After Dewey won the nomination, he assembled a group of about twenty advisers and party leaders at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel to discuss the choice of his vice-presidential nominee. Taft, who was invited but did not appear, sent word urging the selection of Bricker, who had run with Dewey in 1944. But Vandenberg spoke for an emerging consensus in advising “not to build a hybrid ticket—not to choose a V.P. who was not in full harmony with the platform and with … support of international cooperation.” He said that “we could not go to the country with a ticket which did no more than personify the split on this issue among Republicans in Congress.” So compromise with isolationism, as in the balanced Dewey-Bricker nominations of 1944, was rejected. In the end, California governor Earl Warren and former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen, internationalists both, were the only candidates given serious consideration for the nomination, and Warren was chosen.
Dewey’s selection of Warren as a running mate also signaled a continuing change in the Republican party that in turn reflected demographic shifts within the country. In 1944 the New Yorker had followed a pattern as old as the Republican party in uniting with an Ohio man; but in 1948 he looked to California. Starting in that year, the Republicans were to nominate a Californian on their national ticket in six out of seven elections.
The move from an Ohio–New York axis to a California–New York combination represented a shift to a more outward-looking attitude, as both seaboards were open to foreign contacts, goods, and ideas, while the interior of the country—the Middle West—by definition was insular.
But the evolution of the Republican party was set back temporarily by the 1948 election results. With the Democratic party split in three (Truman, left-wing Progressive candidate Henry Wallace, and states’-rights southerner Strom Thurmond, all running for President), and with a powerful ticket of their own, the Republicans looked unbeatable. When they did lose, they felt cheated—and were driven to desperate tactics.
It is entirely possible that America would have been spared some of the more ugly by-products of the cold war had the Dewey-Warren slate prevailed. The isolationist bloc (which flourished only within the Republican party) would have surrendered four years earlier than in fact it did, for it would have been subject to its own party’s discipline; it would have been forced to support an internationalist administration that was Republican.
Much of the anticommunist hysteria whipped up by the frustrated Republican losers of the 1948 elections in an effort to discredit the Truman administration—and, on the other hand, indulged in defensively by the administration to prove itself more anti-Red than its critics—might have been avoided had the Republicans won. The height of the Red-baiting era in the middle of the century corresponds almost exactly with the presidential term that Truman took away from Dewey: 1949–53.
THE CALL FOR an anticommunist crusade issued by Truman and Acheson at Vandenberg’s suggestion did succeed in rallying support for their anti-Russian programs, but unexpectedly, it supplied ammunition to the opposition as well. For anticommunism proved to be a two-edged sword. Congressmen who opposed the high taxes needed to sustain a large foreign policy and military budget could claim the two were not necessary. They were able to argue that the real danger was not that posed by the Red Army: the genuine threat was from within. Firing alleged subversives, blacklisting performers, and banning books from library shelves provided an alternative to voting funds for foreign aid—or even to expanding and strengthening the armed forces.
Senator Joseph McCarthy, the demagogue who gave his name to witch-hunting at midcentury, represented Wisconsin voters, many of them German-American, who had been opposed to American entry into the two world wars. In the prevailing hysteria they took revenge on the liberal internationalists of the eastern seaboard, whom they held responsible for leading the country into wars against Germany.
The communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949 was confusing and troubling to Americans, and it was exploited by the McCarthy wing of the Republican party. Had Dewey been President, perhaps such partisan bitterness could have been avoided. It should have been evident that no matter which party held the White House, the United States could have done nothing to prevent Mao Tse-tung’s victory.
It should have been clear, too, that whatever else might be said against him, Mao was not really Stalin’s man but an indigenous leader with an agenda of his own. The Kremlin in fact had supported Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao had won leadership of the Communist party only by defeating the Moscow-anointed faction. Observers with a long view of history foresaw that China was potentially Russia’s most dangerous adversary.
Yet the Democrats were blamed—successfully—for having let Nationalist China be driven from the mainland. Even in the absence of evidence (and there seems to be none), it is hard to believe that this did not affect Truman and Acheson in their decision the following year to take a stand in Korea.
We do not know what decision a President Dewey would have made the first week in June 1950 after North Korean tanks smashed across the thirty-eighth parallel on their way to destroy South Korea in a blitzkrieg. But the initial reaction of political significance happened to be that of Dulles, then in Japan, who was Secretary Acheson’s adviser and would have been Dewey’s secretary. If South Korea could not hold the line, Dulles cabled to Washington, “U.S. force should be used even though this risks Russian countermoves. To sit by while Korea is overrun by unprovoked armed attack would start disastrous chain of events leading most probably to world war.” This was advice that would have been politically easier for a Dewey to ignore than for a Truman, who allegedly had lost China.
How to react was one of the most complex questions an American president has been called upon to decide. Endorsing a recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman in April 1948 had approved this policy statement: “The United States should not become so irrevocably involved in the Korean situation that an action taken by … any other power in Korea could be considered a casus belli for the United States.” U.S. troops had been withdrawn from South Korea* in 1949 because the military establishment thought it served no purpose for them to be there. For different reasons, the relevant military and political leaders of the Truman administration had all concluded that U.S. forces ought not to be left in vulnerable enclaves on the mainland of Asia but instead should hold a line of islands off the Asian coast, shielded by the fleet.
Holding South Korea was not a vital interest. Its loss in theory might threaten Japan, but in practice not, for the U.S. Navy ruled the waters that flowed between them. Allies elsewhere would not lose confidence in the value of America’s guarantee, as South Korea did not have an American guarantee. South Korea was in a different category than they were: by the NATO treaty, America was pledged to defend such countries as Belgium and Holland, but there was no American commitment to protect South Korea. Then, too, the attack was not by the Soviet Union, but by a client state not inconceivably pursuing its own interests.
Yet it was a brazen aggression by what seemed at the time to be a monolithic, Russian-directed international communist bloc,† and it trampled upon a UN-sponsored line of division between the two Koreas. Truman’s first instinct was to regard it as a test of his and America’s manhood—and to meet it. Later he talked about how the UN would be destroyed if North Korea were allowed to get away with the invasion;‡ it was a common belief at the time that the League of Nations had collapsed because of its failure to stop the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The challenge to the Truman Doctrine bothered him, too; he may not have remembered that his promise to protect free peoples everywhere against communist aggression was supposed to be mere rhetoric for domestic political consumption.
In the map room of the White House, its commanding officer, George Elsey, made a memo of what Truman said to him June 26. “But what he was worried about, the President said, was the Middle East. He put his finger on Iran and said: ‘Here is where they will start trouble if we
aren’t careful.’
“ ‘Korea,’ he said, ‘is the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now, if we stand up to them like we did in Greece three years ago, they won’t take any next steps. But if we just stand by, they’ll move into Iran and they’ll take over the whole Middle East.’ ”
All of the civilian and military administration figures with whom Truman met believed as he did that U.S. forces should act to throw the invaders back. No one seemed to question that. Yet it was an extremely odd decision that marked another great break with the American past.
Americans never before had gone to war unless they believed the other side had attacked the United States.§ It was axiomatic as late as 1941 that the United States would not go to war unless the other side struck first—at America. The gravest threat posed by Nazi Germany to American vital interests—and the virtual certainty that if Hitler conquered Britain and Russia, he would employ all the resources of Eurasia to build up his war machine to attack an isolated Western Hemisphere—was insufficient to move the United States to join in the fight. It was a country that waited for others to attack it first. In the spring of 1917 Wilson had known it was likely that German U-boats would sink American vessels, but realized he could do nothing (and did not want to do anything) until their torpedoes sank ships. FDR was aware the Japanese would attack in late 1941 or early 1942—but by the rules of American politics he had to wait until they did.
Yet suddenly, based on the lessons drawn from their experience of Germany’s creeping aggressions in the 1930s (which they wrongly likened to the Korean situation), Truman’s generation was prepared to go to war at the other extreme: the United States or an ally not attacked; the attack not mounted by Russia or by a country even potentially dangerous to the United States; the territory at stake of no value to America or Russia; the regime attacked, a dictatorship; the conflict located on the far side of the world, in a place few Americans had heard of; and the battlefield, chosen by the other side, one on which the odds were stacked against the United States.
John Foster Dulles had a theory of his own as to why South Korea had to be kept out of the communist bloc—and why Vietnam had to be kept out of it, too. He believed that if South Korea and Vietnam were taken over by the Russian-Chinese combine, their markets would be closed to Japan. Dulles imagined that these were the export markets on which Japanese industry would depend in the years to come; to deprive Japan of them would be to strangle its nascent economy—and drive the country to the communist side.
Dulles was peering into one of the more clouded of crystal balls. The notion that the Japanese would not be able to compete in the world’s export markets—other than Korea and Vietnam—proved to be one of the more wide-of-the-mark predictions of modern times. In any event, Truman, who made the decision to go into Korea, quite clearly was not thinking in terms of export markets. His thinking, and that of most of his aides, came out of their past as witnesses to history, and however inaccurately, they saw themselves as taking the stand that Chamberlain failed to take at Munich.
It is still not entirely clear why Truman did not ask Congress for a declaration of war. True, presidents had sent armed forces into action—on raids and expeditions and Caribbean invasions—somewhere between 100 and 200 times without asking for such a declaration; but Korea was the first real war that a President started on his own. That, too, represented a great break with the American past.
THE FIRST COUPLE OF YEARS of the presidential term to which Truman was elected on his own proved to be a testing time for his leadership. The detonation of the first Russian atomic bomb in 1949, the communist victory in the Chinese civil war, and the North Korean invasion of the south led the President to adopt a response to the Soviet threat that was more military and more militant than had been the case before. The new approach was embodied in the National Security Council policy paper known as NSC 68, which argued that the Soviet Union aimed at domination of the whole world, and that the United States should give priority to massive rearmament. The paper was drafted before the Korean attack, but was not approved or signed by Truman until after it.
In part the shift in emphasis evidenced by NSC 68 may have been the result of a turnover within the State Department: Paul Nitze, who drafted the document, replaced George Kennan as head of the Policy Planning Staff, while Dean Acheson succeeded Marshall as secretary. At the time, Acheson and Nitze tended to employ a hard anticommunist rhetoric that Marshall and Kennan tended to avoid; this may have indicated policy differences on matters of substance as well as style. But the NSC 68 recommendation of rearmament, even if it came about because of a change in the government’s men, was inspired at least as much by a change in the country’s circumstances. The paper was a response to the communist takeover of China and to the invalidation of America’s world strategy as a result of the explosion by Russia of the A-bomb. Until then, the demobilized and disarmed United States had indulged in believing that its atomic monopoly was a threat sufficient to counter the Red Army. Now, clearly, it was not; so if war came, America would have to go up against Russia—and now China, too—man for man and tank for tank. What Acheson and Nitze had seen, the public saw too once the Korean War began.
Ever since taking office Truman had tried to evade it, but now the bill came due for payment. Breaking with a tradition going back to the Founding Fathers, he would have to create a standing army. Building a modern defense establishment meant departing from the principles of small government and low taxes that had always been central to the Republic’s values. It meant becoming like the European nations Americans always had denounced: like a Prussia with a permanent war economy. That was the cost of becoming and remaining involved in world politics. It was only because of the North Korean attack that the country allowed Truman to follow this path.
One surge in the size of the American government had taken place under FDR in fighting the Depression. Now Truman initiated another to fight the cold war—and to be prepared to fight any other kind of war. He gave his approval to NSC 68. The national security government was to continue growing through the second half of the twentieth century.
Truman, Acheson, Marshall, and Eisenhower would have been shocked—as young men in 1901—to learn where it would all end (though, of course, it never ends). Theodore Roosevelt, their newly inducted President, had a White House staff of thirty-five; Ronald Reagan was to have one of 3,366—plus an additional 3,000 on a part-time basis. And in 1992, for the first time, more Americans worked in government than in manufacturing.
IN THE DARK DAYS of the Korean War, Truman called FDR’s generals back to the colors. He phoned Marshall, who was trout fishing in Michigan in retirement, and appointed him secretary of defense. He contacted Eisenhower, who had entered a new civilian career as president of Columbia University, and sent him to Europe as head of NATO forces.
He placed MacArthur in command of United States and United Nations forces in Korea, and the old soldier achieved an astounding and almost miraculous victory by his landing at Inchon September 15. He seemed to have won the war. After hard fighting in the South Korean capital of Seoul, the northern invaders fled back home. MacArthur pursued them.
But the Chinese, hitherto on the sidelines, then announced that the war was going to be fought by their own rules. China declared that if MacArthur’s troops entered North Korea, the Chinese would enter the war. A billion Chinese with the Soviet Union behind them: that was rather too much for the Truman administration to handle. Yet stopping MacArthur’s advance at the frontier line seemed to solve nothing; the North Koreans could simply wait until they had rebuilt their forces and then, if they chose, reinvade.
If the Chinese stood behind their threat, MacArthur’s forces had only two choices, neither of them acceptable: to stay where they were, standing guard forever against the next invasion; or to invade the north and become involved in an endless war against China’s unlimited manpower.
MacArthur chose to believe the Chinese were bluffing. With the app
roval of Truman—whose initial view after North Korea’s attack had been that the invaders should be thrown back only to their own frontier—he ordered the U.S.–UN armies in early October to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and keep on heading north. He led his forces to disaster, dividing them—as Korea’s topography requires, for the mountains run north–south—and storming all the way up to the Yalu River frontier with China. He charged, in a line that was thin and discontinuous, setting up his troops for a counterpunch as waves of Chinese “volunteers” crossed the river in late October and smashed into and through them, sending the American armies reeling back to face annihilation with backs against the sea.
From the heights of success at Inchon to the lower depths of the Yalu retreat, no general can have seen his fortunes plunge so far in so short a time. In despair that his troops would not be able to hold the line—any line—MacArthur demanded that the war be widened. With the limited forces at his disposal, he told Washington, he could not cope with the enemy. Full-scale war against China and Russia suddenly loomed ahead as possibilities, as did the use of atomic bombs.
On November 28, 1950, Truman met with his advisers and made the crucial decision not to widen the conflict: which is to say, to not risk starting the Third World War—even though refusing to widen the war, according to MacArthur, meant losing it. Even for Truman, whose strength was facing facts, these were hard ones to look in the face. Losing a war, for the first time in American history. Watching the complete destruction of the American and United Nations forces in Korea—and accepting that and making no reply. Bearing responsibility for having sent in the troops in the first place. Becoming the greatest failure as a war leader in the history of the American presidency.
In the Time of the Americans Page 67