They had vowed to “unleash Chiang Kai-shek.” Eisenhower never used the phrase, but it was in the platform, and at his order the Joint Chiefs cabled the Seventh Fleet:
2 FEB 53
OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE
TO: CINCPAC PEARL HARBOR TH
INFO: CINCFE TOKYO JAPAN
THAT PORTION UR CURRENT DIRECTIVE WHICH REQUIRES YOU INSURE THAT FORMOSA AND PESCADORES WILL NOT RPT NOT BE USED AS BASES OPNS AGAINST CHI MAINLAND BY CHI NATS IS RESCINDED.
But how could Chiang reconquer the mainland? Lacking ships, how could he even reach it? Still, Eisenhower went along with the fantasy. In drafting his State of the Union message he wrote that as a consequence of Truman’s order, “the United States Navy was required to serve as a defensive arm of Communist China.” Lewis Carroll could not have turned things round more. Furthermore, talk of reopening China’s civil war was provocative; when word of it leaked through the press Anthony Eden warned the President that it might have “very unfortunate political repercussions without compensating military advantages.” Disturbed, Ike decided on the way to Capitol Hill to end the passage on a peaceful note: “Permit me to make it crystal clear this order implies no aggressive intent on our part.” What really became crystal clear was that Chiang, having been unleashed, possessed no teeth. Unhampered by Seventh Fleet patrols, Communist Chinese made a few exploratory amphibious moves and found that the Nationalists lacked strength to dominate or even make a showing in Formosa Strait. As the months passed Chiang came to miss American warships more and more, and on the first anniversary of Eisenhower’s order to the Joint Chiefs the New York Times reported the results: eleven coastal islands had been lost to the Communists. The administration had by no means heard the last of Formosa. Because of possible political ramifications in the United States, or just to ward off Democratic horse laughs, the Seventh Fleet was recalled. The term for that was “releashing Chiang.”
The Chicago platform had further vowed to “repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements.” In writing that plank Dulles, like the rest of his party’s leaders, had believed some things about the American State Department which simply were not true. They were convinced that the Communist empire had been built by Communists and Democrats at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. They had resolved to set this wrong right. In his first speech as Secretary of State Dulles advised eastern Europe that it could “count on us,” and he wrote this passage in the President’s State of the Union address: “I shall ask the Congress at a later date to join in an appropriate resolution making clear that this government recognizes no kind of commitment contained in secret understandings of the past which permit… enslavement.” The reference to Yalta, Potsdam, and Teheran was clear. When Eisenhower read it, the Republicans leaped to their feet cheering. The secret agreements did exist, then, they told one another; they had known it all along. Dulles at the time was still sure he would find the incriminating documents in some obscure vault at the State Department. But they weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere. They didn’t exist. As the truth emerged, both the President and his Secretary of State began to revise their expectations. But the Republican mastodons of the Senate were already preparing a Yalta resolution. As worded by them, it would renounce all wartime agreements. If it went through, Eisenhower realized, the position of Americans in Berlin and Vienna would be extremely awkward.
The upshot was the first serious rift between the White House and the GOP leadership on the Hill. At his February 16 weekly meeting with the Republican legislative leaders Ike presented a waffled draft prepared by him and Dulles. It was virtually meaningless; the United States would express regret over the plight of eastern Europeans and assure them that “all peaceful means” would be used to help them. Taft bridled. That wasn’t at all what he had in mind. Ike pointed out that stronger wording would, among other things, offend congressional Democrats, who would look upon it as an insult to the memory of FDR. But Taft had precisely that in mind. At the next weekly meeting between the President and the legislative leadership, on February 23, Ike and the majority leader squared off again. Taft would settle for nothing less than an outright repudiation of all agreements between Roosevelt and the Russians.
At this point an outside force intruded upon the intraparty row. It was Lyndon Johnson of Texas, the Senate’s new minority leader. Johnson advised the White House that Democrats were just as unhappy about the situation in eastern Europe as Republicans, and would be glad to join them in lamenting it. However, they had no intention of pleading guilty to something neither they nor their Presidents had done. Emmet Hughes and Assistant Secretary of State Thruston Morton sympathized, and the administration resolution went to the Hill without teeth. Bitter ultras there trotted out all their old clichés about the “betrayals” of Roosevelt and Truman. Taft joined other members of the Foreign Relations Committee in adding an amendment asserting that the measure “does not constitute any determination by Congress as to the validity or invalidity of any provisions” of agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Senate Democratic Policy Committee took this as a reflection upon Roosevelt. They rejected the amendment, and the issue was deadlocked.
Thus a central political fact of the 1950s emerged in the fifth week of the Eisenhower Presidency: Ike’s foreign policy would be backed by Democratic senators and opposed by diehards in his own party. The President, resolved to forget the past, was baffled by the ultras’ determination to hold an eternal inquest into the iniquities of Yalta. For their part, they came to believe that all their misgivings at Chicago had been justified. They saw Ike as the puppet of men like Dewey and Lodge, about whose patriotism they had grave doubts. They weren’t quite sure where Dulles stood (neither, at times, was Eisenhower), and they were vigilant for any State Department attempt to succor what Knowland called “the Trojan horse of containment.”
In 1953 Lyndon Johnson and his Democrats saved administration measures no fewer than fifty-eight times. The “enslaved peoples” resolution was not among them, however. The question would continue to bedevil Washington until 1955, when Dulles authorized the publication of all Yalta papers and chagrined Senate ultras found no campaign ammunition in them. All this had almost come to a head two years earlier. The administration draft of the resolution had again headed the agenda for the March 9, 1953, meeting between Eisenhower and the congressional leadership, but before they could meet, fate intervened and tabled it. Stalin would be giving no more orders to anyone. On March 4 he had been mortally stricken in Moscow.
***
The President was dining with Mrs. Eisenhower when the bulletin came in from Moscow Radio: “The heart of the inspired continuer of Lenin’s will, the wise leader and teacher of the Communist Party and Soviet people—Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin—has stopped beating.” The President sent formal condolences to Moscow. To the cabinet he remarked acidly the following morning, “Ever since 1946, I know all the so-called experts have been yapping about what would happen when Stalin dies and what we, as a nation, should do about it. Well, he’s dead. And you can turn the files of our government inside out—in vain—looking for any plans laid. We have no plan. We are not even sure what difference his death makes.”
Alone in his office with Emmet Hughes, he paced the oval room in a wide arc. Hughes’s notes of that hour offer an exceptional glimpse of Ike in action. He said:
Look, I am tired—and I think everyone is tired—of just plain indictments of the Soviet regime. I think it would be wrong—in fact, asinine—for me to get up before the world now to make another one of those indictments. Instead, just one thing matters: what have we got to offer the world? What are we ready to do, to improve the chances of peace?…
Here is what I would like to say.
The jet plane that roars over your head costs three-quarters of a million dollars. That is more money than a man earning ten thousand dollars a year is going to make in his lifetime. What world c
an afford this sort of thing for long? We are in an armaments race. Where will it lead us? At worse, to atomic warfare. At best, to robbing every people and nation on earth of the fruits of their own toil.
But there could be “another road before us,” he said, “the road of disarmament.” If taken it would give everyone “bread, butter, clothes, homes, hospitals, schools.” How could it be reached?
Let us talk straight: no double talk, no sophisticated political formulas, no slick propaganda devices. Let us spell it out, whatever we really offer… withdrawal of troops here or there by both sides… United Nations-supervised free elections in another place… free and uncensored air-time for us to talk to the Russian people and for their leaders to talk to us… and concretely all that we would hope to do for the economic well-being of other countries.
What do we say about the Soviet government? I’d like to get up and say: I am not going to make an indictment of them. The past speaks for itself. I am interested in the future. Both their government and ours now have new men in them. The slate is clean. Now let us begin talking to each other. And let us say what we’ve got to say so that every person on earth can understand it. Here is what we propose. If you—the Soviet Union—can improve on it, we want to hear it.
This is what I want to say. And if we don’t really have anything to offer, I’m not going to make a speech about it.
Sherman Adams believed that “The Chance for Peace,” Ike’s April 16 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, was the greatest in his career. Writing in the New Yorker, Richard H. Rovere called it “an immense triumph,” one which “firmly established his leadership in America and re-established American leadership in the world.” The New York Times found it “magnificent and deeply moving,” and even the opposition New York Post agreed that it was “America’s voice at its best.” Long afterward in the 1960s, Hughes would chiefly remember the struggle to bring it off. Dulles fought it through every draft. Once Hughes asked him whether he thought American interests would be served by any armistice in Korea. Dulles shook his head. He said, “We’d be sorry. I don’t think we can get much out of a Korean settlement until we have shown—before all Asia—our clear superiority by giving the Chinese one hell of a licking.” Hughes passed this along to Eisenhower, who snapped, “If Mr. Dulles and his sophisticated advisers really mean that they cannot talk peace seriously, then I am in the wrong pew.” Later he said, “Sometimes Foster is just too worried about being accused of sounding like Truman and Acheson.” It was a difficult speech all the way; even delivering it was agony. That day Eisenhower was suffering from a vicious stomach upset. He could hardly hold up his head and nearly collapsed at the end.
Unlike hundreds of other such addresses in the 1950s, this one launched an effective peace offensive. The Chinese were tired of fighting, too. Dulles’s rigid diplomacy had given Asia the impression that the new administration was immovable; that the Americans, as an Indian newspaper put it, were “hunting peace with a gun.” Now their President said they weren’t. A new spirit quickened at Panmunjom. More than peaceful intentions were needed to cut the knot there, of course; the negotiators were held fast in a vise of accumulated fears, hatreds and recriminations which had reached a climax in Peking’s accusations that the Americans had resorted to bacteriological warfare.4 Stalin’s death undoubtedly contributed to a solution by removing the hardest of all the hard-liners. Dulles subsequently became convinced that Peking was cowed by blunt warnings, relayed by Nehru, that the United States was planning to issue tactical nuclear weapons to U.N. field commanders. Threats that the war would soon spread to Manchuria were certainly made; Eisenhower later told Adams about them. However, Adams doubted Dulles’s dramatic assertion that the United States went “to the brink of total war” three times—in the Korean truce crisis of 1953, the Indochinese crisis of 1954, and the grave situation which arose from Mao’s threat to invade Formosa in late 1954 and early 1955. Adams wrote: “Whether the Dulles policy was actually put to three crucial tests, as the Secretary believed it was, is a matter that is open to question. I doubt that Eisenhower was as close to the brink of war in any of these three crises as Dulles made him out to be.”
In any event, Ike’s appeal to reason was at the very least one clear note in an orchestration of events which roused the men on the other side and brought them back to the bargaining table. In the first sessions of the new beginning, progress was slow. The bottleneck was the fate of 132,000 North Korean soldiers in U.S. hands. The U.S. was determined to give them the right to decide whether or not they would go home. In 1945 the Allies had delivered Russian POW’s, freed from the Germans, to Soviet commanders; many had then been sent to Siberia, and in some cases executed, for having allowed themselves to be captured. On May 7, 1952, Truman had declared: “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery.” Eisenhower was equally determined. More and more it became evident that the destiny of the POW’s would determine the outcome of the talks.
The negotiations, resumed eleven days after the President’s peace speech, dragged all through May. Holding the U.N. coalition together was becoming increasingly difficult. Some leaders of the European left thought there might be something to Mao’s bacteriological warfare charges. At the other end of the political spectrum, ultraconservatives were urging the U.S. to ignore its timid allies and answer MacArthur’s call for total victory. Ike declined. “If you go it alone in one place,” he told them, “you have to go it alone everywhere.” The most chauvinistic hawk in the U.S. camp was Syngman Rhee. The seventy-eight-year-old South Korean President refused to consider any agreement which would leave Korea divided. Rather than accept as a border the 38th Parallel or the front line, he was prepared to face certain annihilation by driving toward the Yalu without the U.N. Later Adams observed: “The endless efforts to appeal to Rhee’s sense of reason and to make him understand that the United States could not hazard a possible world war for a unified Korea left Eisenhower and Dulles limp and baffled.” The dispute with Rhee, he added, was “more nerve-racking and frustrating than the haggling with the Communists.”
The old man almost sabotaged the peace. On June 4 the Chinese and North Koreans consented to an arrangement under which prisoners who declared before a neutral Repatriation Commission that they did not wish to go home would, after a 120-day waiting period, be freed and demobilized. On June 8 a protocol was initiated, and everything seemed set when, on June 18 at two o’clock in the morning in Washington, Dulles was awakened by a call from a State Department watch officer. On Rhee’s orders guards had opened stockyard gates and released 25,000 anti-Communist North Koreans. The operation had been painstakingly prepared; South Korean police had provided the refugees with food, shelter, and civilian clothing. Dulles called the President—the only time Eisenhower was awakened during his eight years in the White House. Ike was shocked. As expected, the Communists that morning accused the U.N. of “deliberately conniving” with Rhee and demanded that the POW’s be recaptured “immediately”—an impossibility. They broke off negotiations on June 20 and launched a major offensive.
Dulles was undiscouraged. Convinced that the enemy would be receptive to new overtures, he told Ike that if the other side was as anxious for a cease-fire as he thought, “They will overlook Rhee’s impetuosity and will be content to sign an agreement, provided they are given proper assurances.” Peking confirmed him, through New Delhi. That left the assurances, which required further pressure on the intractable Rhee. Ike cabled the South Korean president that he had put the U.N. command in “an impossible situation.” He sent Walter S. Robertson, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, to talk to him. Robertson sat down with Rhee in Seoul and listened hour after hour, and then day after day, while the angry old man poured out his pent-up feelings. After Rhee had run out of steam Robertson explained the U.S. dilemma. After two weeks Rhee gave in.
***
The armistice terms, announced two weeks before the
signing ceremony, satisfied no one. After 37 months of bloodshed and 2,000,000 dead, 80 percent of them civilians and 33,629 of them Americans, Korea would be returned to its status quo ante. Rhee had gained 2,350 square miles as against Kim II Sung’s 850, but in all other respects the settlement was a draw. No principles had been vindicated. The U.N. had not even succeeded in putting through a reliable inspection system to prevent Kim from launching another attack. The end had come as a result of negotiations begun by President Truman, yet his terms for a truce had been harsher; as Paul Douglas pointed out, Truman “would have been flayed from one end of Washington to the other if he had accepted the present agreement.”
When a photographer asked Eisenhower how he felt, he said simply, “The war is over, and I hope my son is coming home soon.” The White House had no other comment on the coming truce. In official Washington only the Secretary of State spoke of it with satisfaction: “For the first time in history, an international organization has stood against an aggressor…. All free nations, large or small, are safer today because the ideal of collective security has been implemented.”
This was also the interpretation of the liberal community. Liberals then were faithful to the Roosevelt-Truman concept of world government and were determined to put the best possible face on its first effort to keep the peace. Richard H. Rovere summed up their conviction that Korea had been a blazing success:
In Korea, the United States proved that its word was as good as its bond—and even better, since no bond had been given. History will cite Korea as the proving ground of collective security, up to this time no more than a plausible theory. It will cite it as the turning point of the world struggle against Communism.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 99
