The former German capital, fully surrounded by communist East Germany, remained an isolated outpost of liberty in an ocean of totalitarian control. West Germany had limited access to the western sectors of Berlin while the Soviets controlled the other half of the city, making Berlin an outpost in enemy territory. If such a metropolitan region became prosperous, as was the tendency of capitalist areas, it would pose a startling shining contrast to whatever Marx’s ghost offered. On June 20, 1948, Stalin sought to eliminate this potential threat by cutting off the railroad and traffic lines into West Berlin.
Stalin’s move came at a key point in the election cycle—just as Truman was engaged in a tough reelection fight not only against the Republican, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, but also against two renegades from his own party: Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, who headed a states’ rights wing of the Democratic Party, and Henry Wallace, who appealed to the party’s disaffected radicals as the Progressive Party candidate. Wallace ran a phenomenally expensive campaign, spending $3 million as a third-party candidate—easily the most costly and least-productive-per-dollar presidential run ever attempted, generating only 2.4 percent of the vote.
As usual, everyone underestimated Truman, who threw himself into a whistle-stop campaign as only an American president could do.29 At one campaign stop, a supporter yelled, “Give ’em hell, Harry.” Truman shot back, “I only tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” The electorate appreciated his candid approach, even if the media discounted him. When Newsweek magazine ran a survey of fifty journalists, all of whom predicted Truman would lose, the president countered, “I know every one of those fifty fellows and not one of them has enough sense to pound sand into a rathole.”30 The epitome of media goofs occurred when the Chicago Tribune prematurely ran a banner headline reading dewey defeats truman. It wouldn’t be the last time the mainstream media was embarrassed on election night.
Once again, the country had rallied around an incumbent in a crisis. Stalin had to deal with a tenacious Truman rather than a conciliatory Dewey. Truman refused to give up Berlin, but had to do so without touching off World War III. He found a middle ground that forced the Soviets into the position of having to fire the first shot.
Truman deployed three squadrons of B-29 bombers to Europe, hoping that Stalin would think they were equipped with atomic bombs (they were not). Rejecting General Lucius Clay’s proposal to resupply Berlin by truck, Truman opted for a massive airlift. From December 1948 to the spring of 1949, American C-47s, C-52s, and escorts shuttled in up to seven thousand tons of supplies a day, demonstrating the Allies’ resolve and impressing upon the Soviets the size and quality of U.S. air superiority. The Soviet dictator realized he could not order any planes shot down—that would be an act of war—and accepted, temporarily, that he was beaten, removing Soviet barricades and roadblocks to Berlin from the West in May 1949.
Most advisers realized they had to rapidly rebuild the armed forces to counter the the 2.5-million-man Soviet army. The cold war would be a long one, one not decided by a few early skirmishes like Berlin. In fact, Stalin had made a critical error by greedily attempting to seize Berlin. Had he waited, the United States might have disarmed so thoroughly that rearming would have been politically impossible. His divisions might have simply walked into Berlin, but Eisenhower saw the danger and stepped in to support the president by conducting a swing through NATO capitals. He then returned to Washington to argue for decisive commitments to NATO. Eisenhower’s speeches convinced Americans and Europeans that resisting the Soviets required them to act together.
So Truman, occasionally in spite of himself, managed to win early victories on the political and military fronts, but there was yet one more battlefield for the cold war—that of culture. America faced a serious propaganda hurdle when the communists could point to segregation of blacks within parts of the American South, and claim that the democratic ideals held out to other regions of the globe were empty words. A series of programs sponsored by the U.S. State Department that sent American jazz musicians overseas proved important in that regard. American jazz was already extremely popular in Europe, with a ready-built audience for jazzmen like Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong, who made tours of Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. Jazz opened doors no diplomats could. As Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon had encountered crowds in Latin America that spit on him and threw rocks at his car. But Louis Armstrong drew crowds that greeted him with standing ovations. Jazz bands carried understated, but obvious, messages without the need for speeches. First, many of the bands were integrated. Black, white, Jewish, and Hispanic musicians played alongside each other. Second, the very nature of jazz (and later, rock and roll) epitomized democracy: the whole band played together in the opening verses and choruses, then a soloist would depart from the band to do his own thing while the rest of the group held the song together. Ultimately, the soloist would return to the scripted parts, reflecting the notion that in a democracy people can cooperate, yet have infinite individuality.
Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong symbolized, as a band leader, that African Americans could attain leadership positions in American culture. Armstrong knew America had its faults—he had criticized the American government during the 1950s school desegregation crisis and the Civil Rights era—yet he was also a proud American. He gained such fame that he became known as the U.S. Ambassador of Jazz. In 1965 his band toured Eastern Europe, taking American jazz behind the Iron Curtain. Twenty years later, when Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet empire, another American music form, rock and roll, played no small role in undermining communism’s grip on the minds of the young.
Containment and Korea
When Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta, they agreed to maintain spheres of influence in Asia, with the Russians taking the northeastern part of Asia, including North Korea, and the Americans dominating the southern part of China and South Korea below the thirty-eighth parallel. Mao Tse-tung, the communist Chinese leader in the north, had the advantage of a unified command of a large patriotic army and virtual sovereignty in Manchuria after the Soviets pulled out (taking all the machinery and hardware they could carry with them). His opponent, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist camp, had some American support, but he suffered from internal dissension among his officers, terrible economic conditions inherited from the Japanese, and corruption. Chiang had squandered vast piles of American assistance, which totaled $2 billion from 1945 to 1949 (although much of it simply vanished through the skyrocketing inflation inside China). Other factors much more insidious also helped undercut Chiang, including the State Department’s pro-Mao tilt that consistently painted Chiang in the worst possible light and depicted Mao as a peasant freedom fighter. The result was that aid earmarked for Chiang—especially gold that could have stabilized the inflation—was delayed at critical times. All of this would surface later, yet the question of how U.S. policy toward China was bent toward Mao’s forces went essentially unexamined.
In 1949, Mao’s troops crossed the Yangtze, capturing the capital city, Nanking, after which all but the most loyal of Chiang’s army disintegrated and was pushed entirely off the mainland to the island of Taiwan (Formosa). There the refractory Chiang established the “true” Chinese government in exile and vowed a return to the mainland. Amid all this communist expansion, where was the United States?
Secretary of State Dean Acheson produced a white paper explaining that the United States had no hope of affecting the outcome of the Chinese “civil war,” and that getting American troops into a land war in China would be a disaster. Republicans, still isolationist at the core, nevertheless reveled in seeing the Democratic administration stumble so badly. Congress blamed the “loss of China” on policy errors and incompetent diplomacy. In truth, Acheson was right. Despite having utterly demolished the Japanese just four years earlier, the United States had played almost no role in actual mainland fighting—that had been conducted by the Chinese of both
groups and the British, Australians, New Zealanders, and Indians. The forces that had existed in the Far East at the end of World War II had for the most part been decommissioned or reassigned. Any serious attempt to intervene would have required a full-scale buildup equivalent to that of 1942, combined with unrelenting use of atomic bombs, and then only if Russia stood by.
No sooner had the world readjusted its maps to the new People’s Republic of China than Acheson gave an unfortunate speech to the National Press Club. There he implied that Korea was no longer considered within the U.S. containment fence, thus suggesting to Kim Il-sung of North Korea that the southern part of the Korean peninsula might be obtained at a minimal price. Using the justification that the Nationalist leader of the South, Syngman Rhee, would try to unify the two Koreas, Kim launched a general attack on June 25, 1950, quickly pummeling the Republic of Korea (ROK) forces. Truman had not backed down in Berlin, and would not now hand over Korea to the communists. “We’ve go to stop the sons-of-bitches no matter what,” he told Acheson. Whereas the military and politicians alike shied away from a land war in China, Korea was different. Its small size and abundant coastline played to America’s greatest advantages, mobile amphibious attacks, carrier-based air power, and easy defense of choke points. Truman also appreciated the fact that unlike the Berlin crisis four years earlier, the United States now had an ample stockpile of atomic weapons and long-range delivery aircraft.
Here, Stalin sought to play the Chinese against the Americans, warning Kim that the USSR wouldn’t “lift a finger” if the North got “kicked in the teeth” by the United States. Instead, he admonished Kim, “ask Mao for all the help.”31 The Soviet dictator now joined the press and Truman’s political opponents in underestimating Truman. Even so, Stalin was startled by the timing of Kim’s invasion. The Soviets had been engaged in a walkout of the United Nations Security Council over another matter, meaning that for one of only a handful of times in its history, the Security Council voted with the United States on a major international issue. While the UN vote was desirable, and put all forces in Korea under United Nations command, it could not conceal the obvious: the Americans would provide the bulk of the forces as well as the supreme commander of the UN forces, General Douglas MacArthur.
Even after the arrival of American forces, the North Koreans continued to push the ROK forces back toward Seoul. Finally, the UN/ROK troops managed to stabilize a perimeter near Pusan. To gain that territory, the communists had overextended their lines, which they could neither defend nor patrol effectively. Taking advantage of U.S. seapower, MacArthur staged a daring amphibious invasion at Inchon, behind North Korean lines, threatening to encircle and exterminate the entire North Korean army. His risky gambit is considered one of the most daring invasions in military history.32 The geography of the location alone presented almost insurmountable challenges. The tidal swell at Inchon was thirty-seven feet, meaning that although high-tide landings would be relatively easy, at low tide ships would be stuck in mud. Initial troops would have to hold for twelve hours before reinforcements could again arrive. Wolmido Island, which controlled the harbor, had to be taken first, which would alert enemy forces to the attack when surprise was of the essence.33
American marines took the island in forty-five minutes, eliminated all the dug-in defenders, and did so without a single American death. MacArthur then defeated Korean troops that numbered 5,000 to 6,000 in the harbor and surrounding areas. In less than two weeks, Allied troops cut all the way across Korea, regaining the thirty-eighth parallel line—the original border whose violation had sparked the war. But MacArthur had proceeded farther north. For reasons of temperament and political ambition, MacArthur would have liked to have pursued the war beyond the thirty-eighth parallel anyway, but he had also received clear instructions from Secretary of Defense Marshall to “feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel [emphasis added].”34 Both MacArthur and Acheson had assured Truman that the Chinese would not intervene, with the general predicting a slaughter if Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River. When the Chinese did launch a massive counterattack in November 1950, the UN struggled to hold the line at the thirty-eighth parallel.
MacArthur, meanwhile, had grown increasingly critical of the president. He urged bringing the Taiwanese into the war, called for intensive bombing of Chinese bases, and a thorough blockade of the People’s Republic. General Omar Bradley, among others, warned Truman that a full-scale war in China would be the “wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” and the president wisely refused to expand the conflict. Meanwhile, MacArthur’s “rank insubordination,” as Truman called it, was not only undesirable but dangerous, unconstitutional, and counter to the American tradition of keeping the military under control of civilians. In a bold and necessary stroke, Truman relieved MacArthur, sparking a public firestorm that even he misjudged. MacArthur returned like a Roman conqueror to address Congress to thunderous ovations as he bade farewell, saying, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.”
Relieving MacArthur had placed Truman in the crucible of public criticism, which naturally did not faze the president. “What would Jesus Christ have preached if he had taken a poll in the land of Israel?” he asked. “It isn’t [polls] that count. It is right and wrong, and leadership.”35 Despite his frequent underestimation of the communist threat, the feisty Missourian protected the integrity of the presidency and squelched permanently any notion that military leaders could dictate public policy. Not since Washington had a general come so close to wielding as much power with public opinion as had MacArthur. It was a battle Truman had to engage in.
The Korean conflict ended in a cease-fire in July 1953 (no peace treaty was ever negotiated), and as late as the 1990s, the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas constantly threatened to erupt into widespread violence. The war had not been cheap. Some 33,000 Americans died in battle, in addition to more than 100,000 wounded and 15,000 missing or made prisoners. The Korean War, like Vietnam, featured dozens of bloody engagements and few memorable battles. Hills often had numbers, not names, and the most successful offensive of the war, devised by General Matthew Ridgway, was aptly named the meatgrinder. The most oft-referenced geographic spot was not a battlefield such as Gettysburg, where a great victory had occurred, but the Yalu River, which American pursuit aircraft were not to cross. It was, according to one soldier, “the war we can’t win, we can’t lose, and we can’t quit.”36
The war was the high-water mark of Truman’s administration, which was noteworthy for its foreign policy successes. But his presidency was far from perfect. Economic growth remained sporadic, and high inflation had left Truman with the nickname Horsemeat Harry for the meats housewives had to substitute when beef prices rose too high. Labor battles had shut down several industries. All of this could have been treated easily, however, by application of basic free-market economics, had Truman been so inclined. More problematic, Truman inherited a raft of Roosevelt appointees who were sympathetic to communists at best or who engaged in treasonous activities and espionage at worst. Revelations about Soviet spies in America severely damaged Truman’s otherwise well-earned reputation.
Soviet Espionage in 1950s America
Soviet spies in America had been active for more than two decades, of course, just as Americans themselves conducted intelligence operations in most major foreign countries. What the Soviets gained through their American agents, however, was substantial. One new study concludes that contrary to the claims of liberals for many years, physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, helped write American Communist Party literature at the University of California and may have been a party member.37 Another recent study of Soviet agents in America, based on newly released KGB documents and coauthored by a former Soviet agent, revealed that Russian intelligence agencies “received substantial and sometimes critical information (including many classified documents) concerning U.S. government policies on highly sensitive
subjects, its confidential negotiating strategies, and secret weapons development, including essential processes involved in building the atomic bomb.”38 The agents’ skills ranged from those of practiced professionals to bumbling amateurs, but, significantly, their level of penetration into the U.S. government is no longer in doubt.
Ironically, by the time Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, got around to discovering the presence of this underground network, it had been shut down for several years because of the defection of a single mentally depressed female agent. McCarthy, whose name has sloppily been linked to hysteria and totalitarianism, was a complex figure.39 The last major American political figure raised in a log cabin, the Irish Democrat had switched parties after the Second World War, winning a judgeship, then the Senate seat that had belonged to Robert LaFollette. He came into the Senate with his two friends John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Joe Kennedy liked McCarthy, and Robert F. Kennedy worked as the senator’s staffer during his investigations.
Like Joe Kennedy, McCarthy was blue collar, rough, and viewed as an outsider. Given to both overdrinking and overwork, McCarthy had a strong record on civil rights and support of Wisconsin’s farmers, but he tended to operate within the committee on which he was seated, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). The PSI resembled the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had commenced operation in 1938 to deal with both Nazi and Communist subversion. McCarthy failed to appreciate—or capitalize on—his own evidence that indicated America’s national security had been penetrated at the highest levels under Roosevelt. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration had provided a breeding ground for young communist agents, sympathizers, and radicals in the 1930s, including John Abt, Lee Pressman, Nathan Witt, Harold Ware, and Alger Hiss. Ware, for example, had already set up a network in Washington with seven cells, all linked to the USSR. Though opposed by his Senate committee, McCarthy, soon assisted on his own staff by young Robert F. Kennedy, and on the House side by Congressman Richard Nixon (pursuing Alger Hiss), succeeded in grabbing headlines and sounding a warning. Too often McCarthy’s willingness to tout any unverified piece of information or to act before he had proof obscured the fact that the genuine damage already had been done to American security.
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 106