Harry Truman (64 page)

During these harrowing days, my father deeply missed the presence of Arthur Vandenberg in the Senate. Senator Vandenberg may have been a bit difficult at times, but he was a man of vision, a politician who realized the nation’s interests had to be placed before politics. After several operations for cancer, he was forced to retire to his home in Grand Rapids, never to return. Dad wrote him a number of touching letters lamenting his absence.

Meanwhile in Korea, Walton Walker, the commanding general of the Eighth Army, was killed in a jeep accident, and General Matthew Ridgway was named to replace him. He arrived in Tokyo on December 25 and within forty-eight hours was in Korea, taking charge. Seldom in American history has there been a more dramatic example of what gifted leadership can accomplish. One of the great combat leaders of his generation, Matthew Ridgway took an army whose confidence had been shaken by retreat and confusion of purpose and within a month restored its fighting spirit. General MacArthur, isolated in his Tokyo headquarters, was unaware of what was happening in the field. He continued to shower Washington with demands for the right to widen the war by bombarding Manchuria and unleashing Chiang.

Early in January, these opinions had to be taken seriously because General Ridgway, under fierce Chinese pressure, was forced to abandon Seoul, the South Korean capital. But he exacted a fearful toll from the Chinese as he fell back, and by mid-January the Chinese “Third Phase Offensive,” which was supposed to knock the UN command out of the war, was an obvious failure.

In the midst of this Chinese offensive, and in fact just as it was petering out, the UN went into another political collapse. The General Assembly passed a new peace plan on January 13, 1951, offering Red China admission to the UN and handing over Formosa to her if she would agree to a Korean settlement. We had done everything we could to forestall this vote, but that meant little to the political opposition in Congress. Senator Taft called the offer “the most complete surrender to which the United States has ever agreed.” To Dad’s immense relief, Red China overplayed her hand. Arrogantly, she demanded immediate admission to the UN and the convening of a peace conference - with the right to continue the fighting. When the Third Phase offensive sputtered out, and the Eighth Army went over to the offensive on January 25, miraculously rigid spines suddenly began appearing in the General Assembly. On February 1, a large majority formally branded Communist China as an aggressor in Korea.

My father, with his knowledge of military history, had foreseen what now began to happen. We had the Chinese at the end of a leaky supply line running 260 miles back to the Yalu. Every foot of this line was being pounded by our airplanes. The Chinese army soon ran short of food, medicine, and ammunition. Typhus, spurred by the brutal Korean winter, seared their ranks. By the end of March, Seoul was recaptured, and the UN army was back on the 38th parallel once more. Behind them lay hundreds of thousands of Chinese corpses. Mao Tse-tung was being taught a very harsh lesson about the rewards of aggression.

Instead of expressing praise and pleasure for General Ridgway’s achievements, General MacArthur became more and more contemptuous of the way we were fighting in Korea. He called it “an accordion war,” sneering that all we could do was advance until our supply lines became overextended, and then we would be forced to fall back, while the enemy took the offensive until his supply lines were overextended. This was nonsense, and a soldier as experienced as MacArthur must have known it. Our supply lines were hardly vulnerable to the savage assault from the air that we were pouring on the roads and railroads of North Korea.

On January 13, my father wrote General MacArthur a long letter, explaining in the most intimate detail the thinking behind his policy to confine the war to Korea. Seldom has a President taken a theater commander so deeply into his confidence. He pointed out how much we would gain from a successful resistance in Korea. We would deflate – as, indeed, we did - the political and military prestige of Communist China. We would make possible a far more satisfactory peace settlement for Japan. We would lend urgency to the rapid expansion of the defenses of the Western world. Above all, he explained our need for “great prudence” pending the buildup of our national strength. “Steps which might in themselves be fully justified and which might lend some assistance to the campaign in Korea would not be beneficial if they thereby involved Japan or Western Europe in large-scale hostilities.” Dad sent General Collins and General Vandenberg, commanders of the army and air force respectively, to Tokyo to elaborate on this explanation.

On March 15, General MacArthur specifically disobeyed his President’s order to refrain from making unauthorized statements on policy to the press. He gave an extensive interview to Hugh Baillie, president of the United Press. He expressed to Baillie the utmost contempt for the decision to stop the Eighth Army’s advance at the 38th parallel. “Our mission,” he intoned, was “the unification of Korea.” Legally, this statement was correct. The UN army was still operating under the UN resolution of October 7, calling for a united Korea. But realistically and diplomatically, the entrance of the Chinese had totally altered the situation, and it was foolish of him to speak out in this way without an iota of concern for the new policy his President was struggling to form.

During these same months, my father had many other things on his mind besides General MacArthur. He was engaged in a struggle to persuade Congress to take the final step in his program for the revitalization of Europe’s defense. He wanted authorization to add four more American divisions to General Eisenhower’s NATO army. This “great debate,” as the newspapers called it, soon evolved into a Republican attack on the powers of the presidency. Senator Wherry introduced a resolution requiring prior congressional approval before the President could send troops anywhere. Dad replied that as commander in chief he could send the troops without congressional assent, but he was willing and even eager to consult with Congress on the matter.

From his sickbed, Arthur Vandenberg staunchly supported Dad’s stand. He pointed out that to transfer any portion of the President’s power as commander in chief of the Armed Forces would subordinate military decision to the political judgments of Congress. “We partially tried that system in the Civil War when the Committee on the Conduct of the War set a tragic precedent against any such bitter mistake.” On January 15 he wrote to Dad: “Nothing matters in this crisis except the welfare of our country. It calls for the greatest possible meeting of minds in behalf of invincible unity against an aggression which is clearly aimed at us. . . . You may be sure that you have all my prayers in the midst of the indescribably heavy burdens which you are carrying.”

On March 6, Dad sent his last message to the senior senator from Michigan, whose health was failing rapidly: “All of your friends are disturbed by reports that you have not been getting on so well lately. This is just a line to let you know that I am thinking of you and hope you will be back in your old place soon. The country needs you.”

For the first time, Senator Vandenberg replied by addressing Dad on a first-name basis: “My dear Harry: I am deeply touched by your telegram of March 6th. I know it is inspired by longtime personal friendship which you and I enjoyed. It moves me to greet you in this personal way. . . . I have abiding faith in the future of our good old U.S.A. . . .”

A month later he was dead of cancer.

Dad won the great debate by skillfully maneuvering his spokesmen within and outside of Congress. Senator Taft and Senator Wherry, the chief exponents of a tie-the-President’s-hands point of view, found themselves cut off and enveloped by arguments from Generals Marshall and Bradley, Secretary of State Acheson, and NATO Commander Eisenhower. The final Senate resolution left the President in full possession of all his powers, gave him the four divisions he wanted, but threw the Republicans a bone by agreeing that “no more could be sent, without further Congressional approval.”

In Korea, meanwhile, the military situation continued to improve. But General MacArthur continued to deteriorate. He was obsessed, as he makes clear in his memoirs, with the idea of winning the global battle against communism then and there. “It was my belief,” he wrote, “that if allowed to use my full military might, without artificial restrictions, I could not only save Korea, but also inflict such a destructive blow upon Red China’s capacity to wage aggressive war that it would remove her as a further threat to peace in Asia for generations to come.” How he hoped to accomplish this, short of massive atomic attack, he never explained. But this was the background for the thinking which led him step by step to insubordination and finally to outright sabotage of his President’s policy.

With the United Nations army firmly entrenched on the 38th parallel and the Chinese Communist army battered to the brink of collapse - in the final stages of the UN offensive they surrendered by the thousands - my father decided it was time to move toward an armistice. He was anxious to end the fighting as swiftly as possible, and he thought the Chinese might feel the same way. So, he ordered the State Department to draft a carefully worded proposal. On March 20, General MacArthur was informed of this plan, as he was informed of all other major policy moves, well in advance of their implementation. The message to General MacArthur said in part: “State Department planning a Presidential announcement shortly that, with clearing of bulk of South Korea of aggressors, United Nations now preparing to discuss conditions of settlement in Korea. United Nations feeling exists that further diplomatic efforts toward settlement should be made without any advance with major forces north of 38th parallel. Time will be required to determine diplomatic reactions and permit new negotiations that may develop. . . .”

My father and State Department officials met for long hours, drafting a statement which would enable the Chinese to negotiate an armistice with a minimum loss of face. They were well aware of the importance of face in the Orient. In the draft of Dad’s statement, he called on all those involved in Korea to give the Korean people the peace they deserved. He held out the possibility of negotiating on Formosa in another paragraph, which stated that “a prompt settlement of the Korean problem would greatly reduce international tension in the Far East and would open the way for the consideration of other problems in that area by the processes of peaceful settlement envisioned in the Charter of the United Nations.”

General MacArthur, as a self-advertised expert on the Oriental mind, certainly knew the importance of face. He also knew the situation of the battered Chinese Communist army. I strongly suspect he thought Dad’s offer would be accepted by the Chinese, after some inevitable huffing and puffing. This prospect did not tie in with the MacArthur presidential program. If there was any negotiating to be done, he wanted to be the man who obtained the concessions from the enemy. At any rate, on March 24, the General issued a statement which made a cease-fire impossible. It opened with a paragraph that scoffed at Red China’s vaunted military power and boastfully declared South Korea cleared of organized Communist forces. Communist weakness, he said, was being “brilliantly exploited by our ground forces” and the enemy was “showing less stamina than our own troops under the rigors of climate, terrain and battle.”

Then came the crusher, the sentence that destroyed my father’s peace negotiations before they even began: “The enemy, therefore, must by now be painfully aware that a decision of the United Nations to depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the area of Korea, through an expansion of our military operations to its coastal areas and interior bases, would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.”

Even a nation that cared nothing about face would find it hard to swallow these overbearing remarks. Moreover, they implied our ability to impose humiliation on Red China - something we simply lacked the military strength to do at that time. The hollowness of the General’s rhetoric immediately convinced the Chinese we were insincere about wanting peace. They scornfully rejected MacArthur’s ultimatum.

When this statement arrived in Washington, no one could quite believe it. White-lipped, my father summoned Secretary of State Acheson and several other advisers to the White House. First, he dictated a blunt statement to MacArthur, referring to his directive forbidding policy statements. But he was no longer trying to straighten out the General’s apocalyptic thinking. As far as Dad was concerned, General MacArthur was dismissed. The only question left for discussion was the matter of timing.

Recalling the situation in later years, Dad said: “Dean Acheson and General Marshall and I decided we should send an ultimatum to the head of the Chinese government for a cease-fire in Korea. We sent the meat paragraphs to MacArthur for approval. Then he sent his own ultimatum to the Chinese. That is what he got fired for. I couldn’t send a message to the Chinese after that. He prevented a cease-fire proposition right there. I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea at that time. I was never so put out in my life. It’s the lousiest trick a commander in chief can have done to him by an underling. MacArthur thought he was the proconsul for the government of the United States and could do as he damned pleased.”