by Roy Jenkins
First, he authorized United States naval and air action sixteen hours in advance of the second UN resolution which gave him the authority of international legality. The Soviet Union and its apologists were later to make mildly effective play with this. It was however a very minor fault, and one on the right side.
Second, he omitted throughout to get any authority from the Congress for his actions. He held quite a lot of informal consultations on a cross-party basis with the leaders at the White House, but he sent no formal message on the war until July 19th. He just acted under executive prerogative, citing many precedents, but for the commitment of troops rather than the engagement in hostilities. It was not that he was without warning—Taft fired quite a powerful shot across his bows on the Wednesday—or that he doubted his ability to obtain a quick majority: a bill to extend selective service for one year went through the House by 315 to 4 and the Senate by 76 to nil. It was more his determination to get on with things and to defend, indeed enhance, the prerogatives of the presidency. It was probably an error of medium proportions. Robert Donovan in a chapter entitled ‘A Costly Mistake’ wrote: ‘The political rather than the legal aspect of war without congressional approval was to hurt Truman, to make the prosecution of the war more difficult for him, and to cause future public concern about what was to be called the ‘‘imperial presidency”.’11 Acheson controverted (in advance) this thesis. The difficulties of the war followed from the difficulties of the war and not from lack of a congressional vote. And while such a vote would in itself have manifestly done no harm, the process of obtaining it might well have done a great deal. His not altogether surprising conclusion was that the President, advised by Acheson, was therefore right. Nevertheless Truman’s method of procedure established a precedent which thereafter effectively deprived the Congress of the power to authorize or prevent war, which had explicitly been bestowed upon it by the Constitution.
Third, and stemming to some extent from his desire not ‘to go to war’9 and his decision not to go to Congress, he publicly underplayed the seriousness of the issues and the size of the stakes. This was one reason for the ‘business as usual’, semi-secret approach of the Saturday evening, Sunday and Monday. By the Thursday it coalesced with one of his most frequent and unfortunate habits, that of allowing reporters to put words into his mouth, to create a phrase which was to reverberate against him for the next two years and more. At a press conference he denied that the United States was at war. ‘Mr President, would it be correct,’ he was then asked, ‘…to call this a police action under the United Nations?’ ‘Yes, that is exactly what it amounts to,’ he replied. The trouble was that police actions which cost half a million casualties on the law and order side are liable to be regarded as somewhat bungled.
The fourth mistake never surfaced. Chiang Kai-shek, as anxious as Louis Johnson and MacArthur to get his own defence muddled up with that of South Korea, rushed in to offer 33,000 Nationalist troops which were to be equipped and transported by the United States. Truman clutched at this straw as a possible alternative to the commitment of US ground forces. Acheson and the Chiefs of Staff joined forces to get him away from the idea. This required only one meeting. The scheme would have been somewhat wasteful in resources and gravely damaging to the prospect for military contributions from other members of the United Nations.
These blemishes apart, and none of them was of the first order, Truman’s performance during what was arguably the most crucial week of his presidency was of a very high quality. He paused enough to consider the options but never so long as to lose the initiative. As a result he married the military potential of the United States with the moral authority of the United Nations to sustain his policy of containment. It was a remarkable feat. He astonished the world, and certainly the Soviet Union, by the resoluteness of his response.
At the end of the week he sent Acheson a note of congratulation:
‘Your initiative in immediately calling the Security Council … was the key to what followed afterwards. If you had not acted promptly in that direction we would have had to go into Korea alone. The meeting Sunday night at Blair House … and the results afterwards show that you are a great Secretary of State and a10 diplomat. Your handling of the situation since has been superb.’12
The tone of this note not only illustrates Truman’s instinctive generosity, but points also to a certain buoyancy following the satisfactory turning of a most difficult corner.
All of that buoyancy was going to be needed, for there then began a most dreadful four weeks of military débâcle. For its first year the Korean War simulated the trajectory of a yo-yo. But during its first downward swing no one could tell whether it was going to come up again. The Korean peninsular is on roughly the scale of England and Scotland, with the frontier running near to Leeds rather than north of Carlisle. Seoul, fifty or so miles from the 38th parallel, had already fallen by the time the first Americans arrived, and they made their first contact with the enemy about another fifty miles south of it. They (the 24th Division) were gradually driven back about another eighty miles to Taejon where they fought a desperate but essential five-day delaying action, from July 16th to 21st. This enabled two more divisions to land at Pusan, the port in the far south-east. Around this they were able to hold a foothold about the size of Kent. The remains of the 24th Division—they had lost their commander, General Dean, and a great number of others too—retreated within this perimeter and a stable line was established for the first time by July 27th-28th. Without the successful delaying action at Taejon the invading troops would almost certainly have cleared the peninsula.
United States air superiority held back the mounting of a major North Korean onslaught on this bridgehead until the last days of August. MacArthur, however, injected some political fireworks into the relative calm a few days before the Communists re-started their military ones. He sent a message to the Chicago convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars which sharply contradicted the policy of the administration, and still more of the UN, whose servant in a loose way he was supposed to have become. Truman was furious, although he does not appear to have contemplated the recall of MacArthur at this stage. The coffin into which the incident drove a final nail was rather that of Louis Johnson. Truman was insistent that MacArthur should be made to withdraw his statement, even though it had already rung around the world. Johnson made about four attempts to stop the transmission through the Pentagon of this instruction. On September 12th he was out and Marshall was back in the government in his place.
The end of August or the beginning of September would in any event have been a peculiarly difficult time at which to replace MacArthur. There was violent fighting on the perimeter, although the conduct of this defensive battle was more the responsibility of General Walton Walker. MacArthur was engaged in his last military coup. On September 15th he changed the whole balance of the war with a successful amphibious landing mounted at short notice and carried out on a most difficult coast two hundred miles behind the bulk of the North Korean army which was hammering away at the Pusan redoubt. He put the X Corps ashore at Inch ’on, the port of Seoul. Eleven days later the capital returned to the possession of the Republic of Korea and an armoured column from the south joined up with the seaborne American invaders. The 38th parallel was crossed in early October. By November 21st the Yalu River, the north-western frontier between North Korea and the Manchurian provinces of the People’s Republic of China had been reached. The yo-yo had remounted the string to the limit.
In view of subsequent events MacArthur was criticized for having advanced so far. He claimed that, as he was expressly (and in his view perversely) forbidden air strikes or reconnaissance north of the Manchurian border, it was the only way in which he could find out what was happening in the extreme north of the country, let alone carry out his instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ‘destroy the North Korean armed forces’. Certainly he was explicitly authorized by a message from Truman on September 29th and, more a
mbiguously, by a resolution of the UN General Assembly on October 7th, to advance north of the 38th parallel.
A somewhat different criticism was that his generalship was at fault in allowing two entirely separate commands, responsible only to himself, the 8th Army in the west and X Corps across the mountain chain to the east, to operate on too wide a front. Certainly when on the night of November 25th-26th the Chinese attacked the 8th Army with a strength of 18 divisions and followed this up on the 27th with an attack of about 12 divisions on X Corps, the effect was devastating. The 8th Army reeled back and X Corps was cut off and had to be evacuated (very skilfully) by sea. By December 15th X Corps were embarked and the 8th Army had managed to consolidate on a line just north of Seoul. The yo-yo was half way down again.
The political repercussions of the Chinese intervention were at least as great as the military ones. The autumn had been a period of fluctuating fortune for Truman, as for MacArthur. They had met once, for a few hours on Wake Island on October 15th. Typically, Truman travelled 4,700 miles and MacArthur only 1,900. He persuaded the President, who was not particularly eager to have him in Washington, that he could not separate himself from his troops for a longer journey. The President found him at a peak of benignant condescension and complacency. ‘We arrived at dawn’, he wrote for his diary. ‘General MacArthur was at the Airport with his shirt unbuttoned, wearing a greasy ham and eggs cap that evidently had been in use for twenty years. He greeted the President cordially …’ He also assured the President that ‘the Chinese Commies would not attack, that we had won the war and that we could send a Division to Europe in January 1951’.13 Truman in return gave MacArthur a fourth cluster to his Distinguished Service Medal, bestowed with a presidential citation which expressed not merely confidence but adulation. So there was a good exchange of misinformation.
The mid-term elections were on November 7th. Truman did little campaigning but accidentally made what might have been expected to be a substantial contribution to a good result. On November 1st he escaped a serious assassination attempt outside Blair House. It was mounted by two young Puerto Rican nationalists. One was shot dead, as was a Blair House guard, with two others wounded. The other would-be assassin was imprisoned until 1979. It was at 2.20 in the afternoon. Despite the month the temperature was 84°F, and Truman perhaps for this reason, but clearly contrary to the perception of his habits, was asleep on his bed at the time. He rather dangerously rushed to his bedroom window, but otherwise took the attack calmly.
It may be that the incident averted worse misfortunes at the polls but there was no direct evidence of its favourable effects. The poison of McCarthy was well into the national blood stream by then, and the results were worse where the Senator had pursued personal vendettas than overall—a sign to all except the most courageous that he was a dangerous man to oppose. As a result it was more the quality than the quantity of the losses from which the Democrats suffered. They retained control of both chambers, although 28 seats changed hands in the House and five in the Senate, reducing the margin there to two. Scott Lucas, the majority leader, was defeated in Illinois, as was Myers, the majority whip, in Pennsylvania. Millard Tydings, into whom McCarthy had plunged his knife most deeply, went down in Maryland, and Richard Nixon, to the particular chagrin of Truman, beat Helen Gahagan Douglas in California.
This was not a glorious outcome for Truman’s last electoral battle, but nor was it a disaster on the scale of 1946. More seriously on his mind during that November was the deteriorating situation in Korea. This was a paradox, for the month was mostly one of rapid, even reckless advance. But it was one in which the Pentagon and the State Department lost almost all remnants of confidence in MacArthur. They were pretty sure that Chinese intervention was coming, and thought that his approach to this alternated between provocation and panic. They distrusted his strategy of advancing far and fast with increasingly splayed out forces and a divided command. And they knew that his continuous public complaints about not being allowed to attack the Chinese were not only gross insubordination but also gravely damaging to the unity of the United Nations allies.
Acheson conveyed the atmosphere well, and also gave vent to a rare burst of self-criticism, when he wrote:
‘All the President’s advisers in this matter, civilian and military, knew that something was badly wrong, though what it was, how to find out, and what to do about it they muffed. That they were deeply disturbed and felt the need for common counsel is shown by the unprecedented fact that in the three weeks and three days from November 10th to December 4th, when disaster was full upon us, the Secretaries of State and Defense and their chief assistants met three times with the Chiefs of Staff in their war room to tussle with the problem, the two Secretaries met five times with the President, and I consulted with him on five other occasions. I have an unhappy conviction that none of us, myself prominently included, served him as he was entitled to be served.’14
This may somewhat exaggerate the extent to which the advisers were baffled rather than intimidated. They knew well enough that the main thing that was wrong was MacArthur, but were inhibited from recommending his removal by a combination of fear of the political explosion which would follow and a natural caution about changing horses in mid-stream. General Ridgway, who was not a full member of the group and might also have been expected—as a likely successor—to be the most inhibited, was the only one who blurted out his impatience that they would not face up to and deal with the MacArthur problem. But he did not do so until December 3rd, when most of the damage was done.
The subsequent mea culpa of the advisers (or at any rate some of them) has naturally been eagerly used by defenders of the President. His daughter seized upon Acheson to write: ‘During these fateful weeks my father did not receive the kind of support and advice he deserved …’15 No doubt he did deserve to be better served, but there must also be responsibility upon him for not better serving himself. He could not shelter behind the Secretary of State or the Chiefs of Staff when it came to sacking MacArthur and there is no reason why he should shelter behind them for not sacking him earlier. It was not as though he had himself proposed such a course and been dissuaded from it by the weight of professional and Cabinet advice. At the Wake Island meeting he had assumed a certain symbiotic relationship with the General.
He had even been impressed. He talked about ‘the ideas of two intellectually honest men when they meet …’16 This mood was only gradually worn away during November. As late as the 30th of that month he wrote for his diary more in sorrow than in anger, but certainly giving no impression that he was being restrained with difficulty from demanding the General’s head on a charger:
‘This has been a hectic month. General Mac as usual has been shooting off his mouth. He made a pre-election statement that cost us votes and he made a post-election statement that has him in hot water in Europe and at home. I must defend him and save his face even if he has on various and numerous occasions tried to cut mine off. I must stand by my subordinates …’17
On that same day he himself had in fact rivalled MacArthur not in insubordination, for that is a sin which by-definition a President and Commander-in-Chief cannot commit, but in creating confusion around the world. He had held a press conference in difficult circumstances. Rattled by MacArthur’s alternations between bombast and panic, his military advisers were undecided as to whether it would be possible to hold on in Korea at all or whether it would be necessary to seek a cease-fire and/or contemplate evacuation. He had to bluff his way over this weakness, which he did successfully. In the course of doing so, however, he let fall some ill-considered remarks about the possible use of the atomic bomb. After saying that the United States would take whatever steps were necessary to meet the military situation, he was asked: ‘Will that include the atomic bomb?’ ‘That includes every weapon we have,’ he said. Then he was asked: ‘Does that mean there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?’ ‘There has always been consideration of its use,�
��11 he replied. Then, later, he was pressed on whether the weapon might be used against military or civilian targets. He said: ‘It’s a matter the military people will have to decide. I’m not a military authority that passes on these things.’ The next question was whether United Nations authority would be required for the use of the atomic bomb. ‘No,’ said Truman, ‘it doesn’t mean that at all. The action against Communist China depends on the action of the United Nations. The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of weapons, as he always has.’18
It was a devastatingly foolish series of answers, and the President could hardly complain that it was interpreted around the world as meaning that MacArthur had been given discretion as to when to use a nuclear weapon and would probably do so very soon. Within an hour the White House issued a retraction which rather engagingly began by stating that ‘The President wants to make it certain that there is no misinterpretation of his answers to questions at his press conference today …’It then pointed out, accurately but eliptically, that what he had said must be nonsense for, by law, only the President could authorize the use of the atomic bomb, and that no such authority had been given. But the alarm bells around the world could not quickly be stopped ringing.
One of them rang in London at a particularly sensitive time. The House of Commons was holding a major foreign affairs debate when news of the President’s press conference came through in the late afternoon. The attendance in and around the chamber was augmented by the tense parliamentary situation of that short Parliament of 1950—1, with a government majority of only six. The news from America, however, united rather than divided the House. It did so in rather an ignoble way, with members crowding and clucking around the main tape machine like animals around a meal trough. A mood of near panic set in. I had certainly never seen anything like it. That was not altogether surprising, as I had then been a member for less than three years. What is more surprising is that I have never seen anything like it in the subsequent 35 years.
