the Senate.
Really like the idea of Nixon as AG, hadn't thought of it myself but it's better than anyone I might have put there before
I can't see Mac picking Dulles even with all of his experience... Mac expresses a very low opinion of State in his memoirs - Dulles being their poster child - (and ITTL blames them for cutting him out of the peace treaties with Japan and Korea), and he was quick to sack anyone that didn't agree with him.
Well, I wasn't going to buy a book... but why not? This is interesting! Thanks!
Let's just say McFarland makes some other gaffe that defends Truman (with Truman's approval being in the 18% range, not hard for that to sink him here). Makes things easier for me that way
I've got a civilian in mind, who it is is up for you to guess
Quite a few of them will be making appearances (I'm 99% sure all the ones on my list for Mac's Cabinet have been introduced to the story already). Though I think Mac would be clever enough not to fill all the top jobs with his yes-men... instead he'd put them in slightly lower positions, and then listen to them over their superiors anyway
Get the doggy bag ready. He's going there. (I'm not going to spoil any others, but Willoughby is obvious!)
- BNC
Is it Curtis LeMay as Secretary of Defense? Because if so Vietnam is screwed!I've got a civilian in mind, who it is is up for you to guess
bguy
Donor
Fair enough. As another possibility for Secretary of State what about Henry Luce? Prominent Republican with strong foreign policy credentials (he probably would have been Wendell Wilkie's Secretary of State if Wilkie had won in 1940), who was fiercely anti-communist, had a deep interest in Asian affairs, and greatly admired MacArthur personally.
LeMay is still on active duty (SAC Commander), doesn't quite fit the 'civilian' part. Nice try
I'd like to this so. I recall reading somewhere that during this period the Senate would give wide deference to the president re cabinet appointees. Also on paper at least Willoughby's record looks pretty good - he's been Mac's intel guy for over a decade (and overseen far more successes than failures). Plus Mac will talk him up at every opportunity he can. And I don't believe he was caught up in any major controversy? (Sure, we have the Unit 731 stuff now, but did that matter to people in 1953?)
I had been thinking Air Force COS Hoyt Vandenberg (another character Mac loved talking up), think I like putting Luce there better. Optics are better with a civilian in the spot. Thanks for the suggestion!
- BNC
Questions I remember you said a lot more of the prewar infrastructure in Korea is still intact right? So I was wondering will Korea still Experience a economic boom? That's even stronger then the one that happend OTL because of the amount of infrastructure left over? Coupled with North Koreas mineral wealth.
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Who will be take over after stalin dies? Malenkov got close and it would make for a very different cold war.
McFarland suffered from a bad case of Prince Philip disease. To quote the Prince "Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, which I've practiced for many years."
My inclination here is actually to say 'no', and instead favour a slower but steadier growth that leaves it in a slightly worse position than OTL SK in per capita terms (though across NK and SK both).
First reason is because one of the key kickstarters for the boom was the war in Vietnam, which was done to copy what happened in Japan because of the Korean War. Korea is a lot shorter TTL, so the example is far less obvious, and Vietnam itself is going to go very differently ITTL for reasons that will become clear later in the timeline.
Second is because a lot of that remaining infrastructure will continue to be used in place of getting new stuff, which is fine for the short term but not so in the longer term when all the old stuff starts wearing out or becoming obsolete. Compare the USA to Germany: Germany got bombed flat, had to start its industrial base from scratch, but could start it with the finest machinery that the 1950s could offer, while their American counterparts were still using tools from the 1920s and 30s, and hence were less productive and got out-competed. Korea ITTL is more of an 'America' than a 'Germany'.
To be revealed later...
- BNC
So what would Koreas closted analog be in terms of GDP and Human Development be by modern day?
Part IV, Chapter 29
CHAPTER 29
“We have to win New Hampshire.”
The Republican Party’s first presidential primary had never been considered essential to an election campaign before. Plenty of candidates before hadn’t needed a victory at the New Hampshire primary to score the party’s nomination. Harding hadn’t won there in 1920. Landon hadn’t won there in 1936. New Hampshire hadn’t even pledged its delegates in the last three elections. Surely the state, which could only offer four electoral votes in November, wasn’t vital?
In the case of the MacArthur campaign, Phil LaFollette believed it would be. The party’s National Convention, not the primary votes, would decide who would be put on the presidential ticket, and even though he had much less appeal to the American people, Robert Taft was very much the favourite. The Convention was going to be packed with Taft’s supporters, many of them his closest friends, and they would not be easily convinced to switch their allegiance to an outsider such as MacArthur.
When LaFollette declared that New Hampshire had to be won, he reasoned that MacArthur’s greatest appeal to the party would be his immense popularity: Robert Taft would never attract a parade of one million if he went to New York City, much less the ten million that greeted MacArthur. The best way to demonstrate this to the party bosses would be to win the primaries. New Hampshire was first, and would be held on March 11th. It offered headlines. It offered momentum. It had also voted for the winner of nearly every presidential election in the last half-century. There really was no substitute for victory.
In the weeks leading up to New Hampshire, MacArthur held a number of advantages. While Taft campaigned in the South and Stassen tried to pull his campaign out of the disarray that McCarthy’s humiliation had left it in, MacArthur had concentrated most of his efforts in the Northeast. New Hampshirites saw him not just on posters or TV, but in their parks and halls. Frederick Ayer, who lived in nearby Massachusetts, had also been meeting frequently with his fellow New Englanders, growing MacArthur’s support there. Taft by comparison had to run everything from Ohio: it wasn’t quite a home field advantage, but it came close.
It might have been the difference between victory and defeat. Despite six months of campaigning, MacArthur had not yet completely supplanted Taft as the assumed next Republican leader. Ayer had predicted that MacArthur could win anywhere between half and two-thirds of the state’s vote. Instead he won with just 40% of the vote, not even a majority. MacArthur’s top supporters privately believed it to be a disappointment. One of Luce’s editors called it “a stunning victory” nonetheless, which, to a degree, it was. Taft had gone into the race expecting to win just as handily, and received just 24% of the vote. If anyone had cause to feel humiliated, it was him.
New Hampshire would also prove to be a wake-up call. Aside from a paltry 3.5% of votes going to Stassen and an assortment of other candidates, Eisenhower, who had not even appeared on the ballot, had received the rest of the votes and came in a comfortable second place. ‘Ike’ had so far remained on the sidelines of the campaign, but his dislike of MacArthur was known, and New Hampshire had been a close enough race that he sensed a chance of victory. A call to arms, which he responded to not because he particularly wanted to be president, but because he saw the alternatives as worse. On March 13th, Eisenhower formally announced that he would be a candidate for the party nomination.
When MacArthur was told about his former aide’s announcement, he barely registered an emotion. Not only had he expected to face Eisenhower for a while, but the worst Eisenhower could do to him was win more votes in an election. MacArthur was worried about another rival with whom he shared a history reaching back twenty years and who had the potential to utterly ruin his presidential ambitions. The same day that Eisenhower announced he would run for President, Drew Pearson published some of MacArthur’s old letters. Letters he had written to his former mistress Isabel Cooper.
MacArthur’s affair with Cooper began a year after his divorce, in 1930. At the time he was fifty, she was sixteen. MacArthur had gone to great efforts to keep the affair secret, to the point that his own mother was unaware of it, not in the least because of the scandal that a half-Filipino mistress would generate if word got out. Word, as it has a habit of doing, did get out eventually, courtesy of MacArthur’s ex-wife, who told the story to Pearson and one of his colleagues. Pearson would track down and contact Isabel herself after they broke up in 1934, and she was more than happy to tell the story, bringing a large collection of love letters with her.
Drew Pearson was in many ways the liberal version of Joe McCarthy, with the ‘Washington Merry-Go Round’ column in the Washington Post and a show on the radio serving as his version of McCarthy’s senate floor. Pearson’s huge range of connections enabled him to find out about a wide range of scandals, which he would then publish in the hopes of discrediting political opponents. When he did not have a scandal at his fingertips, he would make one up, and when he did have one, it was often exaggerated anyway. Even after President Roosevelt publicly described him as a “chronic liar”, many of his readers stuck by him.
Pearson had been looking to ruin MacArthur ever since the 1932 Bonus Army incident, and Cooper had given him some powerful ammunition to use. The Merry-Go Round had published a story that MacArthur was campaigning for his own promotion, to which the general responded with a defamation lawsuit (encouraged on the sidelines by none less than FDR himself). Pearson then offered an ultimatum: either the lawsuit would be dropped, or MacArthur’s letters would go public. MacArthur backed down, and for over fifteen years Pearson kept his silence, but the thought of one of his biggest enemies becoming President was too much for the journalist. He would claim until his dying day that he did keep his word, for the letters were leaked under an associate’s name, but most of the public knew that he was behind it.
Though few outsiders realised it, the story sent the MacArthur campaign into chaos. The Bonus March itself had already been used to criticise the general on the campaign trail, although to little effect. MacArthur and his campaign had expected to be challenged on the matter, and their replies were ready before the press’ questions were. Swift and convincing answers meant that the incident, almost twenty years in the past, had little effect on the campaign.
This time though, neither Ayer nor LaFollette had even been aware of MacArthur’s affair, there were no pre-written responses, and it seems even MacArthur had not expected this particular skeleton to come tumbling out of his closet. Now they had to scramble to prevent the story from destroying the campaign completely.
LaFollette and MacArthur were campaigning together in Minnesota, where the second primary would be held in a few days’ time, when the story broke. Fortunately, there had been no events planned for that afternoon, so as soon as the morning’s speech had been given, LaFollette took MacArthur back to the inn where they were staying, and asked him directly, “How much of the story is true?”
MacArthur, who was far more used to giving the orders and had never been big on confrontations, was understandably hesitant to answer, leading a frustrated LaFollette to reply “General, look, I’m trying to help you, but the only way I can is if I know what we’re facing and what cards we have, and unless we want to let this wreck everything we’ve built the last six months I need to know it today so we can try to shut it up before it gets big.” MacArthur, quite reluctantly, eventually responded “most of it.”
That ruled out denying it entirely. Ms Cooper would be able to refute any outright lies (or so the campaign thought, as it turned out she had been killed in a car accident the previous year), and having the look of hiding something could be quite damaging to the campaign and send voters running straight to Eisenhower. LaFollette soon came up with the best alternative he could think of: whenever a reporter questioned him about his affair, he was to reply “what does this story have to do with my becoming president?” It wasn’t quite an admission of the story, nor would it be a false denial, but hopefully it would be enough to make the uncomfortable questions go away. MacArthur had been positioning himself as a man above petty disputes, especially when he was questioned on foreign policy, and there was no use tarnishing that image now. The less Isabel Cooper had to do with the campaign, the better.
George Patton, who had no presidential campaign to manage nor a reputation he cared about protecting, had a rather different idea on how to handle the story. When he heard about it, he reacted to the news with an unbridled fury even exceeding his previous rage at Senator McCarthy. He knew as soon as he read the paper that Drew Pearson was out for MacArthur, and he wanted to defend his friend. But unlike McCarthy, who had only attacked Patton directly after a month and a half of mutual provocation, with Pearson it was personal.
Patton’s own experience with Pearson had occurred in 1943, when the journalist became the first to publicly report on the slapping incident in Sicily. That report had almost killed Patton’s career, and it was something that Patton had never forgiven him for. His argument with McCarthy had brought the public back on his side and radio stations were desperate to get him on the air (at least after he promised a clean speech), knowing he was sure to bring an audience. A lot of the time, he couldn’t be bothered. Now, he had a score to settle. Only after securing his time on the air did he think to call his nephew about what he was planning. “Listen Fred, tomorrow the ABC will have me on air around noon, and I’m going to tear that son of a bitch Pearson a new asshole for what he said about Mac.”
When Patton did speak on the radio, his half-hour argument proved to be more of an angry rant than a particularly well thought-out speech, but it did expose Pearson’s many, many lies. Patton discussed the slapping incident in great detail, calling out the many exaggerations in Pearson’s telling of it. He reminded his audience of the Tucker Corporation scandal that Pearson had provoked in 1948 and how he drove James Forrestal to suicide in 1949. When he finished by quoting FDR and calling Pearson a chronic liar, anyone who had listened to his tirade would be hard pressed to disagree.
It is hard to say for certain how successful Patton was in discrediting Pearson: unlike McCarthy, Pearson would remain vocal and retain at least a significant fraction of his audience, while Patton would permanently go off the air less than three months later. What Patton does seem to have accomplished is turning the nation’s attention away from MacArthur’s flaws at a time when they would have been the most devastating to his election prospects, by making them wonder about the storyteller rather than the story itself.
That’s not to say MacArthur did not suffer a setback. The second primary was held in Minnesota on March 18th. Though it was Harold Stassen’s home state, his campaign had been badly scarred by his association with McCarthy, something that the pro-MacArthur Hearst press reminded voters of at every opportunity. In polls collected between the end of January and March 12th, MacArthur was considered the favourite to win the state. Instead, Eisenhower would claim victory with a narrow plurality of the votes, MacArthur and Stassen coming in second and third respectively. For a campaign counting on victory in the primaries as their route to nomination, things were not looking good. The loss prompted Stassen to drop out of the race, but if anyone was to directly benefit from that, it would be Eisenhower, who Stassen began publicly supporting.
Ironically, the man who probably did the most to undo the damage of the scandal was not MacArthur or Patton, but Eisenhower. Eisenhower knew the true details of the affair better than any other man alive besides MacArthur, for he had been working for MacArthur at the time it happened and had even been trusted enough to deliver some of the most important letters it ever produced - foremost among them a $15,000 bribe to get the now-famous love letters back from Ms Cooper, although not until Pearson had made copies for himself. As soon as Pearson published his story (and MacArthur continued to insist that it was merely a story), reporters had been hounding Eisenhower to give his side. A side that could easily have been devastating to MacArthur.
Eisenhower had a strong sense of integrity, and seemingly still felt some small amount of loyalty towards his former boss, even despite their known animosity. When the reporters first asked him about it, he declined to comment, and when that wasn’t enough to satisfy them, and another journalist questioned him the following day, he snapped back, telling them that it was none of his business and frankly, none of theirs either. MacArthur noticed this show of loyalty: though Eisenhower would make the occasional joke at MacArthur’s expense for the remainder of his campaign, MacArthur would never again be heard criticising Eisenhower.
- BNC
“We have to win New Hampshire.”
The Republican Party’s first presidential primary had never been considered essential to an election campaign before. Plenty of candidates before hadn’t needed a victory at the New Hampshire primary to score the party’s nomination. Harding hadn’t won there in 1920. Landon hadn’t won there in 1936. New Hampshire hadn’t even pledged its delegates in the last three elections. Surely the state, which could only offer four electoral votes in November, wasn’t vital?
In the case of the MacArthur campaign, Phil LaFollette believed it would be. The party’s National Convention, not the primary votes, would decide who would be put on the presidential ticket, and even though he had much less appeal to the American people, Robert Taft was very much the favourite. The Convention was going to be packed with Taft’s supporters, many of them his closest friends, and they would not be easily convinced to switch their allegiance to an outsider such as MacArthur.
When LaFollette declared that New Hampshire had to be won, he reasoned that MacArthur’s greatest appeal to the party would be his immense popularity: Robert Taft would never attract a parade of one million if he went to New York City, much less the ten million that greeted MacArthur. The best way to demonstrate this to the party bosses would be to win the primaries. New Hampshire was first, and would be held on March 11th. It offered headlines. It offered momentum. It had also voted for the winner of nearly every presidential election in the last half-century. There really was no substitute for victory.
In the weeks leading up to New Hampshire, MacArthur held a number of advantages. While Taft campaigned in the South and Stassen tried to pull his campaign out of the disarray that McCarthy’s humiliation had left it in, MacArthur had concentrated most of his efforts in the Northeast. New Hampshirites saw him not just on posters or TV, but in their parks and halls. Frederick Ayer, who lived in nearby Massachusetts, had also been meeting frequently with his fellow New Englanders, growing MacArthur’s support there. Taft by comparison had to run everything from Ohio: it wasn’t quite a home field advantage, but it came close.
It might have been the difference between victory and defeat. Despite six months of campaigning, MacArthur had not yet completely supplanted Taft as the assumed next Republican leader. Ayer had predicted that MacArthur could win anywhere between half and two-thirds of the state’s vote. Instead he won with just 40% of the vote, not even a majority. MacArthur’s top supporters privately believed it to be a disappointment. One of Luce’s editors called it “a stunning victory” nonetheless, which, to a degree, it was. Taft had gone into the race expecting to win just as handily, and received just 24% of the vote. If anyone had cause to feel humiliated, it was him.
New Hampshire would also prove to be a wake-up call. Aside from a paltry 3.5% of votes going to Stassen and an assortment of other candidates, Eisenhower, who had not even appeared on the ballot, had received the rest of the votes and came in a comfortable second place. ‘Ike’ had so far remained on the sidelines of the campaign, but his dislike of MacArthur was known, and New Hampshire had been a close enough race that he sensed a chance of victory. A call to arms, which he responded to not because he particularly wanted to be president, but because he saw the alternatives as worse. On March 13th, Eisenhower formally announced that he would be a candidate for the party nomination.
When MacArthur was told about his former aide’s announcement, he barely registered an emotion. Not only had he expected to face Eisenhower for a while, but the worst Eisenhower could do to him was win more votes in an election. MacArthur was worried about another rival with whom he shared a history reaching back twenty years and who had the potential to utterly ruin his presidential ambitions. The same day that Eisenhower announced he would run for President, Drew Pearson published some of MacArthur’s old letters. Letters he had written to his former mistress Isabel Cooper.
MacArthur’s affair with Cooper began a year after his divorce, in 1930. At the time he was fifty, she was sixteen. MacArthur had gone to great efforts to keep the affair secret, to the point that his own mother was unaware of it, not in the least because of the scandal that a half-Filipino mistress would generate if word got out. Word, as it has a habit of doing, did get out eventually, courtesy of MacArthur’s ex-wife, who told the story to Pearson and one of his colleagues. Pearson would track down and contact Isabel herself after they broke up in 1934, and she was more than happy to tell the story, bringing a large collection of love letters with her.
Drew Pearson was in many ways the liberal version of Joe McCarthy, with the ‘Washington Merry-Go Round’ column in the Washington Post and a show on the radio serving as his version of McCarthy’s senate floor. Pearson’s huge range of connections enabled him to find out about a wide range of scandals, which he would then publish in the hopes of discrediting political opponents. When he did not have a scandal at his fingertips, he would make one up, and when he did have one, it was often exaggerated anyway. Even after President Roosevelt publicly described him as a “chronic liar”, many of his readers stuck by him.
Pearson had been looking to ruin MacArthur ever since the 1932 Bonus Army incident, and Cooper had given him some powerful ammunition to use. The Merry-Go Round had published a story that MacArthur was campaigning for his own promotion, to which the general responded with a defamation lawsuit (encouraged on the sidelines by none less than FDR himself). Pearson then offered an ultimatum: either the lawsuit would be dropped, or MacArthur’s letters would go public. MacArthur backed down, and for over fifteen years Pearson kept his silence, but the thought of one of his biggest enemies becoming President was too much for the journalist. He would claim until his dying day that he did keep his word, for the letters were leaked under an associate’s name, but most of the public knew that he was behind it.
Though few outsiders realised it, the story sent the MacArthur campaign into chaos. The Bonus March itself had already been used to criticise the general on the campaign trail, although to little effect. MacArthur and his campaign had expected to be challenged on the matter, and their replies were ready before the press’ questions were. Swift and convincing answers meant that the incident, almost twenty years in the past, had little effect on the campaign.
This time though, neither Ayer nor LaFollette had even been aware of MacArthur’s affair, there were no pre-written responses, and it seems even MacArthur had not expected this particular skeleton to come tumbling out of his closet. Now they had to scramble to prevent the story from destroying the campaign completely.
LaFollette and MacArthur were campaigning together in Minnesota, where the second primary would be held in a few days’ time, when the story broke. Fortunately, there had been no events planned for that afternoon, so as soon as the morning’s speech had been given, LaFollette took MacArthur back to the inn where they were staying, and asked him directly, “How much of the story is true?”
MacArthur, who was far more used to giving the orders and had never been big on confrontations, was understandably hesitant to answer, leading a frustrated LaFollette to reply “General, look, I’m trying to help you, but the only way I can is if I know what we’re facing and what cards we have, and unless we want to let this wreck everything we’ve built the last six months I need to know it today so we can try to shut it up before it gets big.” MacArthur, quite reluctantly, eventually responded “most of it.”
That ruled out denying it entirely. Ms Cooper would be able to refute any outright lies (or so the campaign thought, as it turned out she had been killed in a car accident the previous year), and having the look of hiding something could be quite damaging to the campaign and send voters running straight to Eisenhower. LaFollette soon came up with the best alternative he could think of: whenever a reporter questioned him about his affair, he was to reply “what does this story have to do with my becoming president?” It wasn’t quite an admission of the story, nor would it be a false denial, but hopefully it would be enough to make the uncomfortable questions go away. MacArthur had been positioning himself as a man above petty disputes, especially when he was questioned on foreign policy, and there was no use tarnishing that image now. The less Isabel Cooper had to do with the campaign, the better.
George Patton, who had no presidential campaign to manage nor a reputation he cared about protecting, had a rather different idea on how to handle the story. When he heard about it, he reacted to the news with an unbridled fury even exceeding his previous rage at Senator McCarthy. He knew as soon as he read the paper that Drew Pearson was out for MacArthur, and he wanted to defend his friend. But unlike McCarthy, who had only attacked Patton directly after a month and a half of mutual provocation, with Pearson it was personal.
Patton’s own experience with Pearson had occurred in 1943, when the journalist became the first to publicly report on the slapping incident in Sicily. That report had almost killed Patton’s career, and it was something that Patton had never forgiven him for. His argument with McCarthy had brought the public back on his side and radio stations were desperate to get him on the air (at least after he promised a clean speech), knowing he was sure to bring an audience. A lot of the time, he couldn’t be bothered. Now, he had a score to settle. Only after securing his time on the air did he think to call his nephew about what he was planning. “Listen Fred, tomorrow the ABC will have me on air around noon, and I’m going to tear that son of a bitch Pearson a new asshole for what he said about Mac.”
When Patton did speak on the radio, his half-hour argument proved to be more of an angry rant than a particularly well thought-out speech, but it did expose Pearson’s many, many lies. Patton discussed the slapping incident in great detail, calling out the many exaggerations in Pearson’s telling of it. He reminded his audience of the Tucker Corporation scandal that Pearson had provoked in 1948 and how he drove James Forrestal to suicide in 1949. When he finished by quoting FDR and calling Pearson a chronic liar, anyone who had listened to his tirade would be hard pressed to disagree.
It is hard to say for certain how successful Patton was in discrediting Pearson: unlike McCarthy, Pearson would remain vocal and retain at least a significant fraction of his audience, while Patton would permanently go off the air less than three months later. What Patton does seem to have accomplished is turning the nation’s attention away from MacArthur’s flaws at a time when they would have been the most devastating to his election prospects, by making them wonder about the storyteller rather than the story itself.
That’s not to say MacArthur did not suffer a setback. The second primary was held in Minnesota on March 18th. Though it was Harold Stassen’s home state, his campaign had been badly scarred by his association with McCarthy, something that the pro-MacArthur Hearst press reminded voters of at every opportunity. In polls collected between the end of January and March 12th, MacArthur was considered the favourite to win the state. Instead, Eisenhower would claim victory with a narrow plurality of the votes, MacArthur and Stassen coming in second and third respectively. For a campaign counting on victory in the primaries as their route to nomination, things were not looking good. The loss prompted Stassen to drop out of the race, but if anyone was to directly benefit from that, it would be Eisenhower, who Stassen began publicly supporting.
Ironically, the man who probably did the most to undo the damage of the scandal was not MacArthur or Patton, but Eisenhower. Eisenhower knew the true details of the affair better than any other man alive besides MacArthur, for he had been working for MacArthur at the time it happened and had even been trusted enough to deliver some of the most important letters it ever produced - foremost among them a $15,000 bribe to get the now-famous love letters back from Ms Cooper, although not until Pearson had made copies for himself. As soon as Pearson published his story (and MacArthur continued to insist that it was merely a story), reporters had been hounding Eisenhower to give his side. A side that could easily have been devastating to MacArthur.
Eisenhower had a strong sense of integrity, and seemingly still felt some small amount of loyalty towards his former boss, even despite their known animosity. When the reporters first asked him about it, he declined to comment, and when that wasn’t enough to satisfy them, and another journalist questioned him the following day, he snapped back, telling them that it was none of his business and frankly, none of theirs either. MacArthur noticed this show of loyalty: though Eisenhower would make the occasional joke at MacArthur’s expense for the remainder of his campaign, MacArthur would never again be heard criticising Eisenhower.
- BNC
Great chapter
And, I mean, his man and manifold flaws aside... a POTUS who supports civil rights and is in favour of keeping a fair amount of New Deal stuff around, it could be worse...
AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!
...well, where it rains one place the sun shines elsewhere. ITTL, Korea is united and the people of the North aren't going to be suffering as they might have done. OK, Rhee's an incompetent tyrant, but once he's gone...
Yeah, and far better than RL North Korea... I mean, both of those countries are OK to live in, have decent standards of living for the most part, etc.
And, I mean, his man and manifold flaws aside... a POTUS who supports civil rights and is in favour of keeping a fair amount of New Deal stuff around, it could be worse...
AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!!!
...well, where it rains one place the sun shines elsewhere. ITTL, Korea is united and the people of the North aren't going to be suffering as they might have done. OK, Rhee's an incompetent tyrant, but once he's gone...
Yeah, and far better than RL North Korea... I mean, both of those countries are OK to live in, have decent standards of living for the most part, etc.
- Status