The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (14 page)

Slowly a consensus was building: airpower was needed immediately to slow down the North Korean advance, and the issue should be taken to the UN for its support, though, if need be, the United States would be willing to take unilateral action to stop the invasion. Near the end of the meeting, Webb asked
Truman to discuss the political aspects of the situation. “We’re not going to talk about politics!” Truman responded sharply. “I’ll handle the political affairs!” Truman then issued orders for airpower to be used to protect the evacuation of American dependents and to contest the North Koreans in the skies above the South. He asked Pace to have MacArthur send a survey team to Korea to find out what was needed militarily, and then, fatefully, he ordered Sherman to send the Seventh Fleet from the Philippines into the Formosa Straits between Taiwan and the mainland of China, now in the hands of Communists. But he said he wanted no announcement made until the fleet was actually in position.

The decision on ground troops remained like a dark storm cloud overhead. None of the president’s advisers had any faith in the ability of the South Koreans to hold the line. The next day, Truman wrote his wife, Bess (still in Independence), that it had been a grand trip back once he was in the air. The meeting they had held at Blair House was most successful, but the issue of Korea was a tough one. “Haven’t been so upset since Greece and Turkey fell into our lap. Let’s hope for the best….” The idea that Stalin had acquiesced to and not driven the invasion was alien, not that it would have made very much difference. Either way, it was viewed as the same thing. “Russians are Said to be Invading; Red Tank units Push on Seoul” was the headline in the influential
New York Herald Tribune
.

To some of the top people in the national security world, like Acheson, the news, however unnerving, was, if not a godsend, then something perilously close, because they had badly wanted a massive increase in the defense budget, and prospects had not been promising. They had in effect been waiting for something like this to happen, fearful of it but also sure it would come, and that when it came it might help wake up the country to the new challenges it faced.

George Kennan, the nation’s leading expert on the Soviets, had not, to his immense frustration, made the cut at the Blair House meetings. (“The dinner had the effect of defining—by social invitation, so to speak—the group that would be responsibly engaged in the handling of the Department’s decision in the ensuing days,” he later wrote.) He was, in his own words, on the sidelines. He had already left behind the job of director of State’s Policy Planning staff and was essentially on leave, headed for Princeton, to ponder the past instead of the present and the future. Still, fearing that Korea might be a mere feint, Acheson questioned Kennan closely in the next few days about what the Russians were up to. Kennan did not think that this attack represented anything larger. He wrote Acheson that the Soviets were not looking for a larger war with the United States, but they would be delighted to see the United States either bogged down “in a profitless and discreditable war” or standing on the
sidelines doing nothing (and thus be discredited in the region) as the North Koreans conquered the peninsula. The great danger for the United States as it plotted its response, he commented, was not in Europe but in Asia. There, the Russians might try to get the Chinese involved as their proxies. This meant that Kennan did not see a larger war and felt we should be very careful to set limits on it. This turned out to be sobering and largely prophetic advice from the nation’s leading Kremlinologist.

When the principals met again at Blair House on the second day, Acheson, already the most important player on Korea except for the president, announced that the Seventh Fleet was now in place and therefore it was time to issue the order for it to protect Taiwan. At the same time, Chiang, he noted, was to be told very bluntly to cease all operations against the mainland. The Seventh Fleet officers were to make sure that he complied. Then Acheson began to outline his recommendations not just for Korea but for all of Asia. The United States would step up aid to the government in the Philippines, now embroiled in a guerrilla war with the Communist-led Huk guerrillas, and do the same for the French, who were fighting the Communist-Nationalist Vietminh in a colonial war in Indochina. In Indochina that was a critical escalation: the United States had originally opposed the idea of the French resuming their colonial rule there, had gone along with it reluctantly under pressure from Paris, and now, four years into that war, just as the French public was beginning to show signs of tiring, the United States was prepared to take on a major share of the financing. Soon the Americans would become the principal backers and financiers of the French. Sending a major military mission to Indochina meant the American toe was being dipped into new waters, those of a bitter colonial war, without anyone imagining, or for that matter very much caring about, the full consequences. Nor was time wasted in doing it. On June 29, four days after the North Korean crossing, eight C-47 cargo planes flew across the Pacific carrying materiel for the French, the beginning of massive military aid and of what would one day become an ever deeper, ever more melancholy adventure for America.

At the Monday night meeting, the Washington policymakers also discussed the possibility of using Chiang’s troops in Korea. The Generalissimo had already volunteered some of his best soldiers. Truman was intrigued by the offer and at first leaned toward accepting it. Acheson advised strongly against it. He had been thinking about what he considered the Chiang problem from the moment the Korean crisis began and was not surprised when Chiang’s offer came in. He understood that what Chiang wanted (a widening war that would in some way bring in the Chinese Communists) and what the United States wanted (a limited war that China stayed out of ) were in no way parallel. The
two countries might still be allies, but they wanted very different things. Acheson was absolutely sure he was right on this one. In any case, he had seen quite enough of how Chiang’s troops had fought on the mainland to know that he did not want to depend on them in this war, especially against the talented forces who had just defeated them. There were a number of people on the right, including MacArthur, who were fascinated by the idea of using Chiang’s troops—unleashing them was the phrase—but Acheson was not among them, nor in the end were most of the Joint Chiefs, who had their own purely military wariness.

But the administration’s political opponents wanted to use them and saw the beginning of the Korean War as a way of striking against the president and his secretary of state, and of tying Korea to an issue on which they were already attacking Truman, the loss of China. Their response was immediate and visceral. On the twenty-sixth, Senator Styles Bridges, an extremely well-connected figure in what was called the China Lobby, rose on the Senate floor to ask, “Will we continue appeasement? Will we wait ‘for the dust to settle’? [a play on an earlier Acheson phrase of waiting for the dust to settle in China in hope that there might eventually be a chance of separating Russia and China]. Now is the time to draw the line.” Bill Knowland of California, so close to the China Lobby that he was known as the Senator from Formosa [Taiwan], added, “If this nation is allowed to succumb to an overt invasion of this kind, there is little chance of stopping Communism anywhere on the continent of Asia.” And finally Senator George (Molly) Malone of Nevada tied the situation to the Hiss case, in which a figure in the State Department, Alger Hiss, had just been convicted of perjury on charges of spying for the Soviets. What had happened in China and was happening now in Korea, Malone said, had been brought on by left-wing advisers to the State Department.

While Truman’s own response to what had happened when the North Koreans invaded was automatic and almost completely apolitical, it was also true that there were politics at play from the very first. There were in fact some divisions within his own administration over the issue of Chiang, and whether or not to defend him and the island of Taiwan. Not only was continued support of Chiang becoming a major issue employed by the most hostile of the administration’s enemies, but even in the administration’s most private meetings it festered. Acheson thought Chiang literally a lost cause, and supporting him a dubious policy, one that would work against the United States in the long run, given the changing mood and political face of Asia. But his opposite number at Defense, Louis Johnson, who hoped to succeed Truman as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, was openly pro-Chiang. In the minds of some members of the inner Truman group, he was considered a member of
the hostile China Lobby, someone who had promised Chiang’s people at the Nationalist embassy in Washington that he was not only going to neutralize Acheson but drive him out of government. (Not only was his top aide, Paul Griffith, in constant touch with Wellington Koo, the Nationalist ambassador and the key figure in the China Lobby, but unbeknownst to the rest of the administration, some nine months earlier Koo had arranged a dinner in Riverdale, New York, for Madame Chiang and Johnson.) Johnson’s connection to the Nationalists was a fact of the administration, and it meant that the criticism of the administration’s China policy heard constantly from the Republicans was also voiced in-house and that everything said at the top-level meeting was immediately passed on to the Nationalists.

That made for an unpleasant in-house struggle, one that hovered over the administration in the early days of the Korean War as the issue of China itself hovered over every decision. It was not a fight that Johnson could win. In political terms, Truman was much closer to Acheson; the president both admired and trusted him and his political judgment and was eventually wary of anything that might expand the war. But he also owed Johnson, who, almost alone among men with major financial connections, had stood with him in the worst days after the 1948 political convention, when no one thought Truman could win the presidency on his own. Johnson had been Truman’s principal fund-raiser when the Democratic Party coffers were empty, and as a reward, he had gotten Defense.

From the moment that Truman gathered his team together at Blair House, there had been sharp and unwanted disagreement between Acheson and Johnson over Taiwan, a subject that Johnson had raised. Everyone else at the meeting wanted to concentrate on Korea, but Johnson, who had been trying against the wishes of the president and Acheson to include Taiwan in the American defense perimeter in Asia, now seized on the issue again. American security, he said, was more affected by Taiwan than Korea. Acheson tried to move the subject back to Korea. Finally Truman broke it off and said they would have dinner. After dinner Johnson tried again to raise the question of Taiwan, and again Truman cut him off.

At the Blair House talks, Chiang’s troops were then quickly left behind for a more serious consideration of the situation on the ground. Joe Collins pointed out that the ROKs were collapsing. The ROK chief of staff had, in Collins’s phrase, “no fight left in him.” They all knew what that meant—there would be a need for American combat troops. But even in World War II, it had been American policy to avoid putting combat troops on the mainland of Asia. Omar Bradley suggested that the president wait a few days before making so fateful a decision. Truman then asked the Joint Chiefs to ponder the question.
At one point, reflecting the gravity of the moment, Truman looked at the others with great solemnity and said, “I don’t want to go to war.” But he was also aware that he was coming closer and closer to making that ultimate decision.

On the morning of June 27, he and Acheson met with congressional leaders and went over his decisions so far. The congressional response was generally very favorable. At one point, Alexander Smith, a Republican senator from New Jersey, asked whether Truman was going to request that Congress pass a joint resolution on military action in Korea. It was a good question, and one that, remarkably enough, in two solid days of meetings no one in the administration had really considered. Politics, they believed, had been put aside, or at least put aside by them. They would take it under advisement, Truman told Smith. Later that day Truman spoke about it with both Acheson and Averell Harriman, who had become a high-level special aide in the hours immediately after the invasion. Though unlike Acheson he came from a background of unparalleled wealth, Harriman was always shrewder about American politics. He strongly advised Truman to go for a congressional resolution. Acheson opposed a resolution; the events, he said, demanded speed. Truman, a man produced by Congress who surely would have been angered had a president gone over
his
head on an issue of war and peace, tended to agree with Acheson. He did not want to slow down the process, and his constant struggles with the Congress over the issue of China and Chiang made him wary of dealing with his enemies in the Senate. Three days later, on the morning of June 30, Truman met again with congressional leaders. This time, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, hardly the administration’s favorite senator, asked bluntly about congressional approval. (At an earlier hearing Acheson had tried to punch him in the nose, and had had to be restrained by one of his own aides; Truman himself liked to call Wherry “the block headed undertaker from Nebraska.”) Truman tried to put him off. “If there is any need for congressional action I will come to you. But I hope we can get those bandits in Korea suppressed without one.”

That was the ideal time to get some kind of resolution, but soon the moment passed, and the political unanimity that had existed at the hour of the invasion evaporated. As the war became more difficult than originally imagined, the politics of it became more difficult as well, and the support began to fragment. Because Truman had not tried for congressional support, the opposition was off the hook in terms of accepting any responsibility for America’s response. When Secretary of the Army Frank Pace suggested they go for the resolution, Truman had answered, “Frank, it’s not necessary. They’re all with me.” “Yes, Mr. President,” Pace answered, “but we can’t be sure they’ll be with you over a period of time.” For the moment everyone seemed to be aboard.
When the word reached the House that the president had decided to send arms to South Korea, virtually the entire House stood to cheer. Joseph Harsch of
The Christian Science Monitor
, one of Washington’s best and most experienced reporters, wrote, “Never before have I felt such a sense of relief and unity pass through the city.”