The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  ***

  The valor of individuals and units could not obscure the central fact: MacArthur’s men had been dealt a stunning defeat, “the worst,” Time said, “the United States has ever suffered.” Correspondent Homer Bigart declared that “Unsound deployment of United Nations forces and a momentous blunder by General MacArthur helped insure the success of the enemy’s strategy.” An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune, a Republican paper, described the rout as a “colossal military blunder” which had demonstrated that MacArthur “can no longer be accepted as the final authority on military matters.”

  MacArthur took a different view. Although he was deeply depressed—“near panic,” Acheson thought, reading his telecom messages—he couldn’t see that he could be held responsible. On the fourth day of the Chinese blitz his communiqué recognized that “We face an entirely new war,” and he seemed to be attributing it to bad faith in Peking. The enemy drive, he declared, had “shattered the high hopes we had entertained that the intervention of the Chinese was only of a token nature on a volunteer and individual basis as publicly announced.”

  At the end of the first week in December, while the Eighth Army was still in disarray and the 1st Marine Division was pinned in around the Chosin Reservoir, he told the Joint Chiefs that his men were reaching the end of their strength. He could see no alternative to “steady attrition leading to final destruction” unless the terms of the U.N. commitment were changed. The new situation, he said, “calls for political decisions and strategic plans in implementation thereof adequate fully to meet the realities involved.” Translated from MacArthurese, this meant that he wanted the one thing no one in Washington or Lake Success could give him—freedom to invade Manchuria. To Acheson, in Washington, the communiqués from Tokyo “depicted MacArthur in a blue funk, sorry for himself, complaining of the restrictions against expanding the war, and sending to press and Pentagon what Lovett called ‘posterity papers.’” No doubt. The general never forgot that he would be a figure in history. In the Dai Ichi Building, however, his request for authority to cross the Yalu made sense. There was no other way to win the war.

  Unfortunately, winning it was out of the question. The nature of hostilities had changed since 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had changed it. In a world with weapons capable of inflicting megadeaths, war was no longer the last argument of kings and presidents; if it spread and became global, it would mean the end of the human race. To be sure, MacArthur’s enemies in Korea had no U-235 bombs, but their ally in Moscow did, and that in itself was enough to put a checkrein on him. There were other reasons, equally persuasive. The other fifteen members of the United Nations with men in his command wanted no part of a wider war. And even if the United States was prepared to discard the mantle of U.N. approval and go it alone, the logic of its global strategy argued against further Asian entanglement. A Manchurian campaign would have brought a sharp increase of anti-Americanism among nations in the emerging Third World and a virtual halt to American aid in the rebuilding of Europe.

  If MacArthur couldn’t win without crossing the Yalu—and clearly he now could not—new dilemmas arose. A United Nations defeat was unthinkable. At the same time, the two great adversaries could not, in the present circumstances, walk away. The mad solution, then, was war with neither triumph nor subjugation—a long, bloody stalemate which would end only when the exhausted participants agreed to a truce. That, in effect, is what ultimately happened, and in light of the later experience in Vietnam it seems bearable. At the time it was infuriating, especially to MacArthur, a proud officer steeped in nineteenth-century concepts of honor, who with every fiber of his being believed, as he would soon tell his countrymen, that “In war there is no substitute for victory.”

  Christmas was unreal that December. If you belonged to the swing generation and weren’t a “two-time loser”—a World War II veteran trapped by reserve status into fighting the new war, too—your children were just becoming old enough to give the season a special charm and poignancy. The threat of the mushroom cloud hung over them, too. The number one tune on the hit parade was a lugubrious ballad called “The Tennessee Waltz.” While you shopped for gifts among the agitated but strangely silent crowds and wondered whether there would even be a Christmas in 1951, loudspeakers moaned:

  I was waltzing with my darlin’ to the Tennessee Waltz

  When an old friend I happened to see

  I introduced him to my loved one, and while they were waltzing,

  My friend stole my sweetheart from me….

  The headlines in kiosks were odd, even grotesque. While Chinese soldiers and young Americans were killing one another on the far side of the Pacific, a Chinese Communist delegation arrived in Lake Success to state their case. Between the U.N. sessions, one read, General Hu Hsiu-chuan and his thirteen aides bought Mixmasters and nylons for their wives and books on atomic bombs, presumably for themselves. A Montana draft board refused to allow the induction of any more boys until MacArthur was given nuclear weapons and the right to use them. Word reached Washington that a Soviet diplomat had assured Peking that Russia would enter the war if Manchuria were bombed. In a subsequent press conference the President hinted that atomic bombs might be used in Korea, and that MacArthur might be the man to decide when. That brought Prime Minister Clement Attlee over on the next plane from London. Truman told him to forget it, he hadn’t said anything like that, it was all a rhubarb. Nevertheless, Attlee returned home looking grim. He had learned something else. Both Truman and Acheson had confided that the Korean situation looked hopeless. The President had just instructed MacArthur: “We consider that the preservation of your forces is now the primary consideration. Consolidation of forces into beachheads is concurred in.”

  Administration figures in the White House, the Pentagon, and the New State Building were quietly frantic. The President presided over a council of war every morning, as soon as that day’s communiqués were in. Telecom circuits to the Dai Ichi Building were in use twenty-four hours a day. The National Security Council was in almost constant session. And all of it appeared to be in vain. Truman covered memorandum pages with his random thoughts. On one surviving page from that Christmas he scrawled: “…conference after conference on the jittery situation facing the country. Attlee, Formosa, Communist China, Chiang Kai-shek, Japan, Germany, France, India, etc. I have worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is near.”

  It was the worst year’s end since the Bulge in 1944. The Communists recrossed the 38th Parallel the day after Christmas. Three days later the Joints Chiefs told MacArthur that while “a successful resistance [to aggression] would be of great importance to our national interest,” it wasn’t worth “serious losses.” If he was forced back to the Kum River, they told him, they would order him “to commence a withdrawal to Japan.” Replying on December 30, he called upon the administration to “recognize the state of war imposed by the Chinese authorities.” It was his recommendation to follow this up by “dropping from 30 to 50 atomic bombs on air bases and other sensitive points” in Manchuria, and landing an amphibious force of 500,000 Chinese Nationalist troops from Formosa, supported by two divisions of U.S. Marines, at either end of the border between Korea and China. He added that further Communist incursions into Korea should be precluded “by laying down, after the defeat of the Chinese,” a belt of radioactive cobalt all along the Yalu.4

  That same Saturday South Koreans abandoned Seoul for the second time since spring. Temperatures along the Parallel fell below zero and stayed there. The Communists attacked every night. MacArthur’s lines bent and began to buckle, and on New Year’s Eve, at the very hour of “Auld Lang Syne,” the greatest onslaught of all came billowing down through the dense snow and sailed into the U.N. lines.

  III

  SOWING THE WIND

  1951–1960

  EIGHTEEN

  A House Divided

  Seoul fell again on January 4, 1951. Once more the Communists achieve
d a major breakthrough, cutting off the U.S. 2nd Division at Wonju in the center of the Korean peninsula and rupturing the entire U.N. front. Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, MacArthur’s new Eighth Army commander, had 200,000 men—half of them Koreans—to match the enemy’s 400,000. In Washington Acheson was depressed by “the stench of spiritless defeat.”

  The U.N. lines held. Ridgway plugged the Wonju gap, throwing in his reserves, exploiting his superiority in the air, and adroitly moving in troops from his flanks. By the middle of January the fury of the enemy’s New Year’s Eve drive had been spent, and in the last week of the month the U.N. went over to the counteroffensive. The end of February found the Eighth Army back in the outskirts of Seoul. Ridgway recaptured the city on the night of March 14–15, and two weeks later the two great armies again squatted opposite one another on the 38th Parallel, almost exactly where they had been three months earlier—or, for that matter, nine months earlier, at the outbreak of the war.

  A generation still flushed by the mighty triumphs of World War II and dazzled more recently by the miracle at Inchon could not accept the stalemate gracefully. To many Americans, the language of containment—the advocacy of limited objectives as an alternative to unlimited warfare—sounded sour and heretical. A Life editorial rejected “the pap” and the “pernicious fallacy” of “‘coexistence’ with Soviet communism.” China lobbyists scorned administration reluctance to invade Manchuria as “appeasement,” and ultraconservative Republicans found Dean Acheson’s calls for restraint just short of treason.

  Prewar isolationism was now passing through an extraordinary transformation. In December, as thirty-three divisions of Chinese began pouring through the sieve of MacArthur’s defenses, two isolationists had publicly washed their hands of the Korean expedition. Speaking in Charlottesville, Virginia, on December 12, Joseph P. Kennedy had called upon his countrymen to “mind our own business and interfere only when someone threatens… our homes.” Herbert Hoover had then joined Kennedy on December 17. American arms, he reasoned, could never triumph in a global conflict with Communist armies, but U.S. air and sea power could dominate the oceans and defend North and South America. He recommended that they resign themselves to that, meantime feeding “the hungry of the world” and—Hoover’s perennial solution to national crises—balancing the budget.

  Alert isolationologists noted something new, however. Hoover’s go-it-alone hypothesis wasn’t as lonely as it at first seemed and was not, indeed, confined to the western hemisphere. He wanted to hold the Atlantic and Pacific “with one frontier on Britain and the other on Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines.” On the Senate floor Robert A. Taft, Hoover’s successor as leader of the Republican right, made the same concession. Taft accepted the need to protect “the island democracies” if they were attacked and if a successful defense was possible. The Hoover-Taft doctrine, variously called the principle of Fortress America or Continentalism, was being set forth by New Year’s Day as a viable alternative to NATO. The argument over which was best came to dominate all other news from Capitol Hill. Newspapermen called it the Great Debate.

  The immediate issue before the country was an appropriation for four U.S. divisions which Truman had pledged to NATO. On January 5, 1951, Taft told the Senate, “The commitment of a land army to Europe is a program never approved by Congress into which we should not drift.” Three days later Senator Wherry introduced Senate Resolution 8, opposing the assignment of U.S. ground forces to Europe pending the adoption of congressional policy, and on February 15 a majority of House Republicans signed a manifesto endorsing Hoover’s Continentalism. Taft’s adversaries were determined to depict him as an obstructionist, but what they failed to understand, and he neglected to clarify, was the prop behind his whole position: the fact that the Constitution assigned war-making powers to Capitol Hill, not the White House. He did not mean to hobble the executive branch. On January 15 he declared that he was “quite prepared to sit down with the President… or anyone on the majority side, and try to work out a program which could command the unanimous and consistent support of the people of the United States.” But Truman now had no intention of sharing the growing powers of the modern Presidency, accumulated through precedents dating back to Roosevelt’s Hundred Days.

  From the perspective of the 1970s, one of the most remarkable aspects of the debate was the tacit agreement on both sides to accept certain postulates which, twenty years later, were far from being accepted as eternal truths. “The free world” was a phrase favored by administration rhetoricians as well as those on the Hill, and by unanimous consent it included Chiang’s Formosa, Rhee’s South Korea, Bao Dai’s Vietnam, Salazar’s Portugal, Farouk’s Egypt, Franco’s Spain, Batista’s Cuba, Perón’s Argentina, French Algeria, the military dictatorship ruling Haiti, and all European colonies in Africa and Asia. Continentalists and internationalists alike assumed that any application of U.S. military power would be benign, and that no matter who won the debate, the American people would accept the result without demonstrations, protests, or even discussion. All debaters took it for granted that Communism was monolithic—that a central intelligence guided all Red activities, from Shanghai to the Elbe, so that any move, anywhere, by any Marxist, was presumed to have been made after calculating its effect on all of the free world. So closely held was this extraordinary belief that afterward President Truman would write in his memoirs:

  We were seeing a pattern in Indo-China and Tibet timed to coincide with the attack in Korea as a challenge to the Western world. It was a challenge by the Communists alone, aimed at intensifying the smoldering anti-foreign feeling among most Asian peoples. Our British allies and many statesmen of Europe saw in the Chinese moves a ruse to bring to a halt American aid in the rebuilding of Europe.

  The debate arose over substantive disagreements between Hoover-Taft Republicans and Truman-Acheson Democrats, but it was far from being a party issue. Joseph Kennedy was still a Democrat; so were Senators George and Douglas, both of whom held that a President could not send soldiers abroad without congressional approval. Republican Senators Lodge and Knowland, on the other hand, believed that since the Senate had already approved of NATO in principle, Truman could provide the troops to implement it. Thomas E. Dewey, Earl Warren, Harold Stassen, and John Foster Dulles also threw their weight behind NATO, and in the end it was testimony by a future Republican President which determined the outcome of the debate.

  The witness was Eisenhower. General Marshall had spoken eloquently of the need for what was being called “collective security,” but Marshall had been identified with Roosevelt-Truman policies too long to be considered above the battle. This was not true of Eisenhower, who had left Columbia to become supreme commander of the western European defense force only the week before Christmas. There was, he told Congress, no acceptable alternative to “the rearmament and defense of western Europe.” He reported that the will to resist Stalin was strong among Europeans, recommended that the United States assume leadership of the North Atlantic alliance, and urged a larger U.S. military presence in Europe, with no congressional strings attached to future increases.

  Taft protested that this would make the matter “more hazy and indefinite and uncertain in outline,” but the debate was over, and he had lost it. As James Reston observed in the New York Times, Eisenhower had what Acheson lacked, “political support in the country.” Moreover, he had “Republican support, a commodity that has been in short supply at the State Department ever since Senator McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, invaded West Virginia last spring.” Wherry’s resolution was withdrawn, and on April 4 Congress accepted a substitute measure approving the dispatch of the four divisions to Europe. The President was admonished not to send more without “further congressional approval,” but there was nothing to stop his doing it.

  It had been a hard winter for Republicans. Out of office for eighteen years, and unaware of the political strength gathering behind General Eisenhower, they looked toward more bleak sea
sons ahead. McCarthy was now the most famous figure in the party. In November he had gone into Maryland to purge Millard Tydings. It had been a disgraceful campaign. Tydings had been opposed by John Marshall Butler, a Republican nonentity. Backing Butler, McCarthy and the Washington Times-Herald pooled their talents to produce a one-issue tabloid called From the Record. It appeared on every Maryland doorstep the night before the election. In it was every shabby lie McCarthy had used against the Democratic senator, the whole topped off by a fake photograph doctored to make it appear that Tydings was shaking hands with Earl Browder. Tydings lost by 40,000 votes. He had been considered invincible. If he could be eliminated, no one was safe. Looking around at his senatorial colleagues on the morning after the election, a senior Democrat asked, “For whom does the bell toll?” He answered dryly, “It tolls for thee.”

  The following month an incident at Washington’s Sulgrave Club offered a sign of how far Lincoln’s party had fallen. Leaving a dinner there on the eve of Drew Pearson’s fifty-third birthday, Senator Nixon found a drunken Senator McCarthy in the men’s room, beating up Pearson. “This one’s for you, Dick,” McCarthy jeered, belting the columnist in the face. He added, “I’m going to prove a theory. If you knee a man in the balls hard enough, blood’ll come out of his eyeballs.” Nixon stepped in and said, “Let a Quaker stop this fight.” He took McCarthy’s arm. “Come on, Joe,” he said, “it’s time for you to go home.” McCarthy said, “No, not till he goes first. I’m not going to turn my back on that son of a bitch.” After Pearson had gone, McCarthy confessed to Nixon that he couldn’t remember where he had left his car. For a half-hour the two of them searched the area, the California senator reading license plates while the Wisconsin senator lurched after him in the dark. Nixon found it and McCarthy roared off. It would have been better for Joe to sleep it off before driving, just as it would have been better for party morale if some other Republican had won the allegiance of millions, but the party had little choice; it had run out of idols some time ago.