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Like Dulles, he was a hard worker. Once when Dulles himself telephoned the MacArthur home asking for Doug, Mrs. MacArthur mistook him for an aide and snapped irately: "MacArthur is where MacArthur always is, weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays and nights—in that office." (Within minutes, MacArthur got a telephoned order from Dulles: "Go home at once, boy. Your home front is crumbling.") Admiring Dulles' love for uncluttered action, MacArthur also acquired Dulles' conviction that the best hope for peace lay in a network of anti-Communist alliances that the Communists could clearly understand—with each nation involved being a free and willing partner of the U.S.
The Liabilities. In his pursuit of such partnership in Japan, Doug MacArthur discovered that his legacy from Uncle Douglas included some ominous liabilities. Most obvious was Article 9 of the Occupation-imposed Japanese Constitution, which reads flatly: "Land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained." With the out break of the Korean war, the U.S. did an about-face, began to pressure Japan to establish "self-defense forces." But the awkwardness of building a military machine in visible violation of the constitution has haunted every Japanese government since, has given the Socialists a powerful weapon in their unending campaign against rearmament.
More crippling yet, Article 9 has given a color of moral justification to the mass of non-leftist Japanese who simply don't want to pay the taxes to support an army. The result is that the Japanese military establishment today consists of 170,000 ground troops with World War II equipment, a 28,000-man navy with no ship heavier than 2,300 tons, and an air force that has 500 jet pilots but fewer than 400 jets.
A Drive for Trust. Though Japan clearly cannot defend itself, the attitude of most Japanese toward their military alliance with the U.S. nonetheless remains an unenthusiastic "yamu wo enai [it can't be helped]"—which lends strength to the vocal minority which openly prefers neutralism or "neutralism leaning toward China." To forestall the possibility that this situation might ultimately explode in a flash of all-out hostility to the U.S., Ambassador MacArthur soon fell in with Kishi's insistence that the time had come for American concessions designed to convert the Japanese public from yamu wo enai to a relationship of "mutual trust" with the U.S.
MacArthur's first drive for mutual trust came in early 1957 when, against the opposition of U.S. military men, he successfully argued that G.I. William Girard (TIME, May 27, 1957 et seq.) be tried in a Japanese court for his killing of a Japanese woman (which got Girard a three-year suspended sentence). Another notable MacArthur victory over the Pentagon was his success in securing a reduction of U.S. forces in Japan from some 100,000 to about 50,000. His key play for a new era in U.S.-Japanese relations began when he started to hammer out with the Japanese Foreign Office a revised Security Treaty.