by Roy Jenkins
‘It was a delightful trip,’ she added. ‘There was none of the tension of 1948.’1 Perhaps there was not enough tension. It was certainly no Midlothian campaign conducted by a latter-day Gladstone. Truman stuck mostly to domestic issues, although he interlaced them with warnings against the perils of isolationism. But he sounded no call to arms, or even a call to pay vastly more for arms. Nor did he engage head-on with McCarthyism. This was due, not to cowardice but to his mistaken belief that the evil Senator’s machinations would quickly snuff themselves out if not fanned with too much attention.
At the time of the Grand Coulee trip Truman had already decided and committed firmly but privately to paper that he would serve no more than another 2¾ years. Only nine days after he had received NSC 68 (but not I think in any way because of it) he chose a peculiarly fine Sunday, with Washington suffused in sunshine and cherry blossom, to commit himself to not staying there any longer than he had to.
‘I am not a candidate for nomination by the Democratic Convention’, he rather quaintly began.*
‘… I have been in public service well over thirty years, having been President of the United States almost two complete terms.
‘Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson as well as Calvin Coolidge stood by the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and F.D.R. made the attempt to break that precedent. F.D.R. succeeded.
‘In my opinion eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.
‘There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.
‘This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want this country to continue as a Republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, all of whom could have had a continuation in the office, then we will start down the road to dictatorship and ruin. I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by F.D.R. It should not be done. That precedent should continue—not only by a Constitutional amendment but by custom based on the honour of the man in the office.
‘Therefore to re-establish that custom, although by a quibble I could say I’ve only had one term, I am not a candidate and will not accept the nomination for another term.’2
This was a firm and honest statement of his view that he did not want another term, and did not believe that, even if he did, constitutional propriety entitled him to one. It was a little over-embellished by bombast and self-righteousness. It was ridiculous, after the narrow squeak of 1948, to believe in 1950 that he would be unassailable in 1952. Eisenhower would probably have beaten him as effectively, although half for different reasons, as he beat Stevenson. And it was a little far-fetched and nigglingly antiRoosevelt to equate a third term with the beginning of the end of republican virtue. It was always Truman’s way, when putting his thoughts on paper, to be provocative, mock-modest, and critical of the standards of others. However, there is no doubt that he meant what he wrote and that he had taken the decision for largely unselfish reasons.
Furthermore he had the good sense to keep it to himself. He showed the paper to no one until November 1951. Then, with fourteen months of his presidency still to go, he read it to his immediate staff, whose futures were almost as much affected by the decision as was his own. They kept the secret remarkably well. He made no public announcement until a Jefferson/Jackson Day dinner at the end of March 1952. He wisely delayed turning himself into a lame duck until the last reasonable moment. This was of great benefit, particularly during the year from June 1950, when, with the Korean War at full blast, MacArthur insubordinate, Vandenberg dying and most of bi-partisanship with him, Acheson and even Marshall sufficiently hobbled by McCarthyism to be unable to sustain him at home as they had done in 1947-49, he needed every ounce of presidential authority that he could muster.
Truman flew to Independence at the end of Saturday morning, June 24th. He had to begin the day with a speech for the inauguration of Friendship International Airport in Baltimore. But he had intended the next 48 hours to be a relaxed midsummer weekend of family visiting, both with his wife and daughter, who had already retreated from Washington, and with other less frequently-seen relations.
His plans were blown up. So were the ill-trained and ill-equipped eight divisions of the Republic of Korea which were subject to a full-scale attack from the Communist Democratic People’s Republic of the north, launched at dawn on Sunday, June 25th. Differences of time enabled Acheson to receive news of this at his Maryland farm soon after dinner on the Saturday evening. After an hour’s digestion of the news he informed the President.
Truman’s first instinct was to summon the presidential plane (which was at Kansas City Airport) and make an immediate return to Washington. Acheson dissuaded him. Such a long night flight was, somewhat surprisingly, considered to be dangerous, as well as unnecessarily alarmist. There were still a lot of uncertainties. It was better that he should carry on as though nothing had happened until at least the next day, when the question of return could be reviewed.2
The uncertainties were manifold. They related to the scale of the invasion, to the ability of South Korean troops to repel it, and to the degree of commitment of Russia and China to Kim Il-sung’s adventure. Upon this third uncertainty, there turned the likelihood of the invasion leading to a world conflagration, either because this was already planned by the Soviet Union, with moves against Berlin, or Yugoslavia or Iran or all three likely to follow, or because of a more spontaneous escalation if it became necessary for United States troops to be directly involved.
The first two questions were substantially and disagreeably cleared up by lunchtime on the Sunday, when Truman received his second telephone call from Acheson. There was no doubt about the seriousness of the invasion. It was no frontier raid, comparable with those which had quite frequently occurred in the previous months, but a determined military attempt to re-unite the peninsula under Communist control. Nor was the South Korean performance giving any basis for confidence. Syngman Rhee, their seventy-five-year-old president, who had returned from nearly forty years’ exile in the United States, was a master of fulmination, almost as much against the pusillanimity of the West as against the aggression of the Communists. But at this stage at least he could not make his army fight. Within the first twenty-four hours, Seoul, the capital, together with the main airport of the country and the second maritime port were all imminently threatened. What was immediately proposed by Acheson was the calling of an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council in the hope that it would not only denounce the aggression but pass a resolution of action. If it did so the main burden of implementation would clearly fall on the United States. If it did not the responsibility on the leading nation for trying to deal with the resultant diplomatic chaos and the exposed military impotence of the UN would be greater still. Truman therefore decided to return immediately and to summon a dinner meeting of his principal advisers, civilian and military, at Blair House for that evening.
Having decided on the return he set off in such a hurry that half his staff, the whole of the accompanying White House press corps and (almost) the navigator3 were left behind. When confronted with a crisis he was seized with an almost excessive appetite for rapid decision-making. If Goering, when he heard the word culture, reached for his gun, Truman, when he heard the word problem, reached for a decision. The danger was that he would take one before he had heard the relevant evidence; the miracle was that he made so many wise ones. He was therefore impatient to get back. But there was no joyful anticipation. He was not bellicose. The last thing that Truman wanted at this stage was a war in Korea. There was no question of his being like Churchill (before he became older, more battle-scarred, and above all oppressed by the almost infinitely destructive power of nuclear weapons
), who, at midnight on August 4th, 1914 was recorded by Margot Asquith as ‘with a happy face striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room.’3
Truman flew over Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia towards his Blair House rendezvous in a mood of alert determination, but not with a happy face or heart. The war solved one problem for him, that of NSC 68. Within twelve months the United States had a defence budget of over $50 billion a year, and by no means all of the increase went to Korea. But from every other point of view the consequences were heavy. A deep shadow of death and divisiveness was cast upon the last two and a half years of his presidency. The climate of frustration in which the United States, with its still overwhelming nuclear superiority, had to fight desperate and costly conventional battles, in order to limit the dangers of escalation and calm the nerves of its European allies, gave McCarthy-ism a second and stronger wind. It was also a peculiar misfortune that if there had to be a long but limited war in a distant theatre it should be within the area of responsibility of Truman’s most famous and insubordinate commander. General Douglas MacArthur did not allow the remarkable fact that he had not set foot in the United States for thirteen years to prevent his being one of the most ‘political’ generals ever to hold high command; and neither his politics nor (mostly) his policies were those of Truman.
Truman of course could not foresee all this on June 25th. If told that the war could be limited to the Korean peninsula, he would probably have been amazed to be equally informed that United States casualties would approach a half of those in World War I. Yet his thoughts, during the previous 18 hours and in the plane, were sombre. He believed, according to the clear testimony of his daughter who was present at Independence, that the Korean invasion was probably the ‘opening round’ in World War III.4 This was in fact, as he was well advised by his Chiefs of Staff that night in Washington, rather heavily against any balance of rational probability. The Soviet Union was in a substantially weaker position vis-à-vis the United States than it was likely to be in a few years’ time. It could not possibly have sustained a successful all-out war. It would therefore have been extremely foolish to launch one.
On the other hand there was no doubt in the minds of Truman’s advisers, any more than in his own, that the invasion was Moscow-planned, and that forces far greater than Kim’s own, successful though they were so far proving, had to be taken into account. In fact, if Krushchev’s memoirs are to be believed,5 this somewhat exaggerated the degree of central control. The initiative for the attack came from Kim Il-sung. Stalin acquiesced, but only after consulting Mao Tse-tung, and fairly soon began to wish that he had not done so. The strong reaction of the United States, and indeed of the United Nations, was not foreseen.4 Khrushchev’s account clearly brings out the vast difference compared with today in the Far Eastern strategic balance because of the then apparently impregnable alliance between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Behind North Korea stood China, and behind China stood Russia.
Truman was therefore deeply apprehensive. He was also convinced that the invasion could not be allowed to succeed, and that the United States must be prepared to take whatever risks were necessary to prevent this. This conviction sprang at least as much from his view that Korea was a crucial test for the effectiveness of the United Nations as from his proper attachment to the prestige of the United States and to the balance of power in the Far East. The UN of those days, with its membership of less than 60 and its substantial ‘American’ majority (provided by South America, Western Europe and the old British Commonwealth countries) was regarded by its Western protagonists as an organization which could impartially enforce the international rule of law on great and small powers alike, and by the majesty of its authority redeem the weakness of the pre-war League of Nations. Truman was emphatically one such protagonist. He was prepared to fight for Lake Success and take the risks involved, which if anything he exaggerated rather than under-estimated. But he wanted to minimize these risks, both because he knew that this was necessary to get as many other members of the UN as possible to join with him (even if in little more than a token way) in fighting for international order,5 and because he had seen enough of World Wars I and II to be profoundly unanxious to be the President of World War III. This meant that he would have to fight in Korea, but that he must do so in a limited way, seeking only to restore the status quo ante, and suffering operational disadvantages in order to avoid giving even the smallest possible excuse for any widening of the conflict.
These assumptions and this strategy were inchoately in his mind when he got to Washington. He was met by Acheson, by Secretary of Defense Johnson, and the three Secretaries of the individual services. They already had the news that the Security Council had acted satisfactorily, as to both speed and outcome. A resolution condemning the attack, calling for the immediate cessation of hostilities and North Korean withdrawal to the 38th parallel, and also, and most significantly, urging all members to render every assistance to the UN for the execution of the resolution, had been carried by nine votes to nil, with one abstention. The absence of an adverse vote, and indeed of a veto, was due to the fact that the Soviet Union had pursued an ‘empty chair’ policy since January, in protest against the continued presence of a representative of Nationalist China. The one abstention came from Yugoslavia.7
The party proceeded to Blair House where they were joined by the Chiefs of Staff, and four of Acheson’s senior State Department officials. Snyder was also present. For some extraordinary reason particular importance was attached to the quality, and indeed the formality, of the dinner. It was almost as though the seriousness of the occasion called for some sacerdotal communal feast. The occasion echoes throughout almost every memoir of the evening. Truman wrote to his wife: ‘Had them all to dinner at eight, and the dinner was good and well served.’6 Acheson wrote about ‘an excellent dinner … gotten up by the staff on a Sunday afternoon at the shortest notice.’7 Margaret Truman wrote of the meal in a tone of still greater reverence: ‘From the air (the President) wired Charles Claunch, the White House usher, to warn him that a Very Important Dinner should be ready at Blair House by 8.30. Mr Acheson would give him the guest list. Claunch called Alonzo Fields, the head butler at the White House who recruited two cooks and made up a menu en route to Blair House in a taxi.’8 What miracles of gastronomy they concocted during this short journey is nowhere on record, but it was presumably a considerable improvement on the normal standard of American official meals.7 Nor was the quality of the meal allowed to be spoiled by sombre or contentious conversation. Discussion of the subject which was the purpose of the gathering was banned by Truman until the table was cleared and the servants had withdrawn. This was partly a put-down of Louis Johnson, who had attempted before dinner to pre-empt the discussion towards a mingling of the Korean and Formosan issues: Truman was determined that Acheson should lead, and also knew that the Chinese Nationalist cause was a lead balloon at the UN. But it was also partly due to a temporary obsession with secrecy over what was essentially a public issue, which had already led to the farce of Truman pretending to his brother that morning that nothing had happened.
These preliminaries over, however, Truman got down to a very crisp discussion. ‘My conference was a most successful one,’ he wrote to his wife,9 and that was the general view of the participants. They filled in some of the gaps in his knowledge and confirmed most of his instinctive judgments. He stiffened them with his resolution. North Korea was not to be allowed to get away with the aggression. The United States, with the moral backing, it was hoped, of United Nations authority and the material backing of as many other member states as possible, would resist. The crucial question that remained unanswered was whether this objective could be achieved by a combination of naval movements, air cover, and lavish supplies to Republic of Korea troops. Of the service chiefs present, the admiral and the Air Force general thought ‘yes’. Omar Bradley and the Army Chief of Staff, Lawton Collins, thought �
�no’. Truman desperately hoped that the former were right. He did not want to be responsible for the deployment of United States infantry, with the casualties and diplomatic risks that this would involve, and at least until midweek he thought that there was a good chance of avoiding it. When however it became clear, both from the inability of the South Korean troops to form and hold any defensive line and from MacArthur’s prognosis that this degree of detachment could not be sustained, he did not hesitate to authorize the shipment from Japan of three American divisions. MacArthur’s visit of inspection to Korea took place on Thursday, June 29th. On the following morning at an 8.30 meeting Truman agreed to the request.
Doing so was not made easier by the fact that there was already widespread distrust of MacArthur in Washington, not only for his politics but for his generalship. John Foster Dulles was in Tokyo at the time of the North Korean attack, and had been deeply shocked that none of the General’s aides had the courage to rouse him.8 Dulles had to do it himself, and on his return, most ironically as events were to work out, used his position as the senior Republican attached to the State Department to advise Truman that he ought forthwith to replace MacArthur with a younger and more vigorous general (MacArthur was 70).
Truman acted throughout that last week of June with more than sufficient deliberate speed to justify his daughter’s summing up of the march of events: ‘Step by step, in six fateful days, searching for alternatives before each move, my father found himself fighting his third war.’10 The speed was greater than the deliberateness. It was partly responsible for Truman making two, maybe three, of his four mistakes of the week.
