“I was now finally ready for the last great stroke to bring my plan into fruition,” he recalled later. Johnny Walker’s Eighth Army had stabilized the front outside Pusan.
His ships controlled the seas around Korea, his planes in the air above the peninsula. The plan had been forming in his mind since the retreat from the Han River in the war’s first weeks. He intended to crown his career with his most brilliant operation. At 70 he was already far past the age when most soldiers had entered retirement or Valhalla. He knew that Korea was his final campaign.
MacArthur had his own ideas of how war should be waged, and he was sure they were better than those of armchair strategists who had never commanded armies and perhaps never even experienced combat. MacArthur probably never read NSC 81, and if he did he doubtless would have taken its admonition to avoid a general war with China as mere advice. The following excerpt finds MacArthur laying out his plan to attack Korea-and waiting to hear back from Truman and his joint chiefs whether the bold stroke would be approved.
While the two shared the world stage on several occasions, each suffered the other’s time in the spotlight begrudgingly. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur stand as two of the most important figures in 20th-century American history. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC President Harry S. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War , a UT professor explores the contentious relationship between two of America’s most powerful leaders in the years following World War II.
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