The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 14

  From the moment that Truman gathered his team together at Blair House, there had been sharp and unwanted disagreement between Acheson and Johnson over Taiwan, a subject that Johnson had raised. Everyone else at the meeting wanted to concentrate on Korea, but Johnson, who had been trying against the wishes of the president and Acheson to include Taiwan in the American defense perimeter in Asia, now seized on the issue again. American security, he said, was more affected by Taiwan than Korea. Acheson tried to move the subject back to Korea. Finally Truman broke it off and said they would have dinner. After dinner Johnson tried again to raise the question of Taiwan, and again Truman cut him off.

  At the Blair House talks, Chiang’s troops were then quickly left behind for a more serious consideration of the situation on the ground. Joe Collins pointed out that the ROKs were collapsing. The ROK chief of staff had, in Collins’s phrase, “no fight left in him.” They all knew what that meant—there would be a need for American combat troops. But even in World War II, it had been American policy to avoid putting combat troops on the mainland of Asia. Omar Bradley suggested that the president wait a few days before making so fateful a decision. Truman then asked the Joint Chiefs to ponder the question. At one point, reflecting the gravity of the moment, Truman looked at the others with great solemnity and said, “I don’t want to go to war.” But he was also aware that he was coming closer and closer to making that ultimate decision.

  On the morning of June 27, he and Acheson met with congressional leaders and went over his decisions so far. The congressional response was generally very favorable. At one point, Alexander Smith, a Republican senator from New Jersey, asked whether Truman was going to request that Congress pass a joint resolution on military action in Korea. It was a good question, and one that, remarkably enough, in two solid days of meetings no one in the administration had really considered. Politics, they believed, had been put aside, or at least put aside by them. They would take it under advisement, Truman told Smith. Later that day Truman spoke about it with both Acheson and Averell Harriman, who had become a high-level special aide in the hours immediately after the invasion. Though unlike Acheson he came from a background of unparalleled wealth, Harriman was always shrewder about American politics. He strongly advised Truman to go for a congressional resolution. Acheson opposed a resolution; the events, he said, demanded speed. Truman, a man produced by Congress who surely would have been angered had a president gone over his head on an issue of war and peace, tended to agree with Acheson. He did not want to slow down the process, and his constant struggles with the Congress over the issue of China and Chiang made him wary of dealing with his enemies in the Senate. Three days later, on the morning of June 30, Truman met again with congressional leaders. This time, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, hardly the administration’s favorite senator, asked bluntly about congressional approval. (At an earlier hearing Acheson had tried to punch him in the nose, and had had to be restrained by one of his own aides; Truman himself liked to call Wherry “the block headed undertaker from Nebraska.”) Truman tried to put him off. “If there is any need for congressional action I will come to you. But I hope we can get those bandits in Korea suppressed without one.”

  That was the ideal time to get some kind of resolution, but soon the moment passed, and the political unanimity that had existed at the hour of the invasion evaporated. As the war became more difficult than originally imagined, the politics of it became more difficult as well, and the support began to fragment. Because Truman had not tried for congressional support, the opposition was off the hook in terms of accepting any responsibility for America’s response. When Secretary of the Army Frank Pace suggested they go for the resolution, Truman had answered, “Frank, it’s not necessary. They’re all with me.” “Yes, Mr. President,” Pace answered, “but we can’t be sure they’ll be with you over a period of time.” For the moment everyone seemed to be aboard. When the word reached the House that the president had decided to send arms to South Korea, virtually the entire House stood to cheer. Joseph Harsch of The Christian Science Monitor, one of Washington’s best and most experienced reporters, wrote, “Never before have I felt such a sense of relief and unity pass through the city.”

  The president’s advisers all knew that week that they were moving closer and closer to using ground troops on the Asian mainland, the last thing anyone, civilian or military, wanted to do, and it weighed more heavily on them each day. American air and sea power was not going to get it done. MacArthur had been ordered—if he could ever be said to be ordered—to go to Korea and report back on what was needed to hold the line there. Now, very early in the morning of June 30, the word from Tokyo was about to come in and they already knew that it was not going to be good. At about 1:30 A.M., Washington time, John Muccio notified Acheson that MacArthur was going to ask for greater force. Things were desperate on the peninsula, Muccio said. That set the stage for MacArthur’s cable asking for troops.

  An hour and a half later, MacArthur, who had just returned from his tour of Korea, reported to the Joint Chiefs that the United States needed drastically increased forces there. These were his fateful words: “The only assurance for the holding of the present line, and the ability to regain the lost ground, is through the introduction of U.S. ground forces into the Korean battle area. To continue to utilize the forces of our Air and Navy without an effective ground element cannot be decisive.” He wanted, MacArthur said, to introduce a regimental combat team immediately to fight in some already contested areas, and then as quickly as possible to arrange for up to two divisions from his forces in Japan to undertake a counteroffensive. Unless they did this, he said, “our mission will at best be needlessly costly in life, money and prestige. At worse [sic] it might even be doomed to failure.”

  In Washington, Dean Rusk, the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, and Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff, were working their end of the teleconference between roughly 3 A.M. and 4 A.M. But because they were, relatively speaking, lower-level officials, and the hour was early, it turned out to be a slow and clumsy process. Higher authorization was always needed. These were not minor issues posed by Tokyo: they were about nothing less than war and peace. Answers did not come quickly. There were delays on a number of points and this did not please MacArthur. “This is an outrage! When I was chief of staff I could get Herbert Hoover off the can to talk to me! But here, not just the Chief of Staff of the Army delays, but the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense. They’ve got so much lead in there that it’s inexcusable.”

  At about 4:30 A.M. Washington time, MacArthur confirmed his request for ground troops to Collins, and Collins called Pace, who in turn called Truman. Truman was always an early riser. His internal farm-boy clock had never left him. He was shaved by the time he got Pace’s call. Just before 5 A.M. on the morning of June 30, 1950, he approved the use of American ground troops in Korea. With that the deed was done. In the very beginning MacArthur had said that he could easily handle the invasion if only Washington would leave him alone. Now he said he needed two divisions to do it. He was, it would turn out, still underrating the enemy, and overrating the forces who would serve under his own command, including American troops.

  Truman still wondered if there were a plus side to the offer of Chiang’s troops. He then called in Acheson, Harriman, Johnson, and the Joint Chiefs to talk one last time about using them. With the South Korean Army falling apart, Chiang’s offer still made some sense to the president as a stopgap measure. Acheson was sure it would bring the Chinese Communists into the war. And the Joint Chiefs wanted no part of it either.

  Amid the gloom, there was one upbeat note. U.S. troops would fight under a United Nations flag. Before Truman approved the use of American ground troops, he had already gotten UN authorization—easier then than it would be in any decade to come. The UN of 1950 was still very much a reflection of American and Western European interests, the only significant dissent coming from the Soviets and their
satellites. It was in some ways very much a last vestige of a white man’s world. On the Security Council vote to authorize the use of force in Korea, the only two abstentions were by non-white countries, India and Egypt. Beginning in the late 1950s and accelerating into the 1960s, the coming of the end of the colonial era, and the arrival of newly independent African and Asian and Middle Eastern nations, would change the UN’s makeup dramatically, greatly diminishing Western influence and turning it into an organization that conservative political factions in the United States and Western Europe absolutely scorned. The Russians had foolishly boycotted the Security Council meetings on Korea (ironically because they were protesting the fact that the Chinese Nationalists were still on the council), and with their veto gone, the Americans got the resolution they wanted on Tuesday, June 27, eventually giving the predominantly American force a UN flag under which to fight.

  7

  THE UNITED STATES was going to go to war in Korea, and Harry Truman was quite reluctantly going to have to be the commander in chief, dealing with a war he did not want, in a part of the world his national security people had not thought important, and relying from the start on a commander in the field whom he did not like, and who in turn did not respect him. The stars were not properly aligned from the start. Three days after the Korean War broke out, Dwight Eisenhower, then the president of Columbia University, dropped by the Pentagon to talk about the Korean command with Lieutenant General Matt Ridgway, then deputy chief of staff for administration, but the most respected of the new generation of senior officers, and thus the man a number of senior officers thought the ideal candidate to be the battlefield commander in Korea under MacArthur. Few men knew better than Eisenhower how MacArthur operated. He had been MacArthur’s aide in both Washington and Manila, and was intimately aware of just how shrewdly MacArthur rationed the truth when he reported back to the civilian and military world in Washington. Eisenhower told Ridgway that they badly needed a younger general out there rather than, as he put it, “an ‘untouchable’ whose actions you cannot predict and who will himself decide what information he wants Washington to have and what he will withhold.” There was, Eisenhower later wrote, a clear line between military and political affairs, which almost all senior officers scrupulously observed, “but if General MacArthur recognized the existence of that line, he usually chose to ignore it.” MacArthur had acted throughout his life, as Max Hastings once wrote, “on the assumption that the rules made for lesser men had no relevance to himself.”

  MacArthur’s unsettling performance in those first few days, what Dulles and Allison had witnessed when the North Koreans first struck, was never seen by ordinary Americans. Instead MacArthur’s public mystique remained largely unblemished among the senior media people, especially publishers and editors, the men at the top whom he had courted for so long. Four days after the invasion began, the New York Times, typically, ran a glowing editorial on the nation’s good fortune in having MacArthur on the spot: “Fate could not have chosen a man better qualified to command the unreserved confidence of the people of this country. Here is a superb strategist and an inspired leader; a man of infinite patience and quiet stability under adverse pressures, a man equally capable of bold and decisive action.”

  He was seventy years old, the senior officer in the American Army—only God, it was said, was senior to MacArthur, the aging wunderkind of West Point. As a young man he had begun his career with scores that were among the highest ever posted there, 98.14 for the four years, and he had more than lived up to the promise of those grades. He had always been the youngest officer to attain whatever position he attained—not just the youngest division commander in France in World War I but also the youngest superintendent of West Point (and a modern liberalizing force there), youngest Army chief of staff, youngest major general, and youngest man ever to be a full general. His good press did not come through happenstance: it was not just the extraordinary career, and the sheer length of it; it was the immense amount of energy he had always put into making sure that his image was the proper one, that he got the maximum amount of credit for any victory, while his subordinates received as little credit as possible. He was the most theatrical of men, busy at all times not merely being a general but doing it in the most dramatic way possible, the Great MacArthur who played in nothing less than the theater of history—as if life were always a stage and the world his audience.

  The Times, center-liberal in its editorial page, enthusiastic as its homage to MacArthur seemed, was not nearly as fulsome in its praise of the general as Time magazine. Given the passion of its founder and editor, Henry Luce, for China and Chiang Kai-shek, Time was already closely connected to what was coming to be known as the China Lobby, those Americans who saw China and Chiang Kai-shek as one and the same, and believed the administration was sending inadequate amounts of aid to Chiang. Time, at the height of its political and social influence in the late 1940s and 1950s, was far more Asia First in its vision of the world than most other American periodicals of that era, in no small part because Luce himself was a mish-kid; that is, the son of a missionary who had proselytized in China. Chiang, perhaps other than Winston Churchill, was Luce’s favorite world leader, while Douglas MacArthur was probably his favorite general, because of their shared belief in the primacy of Asia and their parallel feeling that other internationalists paid too little attention to it. When Time put MacArthur on the cover on July 10, 1950, right after the North Koreans struck—and appearing on its cover was extremely important in those years—it was his seventh time, placing him in a dead heat with Chiang himself. The copy for the piece, even for a much favored general, set a new standard in journalistic hagiography: “Inside the Dai Ichi building, once the heart of a Japanese insurance empire, bleary-eyed staff officers looked up from stacks of paper, whispered proudly, ‘God, the man is great.’ General Almond, his chief of staff, said straight out, ‘He’s the greatest man alive.’ And reverent Air Force General George Stratemeyer put it as strongly as it could be put…‘He’s the greatest man in history.’”

  Not everyone agreed, of course. If he was successful in his courtship of publishers and editors, working reporters were often put off by MacArthur’s grandiosity and vainglory, and many of them came to despise the sycophantic ambiance of his staff. A meeting with him was not just a briefing—it was likely to be a performance as well, the energy and care put into it geared to the importance of the visitor. The problem with MacArthur, General Joseph Stilwell told Frank Dorn, one of his top aides, was that he had been “a general too long.” Stilwell was speaking in 1944, before MacArthur became the American-approved emperor of an occupied Japan. “He got his first star in 1918 and that means he’s had almost thirty years as a general,” Stilwell said, “thirty years of people playing to him and kissing his ass, and doing what he wants. That’s not good for anyone.”

  BY 1950 MACARTHUR was so grand a figure that everyone had to play by his rules. In effect he had created not only his own little army within a larger army, which he alone was allowed to command, but his own little world where he alone could govern. Any instructions or orders or even suggestions from Washington were more often than not ignored, even if they came from the general’s nominal superiors, men who, in his own view of the hierarchy, were not superior to him, and therefore had no right to question him or give him orders. He had created a dangerously self-isolating little world, one of total social, political, and military separation from everyone and everything else, where no one dared dissent. The men around him were all in awe of him; those who were not in awe of him tended not to last very long in his headquarters. Visitors who arrived at his headquarters at the Dai Ichi building and were deemed worthy of a meeting with him always got The Performance. In the performance—he often practiced that morning in front of a mirror, clad in his bathrobe—he spoke with great confidence and certainty about future events that most men, no matter how knowledgeable, approached with a degree of caution, aware of the tricks that history played.
The performances were often quite dazzling, well rehearsed but delivered as if they were impromptu. He was the most gifted of monologuists. But there was an airless quality to it all. Everything was too finely controlled, too carefully calculated and orchestrated, in a world where events could never be controlled and orchestrated, and where many of the forces at play were new and hostile and very different from the forces at play in the earlier century.

  Given the unofficial rules of the Dai Ichi—he talked, you listened—no one dared challenge his grandiose statements, his role as a kind of self-proclaimed prophet of what was happening in the world, of what Russia and China were doing and what was happening in America, a country he had largely lost touch with and never entirely understood. There was, sadly, one vital quality for any successful general that he lacked—he did not know how to listen. Nor did he want to. Nothing had revealed that quite so clearly as the moment in 1948 when George Kennan had been sent out from Washington to work on issues of political reform and economic rehabilitation in Japan. At that moment most senior commanders or high-ranking diplomats, especially those operating on the edge of the Soviet Union, would have been thrilled to have Kennan around for even a short period of time, even if they did not always agree with him. He was at the height of his own new fame. He was considered the leading expert in the government on the subject of the Soviet Union and its intentions. Of Kennan’s intellect and clarity of mind there could be no doubt. That his knowledge of Russia, the Soviet Union, and China, their histories and their politics, was superb there could also be no doubt. He might still be relatively young, just starting the middle part of his career, but he was obviously a towering figure—with the most practical kind of intellect. But Kennan could never get across the moat with MacArthur—he was too close to people MacArthur loathed. There was to be no give-and-take. In fact Kennan was shocked by what he found in Tokyo. MacArthur, he noted, was “so distant and full of mistrust” toward the incumbent administration that Kennan’s own job was “like nothing more than that of an envoy charged with opening up communications and arranging the establishment of diplomatic relations with a hostile and suspicious foreign government.”