“No President of the last 50 years was so widely and warmly liked by reporters as Mr. Truman,” Cabell Phillips would write.
He “used” the press occasionally as most Presidents have done to test the wind. But he never tried to “con” them with flattery and devious favoritism…. Harry Truman worked less to ingratiate himself with people but succeeded better at it than any important public figure I have ever known. He did it, I think, because he was so utterly honest with and about himself, so free of what we call “side” or “put on.”
Press Secretary Charlie Ross, too, deserved part of the credit for such feelings, for never had he thought it necessary to “sell” Truman to them.
It was the great press lords of the day, the powerful publishers and editors, and several of the syndicated columnists—the “paid columnists,” the “guttersnipe columnists”—whom Truman despised: “What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts, editor of the Kansas City Star, had written in patronizing fashion on Truman’s first day in office. Henry Luce considered Truman the “reductio ad absurdum of the common man.” Michael Straight, editor of The New Republic, had written in 1948 that Truman had “a known difficulty in understanding the printed word.” Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell, and Drew Pearson had all hit him hard, and in ways he would not forget.
Privately he spoke of the lot with vivid contempt. Roy Roberts was “a fat no-good can of lard,” Pegler “a rat,” Winchell and Pearson “newsliars.” The Alsop brothers were “the Sop Sisters.” He detested the newspapers of the Hearst and Scripps-Howard chains, and the lowest of all, still, was Colonel Robert (“Bertie”) McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune. As Truman saw things, McCormick and his kind made their fortunes as character assassins, while those who did the dirty work for them, like some of the columnists, were no better than whores in that they offered their favors for money. “The prostitutes of the mind in my opinion…are much more dangerous to the future of mankind than the prostitutes of the body,” he wrote in a letter he never mailed to Frank Kent, a columnist for the Washington Star whom he particularly disliked. That November, hearing from a friend that a Chicago Tribune writer named Holmes was in Kansas City asking questions about Truman and his family, Truman wrote in reply, “You might tell the gentleman named Holmes that if he comes out with a pack of lies about Mrs. Truman or any of my family his hide won’t hold shucks when I get through with him.”
But for those who covered him daily at the White House, who had traveled with him in 1948, who had been to Key West, he had no such feelings—Cabell Phillips and Tony Leviero of The New York Times, Edward Folliard of the Washington Post, Merriman Smith of United Press, Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, Robert Nixon of the International News Service, Joe Short of the Baltimore Sun. And it was they, his friends, not the “newsliars” or the Bertie McCormicks, who again stood to ask their questions at a sensational press conference the morning of November 30, 1950, when Truman stumbled into still more trouble, blundering as he had never before with reporters, his remarks sending shock waves around the world.
The Indian Treaty Room was packed—more than two hundred stood as he came in—and at first all went well. He began by reading a prepared text, a strong, compelling statement of policy.
Neither the United States nor the United Nations had any aggressive intentions against China. What was happening in Korea, however, was part of a worldwide pattern of Russo-Communist aggression and consequently the world was threatened now with a serious crisis.
As he had once decided to take a stand at Berlin, Truman was now resolved to stay in Korea, and he said so. He was not bombastic, he was not eloquent, only clear and to the point.
We may suffer reverses as we have suffered them before. But the forces of the United Nations have no intention of abandoning their mission in Korea….
We shall continue to work in the United Nations for concerted action to halt this aggression in Korea. We shall intensify our efforts to help other free nations strengthen their defenses in order to meet the threat of aggression elsewhere. We shall rapidly increase our military strength.
The statement had been worked over with extreme care by a dozen or more of the White House staff and State Department. It said nothing about the atomic bomb. The subject of the bomb had never even been discussed during preparation of the statement.
But then the questions began, reporters rising one by one, Folliard of the Post first asking Truman if he had any comments on the criticism of MacArthur in the European press.
“They are always for a man when he is winning, but when he is in a little trouble,” Truman replied, “they all jump on him with what ought to be done, which they didn’t tell him before.” General MacArthur was doing “a good job.”
Taking an exaggeratedly deep breath, Folliard then said the particular criticism was that MacArthur had exceeded his authority, went beyond the point he was supposed to go.
“He did nothing of the kind,” Truman snapped.
Other reporters began pressing him. What if the United Nations were to authorize MacArthur to launch attacks across the Yalu into Manchuria?
Truman stood erect as always, his fingertips pressing on a tabletop as he spoke. Sometimes between questions he would sip from a glass of water or twist the heavy gold Masonic ring on his left hand.
“We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.”
Did that include the atomic bomb?
“That,” said Truman unhesitatingly, “includes every weapon we have.”
Did this mean there was “active consideration” of use of the bomb?
The room was still. The topic that had never been considered appropriate for a press conference had suddenly become the focal point. Truman should have cut off discussion of the bomb before this. But he seems not to have understood where the questions were leading him, while the reporters saw no reason to refrain from pressing him, if, as it appeared, he meant to rattle the bomb a little.
“There has always been active consideration of its use,” Truman replied, adding, as he shook his head sadly, that he did not want to see it used. “It is a terrible weapon and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.”
Merriman Smith, sensing that the President had said more than he meant to, offered him a chance to back off by asking for clarification. “Did we understand you clearly that the use of the bomb is under active consideration?”
Yet Truman insisted: “Always has been. It is one of our weapons.”
Did this mean use against military objectives or civilian, another of the veteran White House press, Robert Nixon, started to ask, but Truman cut him off, saying, “It’s a matter that the military people will have to decide. I’m not a military authority that passes on those things.”
The correspondent for NBC, Frank Bourgholtzer, wished him to be more specific.
“Mr. President, you said this depends on United Nations action. Does that mean we wouldn’t use the atomic bomb except on a United Nations authorization?”
“No, it doesn’t mean that at all,” Truman shot back. “The action against Communist China depends on the action of the United Nations. The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of the weapons, as he always has.”
He had said far more than he ever intended and had been inaccurate besides, but the reporters had their story. The press conference ended at 10:30 A.M. By 10:47 a United Press bulletin was on the wire: President Truman said today that the United States has under consideration use of the atomic bomb in connection with the war in Korea. The Associated Press followed, adding that whether the bomb was used depended on American military command in the field, the clear implication being that the decision was being left to MacArthur. Huge headlines filled the early editions of the afternoon papers.
Truman’s answers had been devastatingly foolish, the pr
ess conference a fiasco. The White House was besieged with calls. An exhausted Eben Ayers, writing privately that night, would describe it as one of the “wildest days” ever. The reaction in Europe was extreme alarm, and especially in Britain, where the news threw the House of Commons into a state of panic such as old-time members had never seen. Acheson hurried to the White House with the draft of a “clarifying” statement. Charlie Ross, under greater pressure than at any time since becoming press secretary, was called into the Oval Office to lend a hand in “damage control.” The statement, ready by mid-afternoon, said that while “the use of any weapon is always implicit in the very possession of that weapon,” only the President, by law, could authorize use of the atomic bomb, and “no such authorization had been, given.” Ross, as he presented the statement, looked and sounded completely spent, the circles under his eyes deeper and darker even than usual, his voice husky. The damage, he knew, had already been done.
By late afternoon came word from London that Prime Minister Clement Attlee was on his way to “confer” with the President. “PRESIDENT WARNS WE WOULD USE ATOM BOMB IN KOREA,” said the front page of The New York Times the next morning. “NO NO NO,” ran a headline in the Times of India.
The air of crisis rapidly compounded. The next morning, Friday, December 1, Truman met with the congressional leadership in the Cabinet Room to hear Walter Bedell Smith, head of the CIA, explain before a huge map of the Soviet Union and its satellites how events in Korea related to events in Europe. The Russians, Smith reported, had just completed maneuvers involving more than half a million men and consolidated their Siberian forces under a single command, an unusual step that “deserved watching.”
There were joint State-Defense “crisis meetings” in the War Room at the Pentagon later in the day and again on Sunday, December 3, some six hours of talk.
As Acheson would write, all the President’s advisers, civilian and military, knew something was badly wrong in Korea, other than just the onslaught of the Chinese. There were questions about MacArthur’s morale, grave concern over MacArthur’s strategy and whether on the actual battlefield a “new hand” was needed to replace General Walker. It was quite clear, furthermore, that MacArthur, the Far East Commander—contrary to the President’s reassuring remarks at his press conference—had indeed deliberately disobeyed a specific order from the Joint Chiefs to use no non-Korean forces close to the Manchurian border.
But no changes in strategy were ordered. No “new hand” replaced Walker. No voices were raised against MacArthur. Regrettably, the President was ill-advised, Bradley later observed. He, Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, had all “failed the President.” Here, in a crucial few days, said Acheson later, they missed their chance to halt the march to disaster in Korea. Acheson was to lament their performance for the rest of his life. Truman would never put any blame on any of them, but Acheson would say Truman had deserved far better. “I have the unhappy conviction,” Acheson wrote nearly twenty years later, “that none of us, myself prominently included, served him as he was entitled to be served.”
Matthew Ridgway would “well remember” his mounting impatience “that dreary Sunday, December 3,” as hour after hour in the War Room discussion continued over the ominous situation in Korea.
Much of the time the Secretaries of State and Defense participated in the talks, with no one apparently willing to issue a flat order to the Far East Commander to correct a state of affairs that was going from bad to disastrous. Yet the responsibility and authority clearly resided right there in the room….
Unable to contain himself any longer, Ridgway spoke up, saying immediate action must be taken. They owed it to the men in the field and “to the God to whom we must answer for those men’s lives,” to stop talking and do something. For the first time, Acheson later wrote, “someone had expressed what everyone thought—that the Emperor had no clothes on.” But of the twenty men who sat at the table, including Acheson, and twenty more along the walls behind, none spoke. The meeting ended without a decision.
Why didn’t the Joint Chiefs just send orders and tell MacArthur what to do, Ridgway asked General Vandenberg afterward. Because MacArthur would not obey such orders, Vandenberg replied.
Ridgway exploded. “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” he said. But Vandenberg, with an expression Ridgway remembered as both puzzled and amazed, only walked away.
The day following, in another closed session, this time at the State Department, Dean Rusk would propose that MacArthur be relieved of command. But again, no one chose to make further comment.
MacArthur, meanwhile, was being taken to task by the press, as he had never been. Time, which had long glorified him, charged him with being responsible for one of the worst military disasters in history. The “colossal military blunder” in Korea, declared an editorial in the New York Herald-Tribune, had shown that MacArthur would “no longer be accepted as the final authority on military matters.” Unused to such criticism, his immense vanity wounded, MacArthur started issuing statements of his own to the press. He denied that his strategy had precipitated the Chinese invasion and said his inability to defeat the new enemy was due to restrictions imposed by Washington that were “without precedent.”
Truman did not hold MacArthur accountable for the failure of the November offensive. But he deplored MacArthur’s way of excusing the failure, and the damage his statements could do abroad, to the degree that they implied a change in American policy. “I should have relieved General MacArthur then and there,” he would write much later.
As it was, he ordered that all military officers and diplomatic officials henceforth clear with the State Department all but routine statements before making them public, “and…refrain from direct communications on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines, and other publicity media.” Dated December 6, the order was widely and correctly seen as directed to MacArthur. He was still expected to express his opinions freely—it was his duty to express his opinions—but only within the councils of the government.
Truman did not relieve the Far East Commander, he later explained, because he knew no general could be a winner every day and because he did not wish to have it appear that MacArthur was being fired for failing.
What he might have done had Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs spoken up and insisted that MacArthur be relieved is another question and impossible to answer.
For now the tragedy in Korea overshadowed everything. If MacArthur was in trouble, then everything possible must be done to help. “We must get him out of it if we can,” Truman wrote in his diary late the night of December 2, following an intense session at Blair House with Acheson, Marshall, and Bradley that had left him feeling desperately low. “The conference was the most solemn one I’ve had since the Atomic Bomb conference in Berlin.”
The talk had been of evacuating all American troops—of an American Dunkirk in Korea after all. Marshall was not even sure such an operation would succeed, should the Chinese bring in their own airpower. “It looks very bad,” Truman wrote.
Yet bad as it was, there was no mood of panic, and this, as those around him would later attest, was principally because of Truman’s own unflinching response. “Mr. President, the Chinese simply must not be allowed to drive us out of Korea,” Acheson said at one point, when things looked darkest, and Truman calmly agreed. When Clement Attlee arrived in Washington and argued, in effect, that the Far East should be abandoned in order to save Europe, Truman said no.
The bloody retreat in Korea continued. Pyongyang fell “to overwhelming masses of advancing Chinese,” as the papers reported. General Walker’s Eighth Army was heading for the 38th parallel. “World War III moves ever closer,” said Life. “The Chinese Communist armies assaulting our forces…are as truly the armies of the Soviet Union as they would be if they wore the Soviet uniform.” Everywhere in Washington the talk was of the “desperateness” of the situation. Senator McCarthy called on Acheson a
nd Marshall both to resign and talked of impeaching Truman. But Truman remained calm and steady. “I’ve had conference after conference on the jittery situation facing this country,” he wrote in his diary. “Attlee, Formosa, Communist China, Chiang Kai-shek, Japan, Germany, France, India, etc. I’ve worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is here. I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”
[The President] thought that if we abandoned Korea the South Koreans would all be murdered and that we could not face that in view of the fact that they have fought bravely on our side and we have put in so much to help them [read the official minutes of his discussions with Attlee]. We may be subject to bombing from Manchuria by the Russians and Chinese Communists which might destroy everything we have. He was worried. He did not like to go into a situation such as this and then to admit that we were licked. He would rather fight to the finish. That was the way he had felt from the beginning…. He wanted to make it perfectly plain here that we do not desert our friends when the going is rough.
When Attlee urged that no decision be made on use of the atomic bomb without prior consultation with the British government, and possibly a formal agreement, Truman declined. He would not use the bomb without consulting the British government, Truman replied, but then neither would he state that in writing. If a man’s word wasn’t any good, he said, it wasn’t made better by putting it on paper.
The goal of uniting Korea by force had been abandoned. The best hope now was to arrange an armistice back at the 38th parallel, and to this end the British agreed to help through the United Nations. On the policy that the war must not be widened, Truman and Attlee were in full agreement.
Attlee arrived in Washington on Monday, December 4. Little was said to the press about the substance of the first day’s meeting, but at the end of the second day, Tuesday, December 5, in response to the pressures on him to release something, Charlie Ross met with some forty reporters at the White House. It was early evening, and Ross, like the President and the prime minister, was planning to attend a conceit by Margaret Truman scheduled to begin in another few hours at Constitution Hall.
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