The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  By March 24, when it was clear that Washington would not aim to unify the peninsula through fresh offensive operations above the parallel, MacArthur underscored his differences with the president in a statement that enraged the Chinese and assured the continuation of the fighting. Pointing to recent UN battlefield gains, he dismissed China’s military capacity to win an extended conflict against the UN and urged Peking to concede its defeat in Korea or face a wider war that would bring an “imminent military collapse.” The Chinese, who did not see themselves as losing the war by any means, dismissed MacArthur’s pronouncement as propaganda and prepared themselves for a spring offensive.

  MacArthur’s statement provoked not only the Chinese but also the White House. Having blundered in crossing the parallel once, Truman had no intention of making the same mistake again. His willingness to return to the status quo ante risked, as it had earlier, a political firestorm in the United States. But having propelled the United States into a larger conflict and increased the likelihood of an even bigger, more destructive war, Truman now concluded that the political explosion at home was a lesser evil than the dangers resulting from another attempt to eliminate North Korea’s Communist regime.

  To keep domestic divisions over Korea from intensifying, however, Truman muted his response to MacArthur’s new attack on his strategy. MacArthur followed with yet a second challenge to White House policy in a letter House Republican minority leader Joseph Martin read into the congressional record on April 5: MacArthur found it “strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest.” He warned that “if we lose the war to communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable…. We must win. There is no substitute for victory.”

  Truman thought him dead wrong and felt compelled to dismiss him. The Joint Chiefs agreed with the president. As the chairman, General Omar Bradley, would famously tell a Senate inquiry into MacArthur’s removal, “Red China is not the powerful nation seeking to dominate the world. Frankly, in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs, this strategy would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

  In firing MacArthur, Truman believed that the general had left him no choice. By endorsing Martin’s recommendation of a Nationalist invasion of the mainland that he hoped could topple Mao’s government, win the war in Korea, and defeat the Soviet reach for global power, MacArthur was assuming the role of commander in chief; it was a breach of the president’s constitutional authority. As Truman later told Merle Miller, his oral biographer, “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was…. I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president.”

  Truman also retired him because he believed that MacArthur was no longer “right in the head.” It was Truman’s way of saying that MacArthur’s proposal to destroy communism in China was reckless and could get the United States into a third world war, which fighting in Korea was meant to avoid.

  From the perspective of more than fifty years after Truman ended MacArthur’s military career, the president has all the better of the argument. Attacking China would have dragged the United States into an impossible struggle to determine China’s political future and would have tested Moscow’s fear of allowing Washington to dominate East Asia and all that might mean to the survival of Soviet communism. The Truman-Acheson-Kennan strategy of containing Communist advance by defending South Korea from Kim’s aggression made eminent good sense. But the more aggressive policy of rolling back post-1945 Communist gains in North Korea or Eastern Europe would have risked the global conflict the containment strategy so successfully averted.

  As MacArthur himself would acknowledge in a 1961 speech, “Global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides…. If you lose, you are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose. No longer does it possess even the chance of the winner of a duel. It contains now only the germs of double suicide.”

  11

  ELUSIVE PEACE

  We must be patient—making peace is harder than making war.

  —Adlai Stevenson, 1946

  Harry Truman paid a heavy political price for MacArthur’s firing. Predictably, the right wing was apocalyptic over the removal of one of the few U.S. officials they believed determined to defeat communism. Their agitation over the general’s ouster became a vicious ad hominem attack on Truman’s competence as president.

  Joe McCarthy denounced the president as drunk on “bourbon and Benedictine” when he recalled the general. Senator William Jenner of Indiana joined McCarthy in calling for Truman’s impeachment, saying that he was part of “a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union.” Whether Jenner actually believed that Truman was a traitor or was posturing for political gain is less interesting than the fact that any number of people in the country were receptive to such an outlandish charge; the frustration with a limited war that might end in defeat enraged people, who turned their anger against a president they blamed for timid leadership. The Chicago Tribune was relatively restrained in describing Truman as “unfit, morally and mentally for his high office.”

  Although most Americans were not ready to dismiss the president as unable to handle his job, two-thirds disapproved of his treatment of MacArthur, less because they continued to have great faith in the general’s leadership than because of how Truman had dismissed him. The controversy further undermined Truman’s sagging approval ratings; toward the end of the year, he fell to an all-time low of 23 percent. But the president’s unpopularity did not translate into political capital for MacArthur: a majority of potential voters opposed a MacArthur bid for the White House, which some commentators believed he envisioned as a capstone to his storied military career.

  As with any member of the military who had devoted years of his life to defending the country—and especially one as revered as MacArthur—millions of Americans believed that the general should have been allowed to retire in a more decorous fashion. An outpouring of regard for him in parades and at an appearance before a joint congressional session more than made the point. In New York, where millions of people lined the nineteen-mile route the motorcade took almost seven hours to travel, the parade greatly exceeded the 1945 celebration of Eisenhower’s return from victory in Europe. MacArthur was an American hero, and in a time of war when so many Americans saw a threat to the country’s long-term survival, they wished to pay homage to the general best known for his contributions to Japan’s defeat and rebuilding. They were also showing him the regard they believed Truman had denied him.

  The expressions of respect for MacArthur were as much an attack on Truman as a feting of the general. It was the Republicans who arranged MacArthur’s appearance before the joint session, knowing that the White House and congressional Democrats would not risk a political backlash by blocking it. A MacArthur speech would embarrass the president by underscoring differences between a general who wanted victory in Korea and a White House willing to settle for a standoff.

  MacArthur’s appearance on April 19, 1951, could have been orchestrated by a Hollywood producer: his march down the aisle before a cheering audience of congressmen and senators, his pronouncements on selfless duty to country, his calls for victory in Korea, and a promise not to seek any grander role for himself in public life but to “just fade away” struck all the right chords in a time of national anxiety. His delivery was pitch-perfect, his voice rising and falling in a melodic rhythm that seemed to hypnotize his listeners. His “gallant men” asked, “Why … surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” Pausing to let the gravity of the question sink in, he responded, “I could not answer.” When he finished, some in the audience sobbed openly and jostled each other as he came up the aisle to touch his hand or arm. A congressman, carried away by the emotions of the moment, declared: “We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!”

  Yet for all
the adulation, MacArthur’s championship of a wider, decisive war fell flat. Privately, White House aides belittled MacAr-thur’s self-importance and appetite for public drama with gallows humor: they suggested that the general should have led a parade to the capital riding on an elephant, and that a proper sequel to his congressional address should have been the burning of the Constitution, the lynching of Secretary Acheson, and a twenty-one-atomic-bomb salute. Truman declared MacArthur’s speech “a hundred percent bullshit,” and marveled at the “damn fool Congressmen crying like a bunch of women.”

  What principally dampened enthusiasm for MacArthur was his testimony before a Senate committee looking into his dismissal and “the military situation in the Far East.” Although radio and television were not allowed in the hearing room, daily transcripts of the proceedings were distributed to the press, which featured them prominently on the front pages of their newspapers and on the airwaves. MacArthur had ample opportunity over three days between May 3 and May 6 to make his case. Sensing that MacArthur’s best critic would be his own words, Senate opponents gave him all the time he wanted to demonstrate that he was a reckless advocate of a war against China and Soviet Russia, if necessary. When asked what his strategy would be should we get into a global war, he skirted the question: “That doesn’t happen to be my responsibility,” he said.

  Truman answered some of his critics and dampened the enthusiasm for MacArthur when he said of the general’s testimony, “We are right now in the midst of a big debate on foreign policy. A lot of people are looking at this debate as if it were just a political fight. But … the thing that is at stake in this debate may be atomic war…. It is a matter of life and death.”

  While the public was not eager to follow MacArthur into a nuclear war, it did share his concerns about the Korean fighting: “What are you going to do to stop the slaughter in Korea?” he asked. “Does your global plan for defending these United States against war consist of permitting war indefinitely to go on in the Pacific?”

  Like the Joint Chiefs, the public had no appetite for the expanded fighting MacArthur favored to defeat the Communists in Peking and Pyongyang and, if necessary, in Moscow too. But it was in sync with MacArthur’s demand for an end to the fighting in Korea—only not in the way he envisioned. Initial majority support for crossing the parallel and destroying Kim’s regime had collapsed with China’s entrance into the fighting and the prospect of a drawn-out stalemate. Most Americans now preferred a negotiated settlement that divided the peninsula along prewar lines and left the Rhee and Kim governments in place rather than an all-out struggle to inflict a decisive defeat on the Communists. MacArthur’s eagerness for a full-scale war with China frightened people, who thought he might lead them into a nuclear holocaust.

  In July both sides in the Korean fighting, implicitly acknowledging that neither was likely to win a clear victory, agreed to open truce talks at Kaesong, a city just below the parallel. Seventy-four percent of Americans thought the discussions a good idea. When an unidentified U.S. senator declared the Korean conflict “an utterly ‘useless war,’” a telling 56 percent of Americans agreed. Remembering Roosevelt’s effective dealings with Stalin during World War II, 70 percent of a survey favored a U.S.-Soviet summit that might ease differences between Moscow and Washington.

  While the White House was receptive to talks, it was eager to salvage something more than South Korea’s autonomy from the negotiations. Given the success of the winter-spring offensive in 1951 that had driven the Communists back above the parallel, Washington demanded more at the negotiating table than a return to the prewar dividing line, as the Chinese proposed. The United States pressed Peking to give the South a swath of territory above the parallel that was then under Communist control. U.S. negotiators argued that their dominance in the air over Korea and the surrounding waters entitled them to push South Korea’s boundary north of where it used to be. Having dropped their demands for discussions of U.S. evacuation of the peninsula, removal of the Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Strait, and a say in negotiating the Japanese peace treaty as part of Korean armistice talks, the Chinese refused to concede anything else, especially any North Korean territory, which could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of defeat.

  With both sides primarily concerned to represent any settlement as a victory, neither would alter their positions. Never mind that Peking could describe its rescue of Kim’s regime from an American occupation as a triumph over the imperialist West or that Washington could claim the defeat of North Korea’s aggression against the South. Each side wished to convince domestic and international observers that they were militarily stronger and politically more resolute than their adversary. But it was their home audiences that the Chinese and American governments were most eager to impress. Mao needed to convince his mass public that its sacrifices in the war and for the revolution were essential to preserve the nation from a new era of foreign imperial control, which would squelch promises of better days ahead. Truman felt compelled to fend off attacks on his administration and party as weak leaders, or maybe even closet Reds, reluctant to defeat the Communist threat.

  The preoccupation with perceptions of winners and losers, regardless of realities on the ground, was central to the armistice talks. At the conference table, the Chinese and North Koreans insisted that Admiral Turner Joy, America’s chief negotiator, sit facing north. Mindful that victors in Asian cultures always sat facing south, the Communists positioned themselves accordingly. Moreover, they arranged to make their chief delegate appear taller and more dominant than Joy at the initial session of the talks by having the latter sit in a smaller and lower chair. To avoid being caught on Communist cameras looking less imposing than the Chinese delegates, Joy insisted on chairs of equal size and height to those of his counterparts.

  The negotiations, which affected so many lives, were inextricably bound up with public posturing. Since neither side was going to emerge from the fighting with any clear advantage, the belligerents were as attentive to appearances as to battlefield results. It was a formula for stalemate rather than an end to war making.

  In August 1951, two military clashes in the neutral zone around Kaesong increased tension in talks already notable for their acrimony. The Chinese, for example, had responded to American boundary demands as “incredible,” “naive and illogical.” Their chief negotiator asked: “Seeing that you make such a completely absurd and arrogant statement for what have you actually come here?” Joy replied: “Rudeness such as you have displayed will lead … the United Nations Command delegation … to conclude you have no serious or sincere purpose at this conference.”

  The violations of the neutral zone became an excuse for the Communists to suspend the negotiations in late August. They blamed the interruption on their adversaries and demanded concessions from them before they would resume talks. To both sides, the negotiations had become a form of alternate warfare or “war by other means.”

  American opinion now hardened against the Communists. The great majority of the country already saw the Soviets and the new Chinese regime as driven, ruthless ideologues who only understood military might. And while the Russian and Chinese Communists were also seen as indifferent to their people’s lives, all too ready to sacrifice their populations in the service of their ambitions, Americans believed that only their determination to preserve their respective governments in Pyongyang, Peking, and Moscow could push the Communists into any kind of settlement with the West.

  The unproductive talks at Kaesong, however, convinced two-thirds of Americans in a Gallup poll that the Chinese were uninterested in peace and that a new round of talks would not end the conflict. A majority in the United States concluded that only the most drastic measures would force the Chinese into a truce: 51 percent in one poll favored use of atomic bombs against enemy targets in Korea; only 37 percent thought it a poor idea.

  During the two months following the breakdown in negotiations, both sides in Korea tested each other’s resolve
with military probes. At the same time, the Soviets increased tensions in Germany, where the Communists put new restrictions on road traffic into West Berlin, and the United States signed a peace treaty with Tokyo that convinced Peking and Moscow of American determination not to leave Japan or the peninsula but to establish permanent bases from which it could threaten China’s Communist regime and Soviet East Asian interests.

  Because a complete breakdown in settlement talks threatened unacceptable losses to the Americans in stepped-up fighting, Washington favored a prompt return to the peace table. The Chinese, who privately acknowledged that the war was putting unbearable strains on their domestic economy, shared an interest in renewed negotiations. A rising concern that a prolonged conflict might trigger a U.S. nuclear attack on China’s principal cities created an added inducement for Peking to restart the discussions. At the end of October, to give the talks a fresh sense of momentum and both sides a greater sense of control over the meeting site, they agreed to resume the negotiations at Panmunjom, another border city southeast of Kaesong.

  In the course of a month, the negotiators agreed to compromise on the dividing line between North and South Korea, accepting the demarcation or battlefield positions at the end of November as the new state boundaries. The agreement, which expanded the South just north of the thirty-eighth parallel, gave the United States some of the border changes it had originally asked, but not enough to suggest a major Chinese concession on the disputed point.

  During the second week in December, the negotiators began to focus on what no one foresaw as a stumbling block to a final settlement—the exchange of prisoners of war. The American decision to make repatriation voluntary among the 116,000 Chinese and North Korean POWs, however, became an intolerable political condition for the Chinese. Washington had every confidence that the 16,000 U.S. and South Korean POWs would eagerly seek repatriation. But if many of the Chinese and North Korean internees would not, it would be a propaganda victory. Washington also saw an “all-for-all” exchange as calculated to boost Communist troop concentrations that could destabilize existing battle lines.