The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read online

  When Acheson heard the estimated price, what they called the back of the envelope cost, of around $50 billion, he told Nitze, “Paul, don’t put that figure in the report. You’re right to tell me and I’ll tell the president, but don’t put any figure in the report.” Finally, on March 22, 1950, they met with Johnson and the Joint Chiefs in Nitze’s office to go over the draft document. The meeting started out peacefully enough. Johnson asked Acheson if he had read the draft. Acheson had. Johnson, of course, had not. In fact, he had only heard of it that morning. Suddenly, it became clear to him that he had been completely cut out of the play and totally ambushed. Acheson and his man Nitze were obviously in charge, had clearly been in close communication with the Chiefs, and just as clearly intended to give the uniformed military not only many of the things he had been cutting out of their budgets but more than he had ever imagined possible. He was, he realized, completely isolated. As Acheson later wrote, all of a sudden “he lunged forward, with a crash of chair legs on the floor and fist on the table, scaring me out of my shoes.”

  Acheson and Nitze, he shouted, were trying to keep him in the dark and he would not tolerate it—he would not be subjected to a humiliation like this. “This is a conspiracy being conducted behind my back in order to subvert my policies. I and the Chiefs are leaving now,” he said. Soon after, Johnson went to Acheson’s office to argue his case one more time and started screaming that he had been insulted. Acheson waved him away, then had others call Truman to tell him what had happened. An hour later, Truman returned the call and told Acheson to proceed with the paper. The president was not yet approving NSC 68—events in Korea would take care of that—but Acheson and Nitze were in charge of the play. Six months later Truman fired Johnson and replaced him with George Marshall. Acheson was convinced that Johnson was unstable at the time.

  NSC 68 was a defining document. It confirmed the American response to the harshness of the Cold War, American mistrust of the Soviets matching Soviet mistrust of Americans, which would in turn create a cycle of ever expanding mistrust and ever greater defense spending on both sides. It defined the global conflict in almost purely ideological terms, especially striking in a paper so secret that it would be seen only by top officials: “The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a fanatical faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” At first, Truman had remained noncommittal about NSC 68 and was quite uneasy with the implicit costs involved. Then, the Korean War began and the Cold War escalated into a hot war, and the force of events had their own financial imperatives. The debate over NSC 68 had become academic, the issue overtaken by events. The budget, which NSC 68 suggested would have to triple, now tripled because of the war. Truman himself never had to make a decision on NSC 68. In fact, by the late fall of 1951, when the fiscal 1952 Pentagon budget was being prepared, it had quadrupled from $13 billion in pre–Korean War days to $55 billion. “Korea,” Acheson would note years later at a seminar at Princeton, “saved us.”

  14

  HARRY TRUMAN WAS, whatever else, a decisive man. Even some of Roosevelt’s people, who in the early days of his presidency had looked down on Truman, this seemingly undistinguished man who had replaced their beloved leader, now understood that. Some Roosevelt insiders had left immediately, believing they could not give their loyalty to him; others came to respect him and understand that their commitment was to the office and not to the man, and that Truman in his own way was an uncommon man. Though Truman would turn out to be the last American president who had not been to college, he had been exceptionally bookish as a child, was unusually well read, and was a serious, if amateur, self-taught historian. Perhaps most important of all, he did not go around doubting himself once he took office. He might not have sought the presidency and it might have come to him in the most unwanted way, but he was going to serve and make his decisions as best he could. He was not, even before he was elected on his own in 1948, going to be governing hat in hand, as if he did not deserve the office and ought more properly to be secreted away in the small office where they still hid vice presidents. The country deserved better than that. Besides, he understood that if he governed like that, as a kind of stand-in for a great man, he would be devoured by his enemies, some of whom were institutional enemies of the presidency, some of whom were ideological enemies, and some of whom were both. He did not intend to be devoured; history judged the devoured too harshly. A lifetime of dealing with ordinary people, in good times and bad—and there had certainly been plenty of those—had convinced him of his skill in reading and judging others, sensing whom he could trust and whom he could not. It had also taught him to get the best people you can, gather the best information possible, ask the best questions you could think of, estimate the likely consequences, then just make the decision and get on with it. He also knew, as he flew back to Washington on the morning after the North Korean attack, that his decisions in the days to come would be on matters of war and peace. Korea would turn out to be in his judgment the most difficult call of his presidency.

  In June 1950, he had already served five years as president, and scored two personal triumphs that had immeasurably strengthened his confidence. Though they were in a sense intertwined, the first—his stunning upset victory over Tom Dewey in the 1948 election—had been the more remarkable. Unlikely as it was, his electoral triumph helped clear the way for his other great achievement—his triumph over the still powerful image of Franklin Roosevelt, which finally gave him a presidency of his own (and growing respect from other politicians, the press, and historians, those who make their living judging the presidencies of other men). Escaping the burden of being Roosevelt’s successor, and being a man who had come to the office almost by mistake, was a success all too easy to underestimate. He had never, in fact, let the burden of his predecessor’s greatness weigh too heavily on him, though he had been a relatively minor figure in the Senate and a virtually invisible one as vice president. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson, the next vice president to succeed to office because the president had died, had been a towering figure in the Senate before replacing John F. Kennedy (who had served for only three years, in contrast to Roosevelt’s twelve); yet by contrast he never entirely escaped the emotional and psychological burden of comparisons with his predecessor, or of the way he had at first attained his presidency.

  Truman was an easy man to underestimate. He lacked one of the great strengths of the Roosevelt persona: to a nation accustomed to a presidential voice that had been warm, confident, aristocratic, and altogether seductive, Truman’s voice was a distinct disappointment, flat and tinny, with little emotional intimacy. His speeches were uninspiring—blunt and oddly without nuance. Some advisers suggested that Truman try to speak more like Roosevelt, and make his speeches more conversational, but he was shrewd enough to know that that was the wrong path, that he could not emulate the great master. All he could do was be himself and hope that the American people would not judge him for what he was not. He was aware that the comparisons with Roosevelt would be unfavorable at first, and they were. In the beginning, he was an easy target for political jokes, and there was often a cruel edge to them. “To err is Truman,” said the acid-tongued Martha Taft, wife of Robert Taft, a key Republican senator. “I’m just mild about Harry” went another. A favorite of the moment, wrote the columnist Doris Fleeson, was “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.” “Poor Harry Truman. And poor people of the United States,” wrote Richard Strout, in The New Republic.

  Truman became president when he was sixty years old. He was a late bloomer of acceptable but not overweening ambition. His people were farmers and he had done his share of farming as a boy, and in 1948 he had delighted Midwest crowds—his support there was one of the keys to his surprise victory—by telling them that he could seed a 160-acre wheat field “without leaving a skip.” He had plowed the old-fashioned way, he added—four Missouri mules, not one of these fancy tractors.
In his senior year of high school, through no fault of their own, the Trumans’ farm had failed and all chance of a college education for Harry had disappeared. He tried for West Point, his one shot at a free education, but was turned down because of his poor eyesight. (He was blind as a mole, he noted later in life.) His one entrepreneurial attempt, to run a haberdashery shop, lasted a mere three years and ended in failure. He spent much of his time trying to prove to his ever dubious mother-in-law, who came from one of Independence’s first families, that he was worthy of the hand of her daughter, that Bess Wallace had not married down. Here success eluded him; he proved better at making the case for his intrinsic value to millions of fellow Americans than to Madge Gates Wallace. He arrived in the Senate in 1934, in his fiftieth year, relatively late in life, as the sparklingly honest representative of the unusually corrupt political machine of Boss Tom Pendergast. It was as if his special assignment within the Pendergast organization had always been to bring it some degree of honor and legitimacy. He was a small-town man with small-town virtues. For much of his life, he wore a triple-band gold Mason’s ring and a small lapel button that showed he had served in World War I. He was comfortable in the world of small-town lodges, and was a member of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Moose, and the Elks.

  But a life filled with a curious blend of disappointments and relatively few successes (at least on the scale of most men who attain the presidency) had created its own set of strengths. “I liked what I saw. He was direct, unpretentious, clear thinking and forceful,” General Omar Bradley wrote after their first meetings. He was not much given to self-deception and there was little artifice to him. He was hardworking, and always well prepared. He did not waste other people’s time, nor did he want them to waste his. In contrast to Roosevelt (who loved to play games with people even when he didn’t need to), Truman was comparatively simple and significantly less manipulative. What you saw, by and large, was what you got. George Marshall had always been uneasy with Roosevelt and some of the games he played with his top advisers. There had been one unfortunate moment when the president had tried verbal intimacy with Marshall, a man who thought the more formal the relationship with a politician, the straighter it was likely to be. Roosevelt called him by his first name, the first step in what was clearly to be a process of seduction. He immediately understood his own mistake by the coolness it generated. It was General or General Marshall thereafter, not George. Marshall for that reason clearly preferred Truman. There were fewer political land mines around.

  In the Senate Truman had been all too aware of his own limitations. A great many of his colleagues were better educated, wealthier, and more successful; they knew worlds of privilege and sophistication he could only guess at. As one of his high school friends, Charlie Ross, later a star reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and eventually his press secretary, said of him, “He came to the Senate, I believe, with a definite inferiority complex. He was a better man than he knew.” America, at the time he assumed the presidency, was changing rapidly, becoming infinitely more meritocratic, driven by powerful egalitarian forces let loose by World War II and new political benefits that went with them, like the GI Bill, which allowed anyone who had been in the military to go to college. Truman, by contrast, was a product of a far less egalitarian America, which had existed at the turn of the century, one where talented men and women did not always attain careers that reflected their abilities and their ambition.

  He was very much a man of his time and his region. “He had only to open his mouth and his origins were plain,” wrote his biographer David McCullough. “It wasn’t just that he came from a particular part of the country, but from a specific part of the American experience, an authentic pioneer background and a specific place in the American imagination. His Missouri, as he loved to emphasize, was the Missouri of Mark Twain and Jesse James.” If Franklin Roosevelt seemed to step out of the pages of a novel by Edith Wharton, McCullough added, then Harry Truman came from the pages of Sinclair Lewis.

  Little was really known of him as a man, even by those who had placed him on the Democratic ticket in 1944. It was not so much that they had wanted him as that they did not like the other vice presidential possibilities, most particularly Henry Wallace, the sitting vice president. As Jonathan Daniels, the Southern editor, noted, they “knew what they wanted, but did not know what they were getting.” He was perhaps as true a reflection of the common man as the country produced for the presidency in the modern era. “What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts, the editor of the Kansas City Star and a part of the inner circle of Republican power brokers, shrewdly wrote during the first days of the Truman presidency. For that was exactly what it was, a test of democracy. He was also a very good working politician, with a keen sense of what was on the minds of ordinary people, their needs and their fears, because his own background was so ordinary and because for so long his life had been so much like theirs.

  When he was first catapulted into the presidency, he complained frequently to his friends about his dislike for it—the Great White Prison, he called it—and seemed at one point ready to offer his support in the 1948 race to Dwight Eisenhower, if he committed to the Democratic Party. Only gradually did he change his mind. The presidency cramped his personal lifestyle and separated him from his family—Bess and his daughter, Margaret, always seemed to be back in Independence and he longed to be with them—but he had never been a man to back off hard jobs, and the more he saw of some of the other men who thought they should replace him, the more confident he became that the country was better served with him in the White House. If he needed to justify his policies by running for election in 1948, then he would make that run—it was not that great a sacrifice. There was a certain bantam rooster cockiness to him. He would not back down from a fight, and, in time, the American people sensed that and rewarded him for it.

  His small-town roots were not that different from many of the Republicans who now became his most bitter political enemies, but his own personal odyssey more often than not had been much harder than theirs, and so he had grave doubts about some of the small-town verities that they so unquestioningly believed in. In American politics of that period, people still voted their pocketbooks, and the Democrats, because of the New Deal, still had the economic whip hand, even in much of what was considered the heartland. A small town of eight thousand might have one thousand blue collar workers at a plant, almost all of whom were Democrats; only a handful of a town’s residents—factory owners, managers, and ancillary local allies like the banker, the lawyer, and the doctor—were people almost sure to vote Republican. Most ordinary Americans were living considerably better than they had in the past. They did not believe the gains they had achieved were, as the Republicans seemed to insinuate, socialistic. Few working people then felt they would prosper under a Republican administration. “The worker’s working every day/ drives to work in a new coupe/ Don’t let ’em take it away” went a Democratic Party theme song of the period. The cultural issues that would, starting in the mid-1960s, gradually tear at the Democratic coalition of blue collar working people, children of the great immigrant waves from Europe, black people, and the white politicians of the one-party South, were not yet important. Labor was newly unionized, still extremely powerful, and grateful for its recent economic gains.

  When he prepared for his own presidential race in 1948, Truman did not believe the economic base of politics had changed that much. He was a fiscal conservative anyway and very careful in those first three years in office to minimize any tax increases. In addition, he had a sixth sense about how to exploit the fault lines in the Republican Party: the difference between what it said were its policies, when it was at a national convention appealing to a national audience, and what its far more conservative leadership in Congress believed. He judged the Republicans in Congress to be a party out of touch with average Americans in the urban and increasingly influential suburban areas of the big states. The
y had killed any number of liberal items he had proposed—on housing, aid to education, and medical care, and then had gone ahead at their convention and called for their passage. Well, he planned to put an illuminating light on that split personality; so, when nominated in 1948, he promptly announced that he was going to call Congress back into session—to pass the items the Republicans supported in their platform. It was a masterful move and proved a decisive one as well. The Republicans were not pleased to be summoned—“the petulant Ajax of the Ozarks,” Senator Styles Bridges called Truman.

  When the 1948 campaign first began, the task before him seemed hopeless. Even the big-city bosses were against him. On hearing that Dwight Eisenhower had no interest in the Democratic nomination, Frank Hague, the Jersey City (New Jersey) boss, said, “Truman, Harry Truman. Oh my God.” Everything appeared stacked against him: in the eyes of many, both politically and as a human being, he had seemed to shrink in the vast space left by his predecessor, and the Democrats had been in power too long. There were the inevitable scandals. Some of the close friends whom he trusted had predictably eaten too well at the public trough. The scandals, though they did not touch Truman personally, brought back the scent of the Pendergast machine. The liberal wing of his own party, led by Jimmy Roosevelt, the late president’s most liberal son, had tried desperately to draft Dwight Eisenhower, even though most of the people who liked Ike had no earthly idea what his politics were, and despite Eisenhower’s own clear rejection of a race. No one seemed to want Truman to head the ticket. “We don’t want to run a race with a dead Missouri mule,” said Governor Ben Laney of Arkansas.

  The 1948 election turned out to be crucial in a way that no one understood at the time, and fateful as well because of the bitterness it created in a party that suffered its fifth straight defeat. The Republicans were prohibitive favorites. Truman, said Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of the country’s most powerful publisher, at the Republican convention, where they were celebrating the fall victory even before the summer was over, was “a gone goose.” Every knowledgeable political expert had conceded the election to the heavily favored Tom Dewey, who was considered admirable, if not likeable. Early in the campaign the Republican high command had even decided that it would be a waste of the party’s money to continue polling, because the outcome was such a sure thing. One major pollster, Elmo Roper, announced in early September that he too would stop polling because the election was a foregone conclusion: “Thomas E. Dewey is almost as good as elected…. That being true I can think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend that he is witnessing a neck-and-neck race.” All of this had a considerable effect on Dewey himself. When another Republican visited Dewey at his Pawling, New York, farm, Dewey showed him the Roper statement and then said, “My job is to prevent anything from rocking the boat.” Clearly the principal aim of the campaign was not so much to define what a mid-century Republican victory would mean as to avoid making a mistake. That, of course, was in its own way a terrible mistake, even though the Democratic Party seemed badly fragmented. It had split three ways, and thereby on paper at least seemed unusually vulnerable: the far left going off with Henry Wallace; while the Southern Democrats, or Dixiecrats, as they would be known, followed Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. None of that seemed to bother Truman very much. Certainly, it made things harder, although the symbols of a party unraveling were far more dramatic than the unraveling itself. (At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Washington in February 1948, Senator Olin Johnston, a Democrat from South Carolina, bought a large table, which because his wife was on the arrangements committee was set up right in front of the podium. Then, because the dinner would not be segregated, the Johnstons kept the table but made sure that no one showed up—a deliberate insult to the sitting president. “We paid $1,100 to keep this table vacant,” one of their friends said.)