The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  A key element in Truman’s decision to rescue South Korea was the conviction that North Korea’s aggression was Soviet-inspired, and if unresisted would become a prelude to other attacks by Communist forces in Europe and Asia. The lesson of World War II was central to White House thinking: memories of how Munich in 1938 had created conditions leading to a Europe-wide war made Truman determined not to repeat Chamberlain’s ill-fated appeasement. To the president, Acheson, and all their national security advisers, to allow South Korea to be overrun by Communist armies acting as surrogates for Moscow was tantamount to inviting the Soviets and Chinese to commit future acts of aggression. Indeed, the North Korean attack was seen in Washington as a renewed Russian drive for world conquest.

  On the face of it, the assumption made little sense. A Soviet Union that lacked the wherewithal to strike the United States with atomic bombs—or any weapons at all—was hardly about to unleash an attack on Western Europe that could bring a devastating response from U.S. air forces with nuclear armaments. The Truman administration should have understood that Stalin, however much he matched Hitler in his ruthlessness toward dissenters at home and in satellite countries, was not about to repeat the Nazi mistake of starting a war he might lose.

  While the White House genuinely believed that intervention in Korea was essential to prevent a third world war, domestic politics also played a part in Truman’s decision, though he refused to acknowledge it. On the day after the fighting began, during a discussion at Blair House, where Truman convened a meeting of his advisers, Undersecretary of State James Webb said, “I’d like to talk about the political aspects of the situation.” Truman decisively vetoed the request: “We’re not going to talk about politics. I’ll handle the political affairs.”

  In the spring of 1950, Communist advances in the Cold War had dropped the president’s approval rating to 37 percent, with 44 percent disapproving of his performance. National eagerness for someone with stronger credentials as a military leader gave General Dwight Eisenhower a 60 to 31 percent advantage over Truman in a poll about a 1952 presidential contest.

  Truman was under the gun to satisfy public eagerness for a firm stand against North Korea’s aggression. Once the president had deployed troops to fight in Korea, 65 percent surveyed said it was the right decision, even though 57 percent of the country thought it meant we were already in World War III. The bad news for the White House was that 50 percent of the country thought that the nation was poorly prepared to fight such a war, which, by a three-to-one margin, the public blamed more on the Democrats than the Republicans.

  In refusing to acknowledge that domestic politics had contributed to his Korean decision, Truman was reluctant to concede that he was in any way countering right-wing complaints about “losing” China and “allowing” Soviet spies to steal atomic secrets. Yet Truman understood that another setback in the Cold War could decisively cripple his capacity to govern eighteen months into his four-year term. To be sure, Truman and Acheson believed it essential to stand up to aggression if they were to avert a world war. And in fact, it made a great deal of sense to counter Kim’s attack and block Mao from invading Taiwan if the United States were to sustain a balance of power in the Far East and convince European allies that it would defend them against aggression. As important, if the United States was to have an effective governing authority during the remaining two and a half years of Truman’s presidency, it was essential to assuage the country’s anxiety about the Communist threat by meeting it head-on in Korea and the Taiwan Strait.

  However popular the administration’s response to North Korea’s aggression, this did not excuse the Truman-Acheson failure to forestall Pyongyang’s attack by making clear that South Korea would not be another Czechoslovakia forced into the Communist sphere. America’s inattentiveness to developments on the Korean Peninsula had given license to the Communists to attack. And while no one should absolve the Communists of prime responsibility for the fighting, Washington’s overt passivity toward Korea before June 1950 contributed to the conditions that led to war.

  Moreover, however wise the determination to halt North Korea’s onslaught might have been, the means by which the Truman administration acted is open to question. To downplay the belief that the world was on the verge of a worldwide conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, Truman sensibly described America’s military intervention as a “police action” under the auspices of the United Nations. A resolution presented to the UN Security Council on June 27 to defend South Korea from Pyongyang’s aggression passed by a vote of seven to one. The Soviet delegation, which had been boycotting Security Council meetings as a protest against the UN’s refusal to replace Chiang’s representative with Mao’s, was not present to exercise its veto.

  The Soviet absence was not the result of an oversight on Stalin’s part. He was content to have the UN, led by American forces, take up the fight against Kim’s troops. As Stalin told Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia’s Communist president, he did not object to the UN action: a United States “entangled in the military intervention in Korea” would “squander its military prestige and moral authority.” He also believed that U.S. involvement in Korea would reduce the likelihood of an American attack against Soviet armies in Germany. A long, drawn-out conflict that eventually pitted China against the United States would further “distract the United States from Europe to the Far East. And the third world war will be postponed for the indefinite term, and this would give the time necessary to consolidate socialism in Europe.” It also gave the Soviets time to develop a hydrogen bomb, now that their spy Klaus Fuchs, who the Soviets playfully called Santa Klaus, had secretly given them the American design Edward Teller had developed in 1946.

  Stalin neglected to say that a Korean civil war, which threatened to become a wider conflict, was also a valuable tool for suppressing his domestic opponents—the men and women in his inner circle he saw as angling to replace him and the ethnics he continued to distrust as intent on subverting his rule. He could more easily execute them or send them to the gulags without exciting protest if external dangers continued to make him the country’s indispensable leader, as in World War II. It was a confirmation of James Madison’s prophetic observation that it is a “universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

  The Korean conflict had long-term domestic consequences for the United States as well. Truman’s decision to describe the war as a “police action” conducted under binding treaty obligations to the United Nations was a wise means of averting a greater sense of crisis at home and abroad. To have asked Congress for a declaration of war against North Korea could have raised questions about China’s obligations to Pyongyang. And if China had chosen to enter the conflict because of treaty commitments to North Korea, it could in turn have triggered discussion of mutual Sino-Soviet defense pledges under the Peking-Moscow pact of January 1950. In short, making American intervention other than an outright act of war averted the sort of crisis that had preceded the outbreak of World War I, when each of the European powers mobilized their armies in response to one another and then found it impossible to step back from an all-out war.

  But Truman’s commitment of U.S. forces to fight in Korea without congressional authorization set a precedent for the unilateral presidential decisions Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush made to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, respectively, in 1964, 1970, and 2003. It is true that the State Department gave Truman a memo listing eighty-seven instances in which earlier presidents had sent troops into combat without congressional authorization. It is also true that the Congress would pass resolutions supporting military actions in Vietnam in 1964 and Iraq in 1991 and 2003. But the pre-1950 military interventions cited by the State Department were typically limited forays to protect and remove U.S. citizens from war zones. And the acts of congressional approval were essentially rubber stamps for prior presidential commitmen
ts.

  At a minimum, as Truman ordered U.S. forces into combat, he could have asked Congress for a supporting resolution that was not a declaration of war but an acknowledgement that the war-making authority in the Constitution remained with the legislature. It would not have precluded Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush from using their authority as commanders in chief to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, but it might have compelled them to have involved the Congress more fully in the decisions. A vigorous debate on the wisdom of military action might have reduced the human, financial, and political costs to the country and the presidents of these largely unilateral commitments to fight.

  Because Congress never speaks with one voice, it is vulnerable to the “imperial presidency” in times of crisis. Nevertheless, the legislature’s failure in 1950 to assert itself more forcefully against the executive’s preemption of its war-making power was an invitation to future presidents to fight wars without the sort of democratic debate the founders of the republic considered essential to the long-term national well-being. The misadventures we associate with the Korean, Vietnam, Cambodian, and Iraq conflicts are, or should be, cautionary tales about the need to return to more robust debates in and between the two branches of government responsible for decisions to fight.

  U.S. involvement in the Korean fighting increased national militancy. A series of Gallup polls during the summer and fall of 1950 revealed a nation committed to battling and defeating Communism with every tool at its command: 61 percent favored using atomic bombs in another world war, ostensibly against the Soviet Union; 68 percent said it was more important to “stop Russian expansion” than “keep out of war”; 79 percent wanted the United States to fight if Russian troops attacked West Germany; 50 percent endorsed the idea of reorganizing the UN without Russia and all Communist-dominated countries; and 64 percent wanted United Nations forces not only to drive North Korean troops out of South Korea but also to cross the thirty-eighth Parallel into North Korea, where the Communists should be forced to surrender.

  In a chilling demonstration of intolerance or the “tyranny of the majority,” as Tocqueville called it, only 1 percent of Americans believed that members of the U.S. Communist Party should remain free. Forty percent wished to see them interned; 28 percent thought they should be exiled, with about half this number suggesting they be sent to the Soviet Union; while 13 percent were ready to have them shot or hanged.

  With the onset of the Korean War, the goals described in NSC-68, which was first put before Truman in April 1950, suddenly became more urgent. Expanding the atomic arsenal, building the hydrogen bomb, establishing larger and more powerful armed forces, and developing covert operations and psychological warfare to destabilize and overturn Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe and undermine communism in Russia, China, and the Third World became national security priorities. The increased costs of implementing the directive was calculated at more than three times the $14 billion the president had included in his budget for fiscal 1951 or an increase on defense spending over five years from 5 to 20 percent of gross national product (GNP). Acheson recalled that “it is doubtful whether anything like what happened over the next few years could have been done had not the Russians been stupid enough to have instigated the attack against South Korea and opened the ‘hate America’ campaign.”

  The Korean attack stimulated not only a wide-ranging defense buildup but more immediately a commitment of the bulk of America’s available ground forces, a quarter of a million troops, to fight on the peninsula. The success of the North Korean armies, which by the end of August had driven hard-pressed ROK troops and American infantry units into a defensive perimeter around Pusan, South Korea’s southernmost port, made Pyongyang’s defeat of the South even more likely.

  MacArthur, who had added to his luster as a military chief in World War II by his effective command of America’s occupation forces in Japan, was charged with reversing ROK-U.S. battlefield fortunes. Truman had his doubts about MacArthur, who at seventy may have been too old for such a demanding assignment. Truman also recalled MacArthur’s retreat to Australia from the Philippines in 1942, which the president saw as an inappropriate surrender of his command and a reason to question his reputation as a great field general. Privately, Truman berated him as a “supreme egoist who regarded himself as a god,” calling him a “dictator in Japan.”

  Truman had considered recalling MacArthur, whose independence from Washington had irked him, but the likely political outcry from Republicans, who shared MacArthur’s outspoken determination to save the world from communism, impressed Truman as too high a political price to pay. He foresaw “a tremendous reaction in the country where he [MacArthur] had been built up to heroic stature.” Moreover, his standing as the architect of victory in the Pacific made it difficult for the president to bypass him as the commander of U.S. and UN forces in Korea.

  In August 1950, after Truman had made him field commander in Korea, MacArthur publicly challenged the administration’s China policy as too weak and lauded Chiang as an essential U.S. ally in the struggle for Asia, suggesting that his return to the mainland should be a high priority. Fearful that MacArthur’s endorsement of Chiang might be seen in Peking as a statement of official policy and could provoke Chinese involvement in Korea, Truman rebuked MacArthur for creating false impressions that the United States intended to help Chiang overturn Mao’s government. The president’s reprimand brought an apology from MacArthur that muted their differences and persuaded Truman not to force the general’s retirement for insubordination. Besides, with the war going so badly, MacArthur seemed like the country’s best hope for turning defeat into victory. Recalling him risked a political firestorm Truman remained unprepared to accept.

  In September, MacArthur rewarded the faith in his leadership by beating back the North Korean offensive. At the beginning of the month, after his forces had halted the Communist advance at Pusan and built a defensive perimeter that the North Koreans seemed unable to breach, MacArthur’s troops found themselves in a stalemate reminiscent of the trench warfare that had dragged on for so long in World War I.

  MacArthur had no intention, however, of settling for a draw that would leave Pyongyang in control of most of South Korea. To break the impasse, he planned a daring offensive behind North Korean lines at Inchon, a port city on the west coast of South Korea within easy distance of Seoul. Defying the difficulties of the tides and terrain, which convinced the North Koreans that Inchon was an unlikely place for an amphibious assault, MacArthur surprised the enemy when 70,000 marines and army troops came ashore on September 15. In a matter of days, they had routed some 30,000 to 40,000 defenders at a cost to American forces of “536 dead, 2,550 wounded, and 65 missing.” Caught between MacArthur’s troops to the south around Pusan and to their rear at Inchon, the North Koreans began a retreat that took them back above the thirty-eighth parallel by the end of September. Recapturing Seoul and clearing the South of Kim’s armies fifteen days after assaulting Inchon, MacArthur’s armies suddenly seemed invincible. The victory gave him renewed standing as a brilliant field commander who was indispensable to the war effort.

  Suddenly an invasion of North Korea, with the destruction of Kim’s regime and the incorporation of the North into the South under the authority of the United Nations, seemed within reach. On September 11, the president approved a National Security Council directive instructing MacArthur to cross the thirty-eighth parallel—but only if neither Soviet nor Chinese forces had entered North Korea from Siberia or Manchuria or showed themselves prepared to intervene.

  On September 27, as the Communists retreated, the Joint Chiefs gave MacArthur a green light to destroy what was left of Kim’s armies, with the only limitations being that no U.S. planes were to violate Chinese or Soviet airspace, and only ROK troops were to approach the Yalu River, which formed the border between Korea and China. Two days later, George Marshall, as secretary of defense, with Truman’s approval, cabled MacArthur, advising him “to feel
unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the thirty-eighth parallel.” MacArthur saw the instruction as countering earlier limits on U.S. troop movements above the parallel. “Unless and until the enemy capitulates, I regard all Korea as open for our military operations,” MacArthur replied. By October 7, when the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a U.S. resolution calling for “a unified, independent, democratic [Korean] government,” ROK troops were already on the outskirts of North Korea’s east-coast port of Wonsan.

  Almost everything now encouraged Truman and his advisers to see invading North Korea to destroy Kim’s armies and end his rule as a realizable goal. To leave the North under Communist control was considered a victory of sorts for Moscow. It would suggest that Kim’s act of aggression, though not successful, nevertheless would go unpunished. Instead, elections that could unite the peninsula under a UN-sponsored democratic government would not only assure Korea’s self-determination but also signal a reversal in the Cold War from defeat to advance.

  Initially, American planners saw little evidence that either the Russians or the Chinese would join the fighting to prevent Kim’s defeat. At the end of September, as UN forces cleared the South and ROK troops entered North Korea, Soviet officials at the UN went out of their way to be conciliatory by signaling an interest in peace talks to end the Korean fighting. Soviet apprehensions about a NATO buildup that would include German forces also seemed to make them less belligerent. In brief, no one saw signs that Moscow was intent on risking a war with the United States over Korea.