Ten days after MacArthur’s dismissal public opinion polls noted the first signs of a decline in his popularity. Simultaneously, another Communist offensive burst upon the U.N. line in Korea. It came as no surprise to Ridgway. Observing the ominous buildup behind the enemy’s earthworks, he had ordered a salient thrust forward into the middle of them. The salient fell to the Chinese in the first phase of their new push, and over the next two weeks, as one ROK unit after another broke and ran, the Eighth Army once more reeled backward across the 38th Parallel. But the Reds again failed to break through. After a month they paused, exhausted, whereupon General James A. Van Fleet reversed the momentum of battle with a skillful counterattack. No sooner had he straightened the line than the Chinese bent it southward. Ridgway bent it right back. By the end of May 1951, he had cleared South Korea of Communist troops, and the jagged front stretched across the waist of the Korean peninsula, from the Sea of Japan on the east to the Yellow Sea on the west. The western anchor for both armies lay near the obscure village of Panmunjom.
The fighting was grim, colorless, and depressing. To enliven it, Ridgway’s staff gave geographical features homely American names—“the Kansas-Wyoming Line,” “the Utah Line,” “Porkchop Hill,” “the Punch Bowl”—a practice which would ultimately lead to Vietnam’s grotesque “Operation Cedar Rapids” and “Operation Attleboro.” Gone were World War II’s crisp code words: Torch, Husky, Overlord, Anvil, Dragoon, Iceberg. If the horrors of war could not be liquidated, it seemed, military public relations men would wrap them in euphemisms until they had been thoroughly Americanized. Like the ubiquitous comic books and the turkey dinners served in foxholes on Thanksgiving, battlefield nomenclature would remind the men of home.
People at home stopped following news about the war. Suspecting that literally no one was reading about it any more, the editors of an Oregon newspaper ran one war story two days in a row—the same text, same byline, same head, and even the same position, halfway down column two on page one. Their hunch was confirmed; not a single subscriber noticed the repetition. In the Nebraska town of Hastings, Eric Goldman reported, an Army corporal named William Jensen, who had been shot in the thigh during the first Chinese attack, limped downtown, stared at the prosperous stores on Second Street, and said, “Man, I never saw anything like it. This town is just one big boom.”
It was; all America was. Although at war abroad, the country had been neither invaded nor attacked, and nothing cherished was in peril. Unlike Kipling’s nineteenth-century Tommy Atkins, who also fought in distant lands, the American soldier did not even have the feeling that he was contributing to the glory of empire. He was fighting battles whose sole objective was peace in another land, participating in a police action whose felons were not going to be punished, and it wasn’t good enough. In James A. Michener’s later view, “starting with the Korean War in 1950 our nation developed a seductive and immoral doctrine which I questioned at the time and about which I have become increasingly dubious. The mistaken doctrine was this: that we could wage with our left hand a war in which a few men chosen at random sacrificed their lives, while with our right hand we maintained an undisturbed economy in which the fortunate stay-at-homes could frolic and make a lot of money.”
Seen in this light, the acclaim for MacArthur appears to have been an escape valve for a thwarted people. In addition it may have goaded administration peace efforts, which badly needed the energies of dedicated men. Arranging an armistice was a delicate business. Officially, the United States government had not even conceded the existence of North Korea and Communist China. The Chinese continued to insist that all its troops along the 38th Parallel were volunteers and therefore not subject to its discipline. Russia disclaimed any responsibility for the conflict. The State Department was wary of discussing peripheral issues—Formosa, Indochina, and diplomatic recognition of Peking and Pyongyang. The very fact that negotiations were under consideration would increase casualties as field commanders sparred to improve their positions. Lastly, there was no reliable go-between for peace feelers. Discretion was essential. Experience had demonstrated the impossibility of keeping a secret at the United Nations. Neutral nations, notably India, were also leaky; indeed, Krishna Menon, India’s ambassador to the U.N., was an Americophobe who seemed bent upon terms which would humiliate the United States.
George Kennan found a way out. On leave from the State Department, he called Jacob Malik from Princeton and suggested they meet for unofficial conversations in Russian. These began on May 31 at Malik’s Long Island summer home. After an awkward beginning they settled into a series of talkathons, interrupted only when Malik felt the need to “consider matters”; that is, to check with Moscow. Eventually he suggested initiatives between commanders in the field, and these were taken, although early results were discouraging. The Chinese remained suspicious. Ridgway, more tactful and less haughty than his predecessor, did persuade them to sit down in the ancient city of Kaesong, between the lines, on July 10, but quarrels about the agenda followed. In early autumn the talks were moved to Panmunjom. While they were better than nothing, communications kept breaking down. Korean hostilities dragged on through a second year of battle and into a third. American enthusiasm for the war, in Acheson’s tart phrase, had “reached an irreducible minimum.”
***
By now cold war temperatures had sunk to arctic levels. Tension between the Communist and free worlds dominated world affairs. It was a kind of pollution which was found everywhere: in novels, plays, movies, magazine articles; in newspaper serials (Herbert Philbrick’s I Led Three Lives, the account of an FBI informer who had been a Communist party member for nine years, ran in more than five hundred papers throughout the 1950s); and on radio and television. The Cincinnati Reds changed their name for a time. Social studies teachers either came down hard on the evils of “Communist slavery” or risked dismissal. The highest lecture fees went to anti-Communist zealots and the biggest Americanism awards to contestants whose reasons for loathing Communists and fellow travelers, or pinkos, were most persuasive.
Even Miss America aspirants had to state their opinions of Karl Marx, and the most popular writer of the new decade was a former Brooklyn lifeguard whose hymns to sex and anti-Communist sadism had, by the end of 1951, sold over thirteen million copies. Wiry, with a crew cut, loudly contemptuous of “longhairs,” thirty-three-year-old Mickey Spillane had published his first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury, in 1947. As he grew more prolific, turning out My Gun Is Quick, Vengeance Is Mine, One Lonely Night, and The Big Kill, he was recognized as the latest expression of the vigilante streak of violence in the American national character. Mike Hammer was more than just another tough private eye. He brought his creator $50,000 a book by killing for justice and democracy. A typical scene in One Lonely Night, which appeared in 1951 and sold three million copies, ended with the gloat:
“I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it…. They were Commies, Lee. They were Red sons-of-bitches who should have died long ago…. They never thought that there were people like me in this country. They figured us all to be soft as horse manure and just as stupid.”
The nebulous figures behind Mike were variously described as “a new McCarthy,” “another McCarthy,” or a nameless reformer who had the courage to expose Commies in government, thereby winning the hatred of disloyal Ivy League graduates. To be consistent, Mike ought to have been a Jacobin hunting aristocrats, but much of the time Spillane wasn’t coherent. Some of his passages were so dense that even the non sequitur was buried. In The Girl Hunters, while mourning for a McCarthy type named Leo Knapp, Mike reflects that “Reds just aren’t the kind who can stand a big push. Like it or not, they are still a lousy bunch of peasants who killed to control but who can be knocked into line by the likes of us. They’re shouting slobs who’ll run like hell when class shows and they know this inside their feeble little heads.” Class shows elsewhere when the auth
or, pondering the gulf between Mike and Communist peasants, muses:
Damn their stinking hides anyway. Damn them and their philosophies! Death and destruction were the only thing the Kremlin crowd was capable of. They knew the value of violence and death and used it over and over in a wild scheme to smash everything flat but their own kind.
Then, presumably to distinguish between these apostles of death and destruction, whose currency is violence and death, and the clean, decent, American way, Mike tells a female captive what will happen if she tries to kill him with a shotgun whose barrels have been plugged with heavy clay.
“The barrel would unpeel like a tangerine and you’d get that whole charge right down your lovely throat and if you ever want to give a police medical examiner a job to gag a maggot, that’s the way to do it. They’d have to go in and scrape your brains up with a silent butler and pick pieces of your skull out of the woodwork with needle-nosed pliers.”
She vomits, and he continues:
“The worst of all is the neck because the head is gone and the neck spurts blood for a little bit while the heart doesn’t know its vital nerve center is gone—and do you know how high the blood can spurt? No? Then let me tell you.”
After throwing up again she says, “Man, are you mean.” He wasn’t as mean as comic books of the time, however. As a sop to reformers and child psychologists they ran pious credos. “This magazine is dedicated to the prevention of crime and subversion,” appeared on the cover of one 1951 issue. “We hope that within its pages the youth of America will learn to know crime and treason for what they really are: sad, black, dead-end roads of fools and tears.” But its pages taught American youth a lot more than that. Graphic drawings showed Negro corpses strung up by their wrists, boys driving white-hot pokers between thighs of disloyal girls, and girls, not to be outdone, stabbing Communist criminals in the eyes with icepicks (“P-put that down!!! NO! AG, AG, AG, UGG…”).
These were recurring themes, together with rape, murder, stamping on children’s faces, and drinking the blood of the opposite sex (“As she bites into his neck he feels a burning poisonous venom seeping through his veins paralizing [sic] his every muscle…. He realizes the answer to it all!”). Phantom Lady’s specialty was tying up victims and whipping them to death. How to hurt people was another common motif. Anatomical diagrams showed everything from “Eyes—finger jab or thumb gouge” to “Arch heel stamp,” while the accompanying text explained, “There are certain spots in the body more sensitive than the rest…. The charts made for the use of government agents in training show just where those spots are and what to use against them.” Some of the tableaux offered Mike Hammerism to the illiterate, as in the illustrations accompanying this message:
So NOW you KNOW, fiends. Now you know WHY there is a ball game being played in the moonlight at midnight in the deserted Central City ball park. Look CLOSELY. SEE this STRANGE BASEBALL GAME! See the long strings of pulpy intestines that mark the base lines. See the two lungs and the liver that indicate the bases… the heart that is home plate. See Doc White bend and whisk the heart with the mangy scalp, yelling… “PLAY BALL… Batter up!” See the batter come to the plate swinging the legs, the arms, then throwing all but one away and standing in the box waiting for the pitcher to hurl the head in to him. See the catcher with the torso strapped on as a chest-protector, the infielders with their hand-mits [sic], the stomach-rosin bag, and all the other pieces of equipment that was once Central City’s star pitcher, Herbie Satten.
Seasoned readers of the comics were not surprised to learn that villainous old Doc White, who had carved Herbie up, was an enemy agent. In that episode evil had won. More often Reds were depicted dangling from lynch ropes, pistol-whipped, buried alive, fed to sharks, or dangling from the bumpers of loyal Americans’ jalopies—“These travel roads are tough on tires!” “But ya gotta admit, there’s nothing like ’em for erasing faces!” “Yeah, even Stalin couldn’t identify this meat!” The lesson was plain. Because organized society was helpless against the free world’s enemies, the only hope lay with brutal men who weren’t afraid to take the law into their own hands, men who were undeniably uncouth but obviously necessary. This was what people meant when they said, “I don’t approve of McCarthy’s methods, but he’s got the right idea.”
The right idea was to thumb your nose at authority, kick over the traces, take Commies down behind the gas works and break their necks. Ordinary men believed it because, like MacArthur, they were fed up with national policy. It was at loggerheads with everything they had learned as children, inimical to their traditions. Korea’s war without victory was but one example. America, they had been taught, avoided entangling alliances. Now they were expected to forget all that. U.S. troops were the backbone of a NATO force which would comprise fifty divisions and 4,000 warplanes by the end of 1952. To support military bases around the globe, an unprecedented proportion of the national income was being poured into military hardware. In Washington the federal bureaucracy grew larger each month. Nor was that all; having suffered through its own Depression just a few years earlier, the United States now seemed to be doling out its new wealth to poor countries all over the world. The bill for all this was being passed along to U.S. taxpayers, who grew increasingly resentful.
Where could they turn? Their only seasoned allies were in the thinning ranks of prewar isolationism. The old America Firsters shared their dismay over America’s new directions. “It’s almost unbelievable in its grant of unlimited power to the Chief Executive,” Vandenberg had written to his wife when he read the first Military Assistance Program. “…It would virtually make him the number one war lord of the earth.” Taft had voted against it because it carried “an obligation to assist in arming, at our expense, the nations of Western Europe. With that obligation, I believe it will promote war in the world rather than peace”; and Senator Forrest Donnell of Missouri had condemned the concept of collective security as a “moral commitment” that would draw the United States into other peoples’ wars.
Twenty years later those words would sound prophetic, but they did not seem so then. The right appeared to be the province of the discredited fossils who had applauded Munich. It occurred to almost no one in public life that the whole structure of international politics had become obsolescent on August 6, 1945, that the dropping of the first atomic bomb then had been a revolutionary act, and that all the panoply of diplomatic relations and military alliances—indeed, the very concept of the nation state—might now be as quaint and irrelevant as a senseless little barrack tune running through the mind of a seventy-year-old general. Armies and navies were useful only if threats to use them were believable. If a course of action has become incredible, all the assumptions based on it have lost their justification. In the atomic age, military solutions were still possible in disputes between little countries, or between little and big countries. Between great countries they meant nothing. One British military analyst saw this. Sir John Slessor said, “We have at last arrived at the point when war—in the sense of total world war as we have known it in our generation—has abolished itself as a practical instrument of policy.” The flight of the Enola Gay over Hiroshima and of her sister ship over Nagasaki had demonstrated that warfare between superpowers would be a thousandfold more ghastly than the bloodiest Spillane fiction or the most revolting comic, and nothing since then had scattered this awful cloud. On the contrary, bombs had been growing much bigger.
***
After Japan’s surrender, Los Alamos had gone into a temporary eclipse. Its celebrities left for college campuses, and key technicians moved to Albuquerque, where a new factory was about to begin assembly line production of nuclear weapons. Laboratories in the old Tech Area were stripped of equipment. Road repair was discontinued. Buildings decayed. After an inspection David Lilienthal reported to Washington that “We found a great many health hazards and fire hazards that were very damaging to morale.” Nothing seemed likely to prevent the decay of Los Alamos into a gh
ost town—and then in the early 1950s something did. Overnight streets were paved. A hospital went up, then schools, and then a library. Stores, a theater, and a community center were built around a central mall; ground was broken for a stadium; athletes were recruited for a sports club called the “Los Alamos Atomic Bombers.”
These signs of prosperity in the death business owed much to the dark, bushy-browed Hungarian named Edward Teller. His enthusiasm for ever greater explosions overcame moral qualms in the scientific community, the Pentagon, and the federal government. It is not too much to call him, as he was called, “the chief architect of the hydrogen bomb.”
The H-bomb is the ultimate in deathmanship, a missile which may be anywhere from twenty-five to a thousand times more destructive than the weapons dropped in 1945. The energy for the A-bomb comes from fission, the splitting of uranium atoms; the H-bomb’s power comes from fusion, the uniting of hydrogen atoms—the very process by which the sun gives light. Fusion can occur only at very high temperatures; therefore H-bombs are called thermonuclear weapons. Their theoretical possibilities had long been known, but after the horrors of Hiroshima conversations about them among atomic physicists were awed and guarded. The hypothetical new bomb was called the “Super.” From time to time cryptic references to it appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but the editors never defined it. In their opinion, the less the world knew about the Super, the better.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 85
