Truman (135 page)

The one encouraging note for Truman was an announcement by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a member of the Tydings Committee, that weeks of effort at the White House, going over the files of the eighty-one “cases” charged by Senator McCarthy, had produced no evidence of consequence.

The weather forecast, an item Truman never failed to check, called for a hot and humid day, with a high of 90 degrees and a chance of late thundershowers.

His plane, the
Independence,
took off from National Airport at mid-morning and before heading west, stopped briefly at Baltimore, where Truman dedicated the city’s new Friendship Airport, with an eight-minute speech stressing peace and constructive confidence. (“We would not build so elaborate a facility for our air commerce if we did not have faith in a peaceful future….”) Through much of the flight afterward, huge thunderheads loomed in the distance. In a violent storm earlier in the day, a Northwest Airlines plane had gone down over Lake Michigan with fifty-eight people on board, all of whom were lost in the nation’s worst air disaster. But Truman’s trip was smooth and uneventful. Landing at Kansas City at two o’clock, he came down the steps from the plane looking fresh, relaxed, even “jaunty” in the Missouri heat.

At the house in Independence, a crowd of several hundred waited beside a new iron fence five feet high recently installed by the Secret Service. The time was now past when anyone could mingle on the Truman lawn.

As he stepped from the car, somebody shouted that he should have been at the Eagles’ meeting the night before. “There are lots of places I’d like to go that I can’t get to,” Truman answered cheerfully with a wave, then started up the walk.

The baking summer afternoon passed quietly, the windows of the old house open wide to what little air was moving. Bess and Margaret had gone to a wedding. Automobiles passed on Van Horne, now renamed Truman Road—a gesture by the town that had pleased Truman not at all—but the sound was faint, mild compared to the steady hubbub outside Blair House. The lazy privacy of the interlude was just what Truman needed. He had not been home since Christmas.

Dinner was called by Vietta Garr at 6:30. Truman and Mrs. Wallace took their customary places at either end of the table. Margaret would recall a “very pleasant family dinner,” after which they moved out onto a newly expanded, screened porch off the kitchen, where they sat talking, “small talk,” until dark, when everyone moved back inside to the study.

By nine, Truman was ready for bed. It had been a long day. The time difference between Independence and Washington was two hours, since western Missouri was not on daylight saving time.

At about 9:20, the telephone rang in the hall. Dean Acheson was calling from his country house in Maryland.

“Mr. President,” he said, “I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”

There had been a report from John Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul, Acheson explained. The North Koreans had crossed the 38th parallel, in what Muccio, an experienced officer, described as a heavy attack, not just a patrol foray of the kind there had been before.

Acting on his own initiative, Acheson had already notified the Secretary General of the United Nations to call a meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

He would leave for Washington at once, Truman said. (“My first reaction was that I must get back to the Capital,” he later wrote.) Acheson, however, advised him to wait. There was no need to take the risk of a night flight, and it might alarm the country.

“Everything is being done that can be,” Acheson said. “If you can sleep, take it easy.” He would call tomorrow when he knew more.

According to Margaret, her father returned from the phone in a state of extreme agitation, having already concluded the worst. “My father,” she wrote, “made it clear, from the moment he heard the news, that he feared this was the opening of World War III.” It was to be a long night for the family.

Sunday morning, the feeling again was of full summer in Missouri, hot and humid.

Of the seventeen churches in Independence, the first to sound its bells, at eight o’clock, was St. Mary’s, the old red-brick Catholic church on North Liberty, followed later by the new clarion at First Presbyterian, two blocks from the house, which played hymns until 10:45, by which time church bells all across town had begun their Sunday crescendo.

Bess and Margaret would leave for services at Trinity Episcopal shortly before eleven. But Truman by then had driven off to Grandview in a Secret Service car. They were all to act as normal and unconcerned as possible, “business as usual,” he had instructed before leaving.

He stretched his stay at Grandview through most of the morning. Chatting amiably with his brother Vivian, he looked over a new milking machine, admired a new horse, and shook hands with Vivian’s five grandchildren before moving on to see Mary Jane. To no one did he say anything about Korea, even though reports of the invasion were in the morning headlines and on the radio.

He reached 219 North Delaware shortly before noon to find Eben Ayers waiting with a copy of Ambassador Muccio’s telegram:
“IT WOULD APPEAR FROM THE NATURE OF THE ATTACK AND MANNER IN WHICH IT WAS LAUNCHED THAT IT CONSTITUTES AN ALL-OUT OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA.”

A swarm of reporters and photographers appeared at the front gate. On his way out, Ayers told them that naturally the President was concerned.

Bess and Margaret had only just returned from church when Acheson’s second call came at about 12:30.

The departure from Kansas City was so swift and sudden that some of Truman’s own staff, as well as the White House correspondents who traveled by chartered plane, were left behind. As the
Independence
took off, Bess, Margaret, and Vivian Truman stood watching in silence, Bess looking much as she had the night of Franklin Roosevelt’s death.

“Everything is extremely tense,” wrote Margaret at home that night. “Northern or Communist Korea is marching in on Southern Korea and we are going to fight.” Apparently from what she had seen and heard, she had no trouble knowing her father’s mind.

The
Independence
touched down at National Airport at 7:15 that evening, Sunday, June 25. Dean Acheson, Louis Johnson, and Budget Director James Webb were waiting on the tarmac as Truman stepped from the plane looking grim and troubled. “That’s all,” he told photographers who were pressing for another shot. “We’ve got a job to do.”

Webb would later recall Truman saying in the limousine as they sped to the city, “By God, I am going to let them have it,” and Louis Johnson, in the jump seat in front of Truman, swinging about to shake his hand.

On the flight from Missouri, by radio, Truman had notified Acheson to summon an emergency meeting at Blair House, beginning with dinner at 7:30. His hours of privacy in the plane had provided opportunity for a lot of hard thinking, Truman later wrote. This was not the first time in his generation when the strong had attacked the weak. He had thought about Manchuria and Ethiopia.

The attack by North Korea had come as a total surprise. There had been incidents along the 38th parallel, Korea had been seen as a potential trouble point, but it was only one of numerous trouble points around the world and had never figured high on anyone’s list. The last American troops had recently been withdrawn from South Korea. Describing the perimeter of American interests in the Pacific in an extemporaneous speech at the National Press Club in January, Acheson had not even included Korea. (The charge made later that the speech had thus inspired the Communist attack on South Korea would prove groundless.) Just that June, testifying on the Hill, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk had said he saw no likelihood of war in Korea. Indeed, among the manifold uncertainties at the moment was whether the invasion of South Korea was only a feint, a preliminary to a larger attack elsewhere, on Yugoslavia perhaps, or Formosa, or Iran.

As Truman had been notified en route to Washington, the U.N. Security Council had met that afternoon and adopted an American resolution calling for immediate cessation of “hostilities” and the withdrawal of North Korean forces to the 38th parallel. The vote was 9 to 0. There was no Soviet vote—no Soviet veto—because the Soviet representative, Jacob Malik, had walked out earlier in the year, when the Security Council refused to unseat Nationalist China, and he had not returned.

Besides the President, Acheson, Johnson, and Webb, the group gathered at Blair House included ten others: three from the State Department, Dean Rusk, Philip Jessup, and John Hickerson; the three service secretaries, Frank Pace, Jr., who had replaced Kenneth Royall as Secretary of the Army, Francis P. Matthews of the Navy, and Thomas K. Finletter of the Air Force; General Omar Bradley; and the three Chiefs of Staff, General Lawton Collins, Admiral Forrest Sherman, and Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg. That made fourteen and they arrived, reported
The New York Times
, “as an atmosphere of tension, unparalleled since the war days, spread over the capital.”

Drinks were served in the garden after Truman came downstairs from calling Bess to say he had arrived safely. He asked that there be no discussion of the crisis until dinner was over and the Blair House staff had withdrawn. Shortly after eight, dinner was announced by Alonzo Fields. They ate at the long mahogany table in the dining room, doors to the garden open to the warm evening air, and, for some reason, the hurriedly assembled meal—fried chicken, shoestring potatoes, asparagus, biscuits, vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce—would be remembered as especially good and well served, “excellent,” according to Acheson.

With the table cleared, it became the conference table and the meeting began, Acheson opening with a “darkening report,” after which Truman asked for everyone’s views.

The United States, said Rusk, had occupied South Korea for five years and had therefore a particular responsibility for South Korea, which, if absorbed by the Communists, would be “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” Bradley, who with Louis Johnson had just returned from Japan, and was feeling so ill he barely made it through the evening, said, “We must draw the line somewhere” and Korea was as good a place as any. (Acheson, some months later, was to say that if the best minds in the world had set out to find the worst possible location to fight “this damnable war,” the unanimous choice would have been Korea.) Russia, in Bradley’s view, was not ready for war, only “testing us.”

There was no dissenting response. Nor did anyone present have the least doubt that what was happening in Korea was being directed from Moscow. But then this was also the prevailing view in the country and the press. It was the “Russian-sponsored” North Korean Army that had launched the invasion, according to bulletins in the papers. As Bradley would write, “Underlying these discussions was an intense moral outrage, even more than we felt over the Czechoslovakia coup in 1948.”

That everyone at the table was in fundamental agreement became quickly clear, Truman’s own obvious resolution having stiffened them all. “He pulled all the conferees together, by his show of leadership,” one of them would say later, preferring to remain anonymous. Repeating Bradley’s phrase, Truman agreed the line must be drawn “most emphatically.” North Korea must be stopped. The Russians, he said, were trying to get Korea by default, gambling that the United States would be so fearful of starting another world war that it would put up no resistance.

“I thought we were still holding the stronger hand,” he later wrote, “although how much stronger, it was hard to tell.”

Admiral Sherman and General Vandenberg thought a combination of naval forces and air cover would be sufficient to do the job. And though Generals Bradley and Collins disagreed, they opposed any commitment of American ground forces in Korea, at least for the time being.

The possibility of active intervention by Soviet forces greatly concerned Truman. No one seemed to think the Russians were ready for a world war, but who was to say. Truman asked about Russian fleet strength in the Far East, Russian airpower, and requested an immediate intelligence report on “possible next moves” by the Soviets elsewhere in the world.

Recalling the evening, Truman would write that what impressed him most was “the complete, almost unspoken acceptance on the part of everyone that whatever had to be done to meet this aggression had to be done. There was no suggestion from anyone that either the United Nations or the United States should back away from it.”

As Truman had determined, it was Acheson who led the meeting, Acheson who proposed the decisions Truman made. General MacArthur was to send arms and supplies to South Korea as swiftly as possible. American civilians in Korea were to be evacuated under the cover of American airpower. The Seventh Fleet would proceed from the Philippines to guard the Formosa Strait, to prevent any attack from Communist China on Formosa, or, as Acheson said, vice versa.

As the meeting was breaking up, Johnson made what in time would be remembered as a remarkable observation. Having just been with MacArthur in Japan, he thought it important that any instructions to the general be detailed, “so as not to give him too much discretion.”

Truman, in an exchange with John Hickerson, the Assistant Secretary of State for U.N. Affairs, said the decisions he had just made had been for the United Nations. He had believed in the League of Nations with all his heart, Truman said, but the League had failed. The United Nations must not fail. “It was our idea, and in this first big test we just can’t let them down.”