by H. W. Brands
—
FIVE YEARS LATER Truman still marveled at the train of events that got him to where he was. And he still wondered, at times, if the prize was worth the winning. His victory in 1948 had been satisfying, but the troubles that followed had left him no respite. He looked forward to the first full weekend of the 1950 summer. He would be going home: to Independence, to the family farm, to the people who had known him before he was president and, he hoped, would still claim him after his presidency ended. He had one official chore on the morning of Saturday, June 24: the dedication of a new airport in Baltimore. But after that he would be off duty for the rest of the weekend. He would board the presidential DC-6, the Independence, and fly to Kansas City. He would spend a quiet Saturday afternoon and evening with Bess and Margaret, who had preceded him west. On Sunday he would visit his brother and sister and inspect the family farm. He would return to Washington on Monday. Like the farm boy he often still felt himself to be, he checked the weather forecast and recalled why corn liked the Missouri Valley: ninety degrees, humid, chance of thundershowers.
Saturday morning and afternoon unfolded as planned. The dedication went smoothly, the flight was uneventful, and the thunderstorms stayed away. Dinner was served at 6:30, and the open windows caught the first stirrings of cooling air. Until dark the Trumans sat on a screened porch in the old house, talking everything but politics. They moved indoors to the library, mentally preparing for bed. An easy day for the president was ending on a quiet note.
Then, jarringly, the telephone in the hallway rang. It was Dean Acheson, who had taken the president’s absence from Washington as occasion to have a holiday of his own, at his house in Maryland.
“Mr. President, I have very serious news,” Acheson said. “The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”
PART TWO
TEST OF NERVE
9
NONE OF US got much sleep that night,” Margaret Truman remembered. “My father made it clear, from the moment he heard the news, that he feared this was the opening round in World War III.”
The president’s instinct was to return to Washington at once. Dean Acheson persuaded him otherwise. The country was still adjusting to air travel, for presidents no less than for anyone else. An unscheduled night flight would signal alarm, besides being risky, Acheson said. Better to wait until the following day. Meanwhile, the secretary of state would do what could be done for South Korea from the distance of America. He had already directed the American representative at the United Nations to request an emergency meeting of the Security Council for the next morning. And he was talking to the Pentagon about options to present to the president on his return.
On Sunday morning the Truman family behaved as though it were any other Sunday. Bess and Margaret went to church at Trinity Episcopal in Independence. Truman skipped his morning walk in favor of an early start to Grandview, where the family farm was located. He spoke for an hour and a half with his younger brother, Vivian, and Vivian’s two sons and five grandchildren. He inspected a new milking machine and nodded approval of a recently purchased horse. He proceeded to the nearby home of his younger sister, Mary Jane, who had never married. By now radio and wire service reports were full of the news of the North Korean invasion, but Truman appeared oblivious to it and spoke to no one from the media.
Only when he got back to Independence did he address the matter. A copy of a telegram from the U.S. ambassador in Seoul, John Muccio, to the State Department awaited him. “It would appear from nature of attack and manner in which it was launched that it constitutes all out offensive against ROK,” Muccio summarized, employing the shorthand for the Republic of Korea, or South Korea. Truman read the message with a grim face, then stepped outside to meet the reporters who clamored for a statement. “Don’t make it alarmist,” the president said, despite feeling no little alarm himself. “It could be a dangerous situation, but I hope it isn’t.” The reporters wanted more, but Truman demurred. “I can’t answer any questions until I get all the facts.”
“Has there been a formal declaration of war by North Korea?” a reporter shouted.
“No, there is no formal declaration of war,” Truman said. “That I know.”
Truman’s aides announced that the president was cutting short his visit. “The President talked to Secretary Acheson and has three or four important decisions to make,” said Eben Ayers, the assistant press secretary. “He feels he should go back to Washington right away.”
Bess and Margaret chose to remain in Missouri, but they saw Truman off. Neither spoke to the press, yet reporters read in their faces the strain they felt. “Mrs. Truman was calm but serious,” a regular on the White House beat recorded. “She looked much as she appeared on the fateful evening of the late President Roosevelt’s death, when her husband took the oath of office.” Margaret Truman watched the departure from the edge of the runway. “She stood staring up, absorbed, at her father’s big plane, her hands clasped under her chin in a subconscious, prayerful attitude.”
Truman arrived at Washington’s National Airport a bit past seven in the evening. Acheson met him, accompanied by Louis Johnson, the secretary of defense. Johnson’s presence wasn’t Acheson’s idea; the secretary of state judged Johnson more devoted to his own career than to the interests of the administration or the country. But Johnson insisted, as the president’s right hand for defense. The three men were driven to Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, which was under renovation.
They were joined by the president’s top military advisers. The three service secretaries were there: Frank Pace of the army, Francis Matthews of the navy and Thomas Finletter of the air force. The Joint Chiefs of Staff came: Chairman General Omar Bradley, General J. Lawton Collins for the army, Admiral Forrest Sherman for the navy and General Hoyt Vandenberg for the air force.
They all sat down to dinner. Despite the pressing nature of the business at hand, the president insisted that they eat before they talk. He was hungry, and he didn’t want the wait staff to hear what was being said.
When the last dishes were cleared and the staff had retired to the kitchen, the discussion began. Acheson led off. The secretary of state understood the dynamics of meetings, and at this early moment he judged that this meeting might define the Truman presidency, not to mention preventing or precipitating World War III. He had told Truman to stay in Missouri in part so he could prepare. “During the afternoon I had everyone and all messages kept out of my room for an hour or two while I ruminated about the situation,” he recalled later. “ ‘Thought’ would suggest too orderly and purposeful a process. It was rather to let various possibilities, like glass fragments in a kaleidoscope, form a series of patterns of action and then draw conclusions from them.” Acheson asked himself what role the Soviet Union had played in the North Korean attack. “It seemed close to certain that the attack had been mounted, supplied, and instigated by the Soviet Union and that it would not be stopped by anything short of force.” But whose force? And how much? “If Korean force proved unequal to the job, as seemed probable, only American military intervention could do it. Troops from other sources would be helpful politically and psychologically but unimportant militarily.” What did the North Korean attack mean for the larger Cold War? What did Moscow want out of it? How forceful should be the American response? “Plainly, this attack did not amount to a casus belli against the Soviet Union. Equally plainly, it was an open, undisguised challenge to our internationally accepted position as the protector of South Korea, an area of great importance to the security of American-occupied Japan.”
Acheson now made this last case to Truman and the president’s other advisers. The president himself had declared in the case of Greece and Turkey that aggression must not go unanswered; Korea was no less vital to American security than Greece and Turkey had been. If anything, it was more vital, Acheson said. American credibility was no less at stake in Asia than it was in Europe. As an immediate first step toward stemming the North Korean
aggression, the secretary of state urged the president to authorize General MacArthur to send weapons from American stores in Japan to the army of South Korea.
A stroke of sheer luck, involving the United Nations, facilitated the decision for Truman. The president had signed the UN charter in 1945 with great hopes that the international body could be a significant force for peace. Conventional wisdom held that World War II had been the result of the failure of the democracies to stand up to fascism when that ideology first reared its head in Germany and Japan. Americans understood that their country had been the principal laggard, not even deigning to join the interwar League of Nations. Pearl Harbor jolted the isolationism out of the American system, and Franklin Roosevelt and then Harry Truman made the United Nations a priority in their planning for the postwar period. Yet Americans, still worried about being dragged into other countries’ quarrels and sitting atop the pyramid of world power, insisted on a veto of substantive actions by the UN. America’s principal wartime allies, Britain and the Soviet Union, demanded no less for themselves, and so the Security Council procedures specified that each of its five permanent members—France and China were added to the initial three—possess a veto over the decisions of the council and therefore over the important actions of the United Nations as a whole.
Had the spirit of cooperation of the war years persisted, the veto rule might have been no more than a sporadic inconvenience. But amid the emerging Cold War the cooperation vanished, and the Soviet veto, actual or merely threatened, largely paralyzed the Security Council and the UN. The point of the Security Council was to provide for the collective security of the peace-loving nations of the world against occasional and would-be aggressors, who would be punished or deterred by the law-abiding majority. The paralysis of the Security Council compelled the Truman administration to look elsewhere for partners in maintaining international order. The North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 bound its dozen members to a form of collective security less comprehensive than that envisioned by the founders of the United Nations, but better than nothing. Or so hoped Truman and his advisers in the summer of 1950, when the Atlantic alliance was scarcely a year old and quite untested.
But they hadn’t given up on the UN, and the stroke of luck made them think there was life in the international body yet. Following the communist victory in China, the United States had refused to recognize the new government in Beijing or to allow the envoy Beijing sent to the United Nations to assume China’s seat there. The Soviet delegate to the UN, protesting the American veto of Beijing’s seating, boycotted the sessions of the Security Council. He was absent at the time of the North Korean invasion and therefore unable to cast a Russian veto against a measure demanding that North Korea cease its aggression and withdraw its forces from South Korea and calling on UN member states to aid South Korea in repelling the North Korean invasion. The result was that Truman, by saying yes to weapons for South Korea, could promote two objectives at once: opposing communist aggression and reviving the ideal of comprehensive collective security through the United Nations.
Acheson had further recommendations. MacArthur should order American warplanes from Japan to provide cover for the evacuation of American nationals from South Korea. More controversially—or at least it would become controversial once the Republicans got wind of it—Acheson urged a strong effort to keep the fighting confined to Korea. The secretary feared that the Korean troubles might trigger a renewal of China’s civil war. To forestall this, he recommended that the president order the American Seventh Fleet to patrol the Formosa Strait and prevent any attack by Chinese forces against Chiang’s troops and position; at the same time, the fleet should prevent Chinese Nationalist forces from attacking the Chinese mainland. Acheson judged it imperative to keep the Korea question separate from the China question, which was vexing enough on its own.
Omar Bradley seconded Acheson’s call for a vigorous response. Bradley brought to the discussion of Korea an experience of large-scale warfare surpassed by no officer in American history; his command of the Twelfth Army Group in Europe during World War II had placed more than a million men under his orders. He was known as a soldier’s general, leaving the politics of command to the likes of Dwight Eisenhower, with whom he had been sharing quarters when news arrived that Franklin Roosevelt had died and Harry Truman become president. George Patton was the one who brought the news. “The three of us were saddened and depressed,” Bradley remembered. “We talked for nearly three hours. It seemed an irreplaceable loss.” Bradley, like the others, expected little from Truman. “He had had no experience in dealing with Churchill and Stalin….None of us knew Truman or much about him. He came from my home state, Missouri, but I had to confess almost complete ignorance. I knew only that he had served in the Army in World War I and had risen to political prominence through the ranks of what I regarded as a somewhat unsavory political machine in Kansas City, Missouri. From our distance, Truman did not appear at all qualified to fill Roosevelt’s large shoes.” Bradley didn’t dispute a comment by Patton: “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who were never intended, neither by party nor by the Lord, to be President.”
Bradley improved his knowledge of Truman four months later when the new president traveled to defeated Germany for the Potsdam conference. “I liked what I saw,” Bradley recollected. “He was direct, unpretentious, clear-thinking and forceful. His knowledge of American history, particularly U.S. military history, was astonishing. I found him to be extremely well informed about the battles we had fought in Africa, Sicily, Italy and on the Continent.”
Truman appointed Bradley head of the Veterans Administration after the war, a post that cemented Bradley’s reputation as the “GI’s general.” He became army chief of staff in 1948 and then the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As chairman he encountered Douglas MacArthur, whom he had not seen since his time at West Point, when Bradley had been a cadet and MacArthur superintendent. Bradley arrived in Japan just days after MacArthur’s seventieth birthday. “Even so,” Bradley recounted, “he was remarkably vigorous and keen and could not have been a more gracious host. For the first time I had an opportunity to take the measure of the man. He was awesomely brilliant; but as a leader he had several major flaws: an obsession for self-glorification, almost no consideration for other men with whom he served, and a contempt for the judgment of his superiors. Like Patton and Monty”—British field marshal Bernard Montgomery—“MacArthur was a megalomaniac.”
Bradley’s confidence in Truman and his skepticism of MacArthur would inform his counsel to the former and his orders to the latter. In the initial Blair House meeting on June 25, Bradley was battling an illness recently contracted on another trip to Japan. Bradley arrived with the group from the Pentagon. He wasn’t impressed with Louis Johnson, whom he called “erratic.” He didn’t expect much from the service secretaries. Francis Matthews was “earnest but discredited”—by some statements that, to Bradley, showed woeful lack of experience and judgment. Frank Pace and Thomas Finletter were new and untested. “Only the JCS had substantial military expertise,” Bradley said of the Defense contingent: “Hoyt Vandenberg, steady and cool; Forrest Sherman, emerging as a gifted strategist; Joe Collins, a ‘can-do’ administrator and advocate, and I.” Yet he himself was far from full strength. “On this historic night I was so ill that all I wanted to do was crawl in bed.”
But he soldiered on. In response to Acheson’s remarks, Bradley said he interpreted the North Korean attack in the context of actions by communist groups and forces since the end of the war. Russia and its allies had been probing the West, seeking and exploiting weakness. “We must draw the line somewhere,” Bradley said. The Russians weren’t ready for war, he asserted, and so the risk of escalation was modest. Korea offered “as good an occasion for action in drawing the line as anywhere else.” He endorsed the use of American warplanes, which would have a “great morale effect” on the South K
oreans even if they didn’t destroy any North Korean tanks or other assets. He added that American warships might provide artillery support on South Korea’s eastern coast. Yet Bradley questioned the value of sending much American matériel to the South Koreans, who weren’t trained to use some of the equipment, especially F-51 fighter planes. And though Acheson hadn’t recommended it, Bradley doubted the advisability of sending American ground forces to South Korea in any large numbers. American troop strength had been drastically reduced after the war, and the United States did not have troops to spare. If America was going to fight the communists, there were more important places to do so than the Korean peninsula.
Lawton Collins—called Joe by most who knew him—reported that he had been in communication with MacArthur in Tokyo. The army chief reported that MacArthur, without waiting for authorization from Washington, was already shipping mortars, artillery and other equipment to South Korea, and he was making F-51s available for South Korean pilots to fly from Japan back to South Korea.
No one at the meeting seemed surprised that MacArthur had acted without orders. The military men knew MacArthur, and they knew that he heeded his own counsel on what a military situation required. Truman had heard enough about MacArthur to be coming to the same conclusion. The president, already inclined to approve the dispatch of weapons to Korea, saw no reason to stickle about the timing.
Forrest Sherman was more eager than Bradley or Collins to jump into Korea in force. The chief of naval operations didn’t think the Russians wanted war. “But if they do, they will have it,” he said. “The present situation in Korea offers a valuable opportunity for us to act.” The United States could not allow Korea to fall to the communists. “Korea is a strategic threat to Japan.” Yet Sherman agreed with Acheson and Bradley on the need to keep the Korean and Chinese questions separate. Chiang had to be prevented from attacking the Chinese mainland. “We must apply our guarantees against military action both ways,” he said. “We could not otherwise justify our action.”
