On July 19, Truman effectively doubled the defense budgetary request for the year in progress. The congressional appropriation for defense for 1950 had been $13 billion; Truman’s supplementary request increased it to $25 billion, and it would be $48 billion for 1951 and $60 billion for 1952. Truman had lost confidence in Johnson by this time, not only for his abrasiveness and hostility to Acheson, but particularly because of the complacency with which he had been slashing the defense budget. (Harriman, who had replaced Winant as ambassador to Britain and then Henry Wallace as secretary of commerce, and was now Marshall Plan administrator, told Truman that Johnson was hoping to force Acheson out and replace him with Harriman himself.) And Truman had long objected to MacArthur as “a play actor and bunco man,”
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though he did not question his military talents. There was clearly a substantial problem in the president’s senior defense team.
By early August, the Pusan perimeter of 130 miles had been extensively fortified and heavy reinforcements of men and materiel had been shipped and airlifted into it. Harriman and Deputy Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway and Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff General Lauris Norstad were sent by Truman to see MacArthur in August 1950. (It remains a mystery what Harriman, a railway heir and Roosevelt supporter of uneven performance in his long and varied public career, was doing in all these roles.) MacArthur had made a much-publicized trip to Chiang Kai-shek at the end of July, and Harriman was sent to tell MacArthur that he would get everything he needed but had to avoid any inflammation of the Chinese situation, and especially any encouragement to Chiang to invade China or otherwise reactivate the Chinese Civil War.
MacArthur took advantage of the visit of Ridgway and the others to propose a brilliantly imaginative plan for smashing the North Koreans in a stroke. MacArthur completely converted the three men (who were not gullible and were not acolytes of his) to his plan to make an amphibious landing at Inchon, near Seoul and 200 miles north of Pusan, and cut the peninsula in two, decapitating almost the entire North Korean army engaged around Pusan, which would then be enveloped on both sides and pounded mercilessly from the air. It was an especially risky operation because Inchon had 30-foot tides, and the landings would have to be conducted at high tide right at the sea wall; there were no beaches to land on. MacArthur thought the risk would ensure surprise, and was aware that this was how the Japanese had conquered Korea in 1895. Harriman, unshaven and hungry, went directly from his returning plane to the White House to brief the president, who listened carefully and then sent him to see Bradley.
The tides would be ideal on September 15. There were now 100,000 defenders in Pusan and the battle there was turning, though by mid-September the U.S. had taken 15,000 casualties. Truman was outraged by a statement MacArthur made to the Veterans of Foreign Wars supporting, in his usual florid superlatives, the defense of Formosa. The actual statement was unexceptionable, but Truman and Acheson were afraid that any encouragement of Chiang could lead to an ill-considered attempt to return to the mainland. Despite his reservations about MacArthur, and the opposition of Bradley, whom Truman respected, the president approved MacArthur’s Inchon plan on August 28. Truman, perhaps more clearly than ever, demonstrated his clarity of judgment and gift for command decisions. He saw the genius of the plan and felt the prospects outweighed the risks, although his personal relationships would have inclined him to Bradley. Ridgway, whom Truman liked and respected, might have been an influence, as he recommended the action. On September 12, Truman fired Louis Johnson as secretary of defense and replaced him at once, and one more time, with General George C. Marshall, despite Marshall’s characteristically thoughtful warning that he was still being blamed for the fall of China. MacArthur’s attack at Inchon proceeded three days later.
The operation was a bone-crushing success, the supreme pinnacle of Douglas MacArthur’s career as one of the great military commanders of modern times. He landed nearly 70,000 men from 262 ships in a little over an hour; Inchon was taken in less than a day, Seoul recaptured in 10 days; and Walker broke out of the Pusan perimeter and in less than two weeks most of the North Korean army was killed, wounded, captured, or surrounded and doomed. On October 1, 16 days after the landing, the United Nations had moved from the desperate perimeter of Pusan to the 38th parallel and had annihilated the North Koreans. Rarely in the history of war had there been such a quick turn in so large a combat. Truman cabled his senior serving general (equal rank to Marshall and Eisenhower and, as of September 22, Bradley, though he had opposed the operation): “Well and nobly done.”
There was general agreement in Washington among the highest circles around Truman, including Marshall, Acheson, and the newly elevated and converted Bradley, that MacArthur should be authorized to cross the 38th parallel. His mission was changed to destruction of the North Korean armed forces, and the invasion of the North was approved by the United Nations, still operating without the Russians, in the first week of October. There were diplomatic reports that Mao’s premier and foreign minister, Chou En-lai, was warning of Chinese intervention in the event of such a push, but this was dismissed as bluff in the heady aftermath of MacArthur’s smashing victory. United Nations forces crossed the 38th parallel going north in great strength on October 9.
Truman and MacArthur had a storied meeting to discuss strategy in light of recent events, on Wake Island on October 15. Contrary to their expectations, they got on well, and met for less than three hours. Truman took off his jacket and invited others to do the same, and when MacArthur asked if the president minded if he smoked his pipe, Truman responded that he did not and had probably had “more smoke blown in my face than any man alive.”
MacArthur, as usually happened when he addressed military matters for which he was responsible, was overwhelmingly prepared and completely persuasive. He held the group spellbound with his summary of the theater, and predicted that Pyongyang would be occupied within a week and his army evacuated back to Japan by Christmas, and that the United Nations would be able to hold country-wide elections before the end of the year. He rated the chances of Chinese intervention as “very little.” He said the Chinese had only 125,000 men along the Yalu and no air force. The Russians, he volunteered, had 1,000 warplanes in Siberia but no significant land forces, and he doubted that Soviet air power and Chinese troops could be successfully coordinated. MacArthur said the 60,000 North Korean prisoners of war were “the happiest Koreans in all Korea,” as they were well fed and clean. He expressed incomprehension at the French problems in Indochina and thought that they only lacked an aggressive general. MacArthur was warm in his praise for Truman and the support he had received from all parts of the administration, and Truman more than fully reciprocated in his praise of MacArthur’s generalship. Truman referred to MacArthur in his communiqué as “one of America’s great soldier-statesmen” and expressed the same views in a world broadcast from San Francisco on his way home. MacArthur, on hearing the president’s address, cabled his respectful gratitude. It was a reciprocal love-in from which no one present dissented.
9. THE CHINESE INVASION OF KOREA
On November 1, Truman learned that there were strong intelligence reports that there were Chinese Communist troops across the Yalu, as many as 20,000 of them. In fact, there were more than five times as many; they marched by night, and rested, heavily camouflaged, during the day. Any Chinese soldier who moved when an Allied reconnaissance plane flew over was executed. (That day was unseasonably hot and Truman took a nap after lunch, during which two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to invade Blair House, where the Trumans were staying while the White House was being renovated, and assassinate the president. They did not gain entry and were both killed, but not before they killed a member of Truman’s security unit.)
On November 24, MacArthur was in Korea, unruffled by intelligence reports that there were now over 30,000 Chinese troops in North Korea. He had divided his forces into two separated armies advancing up each coast of the Korean peninsula, with the plan of encircling whatever enemy forces there were in between them, another bold but risky plan. On November 28, the Chinese invaded with 260,000 men, despite MacArthur, with Truman’s approval, having bombed the Korean ends of the bridges across the Yalu. MacArthur quickly called for massive reinforcements and authority to bomb Manchuria, bring in Nationalist Chinese troops, and blockade the Chinese mainland. This was the beginning of a fundamental parting of the ways, as the National Security Council met on November 28 and it was agreed that the objective was to avoid a war with China as well as with Russia and to get out of Korea with honor. Marshall said that going to full-scale war with China would “fall into a Russian trap.” Truman opposed anything that would embarrass MacArthur in the face of the enemy, but he and his theater commander now differed on the purpose of the war in Korea. MacArthur wanted to smash the Chinese army in Korea, bomb its industrial base, such as it was, to rubble, and generally punish the new People’s Republic with a severe military defeat. Truman, Marshall, Acheson, and Bradley wanted to revert to the original purpose of the UN “police action” and hold the 38th parallel for the South and conduct a limited war only until that end was attained. It was a legitimate strategic disagreement that would ramify gravely through the next 25 years and the next five American presidencies.
At his press conference on November 30, Truman strongly defended MacArthur and in answer to questions about the atomic bomb, said, “There has always been active consideration of its use.” This was a serious error, unless Truman were really prepared to threaten use of atomic weapons, which he was not, and which flew in the face of his decision to wind down the war to holding the 38th parallel until a cease-fire could be restored, after whatever conventional attrition. His contention, and that of his senior national security advisers, down to the talented second level of Kennan, Bohlen, and Nitze, and Ridgway on the military side, was that Korea was not worth an all-out conventional war with China, that atomic weapons were in fact out of the question, that there was a danger of Soviet responses in East Asia and in Europe, and that the objective was avoidance of defeat and not victory.
The contrary view espoused with growing insubordination by MacArthur, but also favored by most Republicans, including that party’s senior foreign policy expert, John Foster Dulles, and upcoming Senate star, Richard M. Nixon, was that the expansion of the war by China had to be replied to by a counter-expansion and not by retreat and a grasping for an “honorable” accommodation on the Korean peninsula. (Nixon had just defeated the glamorous actress and mistress of Democratic senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, Mrs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, by 700,000 votes, calling her “pink down to her underwear”—a simultaneous netting of the Red-baiters and the male locker room, to which she replied by coining the phrase “Tricky Dick.”)
It has been fashionable to endorse the Truman view these 60 years since. But MacArthur made a serious point that a draftee army could not be asked to risk the lives of its soldiers for less than victory. It is now clear, as Chou En-lai confirmed 20 years later to Richard Nixon, that Stalin would not have lifted a finger to help China, and the United States possessed overwhelming atomic deterrence. The United Nations forces could have destroyed a Chinese army of 300,000, or any conceivable larger number, and inflicted a grievous wound on the People’s Republic as it was still puling in its cradle. And it could have eliminated the hideous and venomous asp of the Kim regime in Pyongyang at the outset of what proved a binge of more than 60 years in disturbing and threatening the peace of the whole world (as this is written, with threats of nuclear self-empowerment).
It cannot be easily resolved whether Truman or MacArthur was correct, but there are good arguments for both. Even the judicious but emotionally pro-Truman David McCullough, author of a well-regarded Truman biography (much cited in this chapter), laments that Truman didn’t fire MacArthur as soon as the Chinese attacked. But the point could just as well be made that instead he should have adopted MacArthur’s policy while sternly warning the general never to speak out of turn again. And if he had had to part with Acheson or Bradley or even Marshall, he could have replaced them, won in Korea, and, had he wished, been reelected and served longer as president than anyone except his predecessor. (More than two terms had now been legislated as unconstitutional by the Republicans, out of office almost a whole generation after the defeats they had suffered at the hands of Roosevelt and Truman.)
Marshall was not particularly needed at the Pentagon, and Robert Lovett, who succeeded him, would have been perfectly adequate had he assumed the office a year earlier. Acheson was a very able secretary of state, but he had contributed at least as much to the Korean imbroglio post–November 1950 by his January 12 speech to the National Press Club as MacArthur had by carrying out his orders from Truman and the UN, from which neither Marshall nor Acheson dissented. And Bradley, a popular soldiers’ general, but out of his depth in the same exalted five-star company as Marshall, Eisenhower, and MacArthur, to which he was elevated for mistakenly opposing the epochally brilliant Inchon operation, was completely dispensable and easily replaceable, unlike MacArthur, whose dismissal the limited-war and orderly-retreat advocates now persistently demanded, in a buzz that was constantly in the president’s ears.
Truman was a man of good sense, high courage, absolute integrity, keen intelligence, and impeccable sense of duty, but he uncharacteristically erred in trying to support MacArthur while endorsing a policy that MacArthur cogently opposed. MacArthur had either to be backed in his recommended policy or told that he would have to mend his ambitions to conform to the administration’s views or retire back to the military government of Japan, where all conceded his effectiveness. By allowing the chasm between himself and the theater commander to widen, Truman gave hostages to the Chinese, and created a fissure that would require measures to resolve that were so draconian that they terminated, prematurely and acrimoniously, the careers of both men, a great general and a distinguished president.