In late May and early June of that year, intelligence reports stating that “somewhere across the broad globe the armed forces of some Communist power were expecting soon to go into action” reached the desk of George F. Kennan, the U.S. State Department's leading Soviet expert. Kennan had spent his life studying the Soviet Union in particular and Communist behavior gen-erally—any report that indicated a significant move on the part of the U.S.S.R. or one of its client states was entirely too tantalizing for him to ignore. Kennan and his fellow Russian experts immediately undertook an “intensive scrutiny” of the disposition of the Soviet Union itself, and this study “satisfied us,” in Ken-nan's words, “that it was not Soviet forces to which these indications related. This left us with the forces of the various satellite regimes, but which?”
Possibilities were discussed and discarded, and eventually, the subject of Korea came up. In 1945 that peninsula—the focus of Russian, Chinese, and Japanese ambitions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—had been divided at the 38th Parallel between the forces of the United States and the Soviet Union after the surrender of Japan. The division had supposedly been for military purposes alone, each of the victorious allies assigned the task of disarming Japanese troops within its zone. But in the years since, the arrangement had taken on a political dimension: Both the Americans and the Soviets had set up client regimes under repressive strongmen.
Considering the possibility of an attack by North Korea against the southern republic, Kennan and his colleagues were informed by the Pentagon and by General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo that the idea was out of the question. Kennan was not comforted, for “nowhere else … could we see any possibility of an attack, and we came away from the exercise quite frustrated.” In this state of mind, Kennan left Washington for his farm in Pennsylvania on the morning of Saturday, June 24.
That evening, W. Bradley Connors, in charge of public affairs for State's Far Eastern desk, found himself stuck in Washington. At just past eight P.M., Connors received a phone call at his apartment from the Washington bureau chief of United Press International, who said UPI's correspondent in South Korea was reporting a North Korean attack across the 38th Parallel. Would Connors care to confirm? Connors instead broke off the discussion and tried to call the American embassy in Seoul, but the switchboard was closed.
By 9:26, Connors was at his post at the State Department to receive a cable from John J. Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul: ACCORDING KOREAN ARMY REPORTS WHICH PARTLY CONFIRMED BY [American] KMAG [Korean Military Assistance Group] FIELD ADVISOR REPORTS NORTH KOREAN FORCES INVADED ROK [Republic of Korea] TERRITORY AT SEVERAL POINTS THIS MORNING…. IT WOULDAPPEAR FROM NATURE OF ATTACK AND MANNER IN WHICH IT WAS LAUNCHED THAT IT CONSTITUTES ALL OUT OFFENSIVE AGAINST ROK. Connors immediately got on the phone and contacted his superior, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
Later to gain fame as secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Rusk served as an intelligence officer in China under “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell during World War II. He was consistently on his guard to prevent any repetition of the errors of the 1930s. Rusk sped to the State Department after receiving Connors's call, to find that the assistant secretary for United Nations affairs, John Hickerson, and Ambassador at Large Philip C. Jessup had also been called in. The three immediately telephoned Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was at his farm in Maryland. A forceful and independent thinker with a taste for action, Acheson shared his subordinates' alarm and ordered them to call the secretary-general of the United Nations, Trygve Lie, to inform him of the attack and schedule an emergency meeting of the Security Council for the following day.
Upon hearing Hickerson's report of the North Korean attack, Secretary-General Lie responded, “My God, Jack, this is war against the United Nations.” From that moment on, American officials would do all in their power to promulgate Lie's assessment.
Rusk, Hickerson, and Jessup next got in touch with the Pentagon and began to work out possible American military responses to the North Korean attack. Meanwhile, Acheson put through a call to Independence, Missouri. President Harry S. Truman had gone home for the weekend, and when Acheson's call came, he had just finished dinner and was in his library. When Acheson told him what had happened, Truman wanted to return to the capital right away, but Acheson convinced him to wait until more was known. The secretary said he had requested an emergency Security Council session, where he hoped to obtain condemnation of the North Korean attack.
The next day in his office, Acheson was briefed on further developments. The military situation had only gotten worse, but diplomatically, the United States had already scored a victory: In an emergency session, the U.N. Security Council had passed an American-sponsored resolution calling for an “immediate cessation of hostilities” and a withdrawal of North Korean forces to the 38th Parallel—although some members had asked that the American characterization of the North Korean move be scaled down from “active aggression” to “breach of peace.” The United Nations would remain in this obliging state of mind throughout the early period of the Korean War.
Passage of the resolution had been made possible by the absence of the Soviet delegate, who, Acheson assumed, was continuing a boycott of council sessions begun as a result of the U.N.'s refusal in February to admit the People's Republic of China. In reality, the Chinese issue was only part of the reason for the unusual Soviet inaction on Korea; Stalin had already decided the North Korean gambit was unlikely to pay off, and for the moment—as cables that the Russians recently declassified reveal—he wanted as little to do with it as possible. The practical effect of this Soviet inaction was historic: For the first time, the United Nations seemed ready to vote for concrete action to counter aggression.
On the night of June 25, Truman, just returned from Independence, had dinner with his top advisers at Blair House (the White House was being renovated). He had already decided on a forceful response to the North Korean move, which he, along with everyone else in Washington, believed had been made with the Soviets' consent and encouragement. “If this was allowed to go unchallenged,” Truman later recalled, “it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the Second World War.” Truman found his cabinet and defense advisers in complete agreement. Force, they all believed, was the only answer to such a threat: collective force, if the U.N. could be made to act quickly enough; unilateral force if it could not. Specifically, Dean Acheson recommended that General MacArthur be authorized to give the South Korean army all the matériel it required, that the U.S. Air Force be directed to cover the evacuation from Seoul, and that the Seventh Fleet be sent into the Formosa Strait to ensure that neither Mao Tse-tung nor Chiang Kai-shek would use the Korean hostilities as a cover for operations against his opponent.
The following day, a Monday, Acheson also suggested including direct American air support of South Korean ground actions and additional troops for American garrisons in the Philippines. In addition, he proposed increasing American aid to the French in Indonesia, on the chance that Korea might be just the first of several Communist attacks in Asia. He also recommended that the United States sponsor a Security Council resolution calling for U.N. members to aid South Korea. Acheson, on the advice of Kennan, was betting that the Soviets would continue to boycott the sessions.
The bet paid off. On June 27—three days after the North Korean attack— Acheson got his resolution, and with it international sanction for military action. It was sanction that Acheson and Truman greatly prized but had not waited for: American warplanes were already at work in the skies above Korea, swift testament to American determination that the 1930s failure to prepare for aggression should not be repeated.
The fighting continued to go badly for South Korea. By Thursday, June 29, General MacArthur's personal representative in South Korea was reporting that despite American air support, the pre-invasion status quo—the announced goal of the United Nations—could not be resto
red without the deployment of American ground forces. In typically reckless fashion, MacArthur himself visited the front, then returned to Tokyo and confirmed that without American troops, there would be disaster in Korea.
President Truman wondered whether such American intervention would not lead to a similar response on the part of one of the Communist powers; Acheson informed him that “it was State's view that while the Chinese might intervene, the Russians would not.” MacArthur was asking for one brigade immediately, to be built up to two divisions. Acheson strongly urged the president to assent. On Friday morning, June 30, the decision was made: American ground forces would go to the front. As Acheson later recalled, “We were then fully committed in Korea.”
One more piece of business remained. The United States succeeded in securing approval for a unified military command—five nations had pledged to contribute contingents to the Korean action—under a person of its choosing. The next day MacArthur got the job and was presented with the U.N. flag that had been used in peacekeeping operations in the Middle East.
The cost would be heavy for the U.N. forces that went to South Korea's aid, but (as in the Persian Gulf War) it would be heaviest for the United States, which supplied half the allied ground troops and almost all the air and naval forces: Washington spent some $15 billion in Korea and lost thirty-four thousand dead. The cost to the North and South Koreans, as well as the Communist Chinese, was much higher. But by the end of the summer of 1953, the goal of reversing North Korea's aggression had been realized. And on a larger scale, the United Nations had demonstrated that for the sake of maintaining global peace it was willing to make war on a truly world-class level—provided, of course, that the world's richest power was willing to foot much of the cost in money and lives.
Truman Fires MacArthur
DAVID MCCULLOUGH
In the history of the Cold War—in the entire history of American arms, for that matter—few personal showdowns have been quite so freighted with consequence as the confrontation between Harry S. Truman and Douglas MacArthur. How often do two such dominating figures find themselves on a collision course from which neither is willing to veer? On the one hand, there was Truman, the artillery captain of World War I, the accidental president, the surprise victor of the election of 1948, whose decisions at the start of the Cold War would define the West's diplomatic and military policies for the next four decades. On the other, there was MacArthur, a fighting division commander in 1918, a Medal of Honor winner, the supreme commander of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific during World War II, the master of the operational art turned benevolent autocrat who had presided over the reconstruction—and democratization—of Japan, who had led the U.N. forces in Korea. This American Kitchener was a genuine hero, but then (although people did not recognize it at the time) so was Truman. The two men distrusted each other at long distance: MacArthur had not set foot in the United States since 1937. They would meet only once, and then for a few morning hours in the Pacific, at Wake Island on October 5, 1950. “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur,” Truman had once noted in his diary. “Don't see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.” The feeling was mutual.
It was the crisis of the Korean War and MacArthur's repeated acts of insubordination that brought on the ultimate confrontation. He was a man no one dared to challenge until it was almost too late. As the disaster of the summer of 1950 changed to the triumph of Inchon and then disaster again, and a third world war loomed, Truman would come to one of the most difficult decisions of his presidency.
DAVID McCULLOUGH is one of the most deservedly popular historians of our time. His Truman—from which the following account is excerpted—won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for biography; The Path Between the Seas, his description of the building of the Panama Canal, won a National Book Award for history. His other books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Mornings on Horseback, and, most recently, John Adams, which earned him his second Pulitzer Prize for biography. Millions know him as the host, and often the narrator, of television shows such as The American Experience. The past president of the Society of American Historians, McCullough has also won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
IT WAS, IN MANY RESPECTS, one of the darkest chapters in American military history. But MacArthur, now in overall command of the U.N. forces, was trading space for time—time to pour in men and supplies at the port of Pusan—and the wonder was the North Koreans had been kept from overrunning South Korea straightaway. Despite their suffering and humiliation, the brutal odds against them, the American and Republic of Korea units had done what they were supposed to, almost miraculously. They had held back the landslide, said Truman, who would rightly call it one of the most heroic rearguard actions on record.
In the first week of July, MacArthur requested thirty thousand American ground troops, to bring the four divisions of his Eighth Army to full strength. Just days later, on July 9, the situation had become so “critical” that he called for a doubling of his forces. Four more divisions were urgently needed, he said in a cable that jolted Washington.
The hard reality was that the army had only ten divisions. In Western Europe there was just one, and as former British prime minister Winston Churchill had noted in a speech in London, the full Allied force of twelve divisions in Western Europe faced a Soviet threat of eighty divisions. The NATO allies were exceedingly concerned lest the United States become too involved in distant Korea. Years of slashing defense expenditures, as a means to balance the budget, had taken a heavy toll. For all its vaunted nuclear supremacy, the nation was quite unprepared for war. But now, in these “weeks of slaughter and heartbreak,” that was to change dramatically and with immense, far-reaching consequences.
On Wednesday, July 19, first in a special message to Congress, then in an address to the nation, Truman said the attack on Korea demanded that the United States send more men, equipment, and supplies. Beyond that, the realities of the “world situation” required still greater American military strength. He called for an emergency appropriation of $10 billion—the final sum submitted would be $11.6 billion, or nearly as much as the entire $13 billion military budget originally planned for the fiscal year—and announced he was both stepping up the draft and calling up certain National Guard units.
“Korea is a small country thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American,” he told the nation, standing stone-faced in the heat of the television lights, a tangle of wires and cables at his feet. By their “act of raw aggression … I repeat, it was raw aggression,” the North Koreans had violated the U.N. Charter, and though American forces were making the “principal effort” to save the Republic of South Korea, they were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was a “landmark in man-kind's long search for a rule of law among nations.”
As a call to arms, it was not especially inspirational. Nor did he once use the word “war” to describe what was happening in Korea. But then neither was there any question about his sincerity, nor was he the least evasive about what would be asked of the country. The “job” was long and difficult. It meant increased taxes, rationing if necessary, “stern days ahead.” In another televised address at summer's end, he would announce plans to double the armed forces to nearly three million men. Congress appropriated the money: $48.2 billion for military spending in fiscal 1950–51, then $60 billion for fiscal 1951–52.
Was he considering use of the atomic bomb in Korea? Truman was asked at a press conference the last week of July. No, he said. Did he plan to get out of Washington anytime soon? No. He would stay on the job.
That Truman was less than fond or admiring of his Far Eastern commander, Douglas MacArthur, was well known to his staff and a cause of concern at the Pentagon. Truman's opinion in 1950 seems to have been no different from what i
t had been in 1945, at the peak of MacArthur's renown, when, in his journal, Truman had described the general as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat,” a “play actor and bunco man.” The president, noted his press aide Eben Ayers, expressed “little regard or respect” for MacArthur, calling him a “supreme egotist” who thought himself “something of a god.” But working with people whom one did not like or admire was part of life—particularly the politician's life. Firing the five-star Far Eastern commander would have been very nearly unthinkable. John Foster Dulles told Truman confidentially that MacArthur should be dispensed with as soon as possible. Dulles, the most prominent Republican spokesman on foreign policy and a special adviser to the State Department, had returned from a series of meetings with MacArthur in Tokyo, convinced the seventy-year-old general was well past his prime and a potential liability. Dulles advised Truman to bring MacArthur home and retire him before he caused trouble. But that, replied Truman, was easier said than done. He reminded Dulles of the reaction there would be in the country, so great was MacArthur's “heroic standing.” Nonetheless, at this stage Truman expressed no doubt about MacArthur's ability. If anything, he seemed to have been banking on it.
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