The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (30 page)

In government it does not pay to be right too soon, especially if you are considered on the more dovish side. Kennan was prophetic, and he would be proven right in a surprisingly short time as the tensions between the two nations escalated in the early 1960s and there were constant skirmishes between the two great Communist powers along the Russian-Chinese border. But in 1949–50, in an administration increasingly under siege, dealing with the shocking news of Joe One and Chiang’s departure from the mainland, his ruminations on the coming tensions between Russia and China were not exactly what Acheson wanted to hear. By 1949, David Bruce, another of the bright rising figures at State, noted that his friend Acheson could no longer bear to read Kennan’s cables, believing them too long and windy, finally too literary. His timing was not nearly as good as it had been when he had sent the Long Telegram. But nothing told how quickly the Cold War had escalated, and how the domestic attacks against administration policies had increased, than the fact that Kennan had gone from superstar to outsider in just three years. The problem he posed to Acheson was not merely that he was wordy and argumentative; it was that almost everything he said was right, the affirmation of policies, given different political conditions, that Acheson would gladly have followed but no longer could because of the changed politics of the era. Acheson was too proud to admit it, either at the time or later in his memoirs, but there was in Kennan’s dissent, in his unwillingness to adjust to changing political forces, something of an unspoken rebuke to the secretary,
a man who did not like to be rebuked, or to admit that he had been bent on any of his policies.

It was not just his dissent on the Soviets and China. Among other issues where Acheson and Kennan parted company was the question of whether or not to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb, or the Super as it was known, which was then being pushed by Edward Teller, a former Manhattan Project scientist who had turned bitterly on Robert Oppenheimer. When Truman wanted a special committee to study the issue of the Super, Acheson chose Nitze, a Teller supporter, to head it, which meant that the special committee would almost surely favor going ahead on it. To Nitze the issue of the Super was a pragmatic one—would the bomb work? He had been convinced by Teller that it would. To Kennan, who had grown close to Oppenheimer, a man anguished over what his own weapon had wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was not simply a practical or scientific question but a moral one as well. He thought the Super was nothing less than a potential moral catastrophe. What both Oppenheimer and Kennan believed was that, with the decision to develop the H-bomb, a limitless, unwinnable superpower arms race would be launched, that would, in the end, increase global dangers immeasurably while adding no additional degree of security.

When Nitze’s committee reported, as expected, that the United States ought to go ahead with the Super, it suggested as well that a major review be undertaken of the total national security picture. Acheson’s hand was very much at work here—this was the study he wanted in order to initiate his long-desired overhaul of national security policies. Nitze would lead it. On January 31, 1950, six days after Acheson’s remark about Hiss, Truman gave the go-ahead for such a comprehensive review.

Where Kennan thought of Stalin’s Russia as primarily defensive in its policies, albeit with a deep-rooted national paranoia, Nitze offered a very different vision. “In the aggregate,” he noted at the time, “recent Soviet moves reflect not only a mounting militancy but suggest a boldness that is essentially new—and borders on recklessness.” In effect, he was saying that the United States as a great power could not base its policies on Kennan’s assumptions about tsarist Russia, no matter how brilliant their author. What if Kennan was wrong? Kennan after all was a diplomat and a historian, not an intelligence man, and if his view of Russia was wrong, then the United States would have premised its entire security position on a presumption of historic truths, and might end up unspeakably vulnerable.

To Acheson and his allies, Nitze’s NSC paper would finally begin the process of making America’s military strength compatible with its rhetoric and their vision of its postwar role: the United States would continue to talk big, but
it would carry more than just a single big stick—the potentially unusable atomic one; now America would have a more flexible military response. To Kennan, on the other hand, what Nitze (and Acheson) were proposing was a militarization of American policy—in effect, the creation of a national security state, which would drain far too much of the nation’s financial resources and would inevitably create in its Soviet rival a comparable military defense state. The Soviet atomic bomb, he wrote, did not really change the balance of power: “Insofar as we see ourselves in any heightened trouble at the present moment, that feeling is largely of our own making.”

What was taking place, primarily inside the bureaucracy, was a debate of the most serious and far-reaching nature. Acheson and Nitze moved ahead as covertly as possible. The key person they were marginalizing in their effort was Louis Johnson, the defense secretary. The Joint Chiefs were quietly telling Nitze their needs as Acheson made what was in effect an end run around Johnson. Years later, Omar Bradley would note that the conflict between Acheson and Johnson had created “a rare, awkward, and ironic situation in which the three military chiefs [the commandant of the Marine Corps was not yet a chief] and their chairman were more closely aligned with the views of the Secretary of State than with the Secretary of Defense.” Acheson—and Nitze—were far more sympathetic to their problems, the Chiefs believed, than Johnson was. The minimum price to get U.S. defense systems up to what was wanted, Nitze thought, was somewhere around $40 to $50 billion annually. Otherwise, he and the other hard-liners believed, the United States would not be able to execute its military and defense policies, and the Soviets might dominate the world.

When Acheson heard the estimated price, what they called the back of the envelope cost, of around $50 billion, he told Nitze, “Paul, don’t put that figure in the report. You’re right to tell me and I’ll tell the president, but don’t put any figure in the report.” Finally, on March 22, 1950, they met with Johnson and the Joint Chiefs in Nitze’s office to go over the draft document. The meeting started out peacefully enough. Johnson asked Acheson if he had read the draft. Acheson had. Johnson, of course, had not. In fact, he had only heard of it that morning. Suddenly, it became clear to him that he had been completely cut out of the play and totally ambushed. Acheson and his man Nitze were obviously in charge, had clearly been in close communication with the Chiefs, and just as clearly intended to give the uniformed military not only many of the things he had been cutting out of their budgets but more than he had ever imagined possible. He was, he realized, completely isolated. As Acheson later wrote, all of a sudden “he lunged forward, with a crash of chair legs on the floor and fist on the table, scaring me out of my shoes.”

Acheson and Nitze, he shouted, were trying to keep him in the dark and he would not tolerate it—he would not be subjected to a humiliation like this. “This is a conspiracy being conducted behind my back in order to subvert my policies. I and the Chiefs are leaving now,” he said. Soon after, Johnson went to Acheson’s office to argue his case one more time and started screaming that he had been insulted. Acheson waved him away, then had others call Truman to tell him what had happened. An hour later, Truman returned the call and told Acheson to proceed with the paper. The president was not yet approving NSC 68—events in Korea would take care of that—but Acheson and Nitze were in charge of the play. Six months later Truman fired Johnson and replaced him with George Marshall. Acheson was convinced that Johnson was unstable at the time.

NSC 68 was a defining document. It confirmed the American response to the harshness of the Cold War, American mistrust of the Soviets matching Soviet mistrust of Americans, which would in turn create a cycle of ever expanding mistrust and ever greater defense spending on both sides. It defined the global conflict in almost purely ideological terms, especially striking in a paper so secret that it would be seen only by top officials: “The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a fanatical faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” At first, Truman had remained noncommittal about NSC 68 and was quite uneasy with the implicit costs involved. Then, the Korean War began and the Cold War escalated into a hot war, and the force of events had their own financial imperatives. The debate over NSC 68 had become academic, the issue overtaken by events. The budget, which NSC 68 suggested would have to triple, now tripled because of the war. Truman himself never had to make a decision on NSC 68. In fact, by the late fall of 1951, when the fiscal 1952 Pentagon budget was being prepared, it had quadrupled from $13 billion in pre–Korean War days to $55 billion. “Korea,” Acheson would note years later at a seminar at Princeton, “saved us.”

H
ARRY TRUMAN WAS,
whatever else, a decisive man. Even some of Roosevelt’s people, who in the early days of his presidency had looked down on Truman, this seemingly undistinguished man who had replaced their beloved leader, now understood that. Some Roosevelt insiders had left immediately, believing they could not give their loyalty to him; others came to respect him and understand that their commitment was to the office and not to the man, and that Truman in his own way was an uncommon man. Though Truman would turn out to be the last American president who had not been to college, he had been exceptionally bookish as a child, was unusually well read, and was a serious, if amateur, self-taught historian. Perhaps most important of all, he did not go around doubting himself once he took office. He might not have sought the presidency and it might have come to him in the most unwanted way, but he was going to serve and make his decisions as best he could. He was not, even before he was elected on his own in 1948, going to be governing hat in hand, as if he did not deserve the office and ought more properly to be secreted away in the small office where they still hid vice presidents. The country deserved better than that. Besides, he understood that if he governed like that, as a kind of stand-in for a great man, he would be devoured by his enemies, some of whom were institutional enemies of the presidency, some of whom were ideological enemies, and some of whom were both. He did not intend to be devoured; history judged the devoured too harshly. A lifetime of dealing with ordinary people, in good times and bad—and there had certainly been plenty of those—had convinced him of his skill in reading and judging others, sensing whom he could trust and whom he could not. It had also taught him to get the best people you can, gather the best information possible, ask the best questions you could think of, estimate the likely consequences, then just make the decision and get on with it. He also knew, as he flew back to Washington on the morning after the North Korean attack, that his decisions in the days to come would be on matters of war and peace. Korea would turn out to be in his judgment the most difficult call of his presidency.

In June 1950, he had already served five years as president, and scored two personal triumphs that had immeasurably strengthened his confidence. Though they were in a sense intertwined, the first—his stunning upset victory over Tom Dewey in the 1948 election—had been the more remarkable. Unlikely as it was, his electoral triumph helped clear the way for his other great achievement—his triumph over the still powerful image of Franklin Roosevelt, which finally gave him a presidency of his own (and growing respect from other politicians, the press, and historians, those who make their living judging the presidencies of other men). Escaping the burden of being Roosevelt’s successor, and being a man who had come to the office almost by mistake, was a success all too easy to underestimate. He had never, in fact, let the burden of his predecessor’s greatness weigh too heavily on him, though he had been a relatively minor figure in the Senate and a virtually invisible one as vice president. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson, the next vice president to succeed to office because the president had died, had been a towering figure in the Senate before replacing John F. Kennedy (who had served for only three years, in contrast to Roosevelt’s twelve); yet by contrast he never entirely escaped the emotional and psychological burden of comparisons with his predecessor, or of the way he had at first attained his presidency.

Truman was an easy man to underestimate. He lacked one of the great strengths of the Roosevelt persona: to a nation accustomed to a presidential voice that had been warm, confident, aristocratic, and altogether seductive, Truman’s voice was a distinct disappointment, flat and tinny, with little emotional intimacy. His speeches were uninspiring—blunt and oddly without nuance. Some advisers suggested that Truman try to speak more like Roosevelt, and make his speeches more conversational, but he was shrewd enough to know that that was the wrong path, that he could not emulate the great master. All he could do was be himself and hope that the American people would not judge him for what he was not. He was aware that the comparisons with Roosevelt would be unfavorable at first, and they were. In the beginning, he was an easy target for political jokes, and there was often a cruel edge to them. “To err is Truman,” said the acid-tongued Martha Taft, wife of Robert Taft, a key Republican senator. “I’m just mild about Harry” went another. A favorite of the moment, wrote the columnist Doris Fleeson, was “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.” “Poor Harry Truman. And poor people of the United States,” wrote Richard Strout, in
The New Republic
.

Truman became president when he was sixty years old. He was a late bloomer of acceptable but not overweening ambition. His people were farmers and he had done his share of farming as a boy, and in 1948 he had delighted Midwest crowds—his support there was one of the keys to his surprise
victory—by telling them that he could seed a 160-acre wheat field “without leaving a skip.” He had plowed the old-fashioned way, he added—four Missouri mules, not one of these fancy tractors. In his senior year of high school, through no fault of their own, the Trumans’ farm had failed and all chance of a college education for Harry had disappeared. He tried for West Point, his one shot at a free education, but was turned down because of his poor eyesight. (He was blind as a mole, he noted later in life.) His one entrepreneurial attempt, to run a haberdashery shop, lasted a mere three years and ended in failure. He spent much of his time trying to prove to his ever dubious mother-in-law, who came from one of Independence’s first families, that he was worthy of the hand of her daughter, that Bess Wallace had not married down. Here success eluded him; he proved better at making the case for his intrinsic value to millions of fellow Americans than to Madge Gates Wallace. He arrived in the Senate in 1934, in his fiftieth year, relatively late in life, as the sparklingly honest representative of the unusually corrupt political machine of Boss Tom Pendergast. It was as if his special assignment within the Pendergast organization had always been to bring it some degree of honor and legitimacy. He was a small-town man with small-town virtues. For much of his life, he wore a triple-band gold Mason’s ring and a small lapel button that showed he had served in World War I. He was comfortable in the world of small-town lodges, and was a member of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Moose, and the Elks.

But a life filled with a curious blend of disappointments and relatively few successes (at least on the scale of most men who attain the presidency) had created its own set of strengths. “I liked what I saw. He was direct, unpretentious, clear thinking and forceful,” General Omar Bradley wrote after their first meetings. He was not much given to self-deception and there was little artifice to him. He was hardworking, and always well prepared. He did not waste other people’s time, nor did he want them to waste his. In contrast to Roosevelt (who loved to play games with people even when he didn’t need to), Truman was comparatively simple and significantly less manipulative. What you saw, by and large, was what you got. George Marshall had always been uneasy with Roosevelt and some of the games he played with his top advisers. There had been one unfortunate moment when the president had tried verbal intimacy with Marshall, a man who thought the more formal the relationship with a politician, the straighter it was likely to be. Roosevelt called him by his first name, the first step in what was clearly to be a process of seduction. He immediately understood his own mistake by the coolness it generated. It was General or General Marshall thereafter, not George. Marshall for that reason clearly preferred Truman. There were fewer political land mines around.

In the Senate Truman had been all too aware of his own limitations. A great many of his colleagues were better educated, wealthier, and more successful; they knew worlds of privilege and sophistication he could only guess at. As one of his high school friends, Charlie Ross, later a star reporter for the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
and eventually his press secretary, said of him, “He came to the Senate, I believe, with a definite inferiority complex. He was a better man than he knew.” America, at the time he assumed the presidency, was changing rapidly, becoming infinitely more meritocratic, driven by powerful egalitarian forces let loose by World War II and new political benefits that went with them, like the GI Bill, which allowed anyone who had been in the military to go to college. Truman, by contrast, was a product of a far less egalitarian America, which had existed at the turn of the century, one where talented men and women did not always attain careers that reflected their abilities and their ambition.

He was very much a man of his time and his region. “He had only to open his mouth and his origins were plain,” wrote his biographer David McCullough. “It wasn’t just that he came from a particular part of the country, but from a specific part of the American experience, an authentic pioneer background and a specific place in the American imagination. His Missouri, as he loved to emphasize, was the Missouri of Mark Twain and Jesse James.” If Franklin Roosevelt seemed to step out of the pages of a novel by Edith Wharton, McCullough added, then Harry Truman came from the pages of Sinclair Lewis.

Little was really known of him as a man, even by those who had placed him on the Democratic ticket in 1944. It was not so much that they had wanted him as that they did not like the other vice presidential possibilities, most particularly Henry Wallace, the sitting vice president. As Jonathan Daniels, the Southern editor, noted, they “knew what they wanted, but did not know what they were getting.” He was perhaps as true a reflection of the common man as the country produced for the presidency in the modern era. “What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts, the editor of the
Kansas City Star
and a part of the inner circle of Republican power brokers, shrewdly wrote during the first days of the Truman presidency. For that was exactly what it was, a test of democracy. He was also a very good working politician, with a keen sense of what was on the minds of ordinary people, their needs and their fears, because his own background was so ordinary and because for so long his life had been so much like theirs.

When he was first catapulted into the presidency, he complained frequently to his friends about his dislike for it—the Great White Prison, he called it—and seemed at one point ready to offer his support in the 1948 race to Dwight
Eisenhower, if he committed to the Democratic Party. Only gradually did he change his mind. The presidency cramped his personal lifestyle and separated him from his family—Bess and his daughter, Margaret, always seemed to be back in Independence and he longed to be with them—but he had never been a man to back off hard jobs, and the more he saw of some of the other men who thought they should replace him, the more confident he became that the country was better served with him in the White House. If he needed to justify his policies by running for election in 1948, then he would make that run—it was not that great a sacrifice. There was a certain bantam rooster cockiness to him. He would not back down from a fight, and, in time, the American people sensed that and rewarded him for it.

His small-town roots were not that different from many of the Republicans who now became his most bitter political enemies, but his own personal odyssey more often than not had been much harder than theirs, and so he had grave doubts about some of the small-town verities that they so unquestioningly believed in. In American politics of that period, people still voted their pocketbooks, and the Democrats, because of the New Deal, still had the economic whip hand, even in much of what was considered the heartland. A small town of eight thousand might have one thousand blue collar workers at a plant, almost all of whom were Democrats; only a handful of a town’s residents—factory owners, managers, and ancillary local allies like the banker, the lawyer, and the doctor—were people almost sure to vote Republican. Most ordinary Americans were living considerably better than they had in the past. They did not believe the gains they had achieved were, as the Republicans seemed to insinuate, socialistic. Few working people then felt they would prosper under a Republican administration. “The worker’s working every day/ drives to work in a new coupe/ Don’t let ’em take it away” went a Democratic Party theme song of the period. The cultural issues that would, starting in the mid-1960s, gradually tear at the Democratic coalition of blue collar working people, children of the great immigrant waves from Europe, black people, and the white politicians of the one-party South, were not yet important. Labor was newly unionized, still extremely powerful, and grateful for its recent economic gains.

When he prepared for his own presidential race in 1948, Truman did not believe the economic base of politics had changed that much. He was a fiscal conservative anyway and very careful in those first three years in office to minimize any tax increases. In addition, he had a sixth sense about how to exploit the fault lines in the Republican Party: the difference between what it said were its policies, when it was at a national convention appealing to a national audience, and what its far more conservative leadership in Congress believed. He
judged the Republicans in Congress to be a party out of touch with average Americans in the urban and increasingly influential suburban areas of the big states. They had killed any number of liberal items he had proposed—on housing, aid to education, and medical care, and then had gone ahead at their convention and called for their passage. Well, he planned to put an illuminating light on that split personality; so, when nominated in 1948, he promptly announced that he was going to call Congress back into session—to pass the items the Republicans supported in their platform. It was a masterful move and proved a decisive one as well. The Republicans were not pleased to be summoned—“the petulant Ajax of the Ozarks,” Senator Styles Bridges called Truman.