Tydings’s confidence was ebbing. He was being outfoxed and out-bludgeoned, and he was too skillful a politician not to sense it. While he was shaping the report—which would be read only by Americans already aware of McCarthy’s infamy—public support for McCarthy continued to grow. Even as Republican Margaret Chase Smith of Maine promulgated her anti-McCarthy “Declaration of Conscience,” signed by her and five other liberal Republican senators, Majority Leader Lucas, counting noses, discovered that just twelve Senate Democrats had spoken out against McCarthy. Tydings had won all the battles of reason and decency, but McCarthy had never tried to be reasonable or decent; he was a political charlatan, and his brand of quackery was sweeping the spring primaries. While the committee which had investigated him debated whether to use this adjective or that adverb, Willis Smith was ousting North Carolina Senator Frank P. Graham with a McCarthyite campaign; Congressman George A. Smathers was defeating Florida’s liberal Senator Claude Pepper with a second McCarthyite campaign; and the senatorial candidacy of California’s Helen Gahagan Douglas was being smeared by Manchester Boddy in a third McCarthyite primary—with Richard Nixon preparing yet a fourth McCarthyite campaign which would defeat her in the general election.
Thus the report was discredited before it had been written. In the end it ran pretty much as expected, accusing McCarthy of perpetrating “a fraud and a hoax” and engaging in deliberate, willful falsehoods. Knowing what it would be like, McCarthy had already branded it “a disgrace to the Senate” and “a green light to the Red fifth column in the United States.” Taft had called the proceedings a “farce,” a “whitewash,” and an insult to “a fighting Irish Marine.” Owen Brewster of Maine echoed him, Wherry assailed Acheson, and Republican National Chairman Guy Gabrielson maintained that the GOP was uncovering “spies, emissaries, agents and members of the Communist party” who “infest the government of the United States.”
By summer optimists thought they saw signs that McCarthy had run his course. The wire services were reducing his news conferences to an inch or two of type, and most papers weren’t printing that. Events in the struggle with Reds abroad had overwhelmed his sideshow; when he took the floor to brandish an “FBI report” exposing “three Communist agents” in the State Department, J. Edgar Hoover’s repudiation of the performance surprised no one. For the moment, at least, McCarthyism seemed to be finished.
It was an illusion. Against all logic, Americans by the tens of millions had come to regard Wisconsin’s junior senator as the symbol of anti-Communism, and as long as Communism remained an issue, he would be a hero to them. His arrogance continued to grow. Reminded that he had not replied to the committee’s indictment, he said, “I don’t answer charges, I make them.” A reporter asked, “Wasn’t that a classified document you were reading?” The senator snapped, “It was. I declassified it.” At a cocktail party a girl inquired, “Senator McCarthy, when did you discover Communism?” Leering, he shot back: “Two and a half months ago.”
***
While the government of the United States was engrossed in the question of how many Communists, if any, had worked in the State Department (205? 57? 108? 40? 66? 25? 1? 0?), the government of North Korea was deploying nine superbly equipped divisions to invade the almost defenseless Republic of Korea. Led by 20,000 Korean Communists who had been bloodied in the great Russo-German battles of World War II, including Stalingrad, the 120,000-man North Korea Peoples Army (NKPA) was an elite force by any military standard. Supporting its troops were 122-mm howitzers, 76-mm divisional howitzers, 76-mm self-propelled guns, 120-mm mortars, the whole family of Soviet antiaircraft guns, and every imaginable infantry weapon from antitank rifles to burp guns. Sharpening the tip of the assault spear were 150 T-34 Soviet tanks—the steel giants that had shattered Krupp’s Tigerpanzers in the Kursk salient—and clouds of Yak and Stormovik fighter planes. In the expert opinion of Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., USMC, the NKPA “was, among the Armed Forces of the Far East, probably better trained and equipped for its intended work than any other Army but Russia’s.”
Against it South Korean President Syngman Rhee could field little more than a constabulary. Ironically, the Pentagon had deliberately weakened Rhee’s 65,000-man Army of the Republic of Korea (ROK). Each of the two Koreas had repeatedly announced its intention to invade the other and unite the peninsula in blood, but although the NKPA had regularly crossed the 38th Parallel with patrols—some of them as large as 1,500 men—Washington’s main worry was seventy-five-year-old Rhee. To thwart his aggressive instincts, his ROK units were armed with ancient Japanese model 99 Mausers, short-range M-3 105-mm howitzers, obsolete 2.36-inch bazookas, no mortars larger than 81 mm, no recoilless rifles, no tanks, no offensive artillery, and no warplanes. The administration in Washington was the chief culprit in this negligence, but Capitol Hill was an accessory. Truman had earmarked sixty million dollars for South Korea in his 1950–51 budget, and Congress had cut it out. American hope for South Korean defense was vested in a U.S. Military Advisory Group. It was a frail hope; in Seoul, Rhee’s capital, the advisory officers were training ROK troops as MPs. Beyond that, the Americans provided only bombast. As late as June 13, 1950, the administration’s William C. Foster testified before a congressional committee that “the rigorous training program [in South Korea] has built up a well-disciplined Army of 100,000 soldiers, one that is prepared to meet any challenge by the North Korean forces and one that has cleaned out the guerrilla bands in South Korea in one area after another”; and in a Time interview on the very eve of hostilities, homeward-bound Brigadier General William L. Roberts, the group’s CO, called his protégés “the best damn Army outside the United States.”
It wasn’t true, and it wasn’t saying much. The greatest shock awaiting the American people was the feeble state of their own military establishment. Its decline had begun with the Wanna-Go-Home riots, which had turned postwar demobilization into a rout; the United States had “fought the war like a football game,” said General Albert C. Wedemeyer, “after which the winner leaves the field and celebrates.” Then the unification controversy had torn service morale asunder. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson announced his intention to “trim the fat out of the Armed Forces” and slashed away a lot of muscle by cutting their budgets from 30 billion dollars to 14.2 billion. The Pentagon abandoned defensive radar screens and protective devices to counter the new Russian submarines. By 1950 Russia had as many combat airplanes as the United States, four times as many troops, and thirty tank divisions to America’s one. Only one U.S. infantry division approached top combat efficiency; altogether the Army had just 592,000 men in uniform, less than half its strength on Pearl Harbor Sunday. Lastly, the four divisions of U.S. occupation troops in Japan had been allowed to deteriorate until, in the later words of General William F. Dean, they had become a flabby force accustomed to “Japanese girlfriends, plenty of beer, and servants to shine their boots.”
Their commanders could not plead ignorance of enemy intentions. Korea had an unhappy history of partitions reaching back to 108 B.C., and since V-J Day the 38th Parallel had become increasingly troubled. Apart from the patrolling back and forth and the saber-rattling of Rhee and Kim Il Sung, Rhee’s counterpart in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, the Central Intelligence Agency had alerted Washington to the probability of coming violence. CIA reports describing the immense NKPA buildup along the frontier warned that it could be justified only by plans for a large-scale offensive. If no one else read CIA briefs, the Secretary of State did; in testifying before congressional committees he had read several intelligence cables into the record, including one dated March 10, 1950, predicting that the “PA [NKPA] will attack South Korea in June 1950.” To be sure, thirty months earlier the Joint Chiefs had told the White House that “from the standpoint of military security” the United States had “little strategic interest” in Korea. It hadn’t had it then, perhaps, but any President who refused to confront fresh Communist aggression now would risk impeachmen
t. Afterward the administration pointed out that Korea had been but one of many danger spots. Berlin had been threatening to erupt, the French had faced disaster in Indochina, and Romanian and Bulgarian troops were massing on Yugoslavia’s frontiers. Administration defenders argued that it couldn’t be on its toes everywhere. Precisely. That was the trouble with containment.
***
Entering the last weekend in June 1950, the United States stirred feebly in the hundred-degree temperatures of that summer’s first heat wave. Those who could do it left their little television screens for air-conditioned theaters. Children were watching Robert Newton as Long John Silver in Walt Disney’s Treasure Island. Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth offered literate escape in hammocks. On Morningside Heights Dwight Eisenhower, president of Columbia University, holed up with The Maverick Queen, Zane Grey’s fifty-first novel, published posthumously. Dean Acheson spent the afternoon gardening on Harewood Farm, his Maryland home, and read himself to sleep after dinner. Outside, stealthy shadows flicked back and forth; since the rise of McCarthy the secretary’s hate mail had become so great that he needed bodyguards around the clock.
Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were somewhere over the Pacific, flying home from Tokyo. President Truman was also airborne early that afternoon; at 2 P.M. Saturday his aircraft Independence darted down through a bank of storm clouds and entered its glide pattern above the Kansas City municipal airfield. Two hours before, the President had dedicated Baltimore’s new Friendship International Airport (“to the cause of peace in the world”); now he expected to spend the rest of the weekend going over some family business with his brother Vivian and enjoying the company of old friends. White House correspondents had been told that the lid was on; no presidential activities were expected before Monday.
As usual, the higher echelons of the government were celebrating the President’s absence from Washington by relaxing. Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, was uncoiling at the home of Joseph Alsop. W. Bradley Connors, the department’s public affairs officer for the Far East, was playing with his children in his Washington apartment. The last place any of them might have expected new developments was the United Nations; the U.N. had been deadlocked since January, when Jacob Malik of the USSR had begun boycotting the Security Council. The U.S. Representative on the Council was Warren Austin. He was pruning his apple orchard in Vermont. His deputy, Ernest Gross, was also away from the office, supervising a teen-age party in his Manhasset home on Long Island. Trygve Lie, secretary general of the United Nations, was loafing in nearby Forest Hills.
It was early afternoon in New York, noon in the Middle West, and 4 A.M. on the faraway 38th Parallel when, as MacArthur later put it, “North Korea struck like a cobra.”
***
The summer monsoon had just begun there. Heavy rains were falling on the green rice paddies and the barren brown and gray mountain slopes when the North Korean artillery—forty miles of big guns, standing side by side—opened fire. The shelling was sporadic at first, as smaller batteries awaited flare signals from the 122-mm NKPA howitzers, but presently all artillery pieces were erupting flame, sheet after sheet of it, while officers studied the crumps to the south and corrected their ranges. Overhead, Yaks and Stormoviks winged through the warm moist air toward Seoul, less than fifty miles away. Like the Chinese, the North Koreans still used the bugle to herald charges, and with its first notes infantrymen lunged across the border toward their first objectives. Despite the rain and inevitable confusion in the darkness, NKPA General Chai Ung Jun put 90,000 men into South Korea without any traffic jams. Junks and sampans were landing amphibious troops ashore behind ROK lines to the south. Awakening to the din, South Koreans fumbled for their clothes. In a few hours they would be on the roads, hurrying away from the roar over the horizon. Some would be refugees for the rest of their lives.
Six hours later, at 8 P.M. Eastern Daylight Saving Time, Bradley Connors became the first U.S. official in Washington to hear the news. Donald Gonzales of the United Press phoned to tell him that the UP correspondent in Korea was cabling fragmentary bulletins reporting heavy North Korean attacks all along the 38th Parallel. Did State know anything about it? Not to the best of his knowledge, Connors replied, but he would find out for certain right away. Hanging up, he tried to place a call to the U.S. embassy in Seoul. It was impossible, the operator told him; Sunday morning had arrived there, and all overseas circuits were closed. Connors hurried to the C Street entrance of the New State Department Building, but before an emergency circuit could be put together the department’s communication center received a cable from John J. Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul. Stamped in at 9:26 P.M., it read:
North Korean forces invaded Republic of Korea at several places this morning…. It would appear from the nature of the attack and the manner in which it was launched that it constitutes an all-out offensive against the Republic of Korea.
Dean Rusk and John Hickerson, the department’s assistant secretary for United Nations affairs, were quickly summoned, and at 10 P.M. Hickerson awoke Dean Acheson. Hickerson proposed a special meeting of the U.N. Security Council in the morning to call for a cease-fire. Since Warren Austin was in Vermont, he added, Ernest Gross should take the initiative in New York. Acheson agreed, instructed him to summon the Security Council through Trygve Lie, and picked up the white telephone that tied him in to the White House switchboard.
In Independence the Trumans had finished their evening meal. In the library of their home on North Delaware Street, the householder had begun to yawn; it was nearly his bedtime. Nevertheless, after Acheson’s opening words—“Mr. President, I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea”—he said he would fly back at once. Better get a good night’s sleep, Acheson advised him. Apart from putting the U.N. wheels in motion, nothing could be done now; they had to wait for more information. He would call again in the morning. The President asked if he could do anything now, and Acheson said yes, as a matter of fact, he could; Louis Johnson had imposed absurd restrictions on communications between the State and Defense departments. He would like to deal directly with Secretary of the Army Frank Pace. Done, said Truman; he hung up, and the secretary began gathering in his hands the reins of American initiative. As he saw it, the chief theater of action now, even more important than the battlefield, was at Lake Success, New York.
“My God, Jack,” said Trygve Lie when Hickerson called him, “this is war against the United Nations!” And so it was. The two Koreas were wards of the U.N. The United States merely represented it in the south. At Potsdam the Big Three had agreed that the peninsula’s future would be determined in supervised elections; then the Russians had changed their minds and refused to allow U.N. commissioners above the 38th Parallel. At Acheson’s direction, his staff drafted a Security Council resolution determining that the “armed attack on the Republic of Korea by forces from North Korea” constituted “a breach of the peace” and should be terminated at once in a cease-fire. Since the Soviet boycott of the council continued to be in effect, the measure passed 9 to 0.
Sunday morning the news from Muccio was all bad. A strong NKPA tank column was driving toward Seoul and Kimpo airport, apparently advancing at will; “South Korean arms,” Acheson concluded, were “clearly outclassed.” At 12:35 P.M. he phoned Independence and asked the President to return. Before boarding his aircraft Truman had a few words for reporters: “Don’t make it alarmist. It could be a dangerous situation, but I hope it isn’t. I can’t answer any questions until I get all the facts.” Back at 1628 Pennsylvania Avenue, he ordered an immediate conference of all his diplomatic and military advisers around Blair House’s large mahogany dining table. There he made three decisions: MacArthur would be told to use all the planes and ships necessary for the evacuation of American civilians from Korea, going above the 38th Parallel if necessary; the general was to provide the ROK troops with ammunition
; and the U.S. Seventh Fleet would patrol Formosa Strait, against the possibility that the Korean thrust was a feint masking a leap to Taiwan. Had Mao pursued Chiang there a year earlier, the Americans would have stood aside. Now domestic politics made U.S. neutrality impossible.
Monday, the fifth anniversary of the United Nations, was a dark day, “a day,” said Acheson “of steadily worsening reports from Korea.” Ignoring the U.N. appeal for a cease-fire, NKPA troops were enveloping Rhee’s Seoul in a six-pronged drive. Already Rhee’s government was moving south. The roads were solid with terrified people. ROK soldiers were still running; a desperate stand at Chunchon had disintegrated with the arrival of the first T-34 tank. Dr. John Myun Chang, the Korean ambassador to the U.S., called at the White House. Spinning the big globe in his office and putting his hand on Korea, the President said, “This is the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now, there won’t have to be any next step.” Unconsoled, Dr. Chang left in tears. At 9 P.M. Truman convened another emergency session in Blair House. The “war cabinet,” as he now called it, heard Chip Bohlen and George Kennan say that Russia’s absence from the Security Council offered a great opportunity for the United States; they needn’t worry about a Russian veto. With this in mind, the President approved a new Council resolution calling upon all U.N. members to lend a hand in throwing the North Koreans back. Obviously the most help would be expected from the Americans, and Truman was prepared to provide it. With the approval of his advisers, he directed naval and Air Force units in MacArthur’s command to give direct tactical support to ROK defenders south of the 38th Parallel. At Acheson’s urging, he also increased support of French troops fighting in Indochina.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 80
