As the history of NSC 68 indicates, Congress and the public could not be excluded from many of the most important decisions on foreign policy. The principal area of continuous legislative participation was, of course, appropriations for defense and foreign aid. Here the policies of the foreign affairs side of the Administration ran into the interests of the domestic agencies pushing the claims of their programs and the everpresent demands for economy, a balanced budget, and reduced taxes. Consequently, it was in this area that the conservative foreign policy was left incomplete.12 In the long run, no foreign policy was feasible which did not have legislative and popular support. The Administration had to supplement its other efforts by salesmanship.
The merchandising of containment to the American people, however, was far beyond the scanty political resources of the Truman Administration. The President himself did not command the prestige and respect necessary for the job. The State Department had always suffered from the lack of a domestic constituency. It was furthermore under increasing partisan attack. Its personnel were labeled as incompetent or disloyal, and it became the symbol of popular frustration with the course of foreign affairs. Mr. Acheson, moreover, had at times a somewhat cool disregard for the sensitivities of public opinion; by 1951 even most Democrats in Congress favored his dismissal. As Republicans or conservative Democrats in what was normally regarded as a liberal Democratic Administration, the civilian leaders of foreign affairs were in effect politically sterile. New Dealers and party-line Republicans both had their suspicions of a Lovett or a Hoffman.
The Administration consequently was forced to turn to the military professionals to explain and justify its policies before Congress and the public. To a considerable extent this was done by appointing men such as Marshall to civilian posts. Reliance was also placed upon the Joint Chiefs themselves. The Joint Chiefs still retained much of their World War II prestige. They commanded attention as a professional, disinterested body, and the complete aloofness of their members from public affairs prior to 1940 made it impossible to associate them with radicalism or any other form of sordid politics. Thus, although it was the existence of a special conservative foreign affairs environment which permitted the Chiefs to return to their professional outlook, it was also the existence of this special environment which forced them to become its public advocates before the country. Within the foreign affairs side of the Administration the tension between military professional and civilian statesman which had characterized American civil-military relations for seventy-five years evaporated in a unity of outlook as real as that of World War II but far different in substance. Given the prevalence of liberalism in the American mind, however, this tension reappeared along the line between the foreign affairs sector, and the rest of the political community. The military became the principal ambassadors of the former to the latter. They pleaded for foreign aid appropriations, urged the ratification of treaties, defended the assignment of American troops to Europe, justified the dismissal of General MacArthur, defended the conduct of the Korean War, and explained the Administration’s decisions on force levels and budgets. Generally speaking, they did not relish this role, but they were drawn into it by the needs of the Administration. Before both congressional committees and civic groups they acted as political advocates. Symbolic of their activities was General Bradley’s famous talk before the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce on March 20, 1952 in which he castigated the “Gibraltar theory” of defense advocated by Hoover and Taft as “selfish” and “defensive,” and urged a policy of balanced military strength without overweighting of air power. As Hanson Baldwin acutely pointed out at the time, Bradley’s views were simply “military common sense,” yet he had no business adding them to the rising tide of a presidential election.13
For a while the Joint Chiefs were a success in their advocatory role, capitalizing upon the combined prestige of military hero and technical expert. Congress listened to Bradley when it ignored Acheson. Eventually, however, the military currency began to lose value. The unpopularity of the policies which they were advocating lowered the personal and institutional prestige of the men who were advocating them. Although they still adhered to their professional views on the substance of policy, the Joint Chiefs inevitably opened themselves to partisan criticism by ardently defending that policy in public on behalf of an administration which had adopted it as a political course. This mounted rapidly after the outbreak of the Korean War and intensified with the firing of MacArthur. “I have come to the point where I do not accept them as experts,” Senator Taft declared in the spring of 1951, “particularly when General Bradley makes a foreign policy speech. I suggest that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are absolutely under the control of the Administration . . .” In more restrained terms the Republican foreign policy spokesman, John Foster Dulles, also criticized the role of the military in foreign policy.14 By 1952 their persuasiveness had largely been dissipated.
The carrying out for half a dozen years of a conservative foreign policy on behalf of a fundamentally liberal nation was, in a sense, a considerable political achievement for the Truman Administration. But, inevitably, it could not last. Just as it had been impossible for the military to remain conservative in World War II,so also was it impossible for the combined military-civilian foreign policy agencies to maintain a conservative policy in the Cold War. The issue came to a head over the conduct of the Korean War and subsequently was a major element in the Democratic defeat of 1952. A critic might say that this simply proved the Lincolnian dictum that you can’t fool all the people all the time. But that is unfair. That the conservative policy lasted as long as it did is a tribute to the ability of the Administration to make the best of scant resources. That it came to an end when it did is a tribute to the vitality of American democracy.
THE KOREAN WAR: THE GENERALS, THE TROOPS, AND THE PUBLIC
The Korean War broke the Truman pattern of civil-military relations. It aroused public interest in and indignation over foreign policy; it stimulated opposition, partisan and otherwise, in Congress; it exhausted the political influence of the Joint Chiefs. The Korean War was the first war in American history (except for the Indian struggles) which was not a crusade. It was also the first time that public resentment of the conduct of a war contributed to the ousting of the party in power.
The war was extraordinary in many ways but certainly no more so than in the peculiar relations which existed among the Administration which was conducting the war, the generals who were directing it in the field, the troops who were fighting it in the front lines, and the people who were supporting it at home. The fundamental decision of the Truman Administration was to fight the war for the limited political objective of maintaining the independence of South Korea. To be sure this decision was not reached overnight. Rather, it emerged out of the confusion of events and the complexities of lesser decisions during the long, hard winter of 1950–1951. But, once it had been established, the Administration held to it with a stubborn persistence. All the civilian and military leaders of the Administration — the President, Acheson, Marshall, Lovett, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs — were in agreement on this fundamental concept. This decision, together with its domestic corollaries of limited mobilization and the rebuilding of conventional military forces, was, of course, an essentially conservative one. The United States had no sweeping goals; it simply wished to reestablish the status quo ante. This required the careful measurement and calculated employment of the military force to achieve this goal. Fighting a war according to Clausewitz rather than Ludendorff, however, was a new experience to Americans and one which they generally were unwilling to accept. The fundamental problem of the Administration, consequently, was to secure the support or at least the acquiescence of the troops, the generals and the public in this novel undertaking.
The Administration scored a success with the troops. At the beginning of the war the United States Army was in poor shape. The units pulled suddenly out of the soft life of occupied Japan and thrown in
to a fight against a more numerous foe had a tough time of it. They were undisciplined, poorly trained, and psychologically unprepared for combat. By the spring of 1951, however, the Eighth Army had been rebuilt into a tough, battle-experienced fighting force. The political objectives of the Administration, however, did not permit it either to push on to complete military victory or to withdraw completely from the peninsula. Consequently, the problem became the maintenance of troop morale in an apparently indefinite and indecisive conflict in a far-off corner of the earth. Both material and psychological means were tried. Materially, once the front had become stabilized, every effort was made to make the existence of the soldier as comfortable as possible: a shower once a day, mail twice a day, and hot food three times a day. No means were spared to incorporate as much of the American civilian standard of living as possible into the Main Line of Resistance. By the end of the conflict American troops were fighting on a level of physical luxury and comfort unique in world history.
Equally important, however, in securing the acceptance of the war by the troops was the policy of rotation which shaped the psychology of the front lines. Unlike the provision of material benefits, this represented a sharp break with the American past. In World War II, soldiers were in for the duration: they could only achieve their personal goal of getting home when the government achieved its political goal of military victory. In Korea, however, rotation divorced the personal goals of the troops from the political goals of the government. The aim of the soldier was simply to endure his nine months at the front and then get out. The war was a necessary evil, and he acquiesced and accepted it as such. His attitude was brilliantly summed up in that classic expression of Stoic resignation which emerged out of the front lines: “That’s the way the ball bounces.” For the first time in American history the common soldier fought a major war solely and simply because he was ordered to fight it and not because he shared any identification with the political goals for which the war was being fought. Instead he developed a supreme indifference to the political goals of the war — the traditional hallmark of the professional. And “professional” was the one term seized upon by newsmen and observers to describe the peculiar psychology of the Korean fighting man as distinguished from his World War II counterpart.15
In some ways the spirit of World War II posed as many problems as the Communists in the conduct of the Korean War. Rotation worked a miraculous change in the psychology of the troops, but there was nothing comparable to change the attitudes of the generals who directed the war in the field. There was “no discharge in the war” for them; they continued to think in World War II terms. The only proper end of war was military victory, and they could not understand why this should be denied them. If the Army had been ordered off to fight the Korean War in 1939 there is little doubt but that, from the Chief of Staff down, obediently and without thinking it would have gone and fought the war under the conditions it was told to fight it under. General Marshall, indeed, contrasted General MacArthur’s behavior with Pershing’s obedient acceptance of the confining political restrictions imposed by Wilson on the Mexican punitive expedition of 1916.16 The Joint Chiefs in the sympathetic environment in the Truman Administration could return to their prewar professional moorings. But for the commanders in the field, imbued with the World War II psychology and encouraged by the political and popular resentment at home, this was impossible. Substantively divorced from the military ethic, their subordinate position in a conservative Administration in a liberal country tended to force an advocatory role on them also. The civilian exaltation of military victory as the supreme political goal in World War II thus came back to haunt the civilians ten years later. The responsibility which had once been abdicated was not easily regained. Ironically, General MacArthur’s phrase — “There is no substitute for victory” — might well have been inspired by the ghost of FDR.
The result was that, if “professional” summed up the attitude of the troops, “frustrated” described that of the generals. The troops were willing to accept the way the ball bounced, the generals were not. They reacted. They protested. They evaded. They squirmed. As Homer Bigart reported:
Few of the soldiers seem able to identify themselves with any national goal. Caught up in a stern, primitive and often miserable existence, the soldier’s perception becomes so blunted that foresight is limited to the individual goal — rotation. The officer, with more opportunity for thought, broods over the apparent futility of the stalemate and yearns for rotation. But the generals are driven almost frantic by job frustration.17
The extent to which the generals as a group of field commanders were out of sympathy with the policy of the government probably had few precedents in American history. Even in the Civil War there was never the unanimity of military dissent manifested in Korea. Except for General Ridgway, virtually all the field commanders — MacArthur, Van Fleet, Stratemeyer, Almond, Clark, Joy — irrespective of whether or not they had previous associations with MacArthur or the Far East shared what the Jenner Committee succinctly described as “a feeling of unease because victory was denied, a sense of frustration and a conviction that political considerations had overruled the military . . .” General Clark reported that all the commanders in the Far East with whom he discussed the issue hoped that the government would remove the political restrictions which denied them victory.18
The closest recent parallel to the mass dissatisfaction of the Korean field commanders was the discontent of the atomic scientists with government policy toward the construction of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. In each case, a well defined body of professional employees took a political stand against the policies of the government which they served. In each case, the discontent of the expert group had deep roots in American public opinion and was directed against an essentially conservative policy embodying fundamental assumptions of the military ethic. The physicists refused to accept the burdens and frustrations of an indefinite nuclear arms race with Russia and demanded an end to them by negotiated disarmament. The generals in Korea refused to accept the burdens and frustrations of an indefinite limited war with Communist China and demanded an end to them by total military victory. In each case the principal exponent of the discontent — MacArthur and Oppenheimer — was a charismatic figure, touched with an almost religious mysticism, who aroused intense emotional loyalties and hatreds, and who eventually was unceremoniously ejected from the government.
In the final analysis, the continued viability of the Truman Administration’s policy depended upon its acceptance by the public. But, while the public might take it for a while, the public would not take it indefinitely. In an inarticulate, irrational, and emotional way, the American people still adhered to the attitudes to which Harold Lasswell had given intellectualized expression in his garrison-state essays. The traditional responses refused to die. If the troops sided with the Administration, the public sided with the generals. Indeed, as Walter Millis pointed out, the real problem of morale was not at the front but at home. The dissidence of the generals became the focus and crystallizing point of public discontent. The accumulated public irritation and frustration was a political fact which the opposition party could not ignore. Eisenhower might well have won without the Korean War. But even his‘appeal as a personality was largely tied in with the feeling that he would “do something” about foreign policy. Insofar as there was a dominant issue in the election, it was certainly Korea.19 The Van Fleet letter, the promise to visit Korea, the assertion that Asians should fight Asians, the front-page publicity for casualty lists and pictures of the dead and wounded — all reminded the American people of the unpleasant realities in East Asia and stimulated them to cast their vote for the hope that these might be brought to a quick halt.
THE JOINT CHIEFS IN THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF THE EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION
UNITY Certainly one of the most fundamental changes which the Eisenhower Administration made in the governmental pattern of its predecessor was to reunite foreign an
d domestic policy according to a common outlook. In a sense, this was what the American people had voted for in 1952. The new unity was reflected most obviously in the leadership of the government. The Republican Administration was, literally, a team. Its principal executives were recruited from the ranks of business, particularly manufacturing, or from those who shared the business philosophy. “We’re here in the saddle,” said the Secretary of the Interior quite truthfully, “as an Administration representing business and industry.” The proportion of business executives in top positions in the government was just about double that of the Truman Administration.20 It was unfair to refer to the cabinet as composed of eight millionaires and a plumber, but the element of truth in this wisecrack was emphasized by the early and controversial departure of the plumber. In general, cabinet officials displayed not only an amazing homogeneity of outlook but also an extraordinary continuity and stability in office.
Unlike the Truman Administration, the same type of men ran both the domestic agencies and the foreign-defense units of the government. The proportion of businessmen in the Defense Department was about as high as the proportion in the Commerce Department. At the end of the Administration’s first year in office, seventeen out of twenty-four officials of secretarial rank in the Department of Defense were business or corporation executives.21 The sharp cleavage of background and outlook characteristic of the Truman Administration had disappeared. Forrestal did not talk the language of Hannegan or Chapman. But Wilson had no difficulty communicating with Summerfield or McKay: they had all been connected with the same industrial complex. The Administration, moreover, was all of the same party. The State and Defense Departments, which under Truman had been part Democrat and part Republican, became thoroughly Republican under Eisenhower.
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