Penguin History of the United States of America (114 page)

So the invasion of South Korea by North Korea on 25 June 1950 was automatically seen as a deliberate test of Western wills. It was the occupation of the Rhineland, the
Anschluss
, the Sudetenland affair of the Third World War. It was assumed that the North Koreans would never have dared to
act without the express authorization of Stalin. The Chinese communists were discounted: they too were supposed to be mere tools of the Kremlin. This was the moment long awaited, long feared. If Stalin were allowed to succeed, the United States would be shamed for ever; worse, the security of Japan and the entire western Pacific would be threatened. Stalin might even be sufficiently encouraged by Western inaction to attempt some feat in Europe. So the line had to be drawn here, now. On 27 June President Truman announced that the United States, acting on behalf of the United Nations, would come to the rescue of the South Korean government and people.

They badly needed such assistance. Korea had been a Japanese colony from the end of the Russo-Japanese War until 1945; it had subsequently been divided, as a purely
ad hoc
measure, along the line of the 38th parallel, which ran across the waist of the peninsula. Neither of the Korean states which emerged had much claim on the respect or liking of the world; both were authoritarian governments; but the Stalinist regime of Kim II Sung in the North was much better organized for war than the Southern one of Syngman Rhee. The armies of the North very quickly overran the South, until only a perimeter round the port of Pusan, at the toe of the peninsula, remained in non-communist hands.

But the communist forces had neither the material resources nor the military talent available to the Americans. General MacArthur took command in the field for the last time, and in what was perhaps the most daring and brilliant stroke of his entire career launched an amphibious attack at Inchon on the western coast of Korea, deep in the enemy’s rear. He ran appalling risks, but the crushing victory which followed more than justified him. With astonishing rapidity the UN forces encircled and defeated the communist army, and the whole of the South was liberated. MacArthur began a rapid pursuit which carried him far north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, fell on 20 October.

The United States had now achieved its original purpose: South Korea had been rescued from wanton aggression; Stalin, it was to be hoped, had been taught a decisive lesson. Furthermore, it had all been done under the umbrella of the United Nations Organization. By a lucky chance the Soviet Union had been boycotting the sessions of the Security Council when the matter of North Korea’s invasion was laid before that body, so it had been possible to get a mandate from the UN of a kind never heard of before or since. Although Americans and South Koreans formed the overwhelming majority of the forces commanded by MacArthur, a great many other nations were also represented (including Britain). The whole affair had proceeded with extraordinary speed and success; it seemed that all that was now needed was a mopping-up operation and the establishment of a new, more defensible border across the peninsula.

Unhappily success went to the policy-makers’ heads. The division of Korea into two states was thoroughly artificial and un-historical; besides,
would not the people of the North welcome liberation from communism? And might not an even sharper lesson be taught the Kremlin if the original war-aims were extended? If the North Koreans were finally defeated, dazzling possibilities would open. The peninsula might be remade as Japan had been and as a UN resolution of 1947 had prescribed. Besides, military operations north of the 38th parallel were essential if South Korea was to be made secure. The only drawback seemed to be a developing tendency of General MacArthur to act too much on his own. So he was given strict instructions what to avoid: there was to be no military action of any kind across the Korean frontiers with China and the USSR, and non-Korean troops were not to be used in the frontier zones. Harry Truman flew to a conference at Wake Island to make sure that MacArthur understood his orders. But the essence of the matter was all too well expressed in a cable sent by Marshall (by then, Secretary of Defense) to the General: ‘We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.’ A resolution of the UN General Assembly had already called for the ‘complete independence and unity of Korea’. So MacArthur, seeing the whole peninsula open to him, swept ahead with the same dazzling speed and soon had forces on the Yalu river which formed the border with China: they included US army units, in defiance of orders. The maps published in the newspapers of Europe and America showed the General to be in complete command of Korea, except for some insignificant pockets of resistance in the extreme north. No doubt they would be pinched out in a few days.

Instead there came a counter-attack which sent the UN armies reeling back to the South in what Dean Acheson later called the worst defeat suffered by the US army since first Bull Run. The high command had made the fatal mistake of writing off the Chinese, who had done their best to make their position clear. They had indicated plainly that they could accept the reconquest of the South, but they could not tolerate the loss of the North, any more than the United States had been able to tolerate the original invasion. It was not simply that they would lose face if they allowed an ally to be defeated, or that communism might lose an adherent state. The Chinese also had too much reason to fear that if they allowed the United States to appropriate North Korea they would shortly have to face another Yankee initiative elsewhere. Chiang Kai-shek might be launched on an attempted reconquest of China itself with full American assistance: there was a lot of loose talk going round to that effect. Or the United States might send troops to reinforce France’s effort to re-establish her imperial control of Indo-China (it was already subsidizing that effort handsomely). In short, the Chinese looked at the Americans through the same sort of telescope as that which the Americans were pointing at them. They too seemed to see a self-confident aggressor power making the first moves in a campaign that, unless checked, might lead on to world conquest. They too felt that the moment to avert a Third World War was now, the place here.
They noticed that victory had made MacArthur careless. Chinese forces slipped unobserved over the Yalu and broke MacArthur’s centre. They achieved total surprise and swept forward as rapidly as their foe had done. Seoul, the South Korean capital, changed hands for the third time (though it was soon won back); and the war changed its character. For the Americans, now under the field command of General Matthew B. Ridgway, rallied; turned; checked the enemy; and then, with agonizing slowness, pushed north again. Only now their mood was sober. It was realized that the war could only be brought to a successful end if the original objective, of saving South Korea, were accepted as all that was attainable. With the assistance of Russian armaments and technical advisers, and China’s unlimited manpower, the North Koreans were now unconquerable, since the Americans, or at least the Truman administration, dared not cross the Yalu, either to fight a land battle or to bomb the Chinese industrial centres in Manchuria (it was feared that any such extension of the war might bring in the Soviet Union, with who dared guess what hideous consequences). The mountainous terrain of central Korea was perfect for defensive operations. So the war settled down into a long slog, like the Western Front of the First World War. Both sides sent emissaries to Panmunjon to discuss peace terms, but this turned out to be as long a slog as the battles. Weeks turned into months; 1950 gave way to 1951 which gave way to 1952; American casualties mounted; popular dissatisfaction began to grow, dissatisfaction both with the apparently interminable war and the administration that had got bogged down in it.

Truman and the Democrats, in fact, had run out of luck. They had one last great achievement to their name, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1950. In the wake of the Korean emergency it had been easy enough to persuade the nations of Western Europe to join with the United States in a new alliance designed to build up military, air and naval forces strong enough to deter and if necessary to fight the USSR successfully. It had also been easy to get the North Atlantic Treaty through the US Senate, and presently General Eisenhower was sent to Paris to be the first Supreme Commander of NATO. He quickly built up a formidable force; and although the United States still provided most of the money and material that the alliance needed, the economic recovery of Europe that the Marshall Plan had fostered had already been successful enough to enable the Europeans to make significant contributions of their own. But this success for the administration was offset by Congressional rejection of most of the Fair Deal and by corruption in the executive. Some of Truman’s appointees to office in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy owed their appointment more to the friendship of the President than to their intrinsic fitness for public service, and they allowed themselves to accept presents that were probably meant as bribes. It was all very low-grade, small-time misbehaviour, but muckraking journalists, above all Drew Pearson, who had a much-read, much-dreaded column, ‘The Washington
Merry-Go-Round’, had a wonderful time making the most of it. As 1952 drew near, it began to seem that a good year for the Republicans was coming at last.

Harry Truman decided not to run for re-election. There were signs that even his own party was getting tired of him (in the New Hampshire Democratic primary election, always the first to be held, more votes went to Senator Kefauver of Tennessee than to the President) and besides he was growing old. For the first time since 1932 the Democrats would have to put up a mere candidate, rather than an actual President, for the people’s approval. This was potentially all the more damaging, because the Republicans had found an immensely strong candidate. General Eisenhower had agreed to come home again.

Ike had long been seen and spoken of as a possible President. His immense success as the Allied Commander in Europe during the war was largely attributable to his political skills. He had a hot temper, like George Washington, and like Washington he sometimes found it hard to control; but in public he was always the happy, smiling, friendly, reassuring leader. The only other veteran commander who might have Presidential ambitions was MacArthur; but not only was he much older than Eisenhower, he had also blotted his copybook by his defeat in North Korea and had then displayed persistent insubordination, for which, in April 1951, he was brusquely dismissed. This episode had greatly increased Truman’s unpopularity in patriotic circles, and MacArthur was given a hero’s welcome when he returned to the United States; but on reflection many Americans found that they did not altogether trust him. He was a great general, but he was also conspicuously rash and arrogant. When he allowed his name to be put forward in the Republican primary in Wisconsin, he was buried in votes for Eisenhower. Nor did the civilian Republicans fare much better. It was pretty clear that, with Ike on the ticket, the GOP (Grand Old Party) would be, at last, unbeatable: the same could not be said for a ticket headed by Senator Taft or by former Governor Stassen of Minnesota. The Republican convention met; there was a short, sharp struggle over credentials; the Eisenhower supporters won; and the General was nominated on the third ballot.

The Democrats responded by nominating their best man, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois (1900–1965). Stevenson had proved himself an effective reforming Governor; he had served before that in the State Department; more than that, he was a speaker of great charm and eloquence, with solid liberal principles and solid understanding of the modern world. He captivated a generation of Democrats, especially the younger ones, and thus saved the party from falling back into the clutches of the Southern conservatives. He prepared the way for the reformers of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and, beyond that, for the dissenters who challenged the war in Vietnam. Stevensonian liberalism became as distinct a thread in American political life as, say, Taftite conservatism. But Stevenson never got the Presidency for which he was so well fitted.

The Republicans said it was time for a change, after twenty years, and Truman’s retort, ‘You never had it so good,’ somehow did not seem very effective. They had a string of other issues helping them, above all the war. However, all this was secondary to Ike. When he said that, if elected, he would go to Korea, the people assumed that this meant the war was as good as over. When, on a visit to Wisconsin, McCarthy’s base, he not only endorsed the odious Senator for re-election, but suppressed a passage in his speech in which he defended his old friend and patron, General Marshall, against McCarthy’s libels, few noticed or cared, and (except for President Truman) most that did forgave him. Stevenson made a generally good impression, but in vain: on election night Eisenhower won by a landslide, carrying every single state outside the Solid South, where, it is to be supposed, party loyalty, rather than a liking for Stevenson’s liberalism, carried the day. Three Democratic Senators who had attacked McCarthy were retired by the voters, to the terror of their former brethren. Eisenhower kept his campaign promise and examined the Korean War on the spot. Then he returned to instal an administration of a stripe that nobody in the thirties could ever have expected to see again. Happy days were back for Wall Street.

The Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was a corporation lawyer. The Under-Secretary of State had been head of Quaker Oats, Inc. The Secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey, was the head of Mark Hanna’s old firm. The Secretary of Defense, ‘Engine Charlie’ Wilson, had been the head of General Motors. Big business had recovered its confidence in the prosperity of the forties and early fifties; now it felt ready to take over the country again, and run it on the good old lines.

Unfortunately the Republican party was no longer a very fit instrument for government. McCarthy and his associates in the Senate had their own constituency and let few considerations of party interest or loyalty to the President, as head of the party, restrain them from cultivating it. Even the respectable Republicans were little better than political bankrupts. On domestic affairs, their one notion was to cut taxes and cut back ‘big government’, regardless of how little this would help the party in the metropolitan areas where national elections were now won or lost. On foreign policy they were only half-repentant isolationists: deeply hostile to Russia, but extremely suspicious of any concrete move to resist her, for in that way America might be dragged into unwanted foreign complications (in this at least they were perfectly right). There was even still a residual suspicion of Great Britain: Senator Knowland, the Republican leader in the Senate after Taft’s death in 1953, seems to have believed that it was merely British guile that had involved the United States in two world wars. No doubt there was a case both for government thrift and for caution in American foreign policy, but it was not very convincing as made by this set of rich reactionaries, who had as little concern for the poor and the working class as Andrew Mellon, and as little knowledge of the modern world as Calvin Coolidge.
Furthermore, twenty years as the opposition party had left an ineradicable mark. Congressional Republicans had lost the ability to cooperate with the White House, even when one of their own lived in it; they were imaginatively unable to see and seize the chance they now had of permanently ending the Democrats’ long control of Congress. As a result they went through the motions as before, doing all they could to obstruct their President; the policies of Secretary Humphrey plunged the economy into a slight but unpopular recession, which lasted almost throughout the Eisenhower Presidency, and they lost control of Congress again in the autumn of 1954.