''There are only two things we should fight for.'' -- Maj. Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler

[Octafish]

21. President Kennedy listened to Gen. MacArthur.

MacArthur's views on Vietnam stunned Kennedy

EXCERPT...

The president's first meeting with MacArthur, a courtesy call on the general in New York after the Bay of Pigs disaster, turned out to be an agreeable surprise to Kennedy. Like a lot of Navy veterans of the Pacific war, Kennedy had assumed that MacArthur was a stuffy and pompous egocentric. Instead, the President old us later, MacArthur was was one of the most fascinating conversationalists he had ever met, politically shrewd and intellectually sharp. Later the President invited the general to the White House for lunch. They talked for almost three hours, ruining the whole appointments schedule for that day. I could not drag them apart. The President later gave us a complete rerun of MacArthur's remarks, expressing a warm admiration for this supposedly reactionary old soldier that astonished all of us. MacArthur was extremely critical of the military advice that the President had been getting from the Pentagon, blaming the military leaders of the previous 10 years, who, he said, had advanced the wrong younger officers. "You were lucky to have that mistake happen in Cuba, where the strategic cost was not too great," he said about the Bay of Pigs. MacArthur implored the President to avoid a U.S. military build-up in Vietnam, or any other part of the Asian mainland, because he felt that the domino theory was ridiculous in a nuclear age. MacArthur went on to point out that there were domestic problems -- the urban crisis, the ghettos, the economy -- that should have far more priority than Vietnam. Kennedy came out of the meeting somewhat stunned. That a man like MacArthur should give him such unmilitary advice impressed him enormously.

SOURCE: LIFE, Aug. 7, 1970

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