Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (31 page)

At this point in late September the Truman administration made one of the most fateful decisions of the postwar era: to unify Korea under Western auspices. This meant crossing the 38th parallel, destroying Kim's army, and driving to the North Korea-China border along the Yalu. MacArthur insisted on such a strategy, and his opinion—now that he had managed such a magnificent operation—carried weight. No one at the Pentagon dared to challenge him. But MacArthur's goals merely echoed those of others. Virtually all American officials, flush with excitement after Inchon, believed that the enemy must be destroyed; aggression must not go unpunished; the credibility of the "Free World" was at stake.
²⁹
Public opinion, too, seemed to demand that the UN finish the job. The
New Republic
, dismissing rumors that the Chinese might intervene, agreed: "War with China would certainly be a disaster for the West. Yet war cannot be averted by conceding to illegal aggression."
³⁰
America's UN allies concurred with the decision to cross the parallel, as did the UN itself, which formally approved it in early October.

As these approvals made clear, the decision to go north was not taken in haste. Still, Truman and his advisers might have proceeded with more care, for the goal of unification changed the original goal of UN intervention. In particular, Truman and his top advisers would have done well to ponder the meaning of ambiguous but repeated Chinese threats and warnings. They might have done more consulting with Congress—which again was left out of the loop. And they should have thought more about long-range problems. How close to the Yalu should UN forces go? If the drive succeeded, how would Korea be unified? Did the United States intend to stay in Korea after the fighting in order to protect what it had won? These and other questions received relatively little consideration in the heady excitement that followed success at Inchon.

At first the fighting went well enough. With the X Corps driving up the east and the Eighth Army sweeping up the west of North Korea, UN forces advanced in great strides. Bombing further savaged the enemy armies and devastated civilian life in the North. By the end of October a few ROK units were already near the Yalu. Although the Chinese government was threatening to intervene, military intelligence and the CIA picked up little evidence of major Chinese troop movements toward Korea.

Truman nonetheless decided to talk personally with MacArthur about the situation, and in mid-October he flew with top aides 14,425 miles to Wake Island in the Pacific. MacArthur, Truman later remembered, was arrogant and condescending at Wake. Nonetheless, the two men and their aides managed to reach consensus in only an hour and a half. MacArthur was reassuring, predicting that the Eighth Army could be out of Korea by Christmas.
³¹
When Truman asked about the possibility of Chinese intervention, the general replied, "Very little." He added, "We are no longer fearful of their intervention. . . . The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Of these probably not more than 100,000–125,000 men are distributed along the Yalu River. Only 50,000–60,000 could be gotten across the Yalu River. They have no Air Force. . . . If the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang [the North Korean capital] there would be the greatest slaughter."
³²
When the conference ended, Truman lauded MacArthur and gave him a Distinguished Service Medal.

Two weeks after the Wake Island conference, however, ROK units began capturing soldiers who were Chinese. Interrogation suggested that the invaders were arriving in force. Why they intervened is yet another debated question about the war. One motivation may have been Chinese gratitude to the North Koreans for sending in more than 100,000 "volunteers" to help against Chiang in the late 1940s. Surely more important were Chinese concerns about security, concerns that mounted greatly when MacArthur, disobeying orders, sent American (as opposed to ROK) troops close to the Yalu in late October.
³³
Whatever the Chinese motives, they were compelling enough for Mao to persist even when the Soviets delayed in making good on earlier assurances of air cover to sustain Chinese intervention.
³⁴

MacArthur was relatively unmoved even when the Chinese attacked in force on November 1. He was simply egotistical. Having assured himself that the Chinese would not dare to intervene, he refused to believe that they might prevail. When he returned to Tokyo (where he maintained his headquarters) after a visit to Korea on November 24, he confidently announced a final UN offensive. "If successful," he proclaimed, "this should for practical purposes end the war."
³⁵
It was the day after Thanksgiving.

MacArthur's offensive at first met little resistance. But two days later Mao's tough, battle-seasoned men poured into combat in full force. They wore warm padded jackets to fend off the bitter cold, with wind-chill temperatures as low as twenty or thirty degrees below zero, and with howling winds that froze the weapons and batteries of defenders. Drawn from poor peasant stock, the Chinese were used to privation. They carried only eight to ten pounds of equipment—as opposed to sixty pounds for many UN soldiers—and moved very quickly. Accustomed to the lack of air cover, they were skilled at holding still when planes were overhead. When the planes went away, they swarmed as close as possible to the enemy, blasted away with automatic fire, and engaged in terrifying hand-to-hand combat. Often fighting at night, they overran UN soldiers huddled on the frozen ground and stabbed them to death through their sleeping bags. The Chinese were unimaginably numerous, and they seemed fearless. UN forces likened the hordes before them to an endless wave of humanity that seemed oblivious to danger or death.

The fighting that followed for the next few weeks was among the bloodiest in the annals of American military history. Some of this carnage stemmed from faulty generalship. In his overconfidence MacArthur had left a gap between his forces on the east and on the west, thereby endangering their flanks. In his haste to get to the Yalu he had stretched his supply lines and thinned his forces. UN soldiers were cold, increasingly ill fed and ill supplied, and in many cases cut off from reinforcements. Overwhelmed by the suddenness and surprise of the Chinese assault, they scrambled desperately for cover. In places retreat became rout, as UN forces jammed lowland roads and exposed themselves to withering fire from masses of Chinese on the hillsides.

The bravery of these beleaguered troops has become the stuff of legends. One was an epic "fighting retreat" by members of America's First Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir, where they had been trapped, to the port of Hungnam forty miles away, where they were evacuated. The marines sustained 4,418 battle casualties, including 718 deaths, and (together with their air support) inflicted an estimated 37,500 casualties on the enemy, two-thirds of them fatal. Still bloodier was the lot of men in the United States Army's Seventh Infantry Division, which retreated for some sixty miles over twisting, mountainous roads. Their worst ordeal was a gauntlet of six miles where the Chinese held high ground on both sides and blasted American soldiers with mortars, machine guns, and small-arms fire. On one day some 3,000 American soldiers were killed, wounded, or lost. Overall the 7th Division suffered 5,000 casualties (one-third of its total force) in the last three days of November.
³⁶

The sudden turnabout staggered MacArthur, whose overweening self-confidence disappeared overnight. "We face an entirely new war," he lamented. Thereafter he fired off plaintive, self-serving messages that blamed Washington for giving him meager support. He demanded that Chiang's army be "unleashed" to fight alongside the UN in Korea, that China be blockaded, and that Chinese industrial targets be bombed, if necessary with atomic weapons. "This group of Europhiles," he complained of Truman's advisers, "just will not recognize that it is Asia which has been selected for the test of communist power and that if all Asia falls Europe would not have a chance—either with or without American assistance."
³⁷

Truman did his best to keep his emotions under control during these desperate weeks. But the strain was severe, and domestic provocations had already compounded his troubles. On the unseasonably hot afternoon of November 1, when he was napping at Blair House, two fanatic Puerto Rican nationalists fired at guards outside the house. White House police jumped into action, and a wild gun battle erupted on the steps and the sidewalk. When the shooting was over, one of the would-be assassins was dead, the other wounded. One policeman was shot dead at close range and two wounded. Truman maintained his schedule as if nothing had happened. But the attempted assassination sharply constricted his freedom. There were no more walks across the street to work at the White House—instead he rode in a bullet-proof car. He confided to his diary, "It's hell to be President." The biographer David McCullough thinks that the months of November and December 1950 were "a dreadful passage for Truman . . . the most difficult period of his Presidency."
³⁸

A few days after the Blair House shootings the off-year elections confirmed the President's shaky standing with voters. At that time Chinese intervention was only beginning; it was not yet a big concern. But Republicans nonetheless attacked him for his conduct of the war and for being "soft" on Communism. In Illinois the conservative anti-Communist Everett Dirksen defeated Scott Lucas, who was then Senate majority leader. In Ohio Taft won a sweeping victory that set him up as a major presidential contender for 1952. In California Richard Nixon beat Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, a liberal Democrat, in a nasty fight for a seat in the Senate. She called him "Tricky Dick," a name that stuck. He called her the "Pink Lady" and charged that she was "pink down to her underwear."
³⁹
McCarthy helped to engineer the defeat of Maryland's Millard Tydings, who had chaired the Senate committee that had investigated him, by circulating faked photographs showing Tydings chatting with Earl Browder, a head of the American Communist party. Republicans cut Truman's majority in the Senate from 12 to 2 and his majority in the House from 92 to 35. Pundits interpreted the results as a repudiation of the President.

Already tense in early November, Truman faltered in the aftermath of the post-Thanksgiving Chinese offensive a few weeks later. At a press conference on the morning of November 30 reporters asked him if the United States might fight back by using the atomic bomb. The President responded, "There has always been active consideration of its use. I don't want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing to do with this military aggression." A reporter persisted, "Did we understand you clearly that use of the bomb is under active consideration?" Truman replied, "Always has been. It is one of our weapons." When asked whether targets would be civilian or military, he said, "I'm not a military authority that passes on those things. . . . The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of weapons, as he always has."
⁴⁰

Truman's comments unleashed international consternation. Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of Great Britain, was so alarmed that he flew to the United States for talks. In Washington, Truman's top aides began damage control. Charles Ross, presidential press secretary, issued a release to clarify Truman's comments. The President, he said, knew full-well that only the commander-in-chief, not generals in the field, determined whether nuclear weapons might be used in crisis.

By the time Attlee arrived in Washington on December 4, it was generally understood that Truman did not intend to deploy the Bomb. Shaken by the Chinese onslaught, he had spoken carelessly. But his remarks revealed the edginess that he felt at the time. This became especially clear when Ross, an old and valued childhood friend, suddenly collapsed and died of a coronary occlusion following a press briefing on the afternoon of December 5. Though badly shaken, Truman and his wife pulled themselves together and went off to hear their daughter Margaret, an aspiring singer, give a recital before a gala crowd at nearby Constitution Hall.

Margaret, uninformed about Ross's death, sang to repeated applause. But not all listeners were impressed. Paul Hume, music critic for the
Washington Post
, published a polite but nonetheless devastating review of her performance in the next morning's paper. Truman, up early as usual, read the review at 5:30
A.M.
and exploded by writing a 150-word diatribe to Hume that he immediately sealed and stamped (three cents) and gave to a messenger to post. A key passage said, "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below."

This was by no means the first time that Truman had lost his temper and confided his fury to paper. But he had never gone so far as to post something like this. Hume and his editors at the
Post
did nothing about it, but copies were made, and the letter soon appeared on the front page of the
Washington News
. Publication of it unleashed a deluge of angry mail that descended on the White House. Some of it raged about the war in Korea:

HOW CAN YOU PUT YOUR TRIVIAL PERSONAL AFFAIRS BEFORE THOSE OF ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY MILLION PEOPLE. OUR BOYS DIED WHILE YOUR INFANTILE MIND WAS ON YOUR DAUGHTER'S REVIEW. INADVERTENTLY YOU SHOWED THE WHOLE WORLD WHAT YOU ARE. NOTHING BUT A LITTLE SELFISH PIPSQUEAK.