The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (26 page)

Part of the reason was Truman himself. If Harry Truman was a hawk on most Cold War issues, he was also a hard-liner on budgets, and he hated deficit spending. “A hard money man if I ever saw one,” James Forrestal, the conservative Wall Street man who was an early hawk, once said of him, “believing as I do that we can’t wreck our economy in the process of trying to fight the ‘cold war.’” Truman was by nature an innately skeptical Midwestern populist, wary of men with big titles and those who put on airs, which, he decided, all too many senior military men tended to do. The military, he had always believed, was unusually given to wasting the taxpayers’ money. His own experience as an artillery captain during World War I had made him wary of the brass, especially West Pointers, who, in his mind, took themselves far too seriously. He was a small-town boy who had grown up in draconian economic times, and that had made him a serious fiscal conservative—you did not spend it unless you had it. His views had only hardened during his time as a senator, when he headed the Truman Committee, which had focused on mismanagement by the military at the start of World War II: “No military man knows anything at all about money. All they know how to do is spend it, and they don’t give a goddamn whether they’re getting their money’s worth or not,” he once said. In time he became extremely close to a few senior officers, like Omar Bradley, but his general attitude never changed. As he told the writer Merle Miller, “They’re most of them like horses with blinders on. They can’t see beyond the ends of their noses.”

Harry Truman hated debt with a personal passion. His family had been burdened with it back in Independence, Missouri, and it had helped cost them their family farm. What he had wanted to do at the end of the war was start paying off the immense—at least so it seemed at the time—$250 billion debt the country had incurred over the previous four years. As soon as the war ended, he had gotten the defense budget down from about $91 billion to a point between $10 and $11 billion a year, and he hoped soon to get it even lower, to $6 or $7 billion a year. Truman, in other words, would need a lot of convincing if military budgets were to be adjusted for the new role that most of his top national security people wanted. Certainly Marshall and Acheson wanted larger military budgets. Normally the secretary of defense should have been an ally of men like Acheson on an issue like this, but in this case, the secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, who had replaced James Forrestal when Forrestal’s health broke down, had proved the exception. He had turned out to be a sworn enemy of Acheson, both professionally and personally, jealous of his power and influence with Truman and determined to destroy him politically even if his own budget suffered. The key to Louis Johnson at that point was his own political ambition. He dreamed of succeeding Truman as the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1952, and he intended to do it by portraying himself as the secretary of defense who had held military spending down. That meant that as the winter ended in 1950, Acheson had become the point man for greater spending on defense, and his critics in the other party, who were enjoying attacking the administration for its failures in foreign policy, especially in China, were in no rush to accede. The United States was supposed to be tougher in dealing with its enemies in the world, but there was no rush to discuss how to pay for it.

That placed Dean Acheson in the rare position of being attacked for being soft on Communism, yet cut off from the kind of spending he believed was needed to stave off a Communist threat in Europe and elsewhere. Because increased military spending was a political minefield—for it would surely demand higher taxes—he pursued it cautiously. His key assistant was a young man named Paul Nitze who was just beginning to ascend in the national security world and was in the process of replacing George Kennan as the head of State’s Policy Planning staff, the department’s own think tank, because he seemed to Acheson to be more of a hard-liner than Kennan and thus more in tune with Acheson’s policies. (Nitze would actually take over Policy Planning from Kennan in January 1950, but he had been the de facto head of it for several months before.) Acheson and Nitze were virtually tiptoeing through the bureaucracy with their plan for a complete overhaul of defense policies—a document that would be known as National Security Council Paper 68, or
NSC 68, a seminal paper that completely redefined America’s defense needs. They were trying to keep the magnitude of the change they were planning secret from Johnson and his potential allies for as long as they could, particularly the prospective price. Acheson wanted to get as much support as possible for the principle of an expanded defense commitment from the upper levels of the bureaucracy before anyone talked about price, and he did not want a meeting with Louis Johnson before he was ready. As such he was going behind his back. Ironically, Acheson, the secretary of state, would end up with almost the complete support of the Joint Chiefs in trying to upgrade the budget—for the military had been restless with bare-bones budgets for five years. At the core of these defense budgets on the cheap was the belief that America’s nuclear monopoly allowed it to cut corners on every other defense issue. The American atomic monopoly had ended in the fall of 1949, and therefore long-delayed issues were coming to the fore.

The struggle between the military and the civilians over the budget had been going on since 1945. The entire nation, with both political parties eagerly participating, had been in an indecent rush to cut the armed forces when World War II ended. Everyone in politics, both right and left, had favored the demobe, preferably done yesterday rather than tomorrow. The nation at war, which almost overnight created the mightiest military arsenal in the history of mankind, reflected one America; the demobe reflected another—except that they were one and the same country. The problem with a great democracy like the United States, George Kennan once noted, was that it was almost always like a sleeping giant, impervious to its surroundings until suddenly and belatedly awoken, when it proved so angry about what it discovered that it started lashing out wildly.

In 1946, Dwight Eisenhower, by then Army chief of staff, had been invited up to Capitol Hill to meet with J. Parnell Thomas, one of the era’s foremost congressional rogues, and at that moment chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee. Thomas was a Republican from New Jersey, a fascinating reflection of the era, a virulent anti-Communist who had often talked about Roosevelt and the New Deal sabotaging the capitalist system. As the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he eventually gained some fame hunting Communists in Hollywood, but he would soon enough end up in prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for putting ghost figures on his office payroll and keeping the salaries himself. (There, two of his fellow inmates were Hollywood writers imprisoned because they had refused to testify before his committee.) Preparing to meet with Thomas, Eisenhower had expected a serious discussion with an important member of Congress about how to bring down American force levels with minimal damage to the country. Instead he
walked into a world-class ambush. There was Thomas, surrounded by a group of attractive young women, the wives of servicemen anxious to have their husbands shipped home—and on a table a large number of baby shoes. A photographer soon appeared, and a photo of the wives, the baby shoes, a smiling Thomas, and a furious Eisenhower soon went hurtling over the wires.

At the end of the war, the United States had had 12 million men and women in uniform. The rate of the demobe was overwhelming; fifteen thousand military personnel a
day
were processed out of the services. If there were logistical problems in bringing troops back from abroad, there was a new public outcry, “no boats, no votes.” By early 1947, the services were down to 1.5 million members, and the annual military budget, which had reached a wartime high of $90.9 billion, had plummeted to $10.3. In addition, the awesome hardware of World War II was not being modernized. Within years, much of it was outdated, some of it useless. At the moment when North Korean divisions first pushed into the South, the Army’s studies later showed that 43 percent of the enlisted men in the Far East Command rated in terms of ability and intelligence as either Class IV or Class V, the two lowest categories in the Army’s general classification tests. It was a country, in the eyes of the senior military men, that had simply walked away from its responsibilities. “America fought [World War II] like a football game after which the winner leaves the field and celebrates,” General Albert Wedemeyer said, as he watched the rush to demobilize. “It was no demobilization,” commented George Marshall, “it was a rout.” The Army had, said General Omar Bradley, “only one division—the Eighty-second Airborne—that could be remotely described as combat ready.” In those years after it downsized so rapidly and just before Korea, America had, in Bradley’s words, an army at the start of the Korean War that “could not fight its way out of a paper bag.”

The military budgets were becoming increasingly brutal documents. What was being cut, as Cabell Phillips, a national security correspondent for the
New York Times,
noted, was not fat but muscle and bone. In late 1948, preparing for the fiscal 1950 budget year, the three services submitted their tentative budgets. The total was $30 billion. James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense, working exhausting hours, got it down to $17 billion. But Harry Truman, more concerned with the domestic economy than military spending (and all too aware of the disastrous political consequences of any tax increase), decided it could not go over $15 billion. It finally came in at $14.2. The interservice competition for the limited funds available was savage. The role of the Marines was being sharply curtailed; military men like Bradley were talking about there being no future need for amphibious missions, which would limit the role of the Navy as well. If any branch of the service seemed favored at that moment it was the
Air Force, which had the atomic bomb in its arsenal. It was something that seemed endemic to this particular democratic society, one that had built into its psyche a sense of protection based on the two great oceans. Even during Korea, George Marshall, the man who had been the most important figure in rushing the country to readiness at the start of World War II, was sure that America had not yet learned its lesson. When Truman met with MacArthur at Wake Island in mid-October 1950, Marshall did not make the trip, but he was shocked by the euphoria that seemed to have gripped the returning party. Frank Pace, the secretary of the Army, enthusiastically told him of MacArthur’s optimistic talk about the war being virtually over and how soon the troops would return. “General Marshall,” he had said, “General MacArthur says the war will be over by Thanksgiving and the troops home by Christmas.”

To Pace’s surprise, Marshall did not seemed pleased: “Pace, that’s troublesome.”

Pace thought Marshall had misunderstood, so he repeated the good news that the end of the war was at hand. “I heard you,” Marshall said, “but too precipitate an end to the war would not permit us to have a full understanding of the problems we face ahead of us.” Still puzzled, Pace asked if Marshall meant that the American people needed to better understand the full implications of the Cold War. That, said Marshall, was exactly what he meant. “General Marshall, this has been a very difficult and extensive war from the American people’s point of view,” Pace said. But Marshall was having none of it. He had been through it before at the end of World War II; the moment it was over, the tanks rotting in the Pacific, the boys rushing home to their civilian jobs, the military strength that had been built up had been allowed in his words just “to fade away.”

But that was then and this was now, Pace argued, and “a great deal of water has passed under the bridge since then. Would you say I was naïve if I said that the American people had learned their lesson?”

“No, Pace, I wouldn’t say you were naïve. I’d say you were
incredibly
naïve,” Marshall answered.

THE PERSON IN
the high-level bureaucracy pushing hardest to make an adjustment to changing needs in the early part of the Cold War had been Forrestal, and under the pressure of cutbacks, his own wariness of Soviet intentions, and surely out of some personal psychological disorder, his mental health had begun to deteriorate. He was working man-killing hours that would, Eisenhower said, “kill a horse.” Forrestal had been an early hard-liner in dealing with the Soviets, and he had even raised the question, hardly a popular one, in July 1945 of how complete a defeat the United States should inflict on Japan.
He feared that if the victory were too complete, if too little of the old Japan were left, there would be a political vacuum in Northeast Asia that might be filled all too quickly, not just by the Soviets but perhaps by the rising power of the Chinese Communists, who he was sure were going to win their civil war. Did we really want to destroy Japan’s industrial base, as so many of our top strategists intended? he wondered. Forrestal grew increasingly melancholy in his belief that our defense budget did not match a realistic view of the Russians, or for that matter, our own rhetoric, that our voice exceeded our military capabilities. His political melancholia was coupled with a serious decline in his mental health, and by late 1948, his close friends had become ever more concerned about him. He grew more and more paranoid, and looked gaunt and haunted. His shirt collars seemed to be several sizes too big. He could no longer sleep; his face was ashen. He was absolutely sure the Russians were tapping his phone. In the final few weeks of his service, he was calling a baffled Truman several times a day to bring up the same subject. He was, it became obvious, in the midst of a full-blown nervous breakdown. Forrestal himself sensed that he was coming apart. In early February 1949, he told Truman that he would leave his post by June 1. But Truman knew he would not last even that long. On March 1, 1949, he called Forrestal in and asked for his resignation. Four weeks later, Louis Johnson, who had been so valuable as a fund-raiser for Truman in 1948, replaced Forrestal, and Forrestal was hospitalized. In late May, he took his own life, jumping out of a sixteenth-floor window at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, one of the early victims of, among other things, the pressures of the Cold War atmosphere. Louis Johnson’s appointment proved one of Truman’s worst and most political. Johnson was a bully, full of certitude if not nuance, who in his own way was hardly less emotionally out of control than Forrestal. He managed to earn the enduring hatred of the senior uniformed military, not only because he kept slashing their budgets, but because he treated them so crudely and with such uncommon disrespect.