David Halberstam opens The Greatness That Cannot Be Taught with the notion that you can’t learn leadership from a book. Or from a great general, who is great within a hierarchy. Or from a great football coach, who also expects to be obeyed without question.
Then he switches to the tale of a great general. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to learn from it or not:
In the fall of 1950, General Douglas MacArthur had just executed his brilliant Inchon landing behind North Korean lines. Trapped, the North Korean army hastily retreated north. Thanks to Inchon, MacArthur, a general who always put himself above the normal chain of command, was at the pinnacle of his success. No one dared question him as his armies started pursuing the enemy across the 38th parallel. But President Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were properly nervous as MacArthur went farther north, because just across the Korean-Chinese border were hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops. The one thing Truman and the Joint Chiefs feared was a larger, wider war with the Chinese. In mid-October Truman flew to Wake Island and met with MacArthur. Speaking as a general and a self-appointed expert on the mind of the Oriental, MacArthur assured him the Chinese would not enter the war, but that if they did, the result would be the greatest slaughter in history.And so MacArthur, exceeding his orders, sent his forces farther north, pushing them to race to the Chinese border so that they could be home by Christmas. In late November, his troops — most wearing summer-weight uniforms in Arctic temperatures, fighting in terrible terrain with their lines of communication vastly overextended — were hit by surprise by hundreds of thousands of Chinese. The American units, terribly vulnerable to this assault, largely fell apart (though the Marines’ fighting withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir is one of our most valorous moments).
A month later, in late December, with MacArthur alternating between talk of using the atom bomb and getting off the Korean peninsula completely, Ridgway took command of the Eighth Army in Korea. He was nothing less than a miracle worker. Today he would be called the real deal. He was already known as a great soldier, having led the airborne jump behind German lines on D-Day. A friend of mine in the CIA briefed him during the Korean War and later told me that he had never dealt with anyone as demanding, as probing, and as relentless as Ridgway. He was highly intelligent and ferociously focused. He needed to know everything, especially about the enemy. He was furious with commanders who did not know their men and who did not know exactly where the enemy was. He pushed his troops hard, but he was always out there at the front, sharing as much as possible in their hardships. He wanted his troops warmly clothed, well fed, and well led by tough field officers whom he did not fear to relieve if he felt they weren’t getting the job done. There would be no more retreating, he told his command upon his arrival. They would turn around and start moving north again — hence his nickname, “Wrongway Ridgway.”