The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  While that amazing Roosevelt run had taken place, the Republican right wing had raged impotently. The more it lost, the angrier it became. Each time, its representatives had come to the national conventions confident of their greater truths, only to see the nomination hijacked by an elite from the big industrial states backed up by a few powerful internationalist publishers, most notably Henry Luce, the head of Time and Life, a man then at the very peak of his media power. The residual bitterness from the 1940 and 1944 conventions was very real; it was hard to tell who the right wingers were angrier at, FDR and the Democrats or the internationalist wing of their own party. To them, the internationalists were fake Republicans, Eastern snobs, who had just enough skill to steal the nomination but never enough to win an election.

  With World War II over and Roosevelt dead, the right wing finally believed it was regaining power, both within the party itself and nationally. The 1946 off-year election had given the right-wingers their first chance to strike back. Their cause, as they saw it, was nothing less than simple Americanism, or the protection of an America of sturdy old-fashioned values, which had produced people exactly like them, against the America of their enemies, which had produced people who favored what they saw as socialism or Communism or, in their minds, people whose lives were too heavily subsidized by the government. “The choice which confronts Americans this year is between Communism and Republicanism,” said B. Carroll Reece, the Tennessee congressman and chairman of the Republican Party, just before the election. Nebraska’s Senator Kenneth Wherry added: “The coming campaign is not just another election. It is a crusade.” And in some ways, and in some parts of the country, it was nothing less.

  Harry Truman, the accidental president, the unlikely heir to the mighty Roosevelt presidency, was probably lucky indeed that 1946 was not a presidential election year, given the general unhappiness in the country, and the anxieties that lay just under the surface. Unlike its allies (and enemies) whose lands lay in ruins, the United States had emerged from the war as the sole global economic powerhouse, a nation rich in a world that was poor, its allies and adversaries alike ground down by fighting suicidal wars twice within twenty-five years. America, protected in that era by its two great oceans, untouched on its mainland by enemy bombs, had emerged infinitely more muscular than when it had gone in; the country had been dragged by exterior forces, kicking and screaming, to the zenith of its power. But there was a surprising degree of anxiety as well as stored up resentments just underneath the surface, most notably over dealing with the increasingly difficult and complex peace that the United States had inherited and over accepting the great jump in global responsibility that came with the peace. The new threat of Soviet Communism—the fact that an ally had suddenly become an adversary—was just beginning to fall over American politics. To some of those who had been out of power there was little surprise in this—the Soviets had been an unlikely ally in the first place, and to some of them the war had been the wrong one from the beginning; we had once again fought to save the British. With the war over, not that many Americans were eager to take on these great new unwanted international obligations—and risks—that went with becoming a superpower and replacing imperial Britain as the leader of the Western alliance, nor were many necessarily thrilled to become, as the architects of foreign policy in Washington seemed to be demanding, part of Europe’s endless political-military struggles on a long-term basis. Many Americans wanted less, not more, of a connection with the European democracies.

  And so the Republicans did very well in the congressional election of 1946. The wartime pressure to support the incumbent president—don’t change horses in midstream—had been a very successful Democratic slogan, but it was gone. The Republicans, running on a program of a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut, gained eleven seats in the Senate and fifty-four in the House. The Roosevelt coalition of Northern labor unions and big city machines combined with conservative Southern oligarchs looked like it might be coming apart, replaced by what the Republicans hoped was a return to old-fashioned American normalcy. “The United States is now a Republican country,” said Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, soon to be a major player in what would be known as the China Lobby. Some of the newly elected Republicans had campaigned not so much against the Democratic Party as against Communism and subversion. The election added to the party’s senatorial ranks Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, Bill Jenner of Indiana, John Bricker of Ohio, Harry Cain of Washington, and James Kem of Missouri. Some of them, joining up with conservatives already in the Senate, like Kenneth Wherry, were to turn out to be obsessive on the subject of Communists and subversion in our own government, a wonderful new issue that tended to neutralize their vulnerability on economic matters. “Bow your heads folks, conservatism has hit America. All the rest of the world is moving Left, America is moving Right,” wrote T.R.B. after the election in The New Republic, then a traditionally liberal magazine.

  In play was nothing less than the issue of America’s role in the postwar world. Was it willing to accept the global leadership of the Western democracies? And how much in terms of sheer dollars—in terms of taxes—would this cost? On this issue the leadership of both parties was uncertain. Neither party was in any rush to pay the economic price demanded of a nation that was going to lead the West. The Republican Party, the more virulently anti-Communist, was, if anything, in a greater rush to disarm, more willing to depend on the nation’s nuclear monopoly, and warier of accepting a role in building up a badly damaged Europe, one dangerously vulnerable, it was believed, to internal Communist subversion. The truth was that on the eve of the Korean War, America’s defense posture was a shambles. Its defense budgets had been slashed; its armed forces were far too small; and its weaponry and equipment—the most advanced in the world only five years earlier—was increasingly inferior. The top people concerned with what was already coming to be known as the country’s national security were seriously divided over how much was enough. At the moment that the North Korean Army crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, already under virulent attack from the Republican right wing for being, as it was said, soft on Communism, was trying as deftly as possible to maneuver a new, dramatically elevated commitment to defense spending through the bureaucracy. Though Acheson had already become the most influential member of the president’s top national security team, by no means was this attempt a guaranteed success.

  Part of the reason was Truman himself. If Harry Truman was a hawk on most Cold War issues, he was also a hard-liner on budgets, and he hated deficit spending. “A hard money man if I ever saw one,” James Forrestal, the conservative Wall Street man who was an early hawk, once said of him, “believing as I do that we can’t wreck our economy in the process of trying to fight the ‘cold war.’” Truman was by nature an innately skeptical Midwestern populist, wary of men with big titles and those who put on airs, which, he decided, all too many senior military men tended to do. The military, he had always believed, was unusually given to wasting the taxpayers’ money. His own experience as an artillery captain during World War I had made him wary of the brass, especially West Pointers, who, in his mind, took themselves far too seriously. He was a small-town boy who had grown up in draconian economic times, and that had made him a serious fiscal conservative—you did not spend it unless you had it. His views had only hardened during his time as a senator, when he headed the Truman Committee, which had focused on mismanagement by the military at the start of World War II: “No military man knows anything at all about money. All they know how to do is spend it, and they don’t give a goddamn whether they’re getting their money’s worth or not,” he once said. In time he became extremely close to a few senior officers, like Omar Bradley, but his general attitude never changed. As he told the writer Merle Miller, “They’re most of them like horses with blinders on. They can’t see beyond the ends of their noses.”

  Harry Truman hated debt with a personal passion. His family had been b
urdened with it back in Independence, Missouri, and it had helped cost them their family farm. What he had wanted to do at the end of the war was start paying off the immense—at least so it seemed at the time—$250 billion debt the country had incurred over the previous four years. As soon as the war ended, he had gotten the defense budget down from about $91 billion to a point between $10 and $11 billion a year, and he hoped soon to get it even lower, to $6 or $7 billion a year. Truman, in other words, would need a lot of convincing if military budgets were to be adjusted for the new role that most of his top national security people wanted. Certainly Marshall and Acheson wanted larger military budgets. Normally the secretary of defense should have been an ally of men like Acheson on an issue like this, but in this case, the secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, who had replaced James Forrestal when Forrestal’s health broke down, had proved the exception. He had turned out to be a sworn enemy of Acheson, both professionally and personally, jealous of his power and influence with Truman and determined to destroy him politically even if his own budget suffered. The key to Louis Johnson at that point was his own political ambition. He dreamed of succeeding Truman as the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1952, and he intended to do it by portraying himself as the secretary of defense who had held military spending down. That meant that as the winter ended in 1950, Acheson had become the point man for greater spending on defense, and his critics in the other party, who were enjoying attacking the administration for its failures in foreign policy, especially in China, were in no rush to accede. The United States was supposed to be tougher in dealing with its enemies in the world, but there was no rush to discuss how to pay for it.

  That placed Dean Acheson in the rare position of being attacked for being soft on Communism, yet cut off from the kind of spending he believed was needed to stave off a Communist threat in Europe and elsewhere. Because increased military spending was a political minefield—for it would surely demand higher taxes—he pursued it cautiously. His key assistant was a young man named Paul Nitze who was just beginning to ascend in the national security world and was in the process of replacing George Kennan as the head of State’s Policy Planning staff, the department’s own think tank, because he seemed to Acheson to be more of a hard-liner than Kennan and thus more in tune with Acheson’s policies. (Nitze would actually take over Policy Planning from Kennan in January 1950, but he had been the de facto head of it for several months before.) Acheson and Nitze were virtually tiptoeing through the bureaucracy with their plan for a complete overhaul of defense policies—a document that would be known as National Security Council Paper 68, or NSC 68, a seminal paper that completely redefined America’s defense needs. They were trying to keep the magnitude of the change they were planning secret from Johnson and his potential allies for as long as they could, particularly the prospective price. Acheson wanted to get as much support as possible for the principle of an expanded defense commitment from the upper levels of the bureaucracy before anyone talked about price, and he did not want a meeting with Louis Johnson before he was ready. As such he was going behind his back. Ironically, Acheson, the secretary of state, would end up with almost the complete support of the Joint Chiefs in trying to upgrade the budget—for the military had been restless with bare-bones budgets for five years. At the core of these defense budgets on the cheap was the belief that America’s nuclear monopoly allowed it to cut corners on every other defense issue. The American atomic monopoly had ended in the fall of 1949, and therefore long-delayed issues were coming to the fore.

  The struggle between the military and the civilians over the budget had been going on since 1945. The entire nation, with both political parties eagerly participating, had been in an indecent rush to cut the armed forces when World War II ended. Everyone in politics, both right and left, had favored the demobe, preferably done yesterday rather than tomorrow. The nation at war, which almost overnight created the mightiest military arsenal in the history of mankind, reflected one America; the demobe reflected another—except that they were one and the same country. The problem with a great democracy like the United States, George Kennan once noted, was that it was almost always like a sleeping giant, impervious to its surroundings until suddenly and belatedly awoken, when it proved so angry about what it discovered that it started lashing out wildly.

  In 1946, Dwight Eisenhower, by then Army chief of staff, had been invited up to Capitol Hill to meet with J. Parnell Thomas, one of the era’s foremost congressional rogues, and at that moment chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee. Thomas was a Republican from New Jersey, a fascinating reflection of the era, a virulent anti-Communist who had often talked about Roosevelt and the New Deal sabotaging the capitalist system. As the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he eventually gained some fame hunting Communists in Hollywood, but he would soon enough end up in prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for putting ghost figures on his office payroll and keeping the salaries himself. (There, two of his fellow inmates were Hollywood writers imprisoned because they had refused to testify before his committee.) Preparing to meet with Thomas, Eisenhower had expected a serious discussion with an important member of Congress about how to bring down American force levels with minimal damage to the country. Instead he walked into a world-class ambush. There was Thomas, surrounded by a group of attractive young women, the wives of servicemen anxious to have their husbands shipped home—and on a table a large number of baby shoes. A photographer soon appeared, and a photo of the wives, the baby shoes, a smiling Thomas, and a furious Eisenhower soon went hurtling over the wires.

  At the end of the war, the United States had had 12 million men and women in uniform. The rate of the demobe was overwhelming; fifteen thousand military personnel a day were processed out of the services. If there were logistical problems in bringing troops back from abroad, there was a new public outcry, “no boats, no votes.” By early 1947, the services were down to 1.5 million members, and the annual military budget, which had reached a wartime high of $90.9 billion, had plummeted to $10.3. In addition, the awesome hardware of World War II was not being modernized. Within years, much of it was outdated, some of it useless. At the moment when North Korean divisions first pushed into the South, the Army’s studies later showed that 43 percent of the enlisted men in the Far East Command rated in terms of ability and intelligence as either Class IV or Class V, the two lowest categories in the Army’s general classification tests. It was a country, in the eyes of the senior military men, that had simply walked away from its responsibilities. “America fought [World War II] like a football game after which the winner leaves the field and celebrates,” General Albert Wedemeyer said, as he watched the rush to demobilize. “It was no demobilization,” commented George Marshall, “it was a rout.” The Army had, said General Omar Bradley, “only one division—the Eighty-second Airborne—that could be remotely described as combat ready.” In those years after it downsized so rapidly and just before Korea, America had, in Bradley’s words, an army at the start of the Korean War that “could not fight its way out of a paper bag.”

  The military budgets were becoming increasingly brutal documents. What was being cut, as Cabell Phillips, a national security correspondent for the New York Times, noted, was not fat but muscle and bone. In late 1948, preparing for the fiscal 1950 budget year, the three services submitted their tentative budgets. The total was $30 billion. James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense, working exhausting hours, got it down to $17 billion. But Harry Truman, more concerned with the domestic economy than military spending (and all too aware of the disastrous political consequences of any tax increase), decided it could not go over $15 billion. It finally came in at $14.2. The interservice competition for the limited funds available was savage. The role of the Marines was being sharply curtailed; military men like Bradley were talking about there being no future need for amphibious missions, which would limit the role of the Navy as well. If any branch of the service seemed favored at that momen
t it was the Air Force, which had the atomic bomb in its arsenal. It was something that seemed endemic to this particular democratic society, one that had built into its psyche a sense of protection based on the two great oceans. Even during Korea, George Marshall, the man who had been the most important figure in rushing the country to readiness at the start of World War II, was sure that America had not yet learned its lesson. When Truman met with MacArthur at Wake Island in mid-October 1950, Marshall did not make the trip, but he was shocked by the euphoria that seemed to have gripped the returning party. Frank Pace, the secretary of the Army, enthusiastically told him of MacArthur’s optimistic talk about the war being virtually over and how soon the troops would return. “General Marshall,” he had said, “General MacArthur says the war will be over by Thanksgiving and the troops home by Christmas.”

  To Pace’s surprise, Marshall did not seemed pleased: “Pace, that’s troublesome.”

  Pace thought Marshall had misunderstood, so he repeated the good news that the end of the war was at hand. “I heard you,” Marshall said, “but too precipitate an end to the war would not permit us to have a full understanding of the problems we face ahead of us.” Still puzzled, Pace asked if Marshall meant that the American people needed to better understand the full implications of the Cold War. That, said Marshall, was exactly what he meant. “General Marshall, this has been a very difficult and extensive war from the American people’s point of view,” Pace said. But Marshall was having none of it. He had been through it before at the end of World War II; the moment it was over, the tanks rotting in the Pacific, the boys rushing home to their civilian jobs, the military strength that had been built up had been allowed in his words just “to fade away.”