by H. W. Brands
39
CLEMENT ATTLEE HAD taken over as British prime minister from Winston Churchill at the moment of victory in World War II. Americans had puzzled at the time as to how such a thing could happen, because most had identified Churchill with the British war effort and couldn’t fathom the coalition politics that came unglued as the war ended. Nor did any but a handful of Americans endorse the socialist principles that underwrote Attlee’s Labour government. Joseph McCarthy and others on the Republican right branded Attlee as alarmingly pink if not fatally red, but even among American liberals enthusiasm for the mild-mannered Attlee was scarce. Some chuckled at Churchill’s characterization of Attlee as a modest man who had much to be modest about.
Yet Truman appreciated Attlee. The president understood what it was like to succeed a great wartime figure, to be destined to be measured against a standard of leadership unachievable during peacetime. More important, Truman valued Attlee as an ally in the Cold War. Attlee’s Foreign Office had prompted Truman’s State Department to formulate the Truman Doctrine. Attlee’s foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, had leaped at George Marshall’s suggestion of a recovery plan for Europe. Attlee and Bevin had delivered Britain as an eastern pillar of the North Atlantic alliance. Britain’s support in the Security Council had been vital to the first UN decisions to defend South Korea against the communist attack. And Britain led the UN allies in providing arms and men for service under MacArthur.
But Britain’s interests, though broadly parallel to America’s, were by no means identical. Britain had shed the largest part of its empire—India—yet other parts remained, sometimes devotedly. Hong Kong greatly preferred Britain’s embrace to the alternative: absorption by now-communist China. Attlee’s Labour party was anti-imperialist, but even most Labour radicals couldn’t countenance the abandonment of colonial subjects who didn’t want to be abandoned. And his Conservative opponents, led by the arch-imperialist Churchill, would have done to him what the McCarthyists were doing to Truman. Moreover, though India (and Pakistan and Burma) had left the empire, they hadn’t left the British Commonwealth, which London fancied as the honorable and influential successor to the empire, and the ex post facto justification for the empire.
Britain’s imperial commitments and Commonwealth hopes gave Attlee a decidedly different view of events in Asia. Attlee’s government had quickly extended diplomatic recognition to the new government of China. British leaders and diplomats defended the decision on its merits, as acknowledging the obvious fact that Mao’s regime now ruled the most populous nation in the world. But London simultaneously reckoned that what it couldn’t defend militarily—Hong Kong—it might protect diplomatically. Meanwhile the British cultivated the government of Jawaharlal Nehru in India, believing that whither Nehru and India, thither the Commonwealth.
There was one other thing that separated the British from the Americans in matters relating to Asia. The British, tapping the institutional memory of the empire, judged themselves experts on Asian politics and the Asian mind. They considered the Americans rank novices. Diplomatic politesse, not to mention their country’s dependence on American arms and Marshall Plan aid, prompted them to keep their dismal opinion of American understanding of Asia to themselves, for the most part, but undertones of condescension sometimes slipped into conversations with their American counterparts.
Attlee was the soul of tact in his first conversation with Truman. The two hadn’t met in five years, and Attlee had not been planning a visit to the United States. But Truman’s talk of the atom bomb left the prime minister no choice but to invite himself, and Truman consented at once to the meeting. When Attlee arrived in Washington, Truman dispensed with formality and brought him straight to the White House for a conference. He had Omar Bradley give a military briefing, which focused on the fighting retreat being conducted by MacArthur’s forces toward beachheads south of the 38th parallel. Attlee’s military chief of staff, William Slim, who had fought the Japanese in Burma during World War II while MacArthur was fighting them in the Pacific, asked Bradley if the beachheads were for holding or for evacuating. Bradley responded that this made little difference at the moment but in fact had not been decided. Slim asked if they could be held. Bradley said this depended on what shape MacArthur’s forces were in when they reached the coast.
Attlee said he understood that it was not possible to hold a line clear across the peninsula. The prime minister gave no indication that he had read MacArthur’s recent report making precisely that assertion, but somehow the word had filtered his way.
Bradley acknowledged that this was true. Bradley, of course, had read MacArthur’s report, and he had been persuaded by it. At any rate, he decided that if the theater commander thought the line could not be held, then it would not be held.
Attlee asked how the American air cover was faring. Was it as effective as before?
Bradley said the situation was deteriorating. MacArthur had lost control of some airfields in Korea already and was in danger of losing others. If that happened, American planes would have to fly from Japan, as they had early in the fighting, or from aircraft carriers.
George Marshall interjected that American planes were less effective against the Chinese ground troops than they might have been in other situations, because the Chinese excelled at hiding their troop movements and using the mountains for cover.
When Bradley concluded the military briefing, Truman took up the politics of the Korean conflict. “The United States has responsibilities in the East and the West,” he said. “We naturally consider European defense primary, but we equally have responsibilities in Korea, Japan and the Philippines, as the British do in Hong Kong and Singapore. It must be clear that we are not going to run out on our obligations even though these are hard to meet.” The obligations in Korea had become much more challenging since the entry of China into the fighting. He hoped he and Attlee could reach an accord on what the Chinese intervention signified. He asked for the prime minister’s thoughts.
Attlee responded that like the president he deemed it essential to view events in Korea in the broadest perspective. A first concern was the maintenance of the prestige of the United Nations. “The United States is the principal instrument for supporting the United Nations,” Attlee said, “and the United Kingdom is giving what help it can. This problem has now become very difficult with the Chinese Communists coming in. It is common to our thinking that we wish the Korean business to be limited to asserting the authority of the United Nations against aggression in Korea. We all realize that other forces might come in and might bring on another world war.”
At this point Attlee might have raised the issue of the atom bomb. But it would have been discourteous to mention the unfortunate news conference that had brought him to Washington; his mere presence was reminder enough. Besides, when he spoke of another world war, it went without saying that this one would be waged with nuclear weapons—which was why every effort must be made to prevent it. “We are very eager to avoid extension of the conflict,” Attlee said.
Attlee said Britain and the United States must consider Asian opinion. He had been in close touch with the Asian members of the Commonwealth. They did not want to see a war against China. They did want the West to try to perceive things from China’s point of view. “We ourselves look upon it as a stand by the United Nations against aggression,” he said of the effort in Korea. The Chinese interpreted it differently. “The Chinese Communists are not members of the United Nations”—chiefly because the United States insisted they not be, though Attlee didn’t say so—“and therefore are not obligated by any of those considerations. They regard it as action by those forces fighting against them, especially the United States.” The Chinese feared that the United States, in league with Chiang Kai-shek, would try to reverse their revolution. Attlee added that the Chinese valued their hard-won independence; though allied with the Russians, they would not let themselves become dependent on the Russians.
This opinio
n provoked a sharp response from Dean Acheson. The secretary of state declared that the Chinese Communists were communists first and Chinese only second. “The Chinese Communists are not looking at the matter as Chinese but as communists who are subservient to Moscow,” Acheson said. “All they do is based on the Moscow pattern.” Acheson thought the Chinese intervention in Korea demonstrated China’s subservience to Moscow. “The Russians are no doubt pleased with the idea that we might be fully engaged in war with the Chinese Communists who are acting as their satellites.”
Truman agreed with Acheson. “They are satellites of Russia and will remain satellites so long as the present Peiping regime is in power,” he said. “They are complete satellites.” There was no room for negotiating with such people. Their aggression had to be resisted lest it spread. “After Korea it would be Indochina, then Hong Kong, then Malaya.”
Truman sought to ensure that Attlee understood the lengths to which the United States had gone to avoid war with China. “We have made every possible move to keep out of war with the Chinese Communists,” he said. “We do not want such a war and have shown great forbearance so far in withstanding their attacks.” The president described his Wake Island meeting with MacArthur. He said he had told the general to take pains not to provoke the Chinese. MacArthur had agreed on the wisdom of this course, Truman said, and had predicted that the Chinese would not intervene. The Chinese had proven him wrong and entered the fighting. They were now attempting to push the United Nations out of Korea. Truman said he was trying to prevent this.
Attlee had not said he distrusted MacArthur, but Truman, distrusting MacArthur himself, supposed he did. In any event, Truman emphasized that MacArthur was on a short leash. “We have never taken a move or given General MacArthur an order unless it came from the United Nations,” the president said. The UN connection was crucial, as was America’s link to its Atlantic allies. “We do not want to act independently.”
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THIS WAS PRECISELY the problem, in the minds of MacArthur and the many in America who preferred the five-star general’s judgment on war to that of the artillery captain. Attlee’s Washington visit was intended to reassure British voters and members of Parliament, besides providing the Americans the benefit of Britain’s experience in dealing with troublesome Asians, and it did ease the angst on Attlee’s political front. But it sparked a storm in Washington among Truman’s Republican critics. Anglophobia had been a staple of American politics during the nineteenth century, when candidates and elected officials routinely blamed the British for designs against the United States, and again after World War I, which many Americans retrospectively deemed a conflict the United States had been suckered into by London. World War II required another suspension of the Anglophobia, which the Truman administration had worked hard to keep in abeyance as the Cold War developed. But critics of the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty complained that once more America was acting as London’s cat’s-paw. And when Attlee came to America, the Anglophobes emerged in force.
Senator William Knowland spoke for many when he warned that Attlee was seeking to undermine American resolve against Asian communism. Attlee, Knowland said, embodied the attitude of the weak-kneed members of the UN coalition who were “vacillating and palavering” over whether the movement of hundreds of thousands of Chinese across the international boundary between Korea and China constituted aggression. “Are we to have one set of rules and one set of penalties for small aggressors and none at all for the large? Are we to continue our moral and material support to an organization”—the UN—“which kowtows to the doctrine that might makes right?” Knowland said he had voted for aid to Britain in the past. But if the British didn’t show more spine, he would reconsider. Addressing himself as if to Attlee, Knowland declared, “America has been faced with dark days before. We hoped to meet any future ones with staunch allies in the common cause of freedom, not just regional freedom, Mr. Prime Minister. But if we have to meet them alone, perhaps it is better to find out now. If others want to clasp the hand of the murderer and welcome him into their home, we don’t have to stultify ourselves to that extent.”
—
CHIANG KAI-SHEK MONITORED the Truman-Attlee talks from a distance and leveled his own warning. The Chinese Nationalist leader chafed under the continued blockade by the Seventh Fleet, and he hoped that the new crisis between China and the United States would spring him from Formosa. He took the opportunity of Attlee’s visit to Washington to throw fuel onto the political fire in America. Branding the Truman-Attlee talks as potentially “another Munich,” he reminded all listening that Munich had failed and world war had followed. Appeasement of the Chinese Communists would fail too. “War may break out at any time.” Chiang placed his confidence in Douglas MacArthur, not Harry Truman. He would not let MacArthur down. “If the commander-in-chief of the United Nations forces is given full authority in strategy, and this calls for our military support, we shall certainly give it.”
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THE TRUMAN-ATTLEE TALKS lasted four days. The president and the prime minister spoke at the White House and aboard the presidential yacht Williamsburg. Attlee tried to convince Truman and the Americans that the Sino-Soviet axis was more tenuous than it seemed, that Mao and his colleagues were Chinese first and communists second. “They can be Marxists and yet not bow to Stalin,” Attlee said. Diplomatic wisdom lay in cultivating the Chinese, not driving them into utter dependence on Russia.
Truman and his advisers disagreed. “For fifty years we have tried to be friends with the Chinese,” Acheson rejoined. But they had denounced America as imperialist and now had attacked the United States in Korea. The prime minister had things backward in saying the West ought to cultivate the Chinese, Acheson said. “Instead of our making an effort to prove that we are their friends, we ask them to prove that they are ours.”
Yet the two sides agreed on the necessity of containing the conflict in Korea. “The objectives of our two nations in foreign policy are the same,” declared the communiqué issued at the end of the talks. The United States and Britain stood with the United Nations to deter aggression, and they summoned all other countries to do the same. “Lasting peace and the future of the United Nations as an instrument for world peace depend upon strong support for resistance against aggression.”
In the conclusion of the communiqué, Truman gave Attlee what the prime minister had come to America to get. “The President stated that it was his hope that world conditions would never call for the use of the atomic bomb.”
40
AS HARD AS Truman was working to bolster America’s alliance system, the Kremlin was striving to undermine it. Or so said a new CIA analysis that painted an even grimmer picture than the president had seen before. Titled “Probable Soviet Moves to Exploit the Present Situation,” the report asserted that Moscow found the current state of affairs most pleasing. “The treatment of developments in Korea by the Soviet Union and the Soviet satellites indicates that they assess their current military and political position as one of great strength in comparison with that of the West.” The reverses suffered by American and UN forces in Korea made the Soviets hopeful that American influence could be rolled back from East Asia. The Americans might be forced out of Korea, with damage to their credibility and that of the UN. The American Seventh Fleet might be withdrawn from the waters around Formosa, allowing the emergence of Communist China as the predominant power in the region. In time the United States might be forced out of Japan.
But the larger goal was the weakening of the Western alliance. The CIA report identified Russia’s top priorities: “1. Destruction of the unity among the Western countries, thereby isolating the United States. 2. Alienating the Western peoples from their governments so that the efforts of the Western countries to strengthen themselves will be undermined.” The report declared that the alliance was most vulnerable in Berlin and West Germany. “So far as Germany is concerned, Moscow has been stepping up at a fast rate its p
ropaganda campaign against rearmament of Germany by the West. The present trend of Soviet activity in Germany suggests that there may soon be drastic action, possibly including a renewal of the Berlin blockade and violence in Western Germany.”
The CIA warned that pressure against Germany—complemented perhaps by moves in Indochina, Yugoslavia and Iran—could be the prelude to a broader conflict. “The Soviet Union may seize upon the present crisis to precipitate general war with the United States,” the report said. “Soviet propaganda has been stressing the threat of a new world war arising out of the current situation. The Kremlin is continuing preparations for military actions by Soviet troops. Moscow may be hoping, by these steps, to frighten the West and to reduce our will to resist. However, the situation is such that the possibility cannot be disregarded that the Soviet Union has already made a decision for general war and is getting ready for it.”
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TRUMAN HAD SPOKEN on television before 1950, but few people had seen him. Television receivers were still a curiosity, and television networks lacked the breadth to put a president before the nation as a whole. When he spoke on the evening of December 15, 1950, many more people heard him on radio than saw him on television. Yet the television broadcast caused media executives to see a bright future for the small screen, in that it revealed the natural synergy between television and national crisis.
Truman never mastered a television style, often seeming stiff and cold. On this occasion, however, his demeanor suited his sobering message. “I am talking to you tonight about what our country is up against,” he said. “Our homes, our nation, all the things we believe in, are in great danger. This danger has been created by the rulers of the Soviet Union.” Not the North Koreans or the Chinese, but the Soviets. Truman reminded his viewers and listeners that the Cold War antedated the Korean conflict. “For five years we have been working for peace and justice among nations. We have helped to bring the free nations of the world together in a great movement to establish a lasting peace.”