The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Stalin was a new kind of tsar, a people’s tsar, driven as much by an age-old paranoia—in his case both national and personal—in dealing with the West, a man with little interest or belief in the possibilities of a postwar alliance. By 1950, the Harry Truman who had made that first rather sympathetic run at Stalin was long gone. He had been replaced by a blunt, considerably more suspicious president who felt that the earlier Truman, the one who had ventured to Potsdam, had been “an innocent idealist.” Stalin for his part had gotten Truman as wrong as Truman had gotten him. After they met at Potsdam, Stalin, like various conservative American politicians, had significantly, perhaps dangerously, underestimated the new American president, telling Nikita Khrushchev, then a rising star in the Soviet bureaucracy, that Truman was worthless. A great power chess game had followed the end of the war, inevitably so, given the power vacuum in the world with the collapse of Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, and the disintegration of their empires. By the time of the North Korean invasion, the Cold War had reached its most intense level save for the nuclear abyss the two powers faced during the Cuban Missile Crisis a dozen years later. For the June 25 invasion came four years after Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech, and two years after the Russian blockade of Berlin and the American airlift to resupply that city. By 1950, the Western allies were well on their way to the completion of the Marshall Plan, and soon the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—which the United States saw as a way of strengthening the still war-ravaged and shaky nations of Europe, but which the Communists viewed as part of an attempt to create a great wall of hostile nations ringing them, armed with nuclear weapons.

  When the Truman administration’s top officials convened on June 25 to try to figure out what the invasion meant, other than one half of Korea attacking the other half, they were essentially peering into the dark. These were days when everything the Soviet Union did was clouded in the utmost secrecy, when even the Moscow phone book was a classified document. The immediate belief of the people then gathering around the president in Washington was that the invasion was a direct Moscow move, ordered by Stalin and obeyed by his proxies in North Korea. That would turn out not to be true; years later it became clear from the opening of archives in Moscow that the driving force for the invasion was the young and overconfident Kim Il Sung, and that the ever cautious Stalin had somewhat reluctantly gone along with it. At that moment, the administration’s Soviet experts considered North Korea simply a Soviet satellite, totally under the Kremlin’s thumb, which it largely was, but in this case Stalin was more the accommodator than the instigator. The primary question that concerned Washington at first was: Could the invasion be only a feint, the first move in a larger Russian plan of aggression? And if so, what would Stalin’s next move be? Was Stalin secretly eyeing Europe or a target in the Middle East? Acheson thought the invasion was a feint to be followed up by a Soviet-supported Chinese strike at Chiang on Taiwan or, perhaps equally dangerous, a Communist counterstrike after a provocation by Chiang.

  Truman, by contrast, thought the next move might come in Iran. So did Douglas MacArthur, with whom he rarely agreed on anything. On June 26, Truman, in the company of a few close staffers, walked over to a globe, spun it to the Middle East, and pointed to Iran. “Here is where they will start trouble if we aren’t careful. Korea is the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now, if we stand up to them like we did in Greece three years ago, they won’t take any next steps. But if we just stand by, they’ll move into Iran and they’ll take over the whole Middle East. There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.”

  When the president had arrived back in Washington in the early evening of the twenty-fifth, he was met at the airport by Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and Undersecretary of State James Webb. From the moment the three men joined Truman inside his limo, there was no doubt which way the play would go. “By God, I’m going to let them have it!” Truman said. Johnson quickly responded that he was with Truman. Webb said simply that Truman should look at some of the things the people at State had put together for him. They had multiple recommendations as early responses to the still fragmentary reports from Korea, all of which were bad: they wanted the president to authorize General MacArthur to give the South Koreans such arms as they needed; to use American air and sea power to cover evacuation procedures and to hold Korea’s ports, lest they fall to the North in the midst of an evacuation. At the same time, based on the president’s future decisions, they wanted the Joint Chiefs to come up with what was militarily necessary to stop the North Koreans. They wanted the Seventh Fleet to move into the Straits of Formosa to block any Communist Chinese assault on Taiwan (and also to stop Chiang from doing anything to provoke the new government on the mainland). In addition they believed the United States should initiate military aid programs to support the French in Indochina, and offer military aid to Burma and Thailand. When the limo reached Blair House, where the president was then staying, Webb, in a moment alone with Truman, made one other suggestion: that they consider separating the Taiwan and Korea decisions, especially since Washington intended to take the case of the North Korean invasion to the UN.

  If a line was not being crossed on that day, it was most surely being blurred, and it was not necessarily only in Korea. In the years immediately after World War II, there were probably two main issues confronting the policymakers in Washington as they sought to deal with the destruction of the old order and other havoc created by the war. The first and most obvious and most immediate was the need to draw a line against Soviet expansionism in Europe. That was done with great skill and vision, but unfortunately partially at the expense of the other great issue of the era, one seemingly less immediate and more peripheral in terms of sheer power—how to respond to the end of a colonial age, which found the nation’s greatest allies being challenged politically and sometimes militarily by their former colonial possessions. On the question of understanding the power of nationalism in the underdeveloped world, cloaked as it sometimes was in a covering of Communism, Washington’s record was significantly spottier. There were in fact two very different kinds of Communism posing very different kinds of threats: hard Soviet Communism, driven in Europe by the Red Army, and Communism as it was manifested in the Third World, where it became a convenient instrument of anticolonial forces, who often turned to Moscow (as in Indochina) for help after being rejected by Washington. Whatever else can be said about the North Korean attack, it was an old-fashioned border crossing; but in Indochina, which the United States now began to tie to both Korea and the larger confrontation in Europe, it was a pure colonial war.

  That night, all the top military and civilian people dined at Blair House. After dinner they took up the subject of the invasion. Some things were already becoming clear: no one knew how deep the North Korean penetration was, but this was clearly a major invasion and the South Korean forces were not fighting well. They would not be able to hold on their own. After dinner, General Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who had favored pulling American combat troops back from Korea a year earlier because it would be such a terrible place to fight and because it was deemed of so little strategic value, was the first to speak. A line had to be drawn against the Communists, he said, and Korea was as good a place to do so as any. Its value had changed overnight. Truman interrupted to say that he agreed completely. In that moment, the die was cast. Bradley added that, given the size of the attack, the Soviets had to be behind it. Then Admiral Forrest Sherman, the chief of naval operations, and General Hoyt Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff, spoke. Each reflected the optimism—and dependence—Americans felt about their air and naval superiority, as well as each man’s belief in the unique powers of his own service. Neither had very much respect for the fighting abilities of the North Korean Army. Each was confident that air and sea power could turn back the North Koreans. But Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff, said that based on the reports h
e was getting, it was likely American ground forces would also be necessary. The commitment of ground troops was a very different—much graver—step. Bradley, Collins, and Frank Pace, the secretary of the Army, all insisted that was not a decision the United States ought to rush into. Bradley would soon note, however, that he had underestimated the force and the ability of the North Koreans. “No one believed that the North Koreans were as strong as they turned out to be,” he later testified.

  Slowly a consensus was building: airpower was needed immediately to slow down the North Korean advance, and the issue should be taken to the UN for its support, though, if need be, the United States would be willing to take unilateral action to stop the invasion. Near the end of the meeting, Webb asked Truman to discuss the political aspects of the situation. “We’re not going to talk about politics!” Truman responded sharply. “I’ll handle the political affairs!” Truman then issued orders for airpower to be used to protect the evacuation of American dependents and to contest the North Koreans in the skies above the South. He asked Pace to have MacArthur send a survey team to Korea to find out what was needed militarily, and then, fatefully, he ordered Sherman to send the Seventh Fleet from the Philippines into the Formosa Straits between Taiwan and the mainland of China, now in the hands of Communists. But he said he wanted no announcement made until the fleet was actually in position.

  The decision on ground troops remained like a dark storm cloud overhead. None of the president’s advisers had any faith in the ability of the South Koreans to hold the line. The next day, Truman wrote his wife, Bess (still in Independence), that it had been a grand trip back once he was in the air. The meeting they had held at Blair House was most successful, but the issue of Korea was a tough one. “Haven’t been so upset since Greece and Turkey fell into our lap. Let’s hope for the best….” The idea that Stalin had acquiesced to and not driven the invasion was alien, not that it would have made very much difference. Either way, it was viewed as the same thing. “Russians are Said to be Invading; Red Tank units Push on Seoul” was the headline in the influential New York Herald Tribune.

  To some of the top people in the national security world, like Acheson, the news, however unnerving, was, if not a godsend, then something perilously close, because they had badly wanted a massive increase in the defense budget, and prospects had not been promising. They had in effect been waiting for something like this to happen, fearful of it but also sure it would come, and that when it came it might help wake up the country to the new challenges it faced.

  George Kennan, the nation’s leading expert on the Soviets, had not, to his immense frustration, made the cut at the Blair House meetings. (“The dinner had the effect of defining—by social invitation, so to speak—the group that would be responsibly engaged in the handling of the Department’s decision in the ensuing days,” he later wrote.) He was, in his own words, on the sidelines. He had already left behind the job of director of State’s Policy Planning staff and was essentially on leave, headed for Princeton, to ponder the past instead of the present and the future. Still, fearing that Korea might be a mere feint, Acheson questioned Kennan closely in the next few days about what the Russians were up to. Kennan did not think that this attack represented anything larger. He wrote Acheson that the Soviets were not looking for a larger war with the United States, but they would be delighted to see the United States either bogged down “in a profitless and discreditable war” or standing on the sidelines doing nothing (and thus be discredited in the region) as the North Koreans conquered the peninsula. The great danger for the United States as it plotted its response, he commented, was not in Europe but in Asia. There, the Russians might try to get the Chinese involved as their proxies. This meant that Kennan did not see a larger war and felt we should be very careful to set limits on it. This turned out to be sobering and largely prophetic advice from the nation’s leading Kremlinologist.

  When the principals met again at Blair House on the second day, Acheson, already the most important player on Korea except for the president, announced that the Seventh Fleet was now in place and therefore it was time to issue the order for it to protect Taiwan. At the same time, Chiang, he noted, was to be told very bluntly to cease all operations against the mainland. The Seventh Fleet officers were to make sure that he complied. Then Acheson began to outline his recommendations not just for Korea but for all of Asia. The United States would step up aid to the government in the Philippines, now embroiled in a guerrilla war with the Communist-led Huk guerrillas, and do the same for the French, who were fighting the Communist-Nationalist Vietminh in a colonial war in Indochina. In Indochina that was a critical escalation: the United States had originally opposed the idea of the French resuming their colonial rule there, had gone along with it reluctantly under pressure from Paris, and now, four years into that war, just as the French public was beginning to show signs of tiring, the United States was prepared to take on a major share of the financing. Soon the Americans would become the principal backers and financiers of the French. Sending a major military mission to Indochina meant the American toe was being dipped into new waters, those of a bitter colonial war, without anyone imagining, or for that matter very much caring about, the full consequences. Nor was time wasted in doing it. On June 29, four days after the North Korean crossing, eight C-47 cargo planes flew across the Pacific carrying materiel for the French, the beginning of massive military aid and of what would one day become an ever deeper, ever more melancholy adventure for America.

  At the Monday night meeting, the Washington policymakers also discussed the possibility of using Chiang’s troops in Korea. The Generalissimo had already volunteered some of his best soldiers. Truman was intrigued by the offer and at first leaned toward accepting it. Acheson advised strongly against it. He had been thinking about what he considered the Chiang problem from the moment the Korean crisis began and was not surprised when Chiang’s offer came in. He understood that what Chiang wanted (a widening war that would in some way bring in the Chinese Communists) and what the United States wanted (a limited war that China stayed out of ) were in no way parallel. The two countries might still be allies, but they wanted very different things. Acheson was absolutely sure he was right on this one. In any case, he had seen quite enough of how Chiang’s troops had fought on the mainland to know that he did not want to depend on them in this war, especially against the talented forces who had just defeated them. There were a number of people on the right, including MacArthur, who were fascinated by the idea of using Chiang’s troops—unleashing them was the phrase—but Acheson was not among them, nor in the end were most of the Joint Chiefs, who had their own purely military wariness.

  But the administration’s political opponents wanted to use them and saw the beginning of the Korean War as a way of striking against the president and his secretary of state, and of tying Korea to an issue on which they were already attacking Truman, the loss of China. Their response was immediate and visceral. On the twenty-sixth, Senator Styles Bridges, an extremely well-connected figure in what was called the China Lobby, rose on the Senate floor to ask, “Will we continue appeasement? Will we wait ‘for the dust to settle’? [a play on an earlier Acheson phrase of waiting for the dust to settle in China in hope that there might eventually be a chance of separating Russia and China]. Now is the time to draw the line.” Bill Knowland of California, so close to the China Lobby that he was known as the Senator from Formosa [Taiwan], added, “If this nation is allowed to succumb to an overt invasion of this kind, there is little chance of stopping Communism anywhere on the continent of Asia.” And finally Senator George (Molly) Malone of Nevada tied the situation to the Hiss case, in which a figure in the State Department, Alger Hiss, had just been convicted of perjury on charges of spying for the Soviets. What had happened in China and was happening now in Korea, Malone said, had been brought on by left-wing advisers to the State Department.

  While Truman’s own response to what had happened when the North Kor
eans invaded was automatic and almost completely apolitical, it was also true that there were politics at play from the very first. There were in fact some divisions within his own administration over the issue of Chiang, and whether or not to defend him and the island of Taiwan. Not only was continued support of Chiang becoming a major issue employed by the most hostile of the administration’s enemies, but even in the administration’s most private meetings it festered. Acheson thought Chiang literally a lost cause, and supporting him a dubious policy, one that would work against the United States in the long run, given the changing mood and political face of Asia. But his opposite number at Defense, Louis Johnson, who hoped to succeed Truman as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, was openly pro-Chiang. In the minds of some members of the inner Truman group, he was considered a member of the hostile China Lobby, someone who had promised Chiang’s people at the Nationalist embassy in Washington that he was not only going to neutralize Acheson but drive him out of government. (Not only was his top aide, Paul Griffith, in constant touch with Wellington Koo, the Nationalist ambassador and the key figure in the China Lobby, but unbeknownst to the rest of the administration, some nine months earlier Koo had arranged a dinner in Riverdale, New York, for Madame Chiang and Johnson.) Johnson’s connection to the Nationalists was a fact of the administration, and it meant that the criticism of the administration’s China policy heard constantly from the Republicans was also voiced in-house and that everything said at the top-level meeting was immediately passed on to the Nationalists.

  That made for an unpleasant in-house struggle, one that hovered over the administration in the early days of the Korean War as the issue of China itself hovered over every decision. It was not a fight that Johnson could win. In political terms, Truman was much closer to Acheson; the president both admired and trusted him and his political judgment and was eventually wary of anything that might expand the war. But he also owed Johnson, who, almost alone among men with major financial connections, had stood with him in the worst days after the 1948 political convention, when no one thought Truman could win the presidency on his own. Johnson had been Truman’s principal fund-raiser when the Democratic Party coffers were empty, and as a reward, he had gotten Defense.