Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (91 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

Marshall implied, but did not say, that the choice was between saving South Korea and tolerating the continued existence of North Korea, and a much wider and possibly world and atomic war. This was just speculation, and in the light of subsequent events is known to be mistaken, and should have seemed so then. Stalin was in no position to exchange atomic fire with the U.S., and no one was going to help Mao Tse-tung, whose staying power after 30 years of civil and foreign war in a primitive country was not unlimited. Even if his reserves of manpower might have appeared so, his numbers of adequately trained forces were very limited. The United States could have turned the entire Soviet Union into a radioactive rubble heap in a few days at minimal risk to itself, though the reluctance of Truman to consider such a denouement was to his credit. But he should have remembered who he was dealing with in Stalin, who would certainly take such a threat seriously, as the Chinese did when Truman’s successor made it two years later.
Bradley followed, and uttered the most famous line of the hearings—that following MacArthur’s recommendations would “involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Strategically, MacArthur was correct, and Bradley’s quip was bunk. It would not have been so difficult to expel China from Korea, and the failure to do so has inflicted the terribly tedious and vexing burden of North Korea on the world for all posterity to date. MacArthur was not adequately advised of the change in mission statement from the reunification of Korea that he was ordered to effect after salvaging the campaign at Inchon, to the limited war to hold the 38th parallel after the Chinese intervention. Truman had every right to conclude that getting rid of North Korea was not worth the cost, as his successor also concluded, but he and his entourage should have been more careful about endlessly professing to think it was a choice between the 38th parallel and a world—atomic, or otherwise prohibitively terrible—war.
Truman and his admirers have translated the firing of MacArthur into a triumph of selfless courage, but it was both unnecessary and a disaster. The ultimate issue was insubordination, but it should not have been allowed to develop as it did, and the absolute, belatedly recognized, and negligently aggravated necessities of a great office should not be mistaken for courage, as Truman’s partisans have claimed, with general success. The fact that Harry S. Truman certainly was a courageous man and president makes his dithering and ultimately overreaction in this case the more disappointing. Truman should have moved earlier to curtail MacArthur’s undoubted egomania, as the inexhaustibly confident patrician, Roosevelt, did a number of times (resolving one disagreement with the point that he, not MacArthur, had been elected president, though allegedly allowing that it could have been a case of mistaken identity). Truman should have warned MacArthur to accept administration policy as it evolved or retire gracefully back to Tokyo. Sacking him from all positions in the middle of the night was a shabby, fearful, and spiteful act. All the nonsense about the two men cracking up was terribly undignified, considering their stature—MacArthur compared himself to the music critic who had panned Margaret Truman’s talents and received a threatening letter from her father; Bradley had compared MacArthur to Forrestal, ultimately an acutely paranoid suicide case.
Truman allowed the problem to fester, and insisted on collegially involving the sorcery of a lot of tinkering aides, to the point that when he finally cut the painter, these two great men destroyed each other’s public lives ignominiously and prematurely, and took Marshall and Bradley and Acheson into permanent retirement with them. Of that whole brilliant echelon of Roosevelt’s top strategic team, only Eisenhower, in Paris setting up NATO, survived intact politically, and he inherited the full distinguished legacy of the Roosevelt-Truman decades (although he would to some degree technically run in opposition to it).
Truman eventually claimed to have written a letter to himself on April 9, 1950, upholding the tradition of two presidential terms, which only Franklin D. Roosevelt had departed from, and which was now enforced by constitutional amendment, though Truman was specifically exempted. He may have written the letter, and his word should not be lightly challenged, but whether he had intended to retire or not, he certainly did not intend to retire as a result of acute, if unjust, unpopularity. That was what he now faced, and MacArthur toured the country for months attacking Truman in very destructive terms. The creation of such a political debacle cannot be seen as anything but a regrettable swan song for a great general and a distinguished president. As for MacArthur, General Charles de Gaulle, a military admirer but not an acquaintance of MacArthur’s, and a cordial postwar colleague of Truman’s, correctly described MacArthur in a speech of April 15, 1951, as “a general whose boldness was feared after full advantage had been taken of it.”
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The Korean War settled down very close to the 38th parallel from July 1951 until six months after the inauguration of Truman’s successor, during which time there were fairly continuous negotiations and fierce fire-fighting along the line. Many of the Chinese and North Koreans did not wish to be repatriated, which snarled discussions beyond even the unimaginable intractability of the Chinese and North Korean Communists. The MacArthur fervor subsided, but he continued to be more popular than Truman or Marshall. As the war in Korea dragged on, the Truman-Acheson-Marshall-Bradley policy appeared less successful. It did prevail over MacArthur’s “no substitute for victory” policy, and it left an Achilles’ heel for future open-ended involvement in Asiatic military quagmires by unwary American civilian and military leaders.
At the rise of the national state in the sixteenth century, there had been four Great Powers in the West—England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Turkey. A hundred years after that, the Empire had broken in two, Spain and Austria, and Russia had joined the group. In the eighteenth century, Spain and Turkey fell away, but Prussia emerged. And in the nineteenth century, Prussia became Germany, and Italy, Japan, and the United States joined the ranks of the Great Powers. World War I eliminated Austria, and World War II elevated the U.S.A. and the USSR, and the British, French, Japanese, and Italians, and later the Germans, were effectively client states of the United States, though not without influence in that role, especially Britain and France.
Two long lifetimes after Yorktown (162 years), and one after Appomattox (80 years), America dominated most of the world, challenged only by a large, strange country perversely and militantly advocating the antithesis of America’s message. The dialectical confrontation of Hegel and Marx was at hand: against America’s exceptionalism, individualism, free enterprise, and invocation of a benign Providence was the totalitarianism, atheism, and command economy of Russia and its puppet states. The Americans blinked almost in disbelief that they could be affronted so forcefully by such heresies, but they rose quickly to the challenge of delivering the world from a new dark age. They would contain the threat, until the threat relented, gave way, and collapsed.
Mobilizing a worldwide containment effort on the recently isolationist Americans would require infusing the country with anxious determination, creating atomic bomb shelters, maintaining conscription, and deploying forces all over the world. The Communist takeover of China and penetration of many intellectual circles, and America’s nuclear saber-rattling and official encouragement of some level of domestic paranoia, all made it seem a closer contest that it really was. The ideologically confused, bloodstained regime in the Kremlin was now all that stood in the path of America’s unchallenged, rather gently asserted supremacy in the whole world. America was entering the last lap of the quarter-millennium progression from threatened colony to junior partner in the British Empire, to fragile new republic, regional power, Great Power, Greatest Power, co–Superpower, Supreme Power. To the founders and greatest renovators of the American project, not much of this brilliant, almost vertical, trajectory would have been a surprise.
CHAPTER TWELVE
 
The Red Scare and the Free World, 1951–1957
 
1. THE REPUBLICAN RENAISSANCE AT LAST
 
The balance of Truman’s presidency was an anti-climax, and the principal feature of it was the worst of the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, though Truman deserves no discredit for either. The senator from Wisconsin, on June 14, 1951, in an eight-hour address in the Senate, the last couple of hours to an almost empty chamber, directed the most outrageous allegations that had probably ever been heard there, against General Marshall in particular, accusing him of causing, by his treachery and incompetence, every Communist success since the Bolshevik Revolution. His universally respected conduct as army chief of staff and chairman of the Combined Allied Military Chiefs in World War II (setting him officially at the head of the 25 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the United States and British Commonwealth) was reviled as a series of failures culminating in the gift of Eastern Europe to Stalin. His service as Truman’s emissary in China was held responsible for the Communist victory there, and his time as secretary of state and of defense was deemed responsible for other failures, including Communist victories in Czechoslovakia and North Korea. It was, said McCarthy, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man ... so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”
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It was fantastic that a sophisticated democracy could indulge such heinous calumnies in its legislature without the accuser being subjected to compulsory mental examination. And it was only made possible because of the terrible schism between the followers of Truman and those of MacArthur. The McCarran Act in September 1951, passed over Truman’s veto, required registration of communists and communist-front organizations, the internment of communists during national emergencies, the prohibition of their employment in any national defense industries, and the ineligibility for entry into the United States of anyone who had ever been a member of a totalitarian organization. (Of course, the problems of definition made the whole statute absurd.)
After these rending events and with a state of emergency and a foreign war dragging on, it was unlikely that the Democrats could win a sixth straight election, something that had happened only once before in the U.S. in an era of competing political parties (Lincoln, Grant, Hayes and Garfield, riding victory in the Civil War, and the last two elections were effectively draws, Chapters 7 and 8). When Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee against Roosevelt and Truman, was elected to a third four-year term as governor of New York in November 1950, he forswore any further interest in seeking the presidency and declared his support for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had retired as army chief of staff succeeding Marshall and became president of Columbia University in May 1948.
One month after Dewey’s announcement of his support, Truman asked Eisenhower to take over the military command of the just-founded North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Eisenhower went to extraordinary lengths to pretend complete lack of interest in the presidency and to masquerade as a draftee to the office. It should be the Republicans’ turn, Dewey was out of the race, and the favored candidate for that party’s nomination was Republican Senate leader and son of the former president and chief justice, Robert A. Taft of Ohio, an intelligent but rather colorless man, admired by colleagues but not overly accessible to public enthusiasm, and generally rather isolationist.
Eisenhower, to those who examined his career closely, was a political operator and soldier-diplomat of rare virtuosity. Having served as MacArthur’s understudy as chief of staff and in the Philippines, he returned to the United States on the outbreak of World War II and quickly attracted the just-promoted Marshall’s attention and became his chief of war plans; then commander of the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy; commander of Overlord and of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Western Europe; army chief of staff; president of Columbia; supreme commander of NATO—an astonishing career path, from Abilene, Kansas, to SACEUR in Paris, with the White House beckoning. There had been almost no setbacks and there were almost no audible enemies or serious critics. Ike, as he was always known, was well-liked by Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, de Gaulle, even Stalin (and Churchill, aged 76, had just led the British Conservatives back to office, and de Gaulle was awaiting his opportunity, which would come). Dwight Eisenhower brilliantly combined the amiable, smiling, golfing, avuncular model politician with the five-star generalissimo and victorious military commander.

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