American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  In the center of the Democratic battlefield stood Harry Truman. Not for decades—certainly not since William Howard Taft had been beset by La Follette Progressives and Teddy Roosevelt Square Dealers in 1912—had a President seemed so isolated and deserted as Truman when he announced his candidacy early in March 1948. The Henry Wallace Progressives threatened to carve deeply into the “peace vote.” A number of labor leaders, personally furious with Truman after he had cold-shouldered them during a rash of postwar strikes, threatened to sit the election out. Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal, anticommunist group founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and a host of academics, politicos, and assorted old New Dealers, was sticking with the Democracy, but some of its leaders were working to draft the popular General Eisenhower as the Democratic standard-bearer. The Republicans appeared likely to renominate Dewey, who had his own lines into labor, liberal, and black enclaves.

  Through it all Truman appeared his usual feisty self. He not only aroused antagonism—he seemed to solicit it. In the face of conservative opposition to his Fair Deal economic measures he inflamed southern Democrats even further with his sweeping civil rights message of February 1948. Based on the recommendations of a special presidential commission chaired by Charles E. Wilson, head of General Electric, the message called for a permanent federal commission on civil rights, a permanent fair employment practices commission, the outlawing of segregation in schools and transportation and other public facilities, and a federal antilynching law. Truman’s central strategy, however, was to stand on his Fair Deal extension of the New Deal—housing, welfare, labor and consumer protection, farm subsidies.

  Soon Truman was besieged on three fronts. The GOP duly nominated Dewey on a moderately liberal and internationalist platform, a band of solid Southerners bolted the Democratic convention and later nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for President on the States’ Rights or “Dixiecrat” ticket, and a Progressive convention nominated Wallace. Truman’s whole instinct was to fight back, like the French general who cried, “My left flank is in ruins, my right flank is retreating, my center is caving in. Good! I shall attack.” By midsummer the voters were being treated to a four-cornered race reminiscent of 1912, as Truman crisscrossed the country in an exhausting “whistlestop” campaign by train, Wallace made his rustic, low-key appearances before hyperbolic crowds, Thurmond sought enough electoral votes to throw the presidential race into the House of Representatives, and Dewey tried to appear presidential in order to become presidential.

  For a time, fortune scarcely favored the bold. At the Democratic convention Young Turks headed by Hubert Humphrey, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, had pushed through a strengthened civil rights plank that threatened to alienate even more of the southern Democracy. Zigzagging across the country, the Truman campaign repeatedly ran out of money, requiring frenzied appeals to fat cats, usually to oil barons with ready cash. Toward the end of the campaign the election forecasts, including roundups by The New York Times and other periodicals, had Truman so far behind Dewey as to arouse despair in the President’s entourage. Shown a poll of “fifty political experts,” all of whom predicted a big Dewey win, Truman blinked, grinned, and said, “Oh, well, those damn fellows; they’re always wrong anyway. Forget it, boys, and let’s get on with the job.”

  In the end, fortune did favor the bold. The Dixiecrat bolt backfired, as most southern Democrats stuck with Truman while northern blacks credited his timely civil rights position. Two or three million Republicans stayed home out of overconfidence, or so Dewey later complained. Wallace’s strength steadily ebbed as liberals and laborites feared to waste their ballots on a third-party ticket. They also suspected extensive communist influence over the campaign, and rightly so. Warned of this influence, Wallace was unwilling even to investigate, for fear that he would be guilty of the very red-baiting that he had warned Americans against. He felt far more pressed from the right. Bold enough to stay overnight in the homes of southern blacks, he would remember his campaign through the South as “one long succession of tomatoes and eggs.” The author of The Century of the Common Man later remarked that the “common man can be very, very barbarous.”

  Dewey, seeking to soften memories of his blatant linking of the Democrats with communism in 1944, took the high road, lost his fighting edge, and embraced bipartisanship in foreign policy to the degree that he could not exploit Truman’s chief vulnerabilities. The President skillfully employed FDR’s tactic of attacking the congressional rather than the presidential Republicans. He called Congress into special session, challenged the Republicans to pass the legislation demanded in their party platform, and hung the congressional failure to do so around Dewey’s neck.

  Truman’s close but decisive victory was so unexpected as to be sensational. It quickly became the pride of historians prone to demonstrate the power of individual leadership against historical forces. People saw “a brave man,” in Richard Kirkendall’s words, “fighting almost alone against great odds,” and bringing off the greatest upset in American history. But Truman finally won by not fighting alone. With the help of Stalin’s aggressive blockade of land traffic between Berlin and West Germany, he played on the anticommunism latent in millions of Americans. He received Eleanor Roosevelt’s benediction and exploited the momentum and mythology of the Roosevelt heritage. He depended heavily on the Democratic party, which produced a set of congressional victories as significant as the presidential. He remobilized the economic voting groups of farmers, workers, and urban consumers bequeathed by Roosevelt.

  The gutsy little man from Missouri had ridden these forces, even guided them, rather than being overwhelmed by them. Americans, recovering from their election-night shock, took this underdog—this winning underdog—to their bosom.

  The Spiral of Fear

  For the political leadership of the nation 1948 had indeed been a showdown. For Dewey, whose popular vote fell short of his 1944 total, it would be the end of the presidential road. Thurmond’s States’ Rights party, winning 1,169,000 popular votes and 38 electoral votes, fell far short of its electoral hopes in the South. The Wallace Progressives, garnering even fewer popular votes than the Dixiecrats and no electoral votes, learned once again the bias of American traditions and elections against third parties. Congressional Republican leaders, set up as a perfect target by the Democrats, lost their House and Senate majorities. And renowned political prophets suffered the derision of the winners and the wrath of the losers who castigated them for their sloppy polling techniques.

  For the longer run, however, the 1948 election was less dramatic. In the lexicon of political scientists, it was a “maintaining election,” reflecting persisting party loyalties and stable group attachments. The excitement of a four-cornered battle had not brought out a big vote. In many respects the 1948 election was a fifth presidential victory for FDR and the New Deal. For most Americans, voting Democratic had become a habit.

  Yet in a far more momentous way 1948 was a different kind of maintaining election—an election that sustained the Truman Administration in its Fair Deal posture but above all in its anticommunism. It seemed likely that Truman’s loyalty program and his increasingly hard line toward Moscow had blunted Republican charges of “soft on communism” and helped turn Dewey against the weapon he had used in 1944. Even more, the election ratified the sphere-of-interest strategy on which the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and other Administration foreign policies were grounded. The Administration’s unofficial protectorate over Greece and Turkey, its insistence on holding West Berlin through a resourceful air-supply program—along with its reluctance to interfere in the Soviet sphere—suggested that the war-torn world of the early 1940s was settling down into some kind of Great Power stability based on mutual containment.

  Maintaining that stability, however, would call for the most exacting statecraft on all sides; it would call for clear perceptions of nations’ interests, dependable estimates of the military potential and i
ntentions of rival powers, sophisticated political intelligence about the interplay of national interests within and among rival blocs, realistic estimates of strategic possibilities and impossibilities, skillful national leadership and tenacious diplomacy. The historic balances of power of past centuries had depended on the statecraft of military and political leaders possessing such Bismarckian qualities. But the sphere-of-interest, balance-of-power way of stabilizing international relationships—especially difficult for democracies to manage—was always hostage to one powerful force: change. Alterations in the actual military and economic power of rival and friendly nations, combined with misperceptions of popular attitudes and the intentions of leaders, all in a context of fear and hostility, could—and often did—bring the trembling mobiles of the balance of power crashing down.

  The years 1948 and 1949 bristled with events full of potential for arousing fear and hostility, misperceptions and miscalculations, among the Great Powers. The mysterious, awesome might of the atomic weapon was proving a source more of fear than of security among nations. Evidence of atomic espionage by Soviet spies struck fear in American hearts that the Russians would steal the “secret” of the bomb. The Soviets, knowing that Washington would never permit international controls that would give Moscow that secret, worked feverishly on their own bomb. Despite scientists’ advice that Moscow would not be slow to develop an atomic weapon, many Administration officials confidently assumed that they would continue to hold this trump card. Then in September 1949 came the dread news: winds blowing high over North America were carrying radiation from a Soviet atomic test. A few months later Truman announced that the United States would begin to develop the hydrogen bomb—potentially many times more destructive than the A-bomb.

  Germany was another crisis point. The standoff following the Soviet blockade and the Western airlift left heightened fears and hostility on each side, in turn drawing the divided Germans into the East-West spheres of interest. This balance-of-power tendency might have stabilized the situation, save that a divided Berlin remained a tempting and vulnerable island in eastern Germany. Officials on each side, moreover, now feared that the adversary would seek to draw all of Germany into its own embrace. Step by fearful step, the two camps lost the opportunity, limited in any event, to shape a unified and disarmed Germany.

  But the most profound change—perhaps the most significant transformation of the mid-twentieth century—was threatening the balance of power on the other side of the globe. The civil war in China had accelerated, despite patient efforts by General Marshall to mediate the conflict. By the end of 1947 Mao Tse-tung’s communist armies had won control of Manchuria and by the end of 1948 most of northern China; during 1949 it became clear that soon they would drive Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces off the Chinese mainland. Chiang’s withdrawal to Taiwan created one more outpost—a counterpart to Berlin—that could be protected against invasion only by Western power. And it left fear and anger among Americans who cherished their country’s historic involvement and sympathy with China—most recently with Chiang and Madame Chiang’s Republican China, which they imagined could be guided toward Western-style democracy.

  It was not in Germany or China, however, or in some atomic confrontation, but in the little-known land of the Koreans that statecraft failed and the balance of power began a wild oscillation.

  Although this remote land, protruding into the Sea of Japan out of the great haunch of Manchuria, had for centuries been a jousting ground for rival powers, it had been viewed during the postwar years of tension as one of the less likely theaters of hot war. Divided along an “administrative dividing line”—the 38th parallel—after World War II, Korea fell into the hands of militant communists in the north headed by Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang and militant anticommunists in the south headed by Syngman Rhee in Seoul. The two regimes, each hoping to take over the whole country, glared covetously at each other’s lands across the parallel.

  In January 1950, Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor as Secretary of State, described to Washington journalists an American defense perimeter that ran from the Aleutians to the Ryukyus to the Philippines but excluded Korea, though the secretary added that if such other areas were invaded the people attacked must resist with the help if necessary “of the entire civilized world under the charter of the United Nations.” American occupation troops pulled out of South Korea, leaving light weapons and ammunition but no aircraft, tanks, or heavy naval craft. Washington’s idea was that Rhee would be able to defend but not attack. Moscow, Peking, and Pyongyang looked on with interest.

  The war that erupted after North Korean troops drove through the parallel on June 25, 1950, was in part an old-fashioned campaign of movement and maneuver. Within two days President Truman, without waiting for Congress to act, ordered United States air and naval forces to Korea and authorized the dispatch of a regimental combat team within a week. The North Koreans quickly captured Seoul and drove south down the peninsula, seizing Pohang on the southeastern coast by early September and cornering their foe at the foot of the peninsula. On September 15, American forces under General MacArthur struck back with a brilliantly conceived and executed landing at Inchon, on the coast west of Seoul. Within eleven days the counterattackers had captured Seoul, and by late October they had taken Pyongyang, a hundred miles to the north. Intoxicated by his success at Inchon, by hopes of a glorious triumph over communism, and by visions of his return home to a hero’s welcome, MacArthur drove his troops still further north, toward the Manchurian border.

  The world looked on aghast—World War II was not yet five years over in the Pacific and Americans were once again fighting Asians. How could this “most unnecessary of wars” have started?

  The misperceptions that dominated the Korean War rivaled the blunders that had led to hostilities in earlier centuries when both intelligence and communication among nations were still primitive. Its origins were parochial. Kim feared that Rhee would wipe out communists in the south and then turn north; Rhee feared that Pyongyang would seek to “unify” the country by mobilizing those same southern communists. According to Khrushchev’s later account, Kim, during a trip to Moscow, sought Stalin’s permission to strike south and topple Rhee. Somewhat reluctantly Stalin assented, doubtless calculating on a large gain at small risk. Even so, Stalin ordered all Soviet advisers out of North Korea so that Moscow would not be compromised in the venture. He also had Kim clear the decision with Mao, or perhaps did so himself when Mao visited Moscow. Both the Russian and the Chinese dictator expected that the Americans would not intervene, at least not in time to stop Kim’s conquest of the south. But Truman, under attack himself for “losing China,” was not going to “lose” more real estate. The fall of South Korea would gravely menace Japan.

  The Americans and South Koreans counterattacked far more quickly and effectively than the communist leaders had expected. But now it was the Americans’ turn for miscalculation.

  Truman, assuming wrongly that Moscow had instigated the invasion and that Korea was the first step in the communist march to world conquest, had hopes of rolling back communist power and unifying Korea. Now, with the North Korean forces reeling backwards, he could win a relatively cheap victory. But it would not be cheap. After MacArthur’s forces neared the Yalu River and launched a general assault to win the war, the Chinese counterattacked in heavy force. Soon it was MacArthur’s army, divided and immobilized in the mountain passes, suffering bitterly in the winter snow and ice, bleeding heavily from close Chinese pursuit, that stumbled back to positions on the other side of the 38th parallel. There the two sides sparred with each other for years, suffering further heavy casualties, until an armistice was signed in July 1953, a few months after the death of Stalin.

  Both sides had failed to assess correctly the other’s strategic capability. Both sides were militarily unprepared for the battle they would undertake. Each had underestimated the other’s willingness to fight and then had exaggerated the other’s fighting as
part of a long-planned strategy of global conquest. Each assumed that the “other” Korea was the enemy’s puppet. Originally Korea had not been part of either side’s master plan, but the outbreak of the Korean War, resulting from miscalculations and misperceptions, made Korea part of a crisis plan.

  Then, too, the Korean War had a dire and unexpected impact on the relationship of Moscow and Peking. It was, Adam Ulam concluded, one of the biggest blunders of postwar Soviet foreign policy. “On the surface it appeared as a master stroke to make Peking the lightning rod for America’s wrath and frustration while the Soviet Union remained a sympathetic bystander. In fact, those two years when the Chinese had to assume the burden of the fighting marked their psychological emancipation and speeded up the process of equalization between the two states” that had begun with negotiations between Mao and Stalin in Moscow. The increasing tension between Peking and Moscow heartened Western leaders, but it was a further destabilizing factor in the quivering balance of power around the globe.

  Perhaps the Korean War’s major effect in the United States was on the mass public’s fears and hostility. Anticommunists now cried out that their warnings had been justified, that the North Korean attack proved Russia to be bent on world conquest, that the Chinese attack across the Yalu confirmed that Peking was bent on Asian conquest. It was in this context that anticommunist feeling was reaching a new pitch among Americans.