by Jim Newton
Although Stalin wanted to protect the Soviet Union from direct retaliation, he was happy to supply the North Koreans with equipment and strategic guidance. Soviet materials streamed into North Korea, and Kim massed his forces for invasion. On June 25, 1950, seven North Korean infantry divisions totaling more than ninety thousand men and an armored brigade made up of 120 Russian T-34 tanks stormed across the 38th parallel, capturing roads and railways and then moving nimbly south, crushing the surprised South Korean army—one force bound for Seoul, two others claiming the center and east coast. In Tokyo, General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.S. Far East Command, sank into depression. “All Korea,” he warned, “is lost.”
Truman was in Missouri, and the administration was scattered when the first reports reached America. To avoid showing alarm, the president completed his day’s schedule before departing for Washington. He ordered MacArthur to rush supplies to South Korea and evacuate American civilians. There was no doubt that Truman meant to fight. “If we let Korea down,” he told congressional leaders the next day, “the Soviets will keep right on going and swallow up one piece of Asia after another … If we were to let Asia go, the Near East would collapse and no telling what would happen in Europe.” In light of that threat, Truman said he had “ordered our forces to support Korea as long as we could.” Notes from the meeting record that when the president finished speaking, there were several moments of silence. The next day, armed with a UN Security Council resolution authorizing “every assistance” to the South Koreans (the Soviet Union elected to boycott the session and thus missed the opportunity to exercise its veto), Truman ordered MacArthur to use air and naval forces to strike south of the 38th parallel.
South Korea’s small army was no match for its aggressive northern neighbor. Seoul quickly fell. U.S. forces tried to stiffen the South Korean resistance, but the Americans were unprepared to fight. Without proper training or equipment, U.S. troops were overrun and fell back.
At home, a stunned nation, less than a decade from victory in World War II, now winced as its forces ran from an army few had even considered a threat. By August, the South Korean and American armies had retreated to a small corner of the southeast. Contained within the so-called Pusan Perimeter, they fought heroically and desperately for time. Defeat suddenly was possible and possibly imminent.
It was then that Douglas MacArthur executed the boldest strike of his career. Over the reservations of some of the military’s most senior officials, he led the landings at Inchon, west of Seoul, on September 15, 1950. It was an act of extraordinary daring: MacArthur committed virtually all his reserve forces to a landing at a port famous for its extreme tides, narrow channel, and daunting seawalls. His bravado was rewarded. Light defenses greeted the X Corps, which swept ashore with relative ease and then slogged its way to Seoul. North Korean forces in the area rallied but eventually succumbed to the newly energized invaders. On September 29, American forces recaptured the capital, ravaging it in the process. “Few people,” one reporter wrote, “have suffered so terrible a liberation.” Their suffering, however, was matched by that of the North Korean army: with the troops suddenly split, their supply lines fell apart and morale collapsed. The war turned decisively in favor of the United States.
If panache was MacArthur’s signature in victory, hubris guided him afterward. He imagined a smashing victory over Communism and a unification of Korea—under the rule of the South. He dismissed those who cautioned that proceeding beyond the 38th parallel would invite Chinese entry into the war, and he capitalized on Washington’s disarray. Already headstrong before Inchon, MacArthur was unassailable after it: he had defied the doubters and scored the most smashing victory of the war. “There is,” Dean Acheson acknowledged after Inchon, “no stopping MacArthur now.”
Sadly for the thousands who would give their lives, China’s leaders did not share Americans’ awe of MacArthur. Fueled by ideology and nervous about the approach of enemy soldiers to their border, China decided to commit its own troops if the United States crossed the 38th parallel. “If Korea were completely occupied by the Americans and the Korean revolutionary forces were substantially destroyed, the American invaders would be more rampant, and such a situation would be very unfavorable to the whole East,” Mao wrote to Stalin on October 2, 1950, just three days after MacArthur received permission to head north with caution. The Chinese forces quietly moved toward the Yalu River, hundreds of thousands of poorly armed but driven men. There, they waited. On October 19, the U.S. Army captured Pyongyang, the first time in history that a Communist capital had fallen to Western troops. Victory stoked ego, and MacArthur, his force split, directed the advance to continue, further into the winter, plunging into a deadly trap.
He ignored every signal that China would unleash its armies. On October 24, two American planes were fired on by anti-aircraft guns, even though they were roughly three miles south of the Yalu River. Reconnaissance failed to detect Chinese camps in the area, and MacArthur disregarded the threat. Farther south, an American regiment uncovered weapons dumps that residents said were stashed for the Chinese. Even that failed to alarm MacArthur. On October 25, a South Korean division fifty miles from the Yalu was attacked in a fog by Chinese forces; again, MacArthur’s headquarters ignored the warning.
MacArthur was hindered by his sycophantic inner circle and in particular by his intelligence officer, Major General Charles Willoughby. Born in Heidelberg and raised in Germany, Willoughby immigrated to the United States at age eighteen and enlisted in the Army. Upon graduation from Gettysburg College, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was high-handed and vindictive and weirdly prim. He tailored his uniforms and wore a monocle. In MacArthur’s service, he was best known for his frightening willingness to find intelligence data supporting the general’s views. “Anything MacArthur wanted, Willoughby produced intelligence for,” observed Lieutenant Colonel John H. Chiles. “He should have gone to jail.”
In this case, Willoughby overlooked the presence of not merely several divisions but several armies of Chinese soldiers. Nearly 300,000 soldiers snuck across the Yalu at night over barely submerged bridges and lay in wait. MacArthur had assured Washington that this would never happen, so he trivialized any information that an assault was imminent. Then the Chinese struck. Despite their rudimentary weapons—rifles, grenades, satchels full of explosives—they attacked in darkness and unnerved exhausted UN troops with their haunting battle cries and whistles. The Allied forces beat a disorganized retreat, often abandoning gear in their haste. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the attack ceased; MacArthur again allowed himself to believe that the Chinese threat was illusory. “The Chinese,” he insisted against all reason on November 24, “are not coming in.” Two days later, 200,000 Chinese troops attacked the U.S. Eighth Army. By early December, Pyongyang had been abandoned, and American forces were fighting their way south. A month later, Seoul fell yet again, this time to China.
American troops fought back with bravery, especially once the Eighth Army came under the command of General Matthew Ridgway, a commander as modest as MacArthur was haughty. Ridgway, given the Eighth Army when his predecessor was killed in a car accident, refocused its energies from holding worthless pieces of Korean real estate to eliminating enemy fighters. Operation Killer, as it was inelegantly known, stemmed the Chinese advance and turned the war into a series of offensives and counteroffensives, as Chinese manpower met American technology. For MacArthur, however, the ignominy of having been so wrong encouraged a surly defensiveness and desperate need to blame others. He became increasingly contemptuous of Truman and frighteningly sure of himself. “MacArthur seemed at the time to have decided that his innate brilliance, so frequently illustrated by his military successes, rendered his judgment supreme, above that of all his peers and even of his duly constituted superiors,” Ridgway wrote. When Truman emphatically ordered all his commanders to refrain from discussing diplomatic matters, MacArthur went ahead and publicly mocked China,
threatening the administration’s efforts to secure a negotiated peace. He was now in open defiance of the president. On April 11, 1951, Truman, after pausing over the political ramifications of censuring one of America’s most revered generals, fired him.
The photograph of Eisenhower on learning of MacArthur’s ouster is one of the most memorable and amusing images of the much-photographed Ike. In it, he is startled but hardly dismayed. His eyebrows are peaked, his curiosity piqued, but nothing about him appears angry. Indeed, one senses a suppressed smile as he avoids eye contact with the expectant men around him. It is a glimpse of the man who suffered MacArthur’s theatrics and yet shared some of his mentor’s frustrations with the president who fired him.
Lucius Clay, busy trying to organize support for Ike’s presidential bid, urged Ike to keep quiet about MacArthur; Ike needed no prodding. “I am going to maintain silence in every language known to man,” he replied.
Replacing MacArthur helped reassure leaders from Tokyo to Washington that the war might now be prosecuted effectively. A National Security Council memo from April 23 still anticipated that the war would end by December 31 of that year. Korea chewed up optimists: MacArthur had predicted it would be over by Thanksgiving 1950, only to then face the might of China, and then, delusionally, suggested it would be finished by Christmas of the same year. Through most of 1951 and all of 1952, the conflict dragged on. American forces would advance up the peninsula, Chinese would barrel down. It appeared to many American civilians a pointless struggle, a nauseatingly high price to pay for an uncertain reward.
That was the stalemate that Ike faced as he departed for his visit. Omar Bradley—Eisenhower’s West Point classmate, World War II commander, and now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff——was asleep when Ike boarded the Constellation. He woke, greeted his old friend, and briefed him. As the plane droned, the chairman and the president-elect and their various aides interrupted their work now and again for rounds of bridge. There was a brief layover at Iwo Jima. “I want to know about everything that happened here,” Ike said as he stood beside the memorial to the Marines who raised the American flag.
At 7:57 p.m. on Tuesday, December 2, 1952, the Constellation arrived at an airfield near Seoul; darkness hid the president-elect, and no top military commanders greeted him so as to avoid attention. Once safely inside the country, Ike conferred with commanders of the Eighth Army, inspected troops and equipment, examined photographs of Chinese camps above the Yalu River, and chatted with soldiers from across the UN command. When he arrived at one post, a Marine band greeted him with ruffles and flourishes. Just as the last note sounded, a UN unit fired a rocket fusillade into a nearby hillside. “What are they dropping in here?” Ike snapped. Officers explained that the rockets were aimed at a North Korean position and that sound traveled fast in the cold air.
Asked whether the conflict was, as Truman described it, a “police action,” one British commander boomed: “Police action, hell. It’s warfare.” Eisenhower visited an Army surgical hospital, where business was happily slow. Most of those being treated were Korean children under the care of American doctors.
Throughout his visit, Ike was warmly greeted as a promise for peace. “If anyone can end [the war], General Eisenhower can,” said Sergeant Joseph Killea. “He’s the man to do it.”
As he prepared to leave, President Rhee presented Ike with a Korean flag for the White House. Major John Eisenhower carried it for the first few hundred yards of its journey home, symbolizing his unique place in his father’s heart. Indeed, both father and son had an abiding sense of duty, evidenced by a private pact: John Eisenhower promised his father he would never allow the United States to be at risk of his being held hostage. “I would,” he wrote later, “take my life before being captured.”
On December 5, Eisenhower began the long trip home aboard the USS Helena, a heavy cruiser based in Long Beach, California. On the way, he learned that MacArthur had boasted of having a secret plan to end the war. That agitated Truman, who demanded it, and intrigued Ike, who asked MacArthur to share it with him, too. MacArthur did so in a preposterous memo: Eisenhower should summon the Soviet Union to a conference and propose that both Korea and Germany be allowed to reunite their broken halves under elected governments; foreign troops could then be removed from Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea. If the Soviets agreed, so be it. If not, the Soviets should be told of “our intention to clear North Korea of enemy forces.” His plan then suggested the way to finally achieve the victory that had stymied him and his successors for two and a half years. “This could be accomplished through the atomic bombing of enemy military concentrations and installations in North Korea and the sowing of fields of suitable radio-active materials, the by-products of atomic manufacture, to close major lines of enemy supply.” One last recommendation: “It would probably become necessary to neutralize Red China’s capability to wage modern war.” In short, MacArthur’s solution to ending a protracted and difficult conflict, one that had cost him his job and thousands of Americans their lives, was to launch an all-out war against China while laying waste to the Korean peninsula and poison it for hundreds of years to come. There is no evidence of Eisenhower’s reply.
Coverage of the Korea trip had been squelched by security and censorship, but once Eisenhower departed for home, the details flooded out. Truman derided the mission as “a piece of demagoguery.” The press was more generous. Newspapers lauded Ike for seeing the combat up close, and Americans dared to hope that peace was possible.
Back in the United States, Eisenhower completed the more prosaic but meaningful work of building his staff. He was a shrewd judge of men, neither intimidated by excellence nor distracted by polish. His eye for character helped him construct a strong inner circle to manage the government and supplement his already formidable group of advisers, including his brothers, military friends, and political supporters, many of the latter successful businessmen.
Before appointing his cabinet, Eisenhower created a position that redefined the modern presidency and filled it with a man whose cold intellect had impressed him since the beginning of his campaign. Sherman Adams was the political mirror image of Eisenhower. Clipped, slight, famously taciturn, he was every bit the Yankee as Ike was the Midwesterner. Adams grew up in New Hampshire, graduated from Dartmouth, prospered in the region’s timber industry, and then took to politics, rising through the ranks. In 1948, he was elected governor. New Hampshire was the perfect political stage for the ascent of a man who was admired by many but liked by few. He was an orderly and dedicated public servant, and he appealed to the voters of a state where the flinty held sway over the gregarious. In his role launching Ike’s political career, Adams had demonstrated administrative skill. He ran Ike’s campaign with efficiency and distaste for showmanship. (Typically, for instance, Adams dismissed the effect of the Madison Square Garden rally on shaping Eisenhower’s decision to enter the race; it was, he sniffed, a “dog and pony act.”) Adams could err—it was he who had abruptly pulled Ike’s praise for Marshall from the infamous Wisconsin speech—but he was decisive, and Eisenhower admired his grit. Ike, without ever saying so, made it clear he expected Adams to stay on. Adams was mystified. “To the best of my recollection, he never told me that in so many words,” Adams recalled in 1972, “but it was quite evident.”
Ike naturally borrowed from his military experience. Efficient organization, he had learned, required unified command. He wanted a single person to manage his schedule and appointments, a hardheaded manager who could protect him from unscheduled visitors and say no to those the president would prefer not to offend. Bedell Smith had performed that function during the war, and his office was a model of efficiency. Now, as president, Eisenhower wanted a chief of staff. He avoided creating that title, for fear it would seem too military, but he insisted on the position. Adams was named “Assistant to the President” and was soon known as “the Assistant President.” Having accepted, he said his farewells to New Hampshire and m
oved to Washington. Adams and Ike would never become intimate friends—Adams never joined Eisenhower at the bridge table or on the golf course, but Ike relied on him completely, and no one reciprocated his loyalty with greater ardor.
The most important position in the cabinet was secretary of state, and Eisenhower’s pick exemplified his ability to recognize a man’s flaws but not be overcome by them. John Foster Dulles was an austere and arrogant man, tall with sloped shoulders, mouth turned down at the corners, eyelids soft and puffy. Pious and imperious, he was prone to such deep concentration that guests would think he had forgotten they were in the room. His favorite exercise was a cold swim, sometimes in waters so frigid his staff feared for him. The son of a Presbyterian minister, and grandson and nephew of two different secretaries of state, Dulles was trained as a lawyer but drawn to the foreign service, as were two of his four siblings. By 1952, he had served presidents from Wilson to Truman, and was a leading member of the establishment, more suited to appointed than elected office. Named in 1949 to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate from New York, he took the job but lost his bid for reelection a few months later. No wonder, for if Dulles was indisputably brilliant, he also was undeniably cold. He was, in Churchill’s arch observation, “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”
The speechwriter Emmet Hughes, no fan of Dulles’s, recalled the twitching impatience with which Ike would listen to his secretary of state—“the brisk nodding of the head, in a manner designed to nudge a slow voice faster … the restless rhythm of the pencil tapping his knee … the slow glaze across the blue eyes, signaling the end of all mental contact.” Eisenhower chafed at Hughes’s description (he regarded the Hughes memoir as a betrayal), but he too recognized Dulles’s limitations. After noting in his diary that Dulles was dedicated, tireless, and devoted to service, he added: “He is not particularly persuasive in presentation and, at times, seems to have a curious lack of understanding as to how his words and manner may affect another personality.” They occasionally disagreed. Ike watched his secretary closely at the outset and would forcefully overrule him in their later years together, but he never lost his admiration for Dulles’s devotion or intellect. Eisenhower understood that Dulles brought depth and intelligence to the administration. Their relationship would form the core partnership of Eisenhower’s administration.
