The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read online

  What did bother Truman as he approached the fall campaign was that the Democratic Party, though it had been in office for sixteen years, had absolutely no money, and no one was willing to serve as its finance committee chairman. It was an additional but hardly needed reminder of how slim the Democratic chances were. On September 1, 1948, with the start of the campaign two weeks away, Truman had summoned eighty Party luminaries—men with clout and access to money—to the White House to talk about their financial problems. Only fifty had showed up. The president had then asked for a volunteer to run the finance committee. No one stepped up. The next day Truman called Louis Johnson and pleaded with him to take the job. Johnson agreed to do it. He was a classic example of a certain Washington type, a wheeler-dealer, a self-made man with an inflated sense of his political abilities and possibilities. Because he saw no limits to his ability, Johnson tended to move aggressively into any power vacuum he found. He intended when Truman’s presidency was finished to run for the presidency himself. His political base was his connection with the American Legion, whose senior officer he had been and whose views on foreign policy he tended to reflect. “He was a gambler,” said Jean Kearney, who had worked for the Democratic National Committee that summer. He got into the business of raising money for Truman, she added, “in a cold blooded, calculating way—he gambled that Truman might win, and if he raised money for him, it would advance his own standing as a Washington lawyer and national figure.”

  At that moment Truman’s standing was so low as to be off the charts, and the Democrats were without money, seriously burdened by debt. Johnson came in and signed a personal note for $100,000, which allowed the party to get out of debt and for Truman’s train, scheduled to leave Union Station for its whistle-stop tour of the country on September 17, to depart on time, and go farther than Pennsylvania, which for a time had seemed likely to be the last stop. Johnson did a remarkable job as finance chairman, raising more than $2 million in two months. When the campaign was over, Truman was deeply in his debt, which was why, when James Forrestal came apart emotionally, Johnson got the Defense portfolio.

  The lack of money as they began the 1948 campaign was more important than the party’s interior ideological divisions. The Wallace campaign, from the left, actually gave Truman protection against charges that he might be too far left, since no one was attacking him harder than the Communists and their fellow travelers. As for the Dixiecrats, they carried only four Southern states, for a total of thirty-nine electoral votes. Truman’s special strength that year was that he never lost faith in himself or in the American people. He campaigned vigorously in blunt and simplistic terms. Economic issues were still primal. Before Truman started on his campaign, Vice President Alben Barkley had told him, “Go out there and mow ’em down.” “I’ll mow ’em down, Alben,” Truman had reportedly answered, “and I’ll give ’em hell.” Somehow that part—about giving them hell—had gotten out, and the crowds loved it. There was always someone at every stop egging him on, yelling “Give ’em hell, Harry,” and he did just that, and the American people responded enthusiastically. If he could not be Roosevelt, then he had found the perfect role, the cocky little underdog, his back to the wall, fighting back against the big boys. He had not exactly sought that image, but the role suited both him and the era perfectly.

  Everyone had been sure that he was finished, except the candidate himself. In the 1948 campaign he managed to define himself in the eyes of his fellow citizens in a way he had been incapable of doing in the previous three and a half years. It was one of the last political campaigns to be conducted from trains, a whistle-stop visit to the American people, often in small towns, where Truman felt an easy affinity with the crowds gathered around the caboose. It was a very comfortable incarnation, utterly authentic. “He is good on the back of the train,” his shrewd Democratic colleague Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House, once noted, “because he is one of the folks. He smiles with them and not at them, laughs with them and not at them.”

  His gritty, earthy campaign was carried out so close to the voters that it took place under the radar screen of the taste-making part of the media and the top people in the Republican Party (and even many in his own party). The Republicans were already overconfident, given the poor Democratic showing in the 1946 midterm elections, and they believed the myth of Truman’s incompetence. Dewey helped out by running a disastrous campaign. “The Dewey campaign,” said Clarence Buddington Kelland, a Republican national committeeman from Arizona, “was smug, arrogant, and supercilious.” For Dewey campaigned as if he were the incumbent, Truman the challenger, and the Democrats a minority party. His speeches were boring and full of truisms. Some aides, like Herbert Brownell, blamed his wife for not wanting him to engage in partisan attacks because she wanted him to seem as presidential as possible, above the base quality of politics. If that were true, it would not have been the first time she had been a decisive force in terms of his image. Other aides had argued for years that he should shave off his trademark mustache—it had been an asset when he was a tough district attorney, but as a presidential candidate it made him look cold and hard. “His face was so small and the mustache was so large,” Brownell lamented years later. But Mrs. Dewey liked the mustache, and so it stayed.

  Dewey was in fact an exceptionally able man, well prepared for the presidency after six years as governor of New York—he would eventually be elected for three terms—essentially the same political staircase Roosevelt had taken to the nation’s highest office. At forty-six he was young and seemingly modern—the first presidential nominee born in the twentieth century. He had started as a Mr. Clean, a prosecutor intent on going after the New York mob, and perhaps, some critics thought, that was the problem. It had been a role that demanded a certain icy briskness, a manner invaluable to a prosecutor in front of a jury, that was not necessarily attractive in a presidential candidate, where an instinctive, tangible humanity is of the essence. He looked, said the acerbic Alice Roosevelt Longworth in a quip that seemed to cling to him, like “the little man on the wedding cake.” He was, said one longtime associate, “cold. Cold as an icicle in February.” Even on his campaign train, surrounded by other Republican pols, he would excuse himself at a certain point so he could lunch alone. “Smile, Governor,” a photographer called to him during the campaign. “I thought I was,” he answered.

  Nor was his personal style, or lack thereof, his only problem. The terrible fault lines of the Republican Party were another. To the isolationists, he was the living symbol of everything that was wrong with their party. Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune hated him for his internationalism and for his defeat in the 1944 election, and constantly belittled him. In what turned out to be the most critical decision of the campaign, he held back from taking up the only issue that might have excited them, that of subversion, and refused to make it a central part of his campaign. Indeed, at a key moment in a debate with Harold Stassen during the Oregon primary fight, he had opposed outlawing the Communist Party. It would, he said—and he was a law-and-order man—only serve to drive the Communists underground. Other prominent Republicans, beginning to sense the blood in the water, and knowing they were in trouble on economic issues, pushed him to use the Communists-in-Washington charge. William Loeb, the right-wing New Hampshire publisher, and Senator Styles Bridges, who was Loeb’s man in the Senate as well as the Republican national campaign manager, pleaded with Dewey to use the subversion issue against Truman and the Democrats. He listened to them carefully and then, in the words of one of his campaign aides, Hugh Scott, said he would “fleck it lightly.” Instead he thought it demeaning to accuse the president of the United States of being soft on Communism. He was not, he told Senator Styles Bridges, going to go around “looking under beds.”

  His campaign was uniquely bland. Even as Truman was drawing ever larger crowds, Dewey continued making the same curiously antiseptic, passionless speeches. His campaign, wrote the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier Journal, c
ould be “boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead.” Still, victory seemed such a sure thing. The media, which in those pre-television days was still the press corps, helped to make Truman’s victory a great surprise because its members spent so much time interviewing one another and ignoring what was happening right in front of them. In mid-September, for example, Joseph Alsop, then an important syndicated columnist with a home base on the influential New York Herald Tribune, had witnessed two events: Truman’s speech at the national plowing contest in Iowa, before an enthusiastic audience of seventy-five thousand—the president was sharp, focused, and very much on the attack—and soon after, a Dewey speech to a disappointingly small crowd of about eight thousand at Drake University, also in Iowa. A reporter who was responding to political nuance out in the field might have sensed something was up, but Alsop did not. “There was something sad about the contrast between the respective campaign debuts here in Iowa,” he wrote. “The Truman show was threadbare and visibly unsuccessful—the Dewey show was opulent. It was organized down to the last noise-making device. It exuded confidence. The contest was really too uneven. After it was over one felt a certain sympathy for the obstinately laboring president.”

  In mid-October, Newsweek polled fifty political writers scattered throughout the country. Every single one predicted a Dewey win. The Truman people knew the article was coming, but the headline, “Fifty Political Experts Predict a Dewey Victory,” was disheartening nonetheless. Only one man did not appear to be bothered by it, the candidate himself. “Oh those damned fellows; they’re always wrong anyway,” he said. “Forget it, boys, and let’s get on with the job.” On the eve of the election, the press was still getting it wrong. Alistair Cooke, of the Manchester Guardian, titled his last preelection piece “Harry Truman—Study of a Failure,” and the people who put out the then-influential Kiplinger newsletter devoted their preelection issue to “What Dewey Will Do.”

  In the end Truman won relatively handily: 24.1 million votes to Dewey’s 21.9 million; he carried twenty-eight states, with 303 electoral votes, to Dewey’s sixteen, with 189 electoral votes, and he would have carried Dewey’s home state of New York if Wallace had not siphoned off votes on the left. It was one of the great upsets in American political history. The newly reelected president celebrated famously by holding up for photographers a copy of the Chicago Tribune with the headline “Dewey Beats Truman.” The comedians had a field day. “The only way a Republican can get in the White House now is to marry Margaret Truman,” Groucho Marx said.

  For the Republicans, it was the apocalypse. Roosevelt was gone, but the Democrats, guided by the little haberdasher about whom they had felt such total contempt, had still won. In addition the Democrats had gained nine seats in the Senate. They had scored a miraculous victory, but there would be a brutal price to pay, and foreign policy—or more accurately, loyalty and security as they affected foreign policy—would be where it would come due, the area where the Republicans found fertile ground.

  That Truman was a truly skilled, superior politician, that he had managed deftly to work most of the traditional Democratic groups while cutting into the Republican hold on the farm states, did not dawn on many of his opponents for a long time—he had to leave the White House before many of them realized how talented he really had been. “I don’t care how it is explained. It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House,” said Bob Taft, in words that helped explain why Truman had won. Walter Lippmann, the noted political columnist, thought Truman did not have the soul or spirit or belief of a true New Dealer, but that he had shrewdly kept the Roosevelt political alliance together. To the Republican conservatives, the idea that he could triumph, when it was so clearly their turn, had been unthinkable. (One of the best books written about that election was in fact titled Out of the Jaws of Victory.) Afterward they blamed Dewey and the liberal wing of their party for having run another me-too race; though it is likely that, in the climate of that moment, if Truman had run against their favorite, Robert Taft, the gap might have been even wider.

  In retrospect it is impossible to underestimate the immense impact on the Republican Party of the Truman victory—that and the desperate need to find a new issue, which it created, and the decision that the issue would be the fall of China or, in a broader sense, subversion in Washington. What might have happened if Dewey had won, whether the essential bipartisanship that had existed for almost a decade might have continued with only minor adjustments, and whether the bitter accusations of treason against senior officials might have been greatly tempered, remains a fascinating question. If Dewey had been president and John Foster Dulles his secretary of state, would the Republican right have gone after them anywhere near as cruelly as they went after Truman and Acheson? Might the nation have escaped the ugly fratricidal charges that became known as the McCarthy period, but which were broader in what they represented than the charges issued by the Wisconsin senator? Might Dewey as commander in chief in the years to come have had far more latitude in dealing with (and if necessary relieving) an obstinate Douglas MacArthur, a Republican hero? Or might MacArthur, aware that he had less political leverage under Dewey than Truman, have operated with more respect for his superiors?

  As the Democrats celebrated Truman’s victory, few bothered to ponder what the loss of five elections in a row might mean to the minority party, many of whose most important figures now worried that they might be part of a permanent minority party. For the Republicans, the defeat meant no more Mr. Nice Guy. If they were blocked politically by a blue collar American economy and the rise—and political muscularity—of organized labor, then they would no longer fleck the issue of subversion lightly. Loyalty and anti-Communism would be their new themes, the mantra of attack central to their campaigns. To this end they would be helped greatly by forces outside anyone’s control, most particularly the implosion of the government of Chiang Kai-shek, which would finally give them their defining issue. Domestic politics were about to grow far more bitter. The charge against the Democrats would be twenty years of treason.

  15

  ALL OF THIS—the rise of China as a major domestic political issue, the increasingly polarized debate about American foreign policy, and the fact that the Democratic administration, no matter how hard-line in the view of some of its critics on the left, was being accused of being soft—meant the Korean War was never seen in isolation as just a small war in a small country; it was never just about Korea. It was always joined to something infinitely larger—China, a country inspiring the most bitter kind of domestic political debate. As the Truman administration sent troops to Korea, there was always a vast dark unanswered question haunting them, which was the threat of the entry of Chinese Communist troops into the war, something the president and most of the men around him greatly feared, and that the general commanding in the field and some of his supporters seemed on occasion ready to welcome. The president thus was taking the country into a difficult war with his hands tied. He was also, though no one liked to admit it, politically on the defensive, which was why he had no choice over who his commanding general was going to be.

  Even within his administration there had been a constant squabble over China from the moment that Louis Johnson had come aboard and had begun to take on Acheson. The two men started arguing over aid to Taiwan as soon as Johnson entered the cabinet. Just four days after the North Koreans had crossed the border, Senator Robert Taft, the Republican leader, gave a very emotional speech on the floor of the Senate, attacking Truman for not seeking congressional approval to go to war. Taft also said that the North Korean invasion showed that the Acheson policies on Asia were seriously flawed and that the administration was soft on Communism, and called for Acheson’s resignation. A few hours after Taft’s speech, Averell Harriman, who had been summoned back from Europe by Truman to help Acheson, happened to
be in Johnson’s office. The phone rang and Johnson took a call—from Bob Taft. Johnson thereupon praised the speech lavishly (especially the part about Acheson resigning). “That was something that needed to be said,” he told Taft. Harriman was absolutely shocked—it was like being behind the lines, listening in on the leaders of the enemy. He was even more stunned when Johnson suggested that if Harriman played ball with him he would help make him secretary of state. Harriman immediately told Truman what had happened, and it was the beginning of the end for Johnson as secretary of defense.