by Roy Jenkins
Attlee was quickly confronted by a letter of dissociation with America signed by half his back benchers. Churchill and Eden expressed slightly more measured dismay. Attlee calmed the House by proposing an immediate visit to Washington. This was a remarkable event, for he was no great traveller. He mostly left such things to Bevin. But Bevin was too ill to go, and in any event had been confined to travelling by ship for several years past, and the schedules of the Cunard Line were hardly adequate for such an emergency.
Attlee proposed to Truman a fairly broad-based three-pronged agenda, but the impression given to the House of Commons and the world was that he was going to read the riot act to the Americans. He was nonetheless able to command a full-scale Washington heads of government conference at very short notice. A significant part of the special relationship persisted, and the British had a hard-fighting brigade in Korea. Accompanied by a strong military team, Attlee flew to the United States on the night of Sunday, December 3rd, and had four full days of talks with the Americans.
This visit was, and remains, one of the most varyingly interpreted diplomatic events of the post-war decade. The extreme British and pro-Attlee interpretation is that the Prime Minister arrived at the White House like a feared but respected schoolmaster striding into a disorderly class-room and proceeded to tell Truman, with his well-known economy in the use of words, that he had better pull himself together, give up foolish notions of using the A-bomb in or around the Korean theatre, discipline Mac-Arthur, and generally reduce commitment in the Far East in order to get a better balance in Europe. The extreme American and anti-Attlee version suggests that the Prime Minister arrived in Washington as a lugubrious and unwelcome guest at a time when a tense administration needed sustenance not criticism, proceeded to whine a doctrine of total appeasement in the Far East, and was duly chastened by his firmer minded hosts until he departed, none too soon, with his tail between his legs.
It is not easy to determine exactly where, between the two, the truth lies. First, the myth that Attlee’s visit stopped Truman starting nuclear warfare in Korea can be quickly disposed of. Truman had no intention of doing any such thing, but he had mainly himself to blame for the fact that such a fear had become widespread. Second, it was probably the case that the news of Attlee’s imminent arrival aroused little enthusiasm in the White House. Margaret Truman, who normally reflects the atmosphere well, refers to the trip as being ‘unnecessary’ and ‘defeatist’. On the other hand, Acheson, who was in most ways the sharpest critic of the visit, actually recorded that on December 3rd he successfully ‘opposed efforts to obtain a cease-fire until Mr Attlee had arrived and been consulted’.1219 And the whole administration, President, State Department and military establishment, put themselves out to a remarkable extent for the exchanges. Apart from the four days of formal talks there was a Potomac cruise and a British Embassy dinner attended by Truman. Perhaps the dismayed administration was glad to have something to do other than listen to the mixture of bad news and bad advice from MacArthur. In any event it was treatment which no allied head of government could now secure in Washington, even at 96 days’ notice, let alone 96 hours’.
Truman’s own account of the meetings, given respectfully and at considerable length in his Memoirs (published in 1956) contains no criticism of Attlee. Unfortunately that amounts to little by way of evidence, for these Memoirs were written (certainly not entirely by Truman himself) with all the bland, formal accuracy of British Cabinet minutes. They are a good, flat account of the events of his presidency, purged of any authentic contact with his habits of phrase or thought. In books which better capture his views and personality he is mostly silent upon the visit.
Acheson therefore becomes an important if not wholly conclusive witness. Apart from anything else, he comes near to contradicting himself. He strikes a different note in his own memoirs (published in 1969) and the interview which he gave to Mr Kenneth Harris for his Attlee between then and his own death in 1971. Present at the Creation is, to say the least, waspish about the Attlee visit. ‘December opened by bringing us a Job’s comforter in Clement Attlee …’ he warmly began. ‘He was a far abler man than Winston Churchill’s description of him as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing” would imply, but persistently depressing. He spoke, as John J. Chapman said of President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, with “all the passion of a woodchuck chewing a carrot”. His thought impressed me as a long withdrawing melancholy sigh.’20 For the rest he described how he had to rebuke Attlee for believing that the United States could be expected to combine a policy of determined commitment in Europe with scuttle in Asia, and for saying that nothing was more important for the West than retaining the good opinion of Asia: ‘I remarked acidly that (there was) the security of the United States.’ For the rest he recorded that ‘the chief impression left with me was a deep dislike and distrust of the “summit conference” as a diplomatic instrument’.21
The bridge between this account and that which he gave to Mr Harris was provided by his description of the difficult general battle he had to fight to prevent Attlee skilfully leading Truman into a cumulative acceptance of his argument, and the specific battle over the excision from the communiqué of an undertaking by each of the two countries not to use the atomic weapon without consultation with the other. This, it was alleged, would be as much against United States law as the President delegating such authority to MacArthur. Talking to Mr Harris, Acheson paid high tribute to Attlee, although rather in the way that Churchill described Baldwin as ‘the most formidable politician he ever knew’, and several times using rather inappropriate words:
‘Churchill never asked or got so much as Attlee did,’ Acheson was recorded as saying. ‘He was a very remarkable man … Attlee was adroit, extremely adroit, his grasp of the situation was masterly. His method was seduction:13 he led the President, step by step, to where he wanted to get him. He would make a statement of what the British wanted as though it were a statement of what the Americans wanted, and pause and say, very quickly, “I take it we are already agreed about that,” and Mr Truman, who was no slouch himself as a negotiator, would answer “Yes, we are.” I was horrified. I began stepping on the President’s foot … I found that Attlee had been very much underrated. He was a damn good lawyer.14 All through the talks he was out to get everything he could out of Truman’s hands, and into his. The idea that he came over just to expostulate about MacArthur and the Bomb is most misleading; if we hadn’t watched him like a hawk, he would have gone back to London leaving American policy hamstrung.’22
There remains the question of personal relations between Attlee and Truman. Truman was not particularly good at getting on with those from a different background whom he did not much know. Attlee was still worse. In the circumstances they seem to have managed very well. Lord Franks, who was British Ambassador at the time, but whose judgment is much less affected by achievements as a host than is that of many diplomats, has told me that the embassy dinner on the Thursday evening (the third day of the talks) was in his view an occasion of break-through. Truman and Attlee sang World War I songs together. This particular choral manifestation is not mentioned elsewhere, although both Truman and Acheson give the impression that the dinner was a considerable success.
This was the more remarkable as it took place at the end of 24 hours which had been exceptionally wearing for Truman. On top of having to cope with the débâcle in the Far East and the Attlee talks, he had just sustained the sudden death of the member of his staff to whom he was closest. Charles Ross, his press officer, with whom he had been at school in Independence, had dropped dead at his desk on the Wednesday evening, within minutes of completing a briefing on the progress of the talks during the day on the presidential yacht. Later that evening, Margaret Truman gave a concert in Washington. The music critic of the Washington Post reviewed it in terms which, while not wholly hostile, were fairly critical. Truman read the review at 5.30 the next morning, walked across to his office in the White House, and ther
e poured out to the thirty-four-year-old critic 150 words of bile which was as childish as it was concentrated.15 This was pre-eminently a composition which should have joined Truman’s large collection of letters he did not send. His staff would quickly have gathered it in had he put it in his out tray. Instead he stuck a three-cent stamp on it and got a White House usher to go and put it in an ordinary mail-box. Hume published it two days later. The informed reaction was one of shocked surprise that the President of the United States should attack such a small target so intemperately. But the incoming mail was largely on his side and he wrote defiantly in his diary about what he had done. It was not the best preparation for an embassy dinner with visitors with whom he had already spent most of the previous 72 hours.
On the other hand I must record that when I went to see Truman in Kansas City nearly three years later and tried to get him to discuss his relationship with Attlee, I could elicit little warmth. It was Churchill, with whom he worked for the last fifteen as for the first three months of his presidency, for whom he reserved his enthusiasm and whom he wished to see again. He liked to stress his own homespun virtues in favourable contrast to the grandeur of F.D.R., but he confused the issue by showing much more appreciation of the grandeur of Churchill than of the more homespun quality of Attlee.
The essential skill of Attlee on this visit, which Truman probably appreciated more than Acheson, for all the latter’s high perception, was that he put under the talks the safety net of fairly frequently telling the Americans that the British would in the last resort support them more or less whatever they did. He did this both in public and in private. He told the National Press Club: ‘As long as the Stars and Stripes flies in Korea the British flag will fly beside it.’ In this way he kept American impatience at some of his views well under control and gave himself a relatively safe position, up on the tight-rope, from which to tell them that he hoped the courses in which he would support them would not be too foolish. As a result he could return to London feeling that he had got satisfactory moral (although not formal) assurances about consultation before any future use of the bomb, and that he had made the Americans more aware, not merely of MacArthur’s bad and rash generalship in the context of Korea (it needed ‘no ghost come from the grave to tell [them] that’), but of the dangers of his strategy distorting the whole balance of their world effort.
In Washington the President and his advisers were left to live with the consequences of their crushing repulse in North Korea. The alarmist view that it left only the choices of all-out war or evacuation proved ill-founded, but was refuted only at the price of another six months of bitter and fluctuating warfare with heavy casualties. Compared with the great swoops of the previous six months the advances or retreats became slower, but this stickiness of movement brought more and not less carnage. The line, more or less on the old frontier, which General Walker was able to establish in December, could not be held. Walker himself was killed on December 23rd and replaced by Ridgway, who soon afterwards took over command of all the UN forces in Korea, thereby relegating MacArthur to the role of a semi-spectator in Tokyo.
Ridgway successfully set about restoring the morale of the 8th Army, and of X Corps when it again took the field. His first task was, however, the melancholy one of containing the second Communist invasion of South Korea and again evacuating Seoul. He was back forty or so miles south of the capital by mid-January. On January 25th he launched a counter-offensive and, after a period of setback in mid-February, he regained Seoul by March 15th and was at the 38th parallel by the end of the month. He advanced cautiously north for another three weeks. Then the Chinese launched their expected spring offensive. Once more the UN troops were driven back south of the parallel but managed to hold a line just to the north of Seoul. It was in this withdrawal that the British suffered particularly heavily, with the near massacre, following a most gallant stand, of a battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment.
By May 20th the Communists were stopped. On May 23rd the UN command began yet another offensive which took them once again north of the parallel and to the occupation by June 12th of the two tactically important towns of Chorwon and Kumwha. There, as the anniversary of its outbreak approached, the war settled down. On June 23rd Malik proposed at the United Nations that cease-fire negotiations should be opened between the participants. They were, but not with a great will to peace. It took another 25 months before an armistice was signed at Panmunjon.
These long drawn-out negotiations were punctuated by occasional outbursts of hard fighting, by substantial American trouble with the intransigence of Syngman Rhee, and by North Korean accusations, strongly supported by Dr Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, that the UN forces were engaging in germ warfare, all against the theme of continuing dispute over the repatriation of prisoners of war. This issue was greatly complicated by the facts that the Communists had engaged in some remarkably successful brain-washing of American and British prisoners and that many of the North Koreans in the hands of the UN were determined not to go back. The war dragged on as a running irritant throughout the last eighteen months of Truman’s presidency, and the need to break the log-jam of the stalled negotiations was successfully exploited by Eisenhower in the 1952 campaign. But the crisis went out of the war after June 1951.
During the course of the war Truman had faced three major crunches: first, the decision to resist and then rally the United Nations in June 1950; second, the absorption of the shock of defeat six months later, and the decision to fight back in a still limited war, resisting alike the rival temptations of withdrawal and escalation; and third, the belated dismissal of MacArthur in April 1951.
Although this last was belated, overwhelmingly justified, and essential if the authority of the presidency was to be maintained, it was nonetheless an act of stark courage. I doubt if Franklin Roosevelt would have done it. He would have more successfully massaged MacArthur, while patronizing him a little and certainly not allowing the reverse to happen, as at Wake Island. And he would have shunted him gradually sideways and downwards, so that he ended up somewhere between a grand emissary to the then powerless Emperor of Japan and a keeper of American war graves in the Pacific. But he would probably not have sacked him.
Truman did not decide to do this following the defeat and the Attlee protests of December. In January he was still trying hard, using a mixture of flattery and logical exposition, to find a modus vivendi with MacArthur. This was a hopeless task, for MacArthur, particularly after Ridgway took over the joint command in Pusan, was looking for departure with a flourish and not for quiet cooperation. In mid-March, with South Korea again free of invading troops, Truman ordered careful work to be done on preparing a cease-fire proposal to be put to the Chinese. MacArthur was consulted on the key paragraphs. Thereupon he issued his own ultimatum to the Chinese, couched in terms of such insulting rhetoric that there could be no possibility of their accepting it. That made it impossible for Truman to send his message to the Chinese, and, he subsequently claimed, was when he made up his mind to get rid of him:
‘That is what he got fired for … He prevented a cease-fire proposition right there. I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea at that time. I was never so put out in my life. It’s the lousiest trick a Commander-in-Chief can have done to him by an underling. MacArthur thought he was proconsul for the government of the United States and could do as he damned pleased. ‘23
General Marshall subsequently put much the same point in more restrained and logical language: ‘What is new and what brought about the necessity for General MacArthur’s removal is the wholly unprecedented situation of a local theater commander publicly expressing his displeasure at, and disagreement with, the foreign policy of the United States.’24
MacArthur did not however go immediately after his epistle to the Chinese. Truman showed some guile over the timing. He needed to get some important congressional votes on appropriations for the Marshall Plan and NATO out of the way before lobbing
his bomb into the political arena. He also wanted to be under pressure from his advisers, rather than vice-versa, to agree to the removal of MacArthur. He therefore waited for a further act of provocation, which was a letter from the General to Representative Joseph Martin, the Republican minority leader, which again set out his own foreign policy and which was duly read to the House by Martin on April 4th.
Truman conferred that day and subsequently with a group composed of Marshall, Acheson, Harriman and General Bradley. By April 7th they unanimously recommended to him that Mac-Arthur be relieved of his command. Bradley had conferred with the three service chiefs, and on April 8th brought them to see Truman, when they each gave him their opinion that he should act as proposed. This somewhat deliberate method of proceeding had the great advantage that it led to them all giving extremely firm testimony to a special Senate Committee which subsequently and inconclusively considered the merits of MacArthur’s dismissal. It was the direct opposite of the mood which Louis Johnson had achieved amongst the witnesses before the House Armed Services Committee in 1949.
Its disadvantage was that it defeated the plans for the most courteous possible conveying of the news to MacArthur. This was to be done personally by the Secretary of the Army, Frank Pace, who was in Korea and was to proceed to Tokyo and quietly inform the General. Instead there was a leak, the announcement had to be brought forward, and MacArthur was first informed, not by Pace, but by his incredulous wife, who had just heard it on the radio. This infelicity gave him an exploitable, but hardly decisive, grievance. It is doubtful if he would have taken the news well had it been conveyed to him a week in advance of publication by a joint deputation of every other five-star general in the US Army.
