by H. W. Brands
The work was well begun, but the danger persisted. “Against this movement for peace, the rulers of the Soviet Union have been waging a relentless attack. They have tried to undermine or overwhelm the free nations one by one. They have used threats and treachery and violence.” The threat had shifted geographic focus, but its malignant engine was still the same. “In June the forces of Communist imperialism burst out into open warfare in Korea. The United Nations moved to put down this act of aggression, and by October had all but succeeded. Then, in November, the Communists threw their Chinese armies into the battle against the free nations.” Here again Truman blamed Moscow: It wasn’t the Chinese who had thrown their communist armies into battle but the communists who had deployed their Chinese armies. The world was the prize, not Korea or even Asia. “By this act they have shown that they are now willing to push the world to the brink of a general war to get what they want.”
Truman came to the heart of his message. Against the Soviet threat, America must go onto a war footing. “I will issue a proclamation tomorrow morning declaring that a national emergency exists,” he said. “This will call upon every citizen to put aside his personal interests for the good of the country. All our energies must be devoted to the tasks ahead of us.” The country must build up its defenses as rapidly as possible; military forces needed to double in size and arms production to quadruple. Sacrifice would be required of everyone; all Americans must do their part. “Workers will be called upon to work more hours. More women, and more young people and older workers, will be needed in our plants and factories. Farmers will have to set higher goals of production. Businessmen will have to put all their know-how to work to increase production.” Such a rapid buildup would trigger inflation unless the government stepped in. The administration would impose controls on wages and prices. Some would be mandatory, others voluntary. The better the voluntary controls worked, the fewer mandatory ones there would be. But prices would be controlled one way or the other. “The chiselers will not be allowed to get by.”
Strikes remained a problem in some parts of the economy; the biggest and most troubling was a rail strike that was slowing economic growth and impeding the transport of troops and war matériel. “This strike is a danger to the security of our nation,” Truman declared. “As Commander in Chief, therefore, I call upon the union and its striking members to return to work immediately.” Truman still considered himself a friend of labor, but the national interest came first. “I ask you men who are on strike to realize that no matter how serious you believe your grievances are, nothing can excuse the fact that you are adding to your country’s danger. I ask you, in the name of our country, to return immediately to your posts of duty.” The railroad workers, and all Americans, should take their cue from America’s soldiers. “In the days ahead, each of us should measure his own efforts, his own sacrifices, by the standard of our heroic men in Korea.”
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THE NEXT MORNING Truman signed the proclamation that made the state of emergency official. “His manner was brisk,” one of the few reporters allowed into the president’s office recounted. “He would not pose for ‘one more’ for the ‘One More Club,’ as he calls the photographers. They had to catch him in the act of really signing or lose the picture. Usually he will pose over and over again until each photographer gets a proper ‘shot.’ ”
Briskness pervaded Washington as the significance of the emergency set in. Truman named General Electric president Charles Wilson his mobilization czar, with sweeping powers to place American industry in a war mode. “The director shall on behalf of the President direct, control, and coordinate all mobilization activities of the Government, including but not limited to production, procurement, manpower, stabilization, and transport activities,” Truman’s executive order decreed. The language of the order prompted speculation that Wilson would exercise powers greater than those wielded by James Byrnes as Roosevelt’s World War II mobilization czar. Wilson’s powers took hold sooner than at once: the big automakers were ordered to roll back their prices to levels in effect before the current crisis had prompted a preemptive jump.
Truman again brought the leaders of Congress to the White House, this time to discuss the mobilization measures. The Republicans were unusually complaisant. Kenneth Wherry found himself seated opposite Dean Acheson. “Here is your opposition,” Wherry said with a smile. When Acheson declined to reply, Wherry added, “I mean your constructive opposition.” The session opened with a briefing based on the CIA report that had prompted Truman’s emergency declaration. Most of the lawmakers seemed convinced of the reality of the danger confronting the United States, although Robert Taft wanted more time to consider his response. “We shouldn’t rush into this,” Taft said.
Reactions from beyond Washington varied. The striking railroad workers returned to their jobs. Other workers pledged not to strike. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, promised that his union’s eight million members would keep working during the state of emergency, as they had done during World War II. Most newspapers endorsed his emergency call. A notable exception was Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, which wasn’t as isolationist as it had been during the 1930s but nonetheless denounced Truman’s world-saving schemes. “If there is an emergency, it is Truman himself and his foreign policy,” the Tribune asserted. “His speech makes it abundantly clear that he intends the country to have more of the same that produced the debacle in Korea.” The administration proposed to do for Europe what the Europeans should be doing for themselves, the Tribune said. “Do you hear Britain, or France, or Italy, or anybody else proclaiming an emergency? You do not.” The projected defense buildup was wrongheaded and unnecessary. “If we can’t protect this continent and its outposts after having spent 89 billion dollars on defense in the last five years, and with 45 billion more dedicated to that purpose this coming year, then Mr. Truman and his secretary of defense ought to be impeached and his service chieftains court martialed.”
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THE TRIBUNE WAS equally scathing toward Acheson, as were congressional Republicans, whose modest respect for the state of emergency did not extend to respect for the secretary of state. On the very day of Truman’s announcement of the emergency, the Republican caucuses in the Senate and the House of Representatives voted to demand Acheson’s removal from office. “It is completely obvious that Secretary Acheson and the State Department under his leadership have lost the confidence of the Congress and the American people and cannot regain it,” the Republican motion declared.
The move was mere grandstanding. Congress lacks the power to compel executive resignations, short of impeachment, and in any event the Republicans were a minority in both houses. They would remain minorities, albeit not by much, when the newly elected members were seated. But given the narrowing margins, the motion had political heft, not least because it came on the eve of Acheson’s departure for Brussels, where he would meet with the foreign ministers of the other members of the North Atlantic alliance. The Republicans didn’t deny intending to hamstring Acheson—and Truman—in the administration’s efforts to deepen the American commitment to Europe.
Truman riposted the Republicans with a statement of his own. He charged the Republicans with abetting communist designs by sowing weakness and division in the Western alliance. He would tolerate no such thing. “This meeting in Brussels will show that, contrary to Communist hopes, the peoples of the North Atlantic Community are determined to remain united,” the president said. There would be no replacing Acheson, the architect of the alliance. On the contrary: “Secretary Acheson goes to this meeting with my complete confidence.”
Truman doubled down by announcing that Dwight Eisenhower would become commander of allied forces in Europe. The hero of the war in Europe would return to the theater of his victory; not even the Republicans could complain at this. “You are undertaking a tremendous responsibility,” Truman wrote to Eisenhower in a letter released to the public. “As Pres
ident and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, I know that our entire country is wholeheartedly behind you. Indeed, you carry with you the prayers of all freedom-loving peoples. I send you my warmest personal good wishes for success in the great task which awaits you.”
Truman continued his European offensive in a news conference two days later. The usual mimeographed copies of the president’s opening statement had not been distributed ahead of time; Truman didn’t want leaks. “I will take it real slowly,” he said to the reporters, who prepared to write his statement down.
“Mr. President,” one asked, “if you get ahead of us, do you mind if we stop you?”
“No, that’s all right.”
Truman began reading. “There have been new attacks within the past week against the Secretary of State, Mr. Acheson. I have been asked to remove him from office, and the authors of this suggestion claim that this would be good for the country.”
“You’re ahead of me, sir,” a reporter complained.
“You’re going to take it all down in longhand?” Truman asked, surprised.
“Worse than that,” the reporter answered, “I’m practicing my new shorthand.” Truman shared the general laughter.
But he got back to business. “The authors of this suggestion claim that this would be good for the country. How our position in the world would be improved by the retirement of Dean Acheson from public life is beyond me. Mr. Acheson has helped shape and carry out our policy of resistance to Communist imperialism. From the time of our sharing of arms with Greece and Turkey nearly four years ago, and coming down to the recent moment when he advised me to resist the Communist invasion of South Korea, no official in our Government has been more alive to communism’s threat to freedom or more forceful in resisting it.” Truman noted that Acheson was in Brussels laying the groundwork for a unified defense against communism. Communism had no hardier foe than the secretary of state. “If communism were to prevail in the world—as it shall not prevail—Dean Acheson would be one of the first, if not the first, to be shot by the enemies of liberty and Christianity.”
41
MATTHEW RIDGWAY WAS a student of character, besides being an army general, and he had been studying Douglas MacArthur for decades. “My own feeling toward MacArthur was always one of profound respect, developed through a close association dating from the days when he was Superintendent at West Point and I was in charge of the athletic program, reporting directly to him,” Ridgway remembered. “Because of his avid interest in sports, I was privileged to see a great deal of him in those years. And while my meetings with him in after years, until I went to Korea, were rather infrequent, I never lost my warm personal interest in his career.”
Ridgway found MacArthur fascinating, if at times infuriating. “I came to understand some of the traits of his complex character not generally recognized: the hunger for praise that led him on some occasions to claim or accept credit for deeds he had not performed, or to disclaim responsibility for mistakes that were clearly his own; the love of the limelight that continually prompted him to pose before the public as the actual commander on the spot at every landing and at the launching of every major attack in which his ground troops took part; his tendency to cultivate the isolation that genius seems to require, until it became a sort of insulation (there was no telephone in his personal office in Tokyo) that deprived him of the critical comment and objective appraisals a commander needs from his principal subordinates; the headstrong quality (derived from his success in forcing through many brilliant plans against solid opposition) that sometimes led him to persist in a course in defiance of all seeming logic; a faith in his own judgment that created an aura of infallibility and that finally led him close to insubordination.”
Ridgway’s remark about MacArthur’s penchant for claiming accomplishments not his own reflected Ridgway’s experience with MacArthur in Korea. This experience had its genesis in an accident eerily similar to one that had happened five years earlier, almost to the day. In December 1945 George Patton had died after his staff car collided with a truck in occupied Germany. In December 1950 Matthew Ridgway received a call from Joe Collins. “Matt, I’m sorry to tell you that Johnny Walker has been killed in a jeep accident in Korea.” It was barely forty-eight hours until Christmas, but Collins had a new assignment for Ridgway. “I want you to get your things together and out there just as soon as you can.”
Ridgway departed the next evening. “It was night when we left Washington, night when we landed at Tacoma, still black dark when we took off westward over Puget Sound. Dawn came in a thin, gray light, with no sight of sky or sea. There was nothing to see, nothing to do but think and work.” He jotted notes about what he needed to know about the Eighth Army, now his; about the situation in Korea, so perilous; about MacArthur, so complex. “An hour out of Adak the sun broke through, the undercast dissolved, and below me I could see the black crags of the Aleutians—rock-ribbed, snow-capped, and ringed on the Bering side with surf. We landed in brilliant sunshine. A strong salt-tanged wind was blowing and the thermometer was just below freezing.” He got a haircut from a navy barber as his plane refueled, and he visited with the commanding officer of the Adak Naval Air Station and his wife. He felt a pang for the Christmas he was missing with his own wife and their small son. He took off once more and, twelve hours later, just before midnight, landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.
The next morning he met with MacArthur. “I was again deeply impressed by the force of his personality,” he recounted afterward. “To confer with him was an experience that could happen with few others. He was a great actor too, with an actor’s instinct for the dramatic—in tone and gesture. Yet so lucid and penetrating were his explanations and his analyses that it was his mind rather than his manner or bodily presence that dominated his listeners.” MacArthur evinced recently discovered respect for the Chinese. “They constitute a dangerous foe,” he said. “Walker reported that the Chinese avoid roads, using ridges and hills as avenues of approach. They will attack in depth. Their firepower in the hands of their infantry is more extensively used than our own. The enemy moves and fights at night. The entire Chinese military establishment is in this fight.” Yet MacArthur urged Ridgway to keep an open mind. “Form your own opinions. Use your own judgment. I will support you. You have my complete confidence.”
Ridgway knew the Eighth Army was in retreat. But his was not a retreating spirit. “If I find the situation to my liking,” he asked MacArthur, “would you have any objections to my attacking?”
“The Eighth Army is yours, Matt,” MacArthur said. “Do what you think best.”
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MACARTHUR’S VOTE OF confidence in Ridgway was shared by the Truman administration, but Tokyo and Washington agreed on little else at this point. The essence of their dispute, apart from the personal frictions, distilled to a fundamental question about the place of Korea in American strategic planning. Put bluntly: Was saving Korea worth jeopardizing American security elsewhere?
The joint chiefs, following Truman’s lead, said no. The chiefs prepared for the possibility that Korea might have to be abandoned. They directed MacArthur to fall back, “inflicting such damage to hostile forces in Korea as is possible, subject to the primary consideration of the safety of your troops.” The Eighth Army must survive, for on it depended the defense of Japan. MacArthur must ensure that it did survive. “Since developments may force our withdrawal from Korea, it is important, particularly in view of the continued threat to Japan, to determine, in advance, our last reasonable opportunity for an orderly evacuation.”
The chiefs provided closer guidance than previously, and they prepared to provide closer guidance still. “It seems to us that if you are forced back to positions in the vicinity of the Kum River and a line generally eastward therefrom, and if thereafter the Chinese Communists mass large forces against your positions with an evident capability of forcing us out of Korea, it then would be necessary, under these conditions
, to direct you to commence a withdrawal to Japan.” Yet sensitive to MacArthur’s pride, they solicited his response. “Your views are requested as to the above-outlined conditions which should determine a decision to initiate evacuation, particularly in light of your continued primary mission of defense of Japan for which only troops of the Eighth Army are available. Following the receipt of your views you will be given a definite directive as to the conditions under which you should initiate evacuation.”
MacArthur disagreed, vehemently. He read the letter in “utter dismay,” according to Courtney Whitney. Speaking for his boss, Whitney said of the chiefs’ message, “It showed clearly the confusion and contradiction in which Pentagon minds seemed to be weltering.” MacArthur was supposed to resist the Chinese but not to fight too hard. “Was it, then, a policy that we would meet Communist aggression in Asia only if we could do it without too much trouble?” Whitney asserted that MacArthur drew two conclusions from the letter: that Truman and the administration “had completely lost the ‘will to win’ in Korea,” and that the joint chiefs were trying to dodge their responsibility for this “shameful decision.” Whitney continued, “The implied evacuation of Korea was properly a political decision, not a military one. The thought of defeat in Korea had never been entertained by MacArthur—so long as he would be allowed to use his military might against the enemy’s. Indeed, it was his view that, given this authorization, he could not only save Korea but also inflict such a destructive blow upon Red China’s capacity to wage aggressive war that it would remove her as a further threat to peace in Asia for generations to come. If, however, the U.N. and the U.S. preferred to multiply this threat by meekly lying down and letting the Juggernaut roll on, it must be a political decision, which must be made in Washington, not Tokyo. Everything in his heart and soul rebelled against such a solution.” Speaking for himself, Whitney added, “I have seen MacArthur in moments of great sorrow and distress, but I cannot recall when I have seen heartache etched so vividly on his countenance and in his every attitude.”