The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  Truman agreed, and he personalized a draft prepared for him by Acheson and the others. As fed up as he was with MacArthur, the president still treated the general considerately. “I want you to know that the situation in Korea is receiving the utmost attention here and that our efforts are concentrated upon finding the right decisions on this matter,” Truman said. He took care to explain that he wasn’t issuing orders, not at the moment. “This present telegram is not to be taken in any sense as a directive. Its purpose is to give you something of what is in our minds regarding the political factors.” Truman outlined the positive purposes that would be served by a successful resistance in Korea. It would demonstrate that aggression did not pay and that the free countries would defend themselves. It would deflate the prestige of China. It would win time for other Asian countries to organize for defense against communism. It would vindicate America’s pledge to defend South Korea. It would hearten the Japanese. It would encourage countries around the world to look to the United States rather than the Soviet Union. It would bolster the United Nations.

  All this was why the United States must maintain the fight in Korea. “We recognize, of course, that continued resistance might not be militarily possible with the limited forces with which you are being called upon to meet large Chinese armies,” Truman granted. “Further, in the present world situation, your forces must be preserved as an effective instrument for the defense of Japan and elsewhere.” But the effort must still be made. “In the worst case, it would be important that, if we must withdraw from Korea, it be clear to the world that that course is forced upon us by military necessity.” America’s allies might forgive defeat; they would never forgive abandonment.

  Truman reminded MacArthur—yet again—where the heart of the danger to America lay. “In reaching a final decision about Korea, I shall have to give constant thought to the main threat from the Soviet Union.” The president repeated—yet again—why the conflict in Korea must not be widened. “Our course of action at this time should be such as to consolidate the great majority of the United Nations. This majority is not merely part of the organization but is also the nations whom we would desperately need to count on as allies in the event the Soviet Union moves against us.”

  The president concluded with a generous flourish. “The entire nation is grateful for your splendid leadership in the difficult struggle in Korea and for the superb performance of your forces under the most difficult circumstances.”

  Acheson thought Truman had done more than any president should have had to do. “It was an imaginatively kind and thoughtful letter for the Chief of State to write his theater commander, admitting him to his private mind,” Acheson recalled. “If ever a message should have stirred the loyalty of a commander, this one should have done so.”

  PART FOUR

  THE GENERAL VS. THE PRESIDENT

  44

  MACARTHUR RESPONDED TO Truman’s olive branch with a terse “We shall do our best.”

  Joe Collins and Hoyt Vandenberg flew west to ensure that he did. Their arrival in Korea coincided with Matthew Ridgway’s initial attempt to regain the ground he had yielded in retreating from Seoul. Ridgway ordered a limited attack but one employing infantry, armor and air support. The plan was to hit the enemy hard and then withdraw. The goal was to test the enemy’s strength but also the resilience of the Eighth Army. Vandenberg, the air chief, observed the performance of the air wing of the operation; Collins, the army man, watched the ground operations. “I toured the front with Ridgway,” Collins recalled later. “I talked to corps and division commanders and a number of junior and noncommissioned officers.” He liked what he saw. “I could feel in the Eighth Army the improved spirit that Ridgway had already imparted to his men.” Collins remembered the Battle of the Bulge, when he and Ridgway had commanded adjacent corps and strived to convince Bernard Montgomery that no Germans would get past them. Collins didn’t need convincing now. “I left Korea fully convinced that the Eighth Army would once again stand and fight,” he wrote. Collins quoted Ridgway’s words at their parting: “There is no shadow of doubt in my mind that the Eighth Army can take care of itself.”

  MacArthur elicited less confidence from the visitors. “At our first meeting, Gen. MacArthur read the President’s letter, and said it had cleared up questions as to how long and under what conditions the Eighth Army should remain in Korea,” Collins wrote to Omar Bradley. “He said he interpreted the letter as a directive to remain in Korea indefinitely, which the UN forces could do, though in this case he could not assume responsibility for the risk of leaving Japan defenseless.”

  Collins and Vandenberg pointed out that Truman’s letter had expressly declared that it was not a directive. But they went on to say that in their meeting with the president just prior to their departure from Washington the consensus was that any evacuation from Korea should be delayed as long as possible, consistent with the integrity of the Eighth Army and the security of Japan.

  MacArthur repeated what he had said, with emphasis. “He declared, with some emotion, that his command could not be held responsible for the defense of Japan while required to hold Korea. Although there were no open indications of Russian moves to attack Japan, they had the capability with forces now in Sakhalin and the Vladivostok area.”

  Yet MacArthur, like Collins, interpreted Ridgway’s recent actions as a good sign. “General MacArthur reviewed the military situation and stated that in his opinion the UN forces could hold a beachhead in Korea indefinitely,” Collins told Bradley. “He felt that with our continued domination of the sea and air, Chinese forces would never be able to bring up adequate supplies, over their lengthening lines of communication, to enable them to drive the UN forces from Korea. He reiterated his belief that a decision to evacuate Korea was a political matter and should not be decided on military grounds.”

  Bradley shared Collins’s report with Truman, and when Collins and Vandenberg returned to Washington they briefed the president in person. “The President and his chief advisers, who had access to our reports, were reassured,” Collins remembered. For the first time since November, disaster no longer loomed over Korea. Hard fighting remained, but the Eighth Army would hold.

  Omar Bradley felt more hopeful than he had in months. “We began to think that the Chinese could not throw us out of Korea, even with the self-imposed limitations under which we were fighting,” Bradley remembered. “It was a tremendous relief to all.”

  But it was no thanks to MacArthur. Collins spoke for the chiefs as a group, and for the administration as a whole, when he pointedly gave credit where he believed it due. “General Ridgway alone was responsible for this dramatic change,” Collins said.

  45

  ON JANUARY 5 Robert Taft of Ohio took the floor of the Senate. Taft had come a long way since his isolationist period, when he had warned, as late as a month before Pearl Harbor, that the United States was sliding into the morass of save-the-world thinking that would doom the country to perpetual war abroad and garrison-state socialism at home. Taft had supported the war effort against Germany and Japan and had even voted in favor of American membership in the United Nations. But he had voted against the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, arguing that the alliance it created put American security at the risk of reckless actions by any of the other members, that it illegitimately transferred to the president the constitutional power of Congress to declare war, and that by so patently targeting Russia it made a third world war more likely rather than less.

  Some Taft watchers thought they heard the Ohio Republican building a platform for another run at the presidency. Taft had tried and failed in 1940 and again in 1948 to win the Republican nomination; each time he had lost to a candidate more tolerant of American engagement in the world. But both candidates—Wendell Willkie and then Thomas Dewey—had lost in the general election. Taft might have inferred that a candidate more clearly different from the Democratic internationalists would have a better chance. Or maybe he was simply speaki
ng his mind.

  In any event, when he addressed the Senate in January 1951 he raked the wrong thinking he attributed to Truman, Acheson and the other architects of America’s Cold War policies. “In very recent days we have heard appeals for unity from the Administration and from its supporters,” Taft said. “I suggest that these appeals are an attempt to cover up the past faults and failures of the Administration and enable it to maintain the secrecy which has largely enveloped our foreign policy since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” It was past time to tear the veil. “As I see it, members of Congress, and particularly members of the Senate, have a constitutional obligation to re-examine constantly and discuss the foreign policy of the United States.” Taft preemptively deflected charges that he and the Republican minority were being obstructionist. “We have not hesitated to pass a draft law, a law granting extensive powers of economic control, and almost unlimited appropriations for the armed forces.” If mobilization moved more slowly than the White House desired, the president should look within his own bureaucracy rather than at the Republicans.

  Taft reminded his listeners that the Democrats were the authors of the troubles they now cited to justify the current state of alarm. At wartime conferences at Yalta and Tehran, Roosevelt had signed over to the Soviets large swaths of Central Europe, Taft said. Truman had adopted a policy hostile to the Chinese Nationalists, thereby handing control of the world’s most populous nation to the communists. That nation had lately launched a war against the United States in Korea. The two Democratic presidents had done all this without consulting Congress.

  Truman now proposed to send large numbers of American troops to Europe as part of a permanent force drawn from the Atlantic alliance members. The president could not avoid Congress in taking such a step, for Congress had to provide the money. But the proposal still reeked of the Democrats’ preference for making policy on the sly, Taft said. “The Atlantic Pact may have committed us to send arms to the other members of the pact, but no one ever maintained that it committed us to send many American troops to Europe. A new policy is being formulated without consulting the Congress or the people.”

  Taft drove to the heart of the matter. “The principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people. Its purpose is not to reform the entire world or spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to peoples who have lived and worked out their own salvation for centuries according to the best of their ability. We do have an interest in the economic welfare of other nations and in the military strength of other nations, but only to the extent to which our assistance may reduce the probability of an attack on the freedom of our people.”

  Taft contended that the Truman administration was exaggerating the threat from the Russians. “I do not myself see any conclusive evidence that they expect to start a war with the United States,” he said. “And certainly I see no reason for a general panic on the assumption that they will do so. We have clearly notified them that any attack in Europe upon the United Nations means a third World War, and we are obligated to enter such a war under the terms of the Atlantic Pact.” Taft asked his listeners to step back for a moment. “Look at it from any point of view—and, I think, particularly from the Russian point of view—and it is difficult to see how the Russians could reasonably entertain the hope that they can conquer the world by military action. It must seem to their thinkers an extremely difficult undertaking. I believe they are still thinking in terms of a slow but steady advance by the methods which they have used up to this time. Those methods are dangerous enough.” And those methods were the ones the United States should focus on, husbanding American strength for the long struggle.

  Truman had overreacted in Korea, Taft said. The senator suggested that the Soviet boycott of the Security Council in June 1950, which Acheson and others considered fortuitous with respect to Korea and which enabled the passage of the UN resolution authorizing the defense of South Korea, might have been deliberate. “We took this action”—sponsoring the resolution and acting upon it—“without considering the fact that, if the Chinese Communists attacked and the Russian representative returned to the Security Council, the United Nations could not follow up its action against the Korean Communists by similar action against Chinese Communists. If the Russians had planned it that way, they could not have done better.” The administration’s misplaced confidence in the UN had proved a dreadful error. “We were sucked into the Korean War by a delusion.”

  And an unconstitutional one at that. “The President simply usurped authority, in violation of the laws and the Constitution, when he sent troops to Korea to carry out the resolution of the United Nations in an undeclared war,” Taft said. Now the president proposed to aggrandize executive power the more by sending American troops to Europe. “Without authority he involved us in the Korean War,” Taft said. “Without authority he apparently is now adopting a similar policy in Europe.” The lesson of Korea was just the opposite of what Truman adduced. “We must not undertake anything beyond our power as we have in Korea. We must not assume obligations by treaty or otherwise which require any extensive use of American land forces.” The president’s program must be rejected.

  —

  TAFT’S SPEECH WAS the opening salvo in a months-long debate in Congress over America’s approach to world affairs. The occasion for the debate was Truman’s request for funding for the troops he wanted to send to Europe, but the context, as Taft’s speech made evident, was the continuing conflict in Korea. Taft’s speech, at ten thousand words, was one of the longest, and it was more carefully reasoned than most. But many other lawmakers weighed in. The Republicans decried the president’s handling of foreign affairs, often including the conduct of the war in Korea in their condemnation. Yet few were so bold in declaring the Russian threat overblown. The Democrats were predictably kinder to Truman, even if several in the president’s own party wondered where the path he was charting would lead.

  All understood that Truman had led the United States to the banks of a Rubicon. On the near side was America’s old policy of reacting to aggression after it happened. This had been the country’s approach to the two world wars, and it had characterized policy in Korea. On the far side was a new policy of arming in advance of aggression, of having troops in place where the communists might merely think of attacking. The Atlantic alliance was a paper pact thus far; the Atlantic treaty a promissory note. Truman would put steel in the alliance by putting American boots on European ground.

  Truman recognized that he had to strike a delicate balance in making the case for his policy. He had to portray the world as sufficiently dangerous that his novel action appeared necessary, yet the world shouldn’t seem so dangerous that the simple act of sending the troops to Europe would trigger another general war. The administration labored assiduously to coordinate the voices with which it spoke. Dean Acheson at the State Department, George Marshall at the Pentagon, Omar Bradley of the joint chiefs, and their respective seconds and staffs held meeting after meeting to get the message just right.

  Matthew Ridgway assisted from Korea. By February 1951 Ridgway’s revived Eighth Army had demonstrated that the United Nations would not be driven out of Korea short of a major commitment of new troops and weapons by China. This welcome development allowed the Truman administration to consider options for a ceasefire, presumably leading to political negotiations that would yield a permanent settlement for Korea.

  Three months earlier, in the heady aftermath of Inchon, Truman would have judged a ceasefire a distinct disappointment. Victory had appeared within America’s grasp. But now a ceasefire—a draw, as it were—was the best he could reasonably hope for. Yet the lowering of expectations in Korea oddly strengthened Truman’s argument for sending troops to Europe. Communism wouldn’t easily be defeated; consequently it had to be deterred. The United States had held the line in Korea; it must hold the line in Europe. A patient middle course—between the military recklessness of MacA
rthur and historical heedlessness of Taft—was the surest path to peace.

  46

  MATTHEW RIDGWAY RECEIVED a February visit from MacArthur that revealed one of the latter’s least attractive traits as a commander. Ridgway was preparing an offensive he called Operation Killer. “I had planned this action personally on Sunday evening, February 18, two days before the visit of the Commander in Chief, and had outlined it to the Commanding Generals of the U.S. IX and X Corps and of the 1st Marine Division,” Ridgway recalled later. “This resumption of the offensive was the final implementation of the plan I had nourished from the time of my taking command of the Eighth Army—and had done so it may be said in the face of a retreat-psychology that seemed to have seized every commander from the Chief on down. You can imagine my surprise then and even my dismay at hearing the announcement General MacArthur made to the assembled press correspondents on February 20, the eve of the target date. Standing before some ten or more correspondents met at the X Corps Tactical Command Post, with me leaning against a table in the rear, MacArthur said calmly: ‘I have just ordered a resumption of the offensive.’ ”

  Ridgway was more than irked at MacArthur’s credit-claiming. “It was not so much that my own vanity took an unexpected roughing up by this announcement as that I was given a rather unwelcome reminder of a MacArthur I had known but had almost forgotten.” MacArthur’s grandstanding threatened serious damage to the American war effort, Ridgway judged. “It had long been MacArthur’s habit, whenever a major offensive was about to jump off, to visit those elements of his command that were involved and, figuratively, to fire the starting gun. In general this is an admirable practice. The over-all commander’s personal presence has an inspiring effect upon the troops. And invariably the best impressions of the temper of the men under his command are gained through the commander’s own eyes and ears.” Most commanders made their visits discreetly, with no word reaching the enemy until too late to give anything away. But not MacArthur. “The pattern of MacArthur’s flight from Tokyo and appearance at the front every time a major operation was to be initiated had been well established. And the flights themselves were made with such ceremony that knowledge of them was almost certain to reach the enemy.” MacArthur, who complained so loudly about being deprived of means to neutralize the enemy, deprived Ridgway and the Eighth Army of the element of surprise. Eventually Ridgway would learn to tell MacArthur to stay in Tokyo. But on this occasion he simply bit his tongue at “another of the Commander in Chief’s efforts to keep his public image always glowing.”