The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  There was an immediate impact to Dulles’s arrival in high-level meetings. In George Kennan’s view, Dulles should have been present only at meetings directly pertaining to the Japanese Peace Treaty. His presence, a surprisingly dominating one in certain circumstances, Kennan believed, was a reflection of changing domestic politics, and tilted the debate to a harder line, one reflecting the growing pressure from the right, and bringing that pressure right into the room. By early July, Kennan had already begun to feel that events were slipping out of this administration’s control. On July 10, the Americans had received word from the Indians, who had come up with a peace proposal for Korea, that the Chinese seemed to be interested in it. Under it, the hostilities would stop, both sides would go back to the thirty-eighth parallel, and Communist China would become a member of the United Nations. The Chinese seemed amenable, but the Soviets, not surprisingly, were clearly unhappy. To Kennan, the proposal made eminent sense. He thought Chinese membership in the UN of very little national security importance, since the Soviets were already there and had the veto; more, the proposal had the additional benefit of potentially splitting the Chinese from the Russians. He was, he said, quickly shouted down at the meeting, principally by Dulles—for the proposal would, Dulles and his other critics claimed, reward aggression. Dulles had said that it would “look to our public as if we had been tricked into giving up something for nothing.” To Kennan, the political reasons for spurning the Indian proposal were all too obvious, and on July 17, he had written in his diary, “I hope that some day history will record this as an instance of the damage done to the conduct of our foreign policy by the irresponsible and bigoted influence of the China Lobby and its friends in Congress.”

  By July 1950, Rusk, Dulles, and Allison had formed something of a departmental trinity, and all three of them began to argue for crossing the thirty-eighth parallel, at a moment when almost no one else in the bureaucracy was even thinking about the subject. In a memoir of his years in the Foreign Service (Ambassador from the Prairie: or, Allison in Wonderland), Allison denied playing any role in influencing the decision to cross the parallel. In that he was all too modest. For during that important period he wrote very tough, indeed quite emotional, position papers, clearly acting as a point man for both Dulles and Rusk. They would then follow up with seconding papers. Their memos often seemed to be aimed at discrediting the more dovish papers coming out of State’s Policy Planning, where even under Paul Nitze most of the senior people were nervous about Russian and Chinese intentions. As early as July 1, on returning from Tokyo, Allison had told Rusk in a paper that American forces should not only eventually cross the thirty-eighth but “continue right up to the Manchurian and Siberian border, and having done so, call for a U.N.-supervised election for all Korea.” This was, of course, at a time when not being driven off the peninsula rather than conquering it seemed the most basic issue. On July 13, Allison wrote another impassioned memo to Rusk, this one occasioned by an American military official who had rather casually told reporters that American forces eventually wanted to get to the thirty-eighth and stop there. That infuriated Allison. “If I were a South Korean soldier and had heard of the announcement by the American Army spokesman I would be strongly tempted to lay down my arms and go back to the farm.” A day later, Foster Dulles followed Allison with an even stronger statement to Nitze. The thirty-eighth parallel “was never intended to be and never ought to be a political line,” he insisted. Honoring it now, he noted, would provide “asylum to the aggressor [and was] bound to perpetuate friction and the ever present danger of a new war.” If it could be obliterated, all the better, “in the interest of ‘peace and security’ in the area,” Dulles wrote.

  Rusk was an important figure at this point, both player and litmus test, the first real hard-liner at that level in Asian affairs under a Democratic administration, and an important figure in tilting the way State, and thus Acheson, saw events now unfolding. The old China Hands might have been more nervous about anything that could tempt the Chinese to come in, but they were gone, and Rusk had few doubts about driving north. Later, after the Chinese struck American forces in the far north of Korea, Rusk told his senior colleagues that the attack “should not be on our conscience, since these events are merely the result of well laid plans and were not provoked by our actions.” That was, noted the historian Rosemary Foot, “a fantastic piece of rationalization, designed presumably to bring some comfort to the administration in a time of despair.”

  That all of this was somehow organized, and that the more hawkish people like Rusk wanted to dominate the play at Policy Planning, seemed clear in retrospect. But Kennan and the people in Policy Planning close to him thought that going north was a tragic mistake. Fighting in Korea at all, he believed, was in pure, rational terms a mistake, because of the varying logistical difficulties, and thus unsound; but given other pressures, among them stabilizing Japan, finally worth doing—a necessary mistake, if you will. But as UN forces went farther north, in his words, the dangers of adversaries lurking there, Chinese or Russian, would grow, and “the more unsound it would become from a military standpoint” because of the way the country spread out like a mushroom and because of the increased logistical problems for our forces and the other side’s ability to mass its forces. The idea of advancing above the neck in the North appalled him. But the play was going the other way. On July 15, in a memo to Rusk, Allison entered his “most emphatic disagreement” to a paper by Herbert Feis, a Kennan ally at Policy Planning, who had suggested there was a clear danger of Soviet or Chinese entry into the war if the United States went north of the parallel. The thirty-eighth parallel had always been an arbitrary line, Allison wrote. Only the obvious intransigence of the Soviets had sustained it; the United States, Allison argued, should adapt “a determination that the aggressors should not go unpunished and vigorous, courageous United States leadership to that end should have a salutary effect upon other areas of tension in the world. Notice would be served on the aggressor elsewhere, who is the same as the covert aggressor in Korea, that he cannot embark on acts of aggression with the assurance that he takes only a limited risk—that of being driven back only to the line from which the attacked commenced.” Those were very strong words. A week later, the draft of a Policy Planning paper written by George Butler, yet another Kennan ally, again pointed out the risk of the Russians or the Chinese entering the war. The Communists, Butler noted, were unlikely to permit a pro-Western proxy state to exist so near the Russian and Chinese border. That paper provoked the most emotional and militant Allison memo yet, this one on July 24, to Nitze. First, Allison spoke of the shame that would follow if the United States stopped at the thirty-eighth parallel, the loss of American stature in the eyes of the Korean people if we accepted the prewar status as a postwar division. If that happened, “the people of Korea would lose all faith in the courage, intelligence, and morality of the United States. And I for one would not blame them.”

  Then it really got ugly. Allison used the most explosive and emotional word of that era, the one that had hovered over all National Security discussions since World War II, the A-word. Trying to nail the Kennan wing at Policy Planning, he said that “the [Butler] paper assumes we can buy more time by a policy of appeasement—for that is what this paper recommends—a timid, half hearted policy designed not to provoke the Soviets to war. We should recognize that there is grave danger of conflict with the USSR and the Chinese Communists whatever we do from now on—but I fail to see what advantage we gain by a compromise with clear moral principles and a shirking of our duty to make clear once and for all that aggression does not pay—that he who violates the decent opinions of mankind must take the consequences and that he who takes the sword will perish by the sword.” That was strong stuff. That it could ignite an even larger war did not seem to worry Allison. “That this may mean war on a global scale is true—the American people should be told and told why and what it will mean to them. When all legal and moral righ
t is on our side why should we hesitate?” Red meat was on the table. What Allison was saying was perfectly synchronized within the bureaucracy to match what the critical voices from the right were saying. What it showed was that as the domestic political situation had changed, some of the administration’s critics were now inside the tent. Gradually, as it became clear which way the secretary of state wanted the play to go, opposition within Policy Planning softened. A few days after Allison’s very emotional memo, Policy Planning offered up a milder one that endorsed the idea of a unified, independent Korea. Everyone was getting in line.

  These exchanges were still taking place well below the highest level of policy makers. The war itself was going too badly at that moment for them to turn their minds to the issue. Right after the North Korean invasion, Acheson had seemed to speak of the issue in quite vague terms. The United States wanted to restore the South to its previous borders, he said. But by July, he had begun using a different phrase: The troops could not be expected “to march up to a surveyor’s line and stop.” Throughout July and August, there was an agreement not to talk about it publicly. If either Truman or Acheson was asked about what was going to happen when our troops reached the thirty-eighth parallel, they ducked the question. But Congress, better attuned to the emotions of the American people and with less direct responsibility for events, was more hawkish. Several congressmen were ready on a moment’s notice to talk about appeasement, almost taunting the administration. The decision not to cross the parallel had already been made, some of them now suggested. “The Hiss Survivors association down at the State Department who wear upon their breast the cross of Yalta are waiting for Congress to go home before they lift the curtain on the next act in the tragedy of Red appeasement,” said Representative Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, almost a week after the Inchon landing. Not crossing, Bill Knowland agreed, would be an obvious case of appeasement.

  Everyone, it seemed, including the American public, wanted a larger victory. A Gallup poll taken in mid-October showed that 64 percent of Americans wanted to pursue the North Koreans above the parallel. Polls on such matters, as Vietnam later proved, were notoriously tricky; all sorts of people were for a more aggressive policy as long as they did not have to deal with the consequences. Whether 64 percent of the American people—had they been asked—wanted a shooting war with China was obviously another question entirely. If Acheson had tried to stop the drive north or even slow it down, he would have been caught up in a major fight at the highest levels of the bureaucracy and he would have been fighting at a great disadvantage, on turf that nominally belonged to the military. For the Joint Chiefs too wanted to go ahead, or at least go ahead for a while, in effect until MacArthur’s forces ran into Chinese or Russians divisions. For the senior military men it was, in the beginning at least, when they first crossed the line, like giving in to an irresistible impulse: when you had victory in your grasp, you pushed forward, or at least pushed forward until your troops encountered a different, larger, and more dangerous enemy. For them, the moment was particularly sweet in Korea because it had been preceded by considerable humiliations, and this therefore was more than a victory, it was a redemption. Let the politicians come up with their caveats, the soldiers would take care of the battlefield. That was what soldiers did; they advanced. Much later Omar Bradley would take a second look at George Butler’s Policy Planning memo warning of Russian or Chinese intervention and say, “Read in retrospect—some thirty years later—this paper is full of good sense.” One of the problems with the paper, limiting its influence, Bradley noted, with a sharp jab at his civilian colleagues, was that “Dean Acheson and his chief far eastern advisers, Dean Rusk and John Allison, had adopted a hawkish stance on crossing the 38th parallel.”

  But at the time it was a different matter. The victories were tangible; the reasons that the military should slow down and respect an army that had not yet showed up on the battlefield were abstract. Maybe as they got nearer the Chinese border, some of the senior military men felt, they could take another look. For the president the political choices were terrible. He knew the Chinese were poised at the border, yet the North Korean enemy was not merely defeated, it was fleeing the battlefield. The failure to pursue on the part of an administration already accused of being soft in Asia would bring severe political repercussions. Instead of unleashing Chiang, the new war cry would be an even more strident and politically resonant one: unleash Douglas MacArthur. A midterm election was only a month away. Twenty-five years after the events, John Snyder, who was the secretary of the treasury in those days, wrote a letter to James Webb, who had been the undersecretary of state, a very influential number two man. “My recollection,” Snyder said, “is that President Truman had little choice when he made the decision to proceed northward beyond the 38th parallel. This decision was, in a way, a ratification of actions that were already being taken.”

  The orders given to MacArthur by Washington were, in fact, surprisingly ambiguous. He was to cross the thirty-eighth parallel, but avoid any act that would engage the United States and the UN in a larger war with either the Soviets or the Chinese. He was to break off contact if his troops met up with either Russian or Chinese forces. When he got near the Chinese border, he was to use only South Korean troops; nor were his troops to go anywhere near the Korean provinces that abutted the Chinese or Russian borders. It was, of course, only a piece of paper, and not a very good piece of paper at that. Charles Burton Marshall, one of the top Policy Planning people who helped draft it, said later, “I was full of awareness that we were kidding ourselves with the neatness of the phrasing.” Years after, Acheson would write in his memoirs that if they had only seen into MacArthur’s mind as he crossed the parallel, they would all have been a good deal more cautious. But that was disingenuous on his part. They already knew that MacArthur operated like a sovereign, to use Acheson’s own word, and that he feasted on ambiguous orders. They also had a strong sense that his goals in Korea were grander than their own. But they were being carried along by the tidal force of events and of the general’s formidable post-Inchon status, combined with a changing political climate in which their domestic enemies were becoming more powerful all the time. MacArthur was not merely the leader of the military opposition, but a putative political one as well. That they were more afraid of him than they wanted to admit was always the great secret of the Korean War. They were afraid of him in defeat and they were even more afraid of him in victory.

  When, on September 27, they finally made the official decision to go ahead and cross the parallel, Acheson’s young aide, Lucius Battle, brought the orders over from the Pentagon for Acheson to sign. Filled with the confidence of the young, Battle suggested that the orders were far too vague for someone like MacArthur. Acheson simply exploded—Battle later noted that he had never seen him that angry before—“How old are you Battle, for God’s sake?” Thirty-two, Battle answered. “And are you willing to take on the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff?” Then Acheson signed the orders. It had been a rare moment, Battle felt, when the secretary revealed just how much he was a prisoner of events. Years later, Averell Harriman would sum it all up this way, “It would have taken a superhuman effort to say no. Psychologically it was almost impossible to not go ahead and complete the job.” Like some of the other senior civilians, Harriman had understood that Inchon had been a dual victory for MacArthur, not only against the North Koreans but against his enemies in Washington as well. “There is no stopping MacArthur now,” Acheson told Harriman immediately after Inchon. “Inchon was,” said Frank Gibney, then a young combat correspondent from Time, “the most expensive victory we ever won because it led to the complete deification of MacArthur and the terrible, terrible defeats that happened next.” “The sorcerer of Inchon,” Acheson later called him.

  Nothing in those days seemed to stand in MacArthur’s way. So what if they had rushed the announcement of Seoul’s recapture, even as fighting was still going on in the streets? When MacArthur finally hand
ed back control of his capital to Syngman Rhee, Rhee said, “We admire you. We love you as the savior of our race.” He was the victor and the prophet. There was one more totem now for MacArthur: a united, non-Communist Korea. That was his ultimate goal. Nor did he see any great threat to his forces. He was sure control of all Korea was within his grasp. Joseph Alsop, the hawkish columnist, was with him right after Inchon and felt MacArthur was on a kind of high, brushing aside any suggestion that the Chinese might enter the war. “As a matter of fact, Alsop,” MacArthur had told him, “if you stay on here, you will just be wasting your valuable time.” As Matt Ridgway would later write, “Complete victory seemed now in view—a golden apple that would handsomely symbolize the crowning effort of a brilliant military career. Once in reach of this prize, MacArthur would not allow himself to be delayed or admonished. Instead he plunged northward in pursuit of a vanishing enemy, and changed his plans from week to week to accelerate this advance without regard to dark hints of possible disaster.” If after Inchon, said Ridgway, MacArthur had suggested that a battalion get to a position by walking on water, “There might have been someone ready to give it a try.”