Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (33 page)

IMPEACH THE JUDAS IN THE WHITE HOUSE WHO SOLD US DOWN THE RIVER TO LEFT WINGERS AND THE U.N
.

SUGGEST YOU LOOK FOR ANOTHER HISS IN BLAIR HOUSE
.
⁵⁷

Rancor also colored debate in Congress. Senator Robert Kerr, a freshman Democrat, dared to defend the firing. "General MacArthur," he said, "claimed that if we started a general war on Red China, Russia would not come to her rescue. . . . I do not know how many thousand American GIs are sleeping in unmarked graves in North Korea. . . . But most of them are silent but immutable evidence of the tragic mistake of 'The Magnificent MacArthur' who told them that the Chinese Communists just across the Yalu would not intervene."
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Jenner, however, shouted, "Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction."
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McCarthy, not to be outdone, later denounced Truman as a "son of a bitch" and blamed the firing on a White House cabal "stoned on bourbon and benedictine."
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Partisans like Jenner, McCarthy, and others kept up their attack long after the firing. And Truman maintained a low profile, appearing at no major public events until the opening day of baseball season at Griffith Stadium, where he was booed by the crowd. But it was remarkable how quickly MacArthur's support subsided after the initial frenzies. From the beginning many leading newspapers, including some that normally opposed Truman, had defended the right and duty of a President to punish insubordination. Among them were the
New York Times
, the
Baltimore Sun
, the
Christian Science Monitor
, and even the Republican
New York Herald-Tribune
, which commended Truman's "boldness and decision." Close observers of the crowd in New York agreed that the turnout was amazing and unprecedented but noted that many of the onlookers were more curious than anything else.
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By early May the emotions that had swept through the country in April were already abating. Ridgway, named to replace MacArthur, was holding the line in Korea. Congressional hearings conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees slowly and inexorably completed this process of readjustment. Led by the grave and courtly Richard Russell, a powerful Senate Democrat from Georgia, the senators elicited repeated support for the constitutional principle that had motivated Truman, as well as for his support of a limited war. The Joint Chiefs were especially effective, pointing out—contrary to MacArthur's claims—that they had never shared his views about escalation or the centrality of Asia in the grand strategy of the United States. Bradley delivered the line that everyone remembers when he said that MacArthur's policies "would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."

A
LTHOUGH TEMPERS COOLED
in May and June of 1951, they revealed a stubborn fact: Americans had small patience for lingering "limited war." Most people seemed to agree with Truman that escalation of war with China and use of nuclear weapons would be costly and bloody. At the same time, however, Americans were frustrated. They had initially supported the war believing that the "credibility" of the United States and the "Free World" were at stake. But they had expected to win—America always had (they thought). As MacArthur had said, there was "no substitute for victory." As this very different and difficult conflict became a bloody stalemate after March 1951 their frustrations mounted, and "Truman's War" engendered ever-rising resentment.

Frustration of this sort suggested that democracy and prolonged military stalemate do not easily mix. Indeed, the frustration was understandable, for the fighting continued to shed a great deal of blood. Chinese and North Korean losses became staggering. Nearly 45 percent of American casualties were suffered in the last two years of fighting. This was the war of Heartbreak Ridge (September 1951), Pork Chop Hill (April 1953), bloody night patrols, ambushes, mines, flying shrapnel from artillery, sudden raids for already war-scarred real estate. Bombing and artillery denuded the landscape around the 38th parallel. More sweltering heat and rainstorms, frigid cold and howling winds, heat and rainstorms again, more cold. And no ground gained. Would the war ever end?

Beginning in July 1951 the United Nations, led by the United States, entered into peace talks with their enemies. Headlines thereafter periodically held out hope for an end to the conflict. These were cruel delusions, for the fighting lasted until July 1953. Although both sides seemed willing to accept a cease-fire that would confirm existing military realities—close to what they had been at the start of the war—they differed on the issue of repatriation of North Korean and Chinese prisoners of war. The Truman administration insisted that repatriation of such prisoners—around 110,000 in all—had to be voluntary. Those who did not want to return to North Korea or to China, estimated at more than 45,000, would not have to. China and North Korea refused to accede, arguing that many of these prisoners had been intimidated by brutal Nationalist Chinese guards who were threatening them with injury or death if they said they wanted to go home.
⁶²
Truman probably could have given in on this point without arousing great domestic protest; most Americans did not get excited about the fate
of enemy
prisoners. But he did not, regarding the issue as one of principle. The Chinese and North Koreans, too, held firm, perhaps hoping they could get better terms once Truman was out of office after 1952. The issue was resolved only in mid-1953, when the enemy gave way. At that time 50,000 enemy prisoners, including 14,700 Chinese, refused to go home.
⁶³

The frustrations aroused by war and stalemate in negotiations gradually brought MacArthurite solutions back into the realm of discussion. In January 1952 Acheson contacted the British to get their approval, in case armistice talks broke down or terms of an armistice agreement were violated, for the bombing of military targets in China and for blockading of the mainland. Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister in 1951, demurred. He also sought assurances that the United States would not use nuclear weapons. Bradley gave him cold comfort. The United States did not plan to use atomic bombs in Korea, he said, "since up to the present time no suitable targets were presented. If the situation changed in any way, so that suitable targets were presented, a new situation would arise."
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Bradley's comment seemed to suggest that Truman's advisers were again willing to consider resorting to nuclear weapons. This might have been popular with the American people. In August 1950 polls had showed only 28 percent of Americans in favor of such use. By November 1951, a time of stalemate, 51 percent were willing to see the Bomb let loose on "military targets."
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Two months later—when Acheson was exploring escalation with Churchill—Truman sat down and wrote a memo to himself spelling out a possible ultimatum to the Soviets, whom he still blamed for all that had happened in Korea. It read:

It seems to me that the proper approach now would be an ultimatum with a ten-day expiration limit, informing Moscow that we intend to blockade the China coast from the Korean border to Indochina, and that we intend to destroy every military base in Manchuria by means now in our control— and if there is further interference we shall eliminate any ports or cities necessary to accomplish our purposes.

This means all-out war. It means that Moscow, St. Petersburg, Mukden, Vladivostok, Peking, Shanghai, Port Arthur, Darien, Odessa, Stalingrad, and every manufacturing plant in China and the Soviet Union will be eliminated.
⁶⁶

Four months later, in May, Truman returned to this idea. This time he drafted an internal memo to "the Commies": "Now do you want an end to hostilities in Korea or do you want China and Siberia destroyed? You may have one or the other; whichever you want, these lies of yours at the conference have gone far enough. You either accept our fair and just proposal or you will be completely destroyed."
⁶⁷

The President never sent such messages. As ever, he considered Europe more important to American security than Asia, and he wanted to end the fighting in Korea so that the United States could concentrate its resources in the West. His memos were ways of blowing off steam—contingent schemes that would be considered only in the event of collapse of negotiations or aggression elsewhere.
⁶⁸
Still, it was clear that high American officials—Acheson, Bradley, the President—found the trials of limited war deeply frustrating as of 1952.

T
HE
K
OREAN
W
AR FINALLY
came to a close on July 27, 1953, after the Chinese and North Koreans agreed to voluntary repatriation of prisoners of war. Why they relented after two years remains yet another debated mystery of the war. Some people point to the death of Stalin in March 1953, arguing that the new Soviet leadership pressured China to back down. Others think Eisenhower, then President, may have threatened the enemy with the use of nuclear weapons. This cannot be solidly documented. The most likely reason was that the Chinese and North Koreans were tired. Recognizing that Eisenhower and the new Republican administration were impatient and uncompromising, they decided to settle. After more than three years of fighting, an uneasy cease-fire settled on a peninsula now more implacably divided than ever. The boundaries did not differ greatly from those at the start of the fighting in 1950.
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How did the war affect the United States and the world?

In some ways, not very happily. Truman's failure to consult Congress set a poor precedent and helped to saddle his administration with blame when the fighting fell into apparently pointless stalemate. More important, Western "credibility" would have been stronger if the UN had stopped at the 38th parallel. The decision that provoked the stalemate—to drive further north—was indeed hard to resist: what would the American people have said if enemy troops, then on the run, had been allowed to escape and regroup behind their old borders? Still, pressing to the Yalu obviously proved costly. That decision also enabled the Chinese, who might otherwise have stayed out of the war, to establish their own "credibility" and to emerge with enhanced standing in the eyes of many "have-not" nations in the world.

The conflict in Korea also accelerated the process of globalization of the Cold War. When the fighting ended, the United States found itself ever more strongly committed to greater military support for NATO. It redoubled efforts to rebuild Japan as a bastion of capitalist anti-Communism in Asia.
⁷⁰
It had to protect Rhee, a tyrant, and to station troops in South Korea for decades ahead. It also found itself more engaged in the support of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and in the camp of the French in Indochina. By January 1953 America was providing 40 percent of the French effort in that little-known but highly incendiary outpost of Southeast Asia.
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The war had a mixed impact on the American economy. Increases in defense spending boosted the GNP, accelerating the boom psychology of the American people and promoting ever-grander expectations about personal comforts in the future. At the same time, however, defense spending sparked the flame of inflation, which incited some 600,000 steel workers to strike for better wages in April 1952. When the workers refused to settle, Truman seized the mills in hopes of forcing the strikers back to work. His dramatic move exposed the social tensions that gripped the nation during the war. It also set off a major constitutional impasse. This was resolved only in June when the Supreme Court rejected the argument that his standing as commander-in-chief justified the seizure.
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The increases in military spending—and the larger global commitments that America shouldered after the war—greatly changed the mix of federal expenditures in the United States. Defense spending, $13.1 billion in 1950, jumped to a wartime high of $50.4 billion in 1953 and remained between $40.2 billion and $46.6 billion for the remainder of the 1950s. By contrast, non-military spending tended at first to suffer, declining from approximately $30 billion in 1950 to a low of $23.9 billion in 1952 before rising slowly for the next several years—to $38 billion in 1958. Per capita spending for non-military ends increased hardly at all in these years. The emphasis on military expenditures boosted by the Korean War, while helpful to areas engaged in defense contracting, set public priorities that did little to promote government support for a healthy peacetime economy.

Notwithstanding these not altogether happy results of the war, it is fair to conclude that Truman, once faced with the fact of North Korean aggression, acted in the best interests of world stability. To have stood by while Kim overran the South would have been demoralizing indeed to peace-abiding nations. By intervening the United States and the UN made North Korea pay dearly for its greed. They may also have discouraged the Soviets from supporting subsequent military adventurism by client states elsewhere in the world. In these important ways Truman's decision to fight in June 1950—and his refusal thereafter to provoke a much wider war with China—not only sent strong signals against aggression but also guarded against still more dangerous escalation of the conflict.