The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (94 page)

So it was under the American aegis in the midst of the Cold War, which had so immediately followed a hot war, that South Korea was allowed to modernize, first militarily and then technologically and industrially, but not politically; that was not part of the original package. But then, in some thirty years,
in retrospect an amazingly quick turnaround, there was a startling democratization of the society, a surprising by-product of the other aspects of modernization. What happened in South Korea was an odd mix of revolution with evolution, all taking place at an unusual rate of speed. It had begun with the need, self-evident during the Korean War, for a better South Korean Army, and that had to begin with better, more professional Korean officers. Too many of the existing ones at the start of the war were hacks who held their positions out of loyalty and willingness to play their part in the massive national corruption. In 1952, under pressure from the Americans, a new military academy was inaugurated, based to an uncommon degree on West Point. Many of the early faculty members were American officers. The curriculum, like the one at West Point, was tilted heavily toward engineering. Many of the country’s most talented young students were sent there—and it became an instant source of meritocratic talent, a place where a generation of talented young Koreans could get a badly needed education and prove their worth, and break through some of the social restraints of the past.

It was an early harbinger of a new, potentially more modern society. It was probably the first step in creating what became in effect a new class in Korea, that of modern, purposeful, increasingly well-educated young men who wanted to bring a new definition of modernity to their country. The consequences of the military school and its then critical role in the nation were greater than any of its founders realized they might be: in effect the more the Army—and the country—modernized technologically and economically, the more the old ways were going to be seen as archaic and corrupt, and the less control that Rhee and the men who eventually replaced him had over the country. And in some ways the association of these students with their American teachers was fateful. The American officers represented something new. Their body movement and language reflected two quite contradictory things—respect for the military hierarchy and yet a high degree of personal freedom within that same hierarchy.

It was the first critical step in the modernization of an educational, social, and then economic, and finally political, order. As the military system was modernized, so too were other colleges and universities; as the nation gained in stature and talent and confidence, it began to want to be a player economically on the international scene, and that same engineering talent was put at play there, a kind of state-guided, state-propelled capitalism. In some ways it was not unlike a smaller Japan, although the victories in Korea were far greater, because there had been an earlier precedent for some of Japan’s economic successes, but little for those of Korea.

What happened in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s was a fascinating human and societal story, a great lesson in the uses of adversity. The people who
ran the country, Rhee and the men around him, did so for some thirty years in a narrow and dictatorial manner, but even as they did and as they suppressed a series of student protests, the currents within the country for a better life were becoming more powerful. Economic success gradually begat an increasing social optimism and confidence, and in time a growing restlessness on the part of the population, manifest first among its students. That change was taking place in home after home, even as Rhee and the government thought they could do business as usual and that all the power in the society existed at the top. It was a case of a nation, surely not the first and surely not the last, changing in its expectations and aspirations without the hierarchy at the top understanding the new forces. When Rhee finally fell from power in April 1960, the chief of staff of the ROK Army said, “Personally, I respect Dr. Rhee. But history has turned him down, has scorned him and lost its trust in him. I, who saw the march of events, am sick inside about it.”

In the background to all of this there was the leavening influence of the United States; in those early years the American government at the highest level, still deeply engaged in the Cold War, might have constantly tilted toward an authoritarian definition of Korean leadership, but there were other influences of America as well; many of the young Koreans had studied in the United States and discovered that you could be a loyal citizen and a free person at the same time, that loyalty to the state often had a built-in complexity to it that allowed you to disagree with the government’s actions while still loving your country. So it was that South Korea, in small steps that few people understood at the time, and that no one planned or expected, stumbling toward a freer society, began the process in the late 1970s of serious democratization. More young Koreans were feeling more confident about their own abilities and lives and wanted greater increments of freedom to go with the greater increments of prosperity. The kind of talent and ambition that some of the early missionaries had spotted in another century—the capacity for hard work, the immense discipline, the desire for more education—were manifesting themselves on a national scale, and this had its own dynamic. Once the people of the South sensed the possibility of a better life, it was hard to slow them down.

The government tried for a time to suppress those forces, but it was overtaken by the very successes it had authored—the more successful the economy, the more confident ordinary Korean citizens felt about themselves, and the more they wanted to share, both economically and politically, in the fruits of their success. The government faced a crisis that it never really understood—in a sense a vast nationwide protest driven by rising expectations. At first the pressure for political liberalization came primarily from the universities and the students, but in time the labor unions joined up and ordinary citizens of
the middle class followed them. “Korea by 1987 had irrevocably changed,” said Gaston Sigur, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific in the late 1980s. “The middle class had become a power. And it could no longer be disregarded. The government wasn’t dealing with a handful of left-wing students. They may have been out in front, but it was plain that you had strong middle class support for the demonstrations.” In a stunningly short time, South Korea had morphed itself into a dynamic, highly productive, extremely successful democracy. “I cannot think of another country, at least in recent history, that went so swiftly from an authoritarian system to a democracy on its own,” a member of the party of Roh Tae Woo, a truly democratically elected president of Korea, once told Frank Gibney. In the South the great success had come because the top of the political hierarchy had been forced, no matter how reluctantly, to pay attention to the needs and aspirations of the bottom and middle of the society.

FOR THE AMERICANS
and others who had fought there, who had more often than not felt the lack of recognition in their own country, and who had not particularly liked the country when they were there, the success of South Korea as a nation brought a sense of belated validation to their sacrifice, and the sacrifice of others who had not come home, and granted them a legitimacy and honor that they had not always felt.

So many of them had for so long kept it inside themselves. No one wanted to hear about the war when they had first come home, and so they never talked about it, not to their families or to their oldest friends. Or when they did, no one understood—or, worse, wanted to understand. Their children more often than not would grow up knowing only that their fathers had served in the war, but almost nothing else—which units they had been with and what battles they had fought in. They would complain about their fathers, that they were never willing to talk about the war.

It was all bottled up. What they had done and why they had done it were still important to them—they were proud of having gone, and proud also of how well they had done under dreadful conditions. They mourned those who had not come back, but they shared it only with one another. More than half a century later, this was still the defining experience in so many of their lives, and a number of them had become, in their own way, amateur historians. Late in life they wrote their own memoirs, sometimes privately published or simply Xeroxed and stapled together, done often somewhat belatedly at the urging of their children and grandchildren. A surprising number of them had, in effect, their own history rooms, with small libraries devoted to the Korean War, and with large maps of the country showing selected battle areas pinned to the
walls. But the rooms, like so many of the experiences and the memories, were effectively closed off to outsiders. No one, save the others who had gone, had offered the proper respect for what they had done and why they did it back when it had mattered. It was as if a critical part of the experience, the validity of it as judged and valued by others, had been stolen from them.

They shared, then, this one great bond—that they could talk to one another and that those who had been there would always understand. They kept in touch by phone and letter, and then late in life by the magic of the Internet, a wonderful means as well of locating old buddies who had been lost in the shuffle of time. Their alumni associations were important, and they took their division and regimental newsletters seriously, as well as their annual conventions. Friendships were sustained, and sometimes new ones flowered between men who had been in adjoining units but had not known each other in Korea itself. At the reunions they gathered in small groups, often men who had been at a particular battle, summoning their pasts through the haze of half a century of memories. In the words of Dick Raybould, an artillery forward observer in the Ninth Regiment of the Second Division, “You go to the reunions and you find yourself trying to remember what you’ve spent the last fifty years trying to forget.”

Gradually some of them began to go back to visit South Korea. At first it was something of a trickle, and then more of them went and came back and talked about it, and they went on organized tours with other veterans. They visited places where they had fought during the Naktong battles, and certain special battlefields, like Chipyongni. They did not visit the area around and above Kunuri and The Gauntlet, where the terrible defeat had first been inflicted on them, because that was the other side of the parallel and could not be visited. But they, many of whom had hated the country when they first served there, were impressed, first by the success of the country itself, its remarkable modernization, but also by the sense of gratitude that they felt on the part of the local people—far greater than anything bestowed on them in their native land. And they took pride in one additional thing: that if it had not been a victory in the classic sense, in some way what they had done had worked, because it was the crossing of an existing border in the Cold War; and because they had made their stand, it had not happened again.

A
N IMMENSE AMOUNT
of damage had been done to the Democratic Party by those years. There was a legacy from all this, a price still to be paid, and it was paid, first by the Democratic Party, and then in time by the country. There were many forces that had worked against the Truman administration at the end. It wasn’t just the Korean War and the fall of China, it was something larger that was in the air, a mounting sense of fatigue with the Democrats, an exhaustion from a very difficult, grinding era, both international and domestic, with which they had tangled for too long. The Democrats by 1952 had, whatever their successes both economic and political, served for seven very hard postwar years, years in which both the administration and the nation were forced into a new kind of war that produced anxieties rather than victories. The Communists appeared likely to stand as an enemy in perpetuity. Americans, not surprisingly, wanted a change by 1952. But the lessons of that era were nonetheless haunting, and it was like a virus that got into the bloodstream of the Democratic Party, placing it perpetually on the defensive. For the Republicans had found their issue—they were in their rhetoric always tougher on the Communists. They sold their party as the one that would more eagerly stand up to Khrushchev or his successors. National security had changed: there was a genuine Communist threat out there, but measuring it accurately became more difficult because it was now so deeply entwined with domestic American politics. The Democrats were, in the decades that followed the 1950s, haunted by China as an issue, seemingly unable to answer the charges against them as they were put forth in the raw crucible of the political arena, unable to explain the complexity of what had happened so far away. China became their Achilles’ heel. The larger question that arose from those years after the Korean War was soon ignored: whether or not America could separate serious and genuine national security concerns from the increasing power of simplistic anti-Communist rhetoric expressed in domestic political campaigns. Was the country wise enough to identify what was a real national security threat and what was not? And that quandary, because of the vulnerability of the Demo
cratic Party, helped lead America into Vietnam. The successes of the Democrats in stabilizing Europe after World War II were largely ignored; they had, after all, seemingly failed on China.

In the years that followed the 1952 campaign, the Cold War deepened exponentially as a political issue, even as the outer limits in terms of real power alignments were largely settled. More, it was no longer just a struggle with the Soviets over Europe, a theater where the Russians were clearly the imperial power, imposing their will by force and inflicting their cruel little police states on unhappy satellite nations and where the United States was often identified with indigenous nationalism, a deep national longing for some form of Christian, democratic capitalism. Now the battlefield was perceived as spreading to the Third World. There indigenous forces were in the process of rising up against what had often been Western colonial or neocolonial regimes, often turning to the Communists for aid and weapons. The countries where these challenges were taking place were rarely in pure geopolitical terms terribly important or powerful, nothing that could shift the global balance; they were the kind of countries whose overall value George Kennan would have scoffed at in terms of realpolitik, and where he would have been sure there would be an inevitable conflict between Moscow and some local Communist government. The British, and in time the French, were learning that there was no upside to trying to sustain colonial relationships in this new era, and were pulling back, but now, somewhat to the surprise of its allies, America began to step in under the banner of anti-Communism.

Gradually even the Democratic Party made its adjustments to the changing political dynamic. By 1960 most of the contradictions of the era were reflected almost perfectly in Jack Kennedy, probably the party’s most attractive young candidate. Kennedy was an intellectually superior, quite skeptical, uncommonly modern political figure. There was a certain iciness at his political core that suited him well in this new political age, framed as it was by nuclear weapons, and therefore one that demanded ice instead of fire in a leader. He seemed to embody little in the way of genuine political passion—other than to be a rational man, as if being a rational man would always be enough. This meant that Kennedy, more than any other Democrat of that era, came to represent the conflicting forces of the New Deal Democratic Party as it evolved into the era of the Cold War Democratic Party, a young man who at least on the surface took a harder line than the candidate who had preceded him, Adlai Stevenson. No longer would a Democratic candidate dare be accused of being soft on Communism. “Isn’t he marvelous!” the ever hawkish columnist Joseph Alsop once said about Kennedy during the 1960 campaign, “a Stevenson with balls.” In the 1960 election Kennedy and the Democrats, if anything, took a
harder line on the subject of Fidel Castro, who had come to power in Cuba during the Eisenhower years, than did Kennedy’s opponent, Richard Nixon. For Cuba by then had become the litmus test for a presidential macho index. (In the 1960 campaign Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, had gone through the American South telling people at each stop that he would know how to deal with Castro: “First I’d wash him. Then I’d shave him. And then I’d spank him.”) In that same campaign, Kennedy also accused the Republicans of creating a missile gap with the Soviets—thus showing that perhaps it was the
Republicans
who were soft on Communism, and at the same time, however involuntarily, feeding the nation’s nuclear anxieties. His charge turned out to be true; there was a missile gap—the United States had two thousand and the Russians had only sixty-seven—but it kept the Republicans just a bit more on the defensive, and Khrushchev, delighted to look more powerful than he was, never corrected Kennedy.

Kennedy might have thought privately that our China policy, our insistence that Taiwan was China, was a quaint kind of irrationality, a sentiment he was willing to express with some of his more liberal aides, but he was not about to take any political risk to change it, at least not in his first term. He could be stunningly candid about these things in private, for personal candor was part of his charm and added considerably to his reputation as a realist. But Kennedy’s candor was always a
private,
rather than a public thing. Because of that, those exposed to his private side liked him even more, and saw him not as being timid, but instead as being realistic. After the election, he told those liberal advisers to whom he had earlier seemed to promise a new policy on China that he could not talk about China for the present. Perhaps in the second term…So much, it was clear, was going to have to wait for the second term.

Instead his administration was embattled—indeed on the defensive—from the start. The margin of victory over Nixon was paper thin, barely a hundred thousand votes. Then the administration, hoisted on its own petard, went along with a bizarre CIA plan to support Cuban rebels who wanted to take the country back from Castro by landing them on Cuban beaches. The Bay of Pigs plan, run by the CIA not the military, with Kennedy cutting back some of the air cover, failed miserably and predictably. In political terms, Kennedy was seriously wounded by its failure, more on the defensive now than before. At a meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna two months later, the Soviet leader, mistaking the Bay of Pigs escapade for a sign of Kennedy’s larger weaknesses, decided to bully him. The only place where the West and the Communists were fighting with real bullets was Vietnam, and as a means of showing Khrushchev that he was made of sterner stuff, Kennedy decided to up the ante there.

There was, however, a great unanswered issue about Vietnam—if the Democrats could not deal with China, which their party had been accused of losing, how could they avoid the same pitfalls in Vietnam? The question went unanswered because it went unasked. In the administration no one even discussed China. That Vietnam might now become their China and they would be blamed for losing it to the Communists was a far more immediate question for them. So a line was to be drawn there. Their policy on China was one of essential silence. Yet China and Vietnam were two parts of the same issue. Of the two countries, China was the done deal—a policy that was deceased—the other, Vietnam, was a work in progress, or perhaps more properly, a tragedy in the making. They were tied to each other by the same political forces: one could not deal with the real challenge of the Communist-nationalist forces in Vietnam, because one could not deal with the issue of why those same forces had won in China. The people who did not want the Americans to lose Vietnam, another Asian country that had never been theirs, were largely the same people who had already frozen U.S. China policy. The new administration, so filled with confidence about changing what it considered outmoded Dulles policies, decided to lay off the most outmoded one of all and continue the fight to keep Communist China out of the UN. On China, Kennedy was, said the prominent China expert Allen Whiting, who served in that administration, “a profile in caution.”

Typically, at his home in Hyannis Port in the summer of 1961, Kennedy met with Adlai Stevenson, by then his UN ambassador; Harlan Cleveland, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations; and Arthur Schlesinger, his aide and historian. When they got to the subject of China, and the president’s desire to keep Mao’s China out of the UN for the foreseeable future, Kennedy, sensing the moment had arrived to strengthen everyone’s resolve just a bit, immediately called out to his wife, “Jackie, we need the Bloody Marys now.” He wanted, he told a dubious Stevenson, to buy at least one more year before dealing with China. That year soon stretched on.

At a meeting a few weeks later, with Stevenson, Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, his chief national security aide, and Ted Sorensen, his top domestic adviser and principal speechwriter, the subject of China came up again. Stevenson, Kennedy said, was in a terrible position, one of keeping the real China out of the UN. “You have the hardest thing in the world to sell. It really doesn’t make any sense—the idea that Taiwan represents China. But, if we lose this fight, if Red China comes into the UN our first year in town, your first year and mine, they’ll run us both out. We have to lick them this year. We’ll take our chances next year. It will be an election year; but we can delay the admission of Red China until after the election. So far as this year is concerned you have to
do everything you can to keep them out. Whatever is required is okay by me.” Stevenson asked if the blockage was to be for one year or more permanently. At least for a year, Kennedy answered. He himself was going to make clear to Chiang Kai-shek that he could not make the issue of China at the UN a domestic political issue. And then he offered a curiously innocent description of how he was going to get a group of China Firsters—Harry Luce, Walter Judd, and Roy Howard—and bring them around on the issue. Anyone listening to him at that point, knowing how passionate these other men were on the subject of Chiang, and how little connection they felt to Kennedy’s own election, might have wondered if his normally cool, realistic appraisal of political forces had completely deserted him. Changing their position on Chiang was not something those men were likely to do because of a friendly presidential phone call. John Kennedy at that point was the most rational of men, carrying on the most irrational of policies.

In the late fall of 1961, Kennedy decided to up the ante in the ongoing but still relatively low-key guerrilla war in Vietnam. At the time there were only six hundred American advisers in South Vietnam. His was the most dangerous of moves geopolitically even if at first it was a limited commitment of advisory and support troops, totaling perhaps some seventeen thousand additional Americans by early 1963. The Kennedy escalation meant that even if the commitment was in the beginning relatively small, nonetheless the flag had been planted ever more deeply and planted in a country and a war where the United States did not by itself control the dynamic and where the forces gathering against the American proxy were driven by a deep historic dynamic. It was America, because it was great and mighty and rich, believing it was in control of events but following a path over which it would have less and less control; in effect it was following the French path. “The Americans are walking in the same footsteps as the French,” said the journalist-historian Bernard Fall, who was eventually killed there, “but dreaming different dreams.”

The Kennedy commitment in Vietnam was more than anything else driven by domestic politics. As he could not deal with China in his first term, he could not afford to lose another country—one where there was an actual shooting war taking place. Saving South Vietnam from Communism, though it became the rallying banner for an ever increased American presence, was always peripheral. It was much more about a Democratic administration not wanting to be driven out of Washington. Nothing reflected the change caused in American domestic politics by the Cold War more than the increasing escalation of the Vietnam War. The wartime America that had been against any colonial presence was frailer, that vision replaced by the new anti-Communism. Dean Acheson, now a Democratic foreign policy elder statesman, a traditionalist
and a man of Europe anyway, and now badly wounded in the struggle over the fall of China, had become in this new era, on this derivative issue, one of the leading hard-liners. Some of his old colleagues from the Truman days were shocked by his hawkishness. George Elsey, one of Truman’s top White House aides, would say years later, “The one thing I can’t forgive about Dean is how he switched sides on Vietnam—he who should have known so much why it wouldn’t work became all too much like the right wingers who had criticized him all those years.” Acheson became ever more hostile to what he considered the soft-liners in the administration, men like Stevenson, Chester Bowles, and Kennan. It was almost as if he made a practice of taunting his old colleague Kennan in that period, as the political distance between them seemed to widen. When Kennan was named ambassador to Yugoslavia by Kennedy, Acheson told friends in an uncommonly cruel remark, “Tito is going to have a field day playing with poor George’s marshmallow mind.”