The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  He saw himself as a man of realpolitik. To him, in realistic terms, Chiang’s China was finished, cooked. When Mao and the Communists appeared to be taking over the mainland, Acheson had at first seemed to accept that Mao and his men were not Soviet puppets, that one day the United States might be able to deal with them. In February 1949, he felt the civil war was over and that any additional aid to Chiang might well “solidify the Chinese people in support of the Chinese Communists and perpetuate the delusion that China’s interest lies with the USSR.” That was the view favored by most of the old China Hands, and men like George Kennan. But the politics of the era were changing. At virtually the same time, Senator Vandenberg visited the White House and warned against any cessation of China aid. A few days later, fifty-one members of the Congress asked for a review of U.S. China policy. In late February Acheson met with the congressional leadership about China, trying to buy some time and flexibility. He spoke of the dangers of continuing to support Chiang and made his let-the-dust-settle statement. The next day Pat McCarran of Nevada, a Democrat but one of the leaders in the China Lobby, knowing that they had Acheson in a bind, called for a $1.5 billion China aid package.

  Acheson had arrived in time for as tumultuous a tour as any secretary of state ever endured, perhaps the single most difficult four-year stretch in the country’s history in terms of its foreign policy. Even as he was taking office, Chiang’s government was collapsing on the mainland, and the Generalissimo himself was fleeing to Taiwan. (Acheson was sworn in on the very day that Chiang left China for his new island home. “We passed, I coming in, Chiang going out,” Acheson later noted with mordant humor.) Things got even worse that fall. Within the space of a few weeks the Soviets tested their first atomic weapon and the Chinese Communists took power in Beijing, announcing the creation of their new government, anathema to a vast segment of the American populace. Both of these events not only signaled a changing global security balance but sent psychological shock waves through the American political system. The United States was no longer the only member of the atomic club, and at virtually the same time, China, a beloved country to millions of Americans because of the missionary outreach programs there, the country that was supposed to be our great ally in Asia, had gone Communist.

  Nothing changed the existing American outlook on defense like the first Russian atomic explosion. On September 3, 1949, a long-range American reconnaissance plane, used regularly to test the stratosphere for any evidence of Soviet atomic activity, returned from its mission reporting an unusually high level of radioactivity. A filter on the plane had registered 85 radioactive counts per minute. Normal background activity would have been about 50. A second filter showed 153 counts per minute. Two days later another plane, flying from Guam to Japan, registered a count of more than 1,000. America’s nuclear specialists concluded that the Russians had secretly set off an atomic explosion, presumably between August 26 and 29, somewhere in the Asian part of the Soviet Union. The bomb was immediately dubbed Joe One in honor of Joseph Stalin. Because the British pound had just been devalued and Truman feared that the two news items might set off a panic on the world’s financial markets, the announcement of the test was held back until September 23. Truman very deliberately spoke of an explosion rather than a bomb, but the impact was immediate and it was politically chilling. When J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American atomic bomb, testified before Congress shortly afterward, Senator Arthur Vandenberg asked quite nervously, “Doctor, what shall we do now?” “Stay strong and hang on to our friends,” Oppenheimer answered. But Oppenheimer himself was now a marked man: he might have weathered a constant series of security checks during his brilliant tour as the head of the Manhattan Project, but his ambivalence about what he had created and the human consequences of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and his wariness about going ahead with a hydrogen bomb project, soon cost him his own security clearance.

  If the testing of Joe One and the departure of Chiang from the mainland had not been bad enough, Acheson had made his own way significantly more difficult in late January 1950, by seeming to reach out and emphasize his friendship and loyalty to Alger Hiss, a former State Department figure who had just been tried for the second time on perjury—though in the background was the more serious question of whether he had been a Soviet spy during World War II. It was a moment of great arrogance on Acheson’s part, an utterly gratuitous statement on behalf of a man convicted of a serious crime, and it was devastating politically, not just for him personally, but equally damaging for the administration he served. The Hiss case had held the national spotlight for almost two years by then. It was later said to reflect all the divisions of a generation in which some on the liberal left who lost faith in the capitalist system because of the Depression and the rise of fascism had become Communist Party members, or at least fellow travelers. That was surely a considerable exaggeration: whatever the failures of democracy in that period, most people on the liberal left remained loyal citizens and did not join the Communist Party or work as its agents. If in the beginning many people had seemed to favor Alger Hiss over Whittaker Chambers, his accuser, a former Communist and a senior writer at Time magazine, in their two-man confrontation, it was because at first Hiss seemed by far the more attractive figure of the two, and because there was also an incipient dislike of the red-baiting that was beginning to gain momentum in some parts of the country. Hiss, wrote Alistair Cooke, the British journalist who normally covered America with exceptional insight, “was a subject for Henry James; a product of New World courtesy, with a gentle certitude of behavior, a ready warmth, a brighter, naiver grace than the more trenchant, fatigued, confident, or worldlier English prototype.”

  In the beginning, on paper, Alger Hiss was the better bet, the very model of the candidate for serious membership in the Eastern Establishment, with perfect bearing and posture, if just a bit stiff and austere. He seemed destined for a great career with the Establishment from the start: Harvard Law School, clerkship with Oliver Wendell Holmes arranged by Felix Frankfurter, holder of proper if not critically important government jobs in the New Deal era; and yet almost surely, the evidence gradually implied, he had been a Communist spy starting in the 1930s and continuing during World War II. As Hiss on the surface seemed all graces, Chambers was the opposite—brooding, dark, disheveled, and paranoiac. He was the survivor of a horrendous childhood and young manhood—an alcoholic father had left home for a homosexual lover when he was a boy. He was a man of absolutes, who had been a true believer when in the Party and perhaps an even truer believer when, bitterly disillusioned, he exited it. In his youth, he believed that all the great truths in the world were being preached by the Party; when he was older and disillusioned, he came to believe that all the great lies in the world were preached by the same Party.

  As a senior writer at Time, he was considered both talented and the most difficult of colleagues. As he had been on a wartime footing because of his Party membership, when he left the Party he still felt that everyone else should be on that same footing and that all Time correspondents in the field who did not share his sense of deep foreboding—indeed doom—about the global struggle taking place might as well be fellow travelers with the Communists. He was the perfect writer for a somewhat gloomy magazine that liked to issue periodic warnings about the decline of the West. The essayist Murray Kempton, who covered that era and the Hiss case with distinction, once noted: “There was no one who could do the drum roll of alarm, of Western civilization come to the brink, like Chambers.”

  Chambers claimed he had known Hiss well when they were both in the Party. Hiss denied it. But soon certain discrepancies and partial truths in Hiss’s story became apparent, and these were picked up on by a young congressman from California named Richard Nixon, who was being helped on the side by the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. There were, noted the New York Herald Tribune’s Homer Bigart, just too many glitches in Hiss’s story, just too many things that did not add up. The jury, t
rying to decide whether Hiss had perjured himself, split eight to four against him. Then on January 22, 1950, a second jury convicted him of perjury. At the time, Acheson had been secretary of state for a year. There had been a Hiss-Acheson link in the past, primarily to Hiss’s brother, Donald, and there had been warnings about the Hiss brothers more than a decade earlier from Adolf Berle, then head of security for the State Department. In 1939 Chambers had told Berle that both Alger Hiss and his brother, Donald, were Communists. Alger Hiss had worked at State during the war, as director of the department’s Office of Special Political Affairs, which dealt primarily with UN matters; Donald Hiss had been an assistant of Acheson’s during the war and a law partner after. When the question of the Hiss brothers had been raised, Berle later noted, Acheson answered that “he had known the family and these two boys since childhood and could vouch for them absolutely.” Later, after the war, when Hiss and Chambers had their first showdown, Acheson covertly helped Hiss prepare a public statement to be used before the House Un-American Activities Committee. That was not known at the time. When Acheson was nominated as secretary of state, he subsequently went before an essentially friendly Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was a little bothered by the Hiss connection. Some members of the committee even suggested and helped draft a statement that Acheson could read that reflected his own anti-Communism. Some of the Republicans on the committee might not have been so friendly had they known he had counseled Hiss earlier on.

  On Tuesday January 25, three days after the second jury convicted Hiss, Acheson was scheduled to hold a press conference. What eventually took place was in no way a journalistic ambush. Acheson knew exactly what was coming. That morning he had told his wife, Alice, that he would surely be asked about Hiss, and that he intended to say he would not forsake him. “What else could you say?” she asked. “Don’t think this is a light matter,” he had answered. “This could be quite a storm and it could get me into trouble.” Alice Acheson then asked if he were sure he was doing the right thing. “It is what I have to do,” he answered. His staff was already on edge. His personal aide, Lucius Battle, and Paul Nitze, by then his closest professional ally at State, both pleaded with him to turn aside questions about Hiss. Battle in particular feared that Acheson’s stubbornness—his own growing personal rage at all the charges coming from the political right—when combined with his not insignificant righteous streak, might lead him into an incautious misstep. Acheson told Battle and Nitze that he would read from the Sermon on the Mount. That did not necessarily augur well. It felt, Battle said years later, as if Acheson were spoiling for a fight. At a staff meeting that morning, James Webb, the undersecretary, asked Acheson what he was going to say and suggested he be cautious. Acheson repeated that it would be the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the thirty-sixth verse. Carlise Hummelsince, another high State official, advised him that the words had different meanings to different people.

  The question was posed by Homer Bigart of the Herald Tribune: “Mr. Secretary, do you have any comment on Alger Hiss?” Acheson began by answering that the case was still before the courts, and therefore it would be improper to comment on it. There, his colleagues had thought with some relief, he’s made it out. But then Acheson took it a step further. “I take it the purpose of your question was to bring something other than that out of me,” he said. “I should like to make it clear to you, that whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss and his lawyers may take on this case, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” There it was; he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss, now viewed by much of the country not merely as a perjurer, but as a spy. For a political man already under fire asked about someone he did not really care for that much, someone who had just been convicted of perjuring himself on espionage charges, it was the ultimate arrogance. He then went on to tell the reporters to read their Bible, Matthew 25:36, a passage in which Christ calls upon His followers to understand that whoever turns his back on anyone in trouble turns his back on Him: “Naked and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.”

  Even as Acheson made his statement, the Senate was in session, and Karl Mundt, a conservative Republican from South Dakota, was talking about how Hiss and his Harvard accent had brought about the downfall of China (a policy Hiss had no influence over). Just then Joe McCarthy raced onto the Senate floor and interrupted Mundt. “I wonder,” he asked, “if the senator is aware of a most fantastic statement the secretary of state has made in the last few minutes.” Acheson’s close friend, James (Scotty) Reston, the New York Times Washington columnist, was stunned by the stupidity of it—all he would have had to say, Reston believed, was that he would not kick a man when he was down. Average Americans would have understood that. It was, the historian Eric Goldman has noted, “a tremendous and totally unnecessary gift to those who were insisting that the foreign policy of the Truman Administration was being shaped by men who were soft on Communism.”

  His answer might have been brave, but it was amazingly arrogant as well, a political disaster for the Truman administration. Truman himself thought Hiss guilty. When the second trial was about to begin, Truman had told his favorite Secret Service man, Harry Nicholson, “Dean Acheson tells me Alger Hiss is innocent. After reading the evidence in the papers I think the s.o.b. is guilty and I hope they hang him.” Security issues had by then become ever more political, and the debate increasingly partisan, those on the Republican right charging ever more loudly that the Democrats were the party of treason. And now Acheson had taken the most publicized spy case in the nation and connected it to himself and to the heart of the American government. It would have been hard to think of a greater political gift to the Republicans. Typically, Richard Nixon soon gave a speech, saying, “Traitors in the high councils of our own government have made sure that the deck is stacked on the Soviet side of the diplomatic table.” Earlier in the political sparring, a reporter had asked Truman if he thought the Hiss case was a red herring. He had answered in the affirmative. Now, wrote Robert Donovan, “even though he himself had not spoken the words he was stuck with them,” and because of Acheson’s careless answer, “he had a dead cat around his neck also.”

  For what was to become known as McCarthyism, a powerful new political virus, was about to be born. On February 9, 1950, fifteen days after the Acheson press conference, and some five months before the North Korean invasion, Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, who had been looking for an issue and had been advised that Communists in the government might be a hot-button one, rose at a speaking engagement in Wheeling, West Virginia. There he claimed that he had in his hands the names of 205 members of the Communist Party still working in the State Department. Though State had been warned, McCarthy said, nothing had been done. He detailed how many more people now lived under Communism in the last six years, largely because of the fall of China. Then he connected the dots, Hiss to Acheson: “As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered the most abominable of all crimes—being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust—high treason.” The charges of what became McCarthyism pulled together disparate strands that the far right had been using for several years: that China had fallen not because of overwhelming historical forces that we were powerless to reverse, but because of subversion at very high levels in Washington, which could be traced through disloyal (or hopelessly naïve) China Hands in the State Department, often connected to Alger Hiss.

  13

  NOTHING REVEALED THE contradictions of the United States as it moved reluctantly from isolationist power to internationalist superpower so much as the almost desperate struggle of Dean Acheson to upgrade the defense budget on a dramatic scale even as he became the chief target of an increasingly angry and alienated right wing. Acheson by early 1950 had already assigned Paul Nitze to produce the key document in the drive, what would eventuall
y be known as NSC 68, and shepherd it through the bureaucracy. The choice was not a surprising one. Nitze’s star was in ascent and he was very much an extension of Acheson himself—his thinking closely paralleling that of the secretary.

  Nitze was originally a Forrestal man. One of his most important early sponsors had been George Kennan, much taken by Nitze’s intelligence, who had wanted to bring him as his deputy onto the Policy Planning staff, the State Department’s special think tank, which he headed. Policy Planning was quite influential in those days. It was where the department’s best minds could ponder the consequences of events, at a time when the consequences of events were still considered important, and think in long-range terms about issues that would soon enough be of pressing immediacy. But Acheson had vetoed the suggestion, thinking that Nitze, who had (like Forrestal) originally worked for Dillon Read, one of the top Wall Street investment houses, was too much of a Wall Street operator. Acheson eventually changed his mind, and in the summer of 1949, when Kennan again asked for Nitze, Acheson gave his permission. Acheson and Nitze became ever closer both professionally and personally, even as Kennan was falling into disfavor.

  Just four years earlier, Kennan had been a superstar at State, with his brilliant early analysis of Soviet intentions, but now as the Cold War deepened, and lines hardened both internationally and in domestic politics, he was becoming marginalized at State, his influence in steady decline. That he was no longer a major player was proof that the debate, such as it was, had changed, that Acheson was no longer interested in hearing his complicated dissents, thoughtful and worthy though they might be, and that the administration, whether it realized it or not, was being pulled along by the force of events, crossing over fail-safe points without even realizing it. As the power of the political right increased and the administration found itself ever more besieged by critics, Kennan’s value was depreciating rapidly. In the fall of 1949 he was told to report to one of the department’s regional assistant secretaries rather than to Acheson himself. That meant his access to the secretary was being cut off, and everyone in the department would know it and as his access was being cut off, so his power and influence were being cut off as well. A few weeks later he asked Acheson to be relieved of his Policy Planning duties as soon as possible and requested an indefinite leave.