Miseries at Home and Abroad
On January 4, 1950, the president went before a joint session of Congress to report on the State of the Union. Deference toward the office of the president traditionally dictated a degree of decorum that mutes the partisan politics that invariably exists between the opposing party and the occupant of the White House.
Truman’s appearance in 1950 was different. After the unexpected and bitter defeat in 1948 and seventeen years of Democratic presidents, with three more years to go, the Republicans could not contain their anger at an administration they now saw as jeopardizing the nation’s security. Truman’s critics were enraged by the Soviet Union’s control of Eastern Europe, its acquisition of the atomic bomb, and the loss of China to communism, and they saw Truman as wretchedly shortsighted in meeting Communist dangers at home and abroad. Although the Republicans had no better ideas on how to answer these threats, politics dictated that they decry the president’s performance as falling short of what they could accomplish in his place.
When the president characterized the state of the nation as “good” and dangers in Europe and the Mediterranean as having receded, the opposition sat silent as Democrats applauded. When the president complained that the Republican tax cuts in the previous
Congress had left the country with insufficient revenue to meet its domestic and foreign obligations, however, his statement provoked boos, jeers, and dismissive laughter. Truman paused, smiled, and turned beet red with anger as he carried through to the end of his speech.1
It was the first of a renewed series of attacks on Truman during the remainder of his term. The first blow came on January 22, when a jury convicted Alger Hiss of perjury, for lying under oath about passing government documents to Whittaker Chambers. Dean Acheson’s public refusal to turn his back on Hiss gave a semblance of truth to accusations that the administration was shielding its Communist officials, who were weakening its determination to stand up for U.S. global interests. Richard Nixon accused the Truman White House of a “deliberate” attempt to hide the truth about Hiss and other Communist conspirators in the administration. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin wanted to know if Acheson’s statement about Hiss meant that he would “not turn his back on any other Communists in the state department.” Hugh Butler, the junior Republican senator from Nebraska, decried Acheson’s “smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, ‘Get out! Get out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years.’”2
A second blow came on February 4, when British authorities arrested the physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had worked in the Manhattan Project, for having passed secrets to Soviet spies, another news report that added to the belief that the Democrats had been complicit or lax in protecting the country from Communist espionage.3
The Hiss and Fuchs cases were immediate backdrops to the president’s decision to move forward on building a hydrogen bomb. No president can entirely resist domestic crosscurrents about foreign dangers, and this was certainly true of Truman’s decision to build the “super” bomb. But Truman also had genuine fears of a Soviet advantage that exceeded any worries about political recriminations. At the same time, as he gave the go-ahead to develop the hydrogen bomb,
Truman commissioned a study of America’s defense needs to protect itself from alleged Soviet plans for worldwide conquest. The report, which was given the designation NSC-68, would be completed in April. It began with the assumption that the Soviets were driven by “a new fanatic faith antithetical to our own” that aimed at establishing “absolute authority over the rest of the world.”4
The objective in NSC-68 was to put forward a strategy not just to contain the Soviets in the hope that their system would eventually wither and die, but to defeat the Communists in an intensely competitive cold war. Under this plan, annual defense spending was to grow from $14.3 billion to $50 billion, a fourfold increase from 5 percent to 20 percent of gross national product. The report did not rule out negotiations with Moscow, but any talks were to be done from a position of clear military superiority, which would force the Soviets into concessions or to back away from their plans for worldwide conquest.5
The report, Dean Acheson said later, was meant to create conditions that could intimidate Moscow. But it also aimed “to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ that not only could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out,” meaning that resistance in the government to such huge increases in defense spending from fiscal conservatives would be overcome. 6 On this point, Truman had public support: 40 percent of Americans saw war as the nation’s greatest problem, and 63 percent favored larger military outlays.7
But the public was responding less to the administration’s objective assessments of Soviet intentions and more to the fears generated by Truman’s domestic political critics, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy spoke with a convincing passion about the Communist danger at home that resonated with millions of Americans. In February 1950, in a speech before the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, he charged that 205 Communist spies worked in the State Department. When
McCarthy followed his speech with a telegram to the White House, he stated that he had in his possession “the names of 57 communists who are in the State Department at present.” A week later in remarks on the Senate floor the number had risen to eighty-one. Because the press gave extensive coverage to McCarthy’s allegations, it became impossible for the Senate to resist hearings on the charges.8
And because McCarthy was so evasive about what he had as solid evidence about the Communist danger, he can be seen as a political opportunist who saw an issue ripe for public consumption and used it to gain political advantage for himself and his party. Truman dismissed McCarthy then and later as a charlatan, “a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.” The president also privately described him as a “pathological liar” and characterized his attacks as part of the 1950 congressional election campaign.9
Truman also attributed McCarthy’s overnight appeal to a recurring national affinity for hysteria about an apocalyptic danger like the Red Scare of 1919–1920. Frightened by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which was promising to topple established authority around the world, and by the presence of anarchists in the United States, some of whom exploded a bomb on Wall Street, American business and political leaders supported the suspension of civil liberties and the expulsion of radical aliens from the country. Similar fears surfaced in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Truman considered McCarthy to be Stalin’s best ally in undermining a bipartisan foreign policy that could effectively meet the Soviet threat. After McCarthy destroyed himself in 1954, when his ruthless abuse of the truth came to light during the televised army-McCarthy congressional hearings, Truman felt fully vindicated by his understanding of what a vicious and unconstructive public figure McCarthy was.
But no one could deny that during his years of influence between 1950 and 1954, he effectively poisoned the public’s mind
with unsubstantiated charges against men and women who, whatever their politics, were no significant threat to the republic’s survival. He was an ingenious demagogue who made the rise of a national security state impossible to resist. To be sure, even without McCarthy, the Truman administration would have felt compelled to meet the Soviet threat with hydrogen bombs and the fulfillment of the preparedness program outlined in NSC-68. But the exaggerated fears that McCarthy spawned made America a less open, less democratic society, with public receptivity to political charges of unpatriotic weakness by one party against another for failing to be sufficiently steadfast in meeting external and internal dangers. A conviction that political gains can be made by exaggerated attacks on an opponent’s insufficient militancy about the country’s real and alleged enemies has become an ugly mainstay of America’s perpetual political campaigns.
The Communist threat, abetted by McCarthy’s exaggerated charges, produced a dramatic shift in America’s traditional relations with the nations of East Asia. With a belief after 1948 that the Soviet threat in Europe and the Mediterranean was being contained, national anxieties about communism focused on the far side of the Pacific. China, once America’s benign friend, which had been victimized by Western and Japanese imperialism, suddenly became America’s archenemy: a Communist power intent on spreading its antidemocratic poison across East Asia. Japan, by contrast, America’s traditional rival for influence and markets in the region, became our best hope for creating a model democratic, prosperous capitalist society.
Southeast Asia and Korea, which had been peripheral areas of U.S. concern before 1945, had become regions of greater concern in the postwar world. True, the United States was eager for the British, Dutch, and French to resume their traditional responsibilities for their Southeast Asian colonies, though with more liberal policies aimed at ultimate self-determination. But the Asians’ justifiable distrust of European intentions turned into rebellions, which
drove the Truman administration into a new preoccupation with Asian affairs.10
Nowhere was this more true than in Korea. From the start of the U.S. occupation in 1945, the Truman administration had been working to limit its involvement with Korea by encouraging Seoul’s autonomy and United Nations responsibility for the country’s future. The U.S. military withdrew from the peninsula in 1948 and 1949, and in private discussions and public statements Washington made clear that it did not see Korea as vital to U.S. strategic needs in a worldwide or Asian war.
Unknown to the president or any American policymakers, North Korea’s president, Kim Il Sung, had lobbied Stalin in March, August, and September 1949 and again in January 1950 to let him launch an attack against the South. Stalin’s initial reluctance gave way to approval in 1950. As Don Oberdorfer, a leading expert on Korea, concluded in a 1997 book, “Scholars are still unsure what led to Stalin’s reversal.” Oberdorfer speculates that it could have been the withdrawal of U.S. forces and a famous Dean Acheson statement excluding Korea from a U.S.-Asian defense perimeter, the Soviet atomic bomb, or Mao’s victory in China.11
On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, with Kim denouncing Rhee’s unpopular government in the South as a U.S. colonial surrogate. Kim promised to unify Korea and to ensure its self-determination with democratic elections—a promise no observer of Communist practices could take seriously.
Truman faced several difficult choices: Should he stick to strategic assumptions about the limited importance of Korea to American national security and allow the North to win what seemed like a sure victory; or should he intervene by rushing in U.S. forces, stationed in Japan, to halt and eventually defeat the North’s attack? And if he decided on a military response, could he simply invoke his powers as commander in chief or did he need to ask Congress for a declaration of war? What role should he ask the United Nations, which had taken responsibility for Korea since 1948, to play?
The answers were not long in coming. Truman concluded, for both international and domestic considerations, that he needed to meet the North Korean aggression head-on. His principal analogy was the Munich appeasement of Hitler’s aggression against Czechoslovakia in 1938. If he allowed the North Koreans to overwhelm a U.S. ally, would it not embolden the Soviets, who might feel freer to reach for greater control in Europe and the Mediterranean? And might it not give the Chinese hope of expanding their influence and control into Southeast Asia? Would it not also embolden the Japanese Communist Party? “Korea is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman told an aide on June 26. “If we just stand by, they’ll move into Iran and they’ll take over the whole Middle East. There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.”
Although he had next to nothing to say about the domestic pressures on him to respond to the attack, they were part of his calculations as well. Allowing South Korea to fall would have intensified the right-wing attack on his administration as a collaborator with the Communists, who were exploiting the weakness of an irresolute president. Moreover, understanding how essential it was to move quickly, Truman did not hesitate to direct U.S. forces to join the fight and to call on the United Nations to stand up to an act of overt aggression that challenged the very principles of that organization.
As it turned out, the Soviets were boycotting the UN Security Council, in protest of the world body’s refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate government of that country. With the Communist superpower absent, the UN immediately condemned the attack. The Soviet absence may have been a signal that Beijing (and not Moscow) had been the principal backer of Kim’s decision to invade, or at least Moscow may have wanted it to appear that way. While the Soviets would not join any condemnation of the aggression, they may also have been insulating themselves from any American impulse to turn the conflict into a wider war with the Soviet Union.
To blunt any suggestion that he had bypassed the Congress and
the Constitution in ordering military action, Truman declared that the United States “was working entirely for the United Nations.” The president told the press that he was collaborating with the UN “to suppress a bandit raid.” When a reporter asked if Truman believed he was engaged in a “police action,” he replied, “Yes. That is exactly what it amounts to.” This decision left him free to fight the war without feeling the need to ask for a congressional resolution, which was certain to pass, but would have given right-wing opponents an opportunity to repeat their complaints about the president’s handling of China and the growth of Communist influence in Asia.12
The initial fighting gave the North a distinct advantage. U.S. military planners and State Department officials had assumed that Rhee’s forces could hold their own and perhaps even beat back any attack from the North. But to their surprise, the North Koreans routed their southern counterparts. They quickly captured Seoul and seemed poised to take control of the entire peninsula. When General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of all U.S. forces in Asia, visited the battlefront on June 29, he predicted that the North would win a quick victory unless he was allowed to deploy U.S. ground troops stationed in Japan to Korea. Truman agreed, and on June 30, a regimental combat team was sent to Korea with additional forces to follow as quickly as possible.
Truman and Acheson saw the battle for Korea as essential to stem further Communist advances around the globe. By fighting in Korea, the administration hoped to demonstrate to Stalin and Mao that America was prepared to contest aggression wherever it occurred—even in as secondary a theater as Korea.
Within a matter of weeks, American air, sea, and ground forces halted and began reversing the North’s success. On September 18, in a brilliant, unexpected amphibious landing at Inchon, behind North Korean lines, MacArthur’s forces caught the North Koreans in a pincer and drove them back up the peninsula. On September 29, MacArthur recaptured Seoul and by the beginning of October, the South had been liberated from Kim’s troops.13
The great issue now facing the president was whether to cross the 38th parallel, complete the defeat of Kim’s forces, and free North Korea from Communist rule. As early as September 11, Truman had issued an order authorizing MacArthur to prepare to cross the parallel. Truman’s reasoning rested on the conviction that the restrained Soviet and Chinese response to America’s defeat of the North Korean troops signaled their reluctance to intervene in the fighting. During September, the Soviet UN delegation discussed “a cease-fire, internationally supervised elections, and a unified Korea.” Washington policymakers thought that current developments provided “the United States and the free world with a first opportunity to regain territory from the Soviet bloc … . Throughout Asia, those who foresee only inevitable Soviet conquest would take hope.”14
Domestic political considerations were not absent from Truman’s thinking. Congressional elections were only a month off, and a failure to seize the opportunity to destroy a Communist regime that had committed an act of such overt aggression would be a political gift to the Republicans, who were only too happy to continue their political assault on Truman and the Democrats as soft-minded liberals all too ready to appease Communists at home and abroad. Moreover, 64 percent of a Gallup poll wanted the United States to continue fighting after pushing North Korean forces above the parallel and to force North Korea to surrender.15
While Truman was inclined to cross the parallel, he also wished to proceed cautiously. MacArthur was told to stop American troops from entering North Korea if Soviet or Chinese forces appeared in the North. Moreover, even if U.S. units crossed the parallel, they were not to accompany the South Koreans to the border areas with China or Russia. With the Chinese issuing repeated warnings through their press and foreign embassies that an invasion of North Korea would provoke their intervention, Truman decided to meet General MacArthur in the Pacific on Wake Island on October 14.
His motives for traveling seventy-five hundred miles from Washington and bringing his commanding general so far from the war
zone were, Alonzo Hamby explains, “highly mixed.” He wanted to meet MacArthur face-to-face for the first time, get his direct assessment of the consequences of a move into North Korea, and “perhaps most important, secure a good photo opportunity with an American hero against a backdrop of unfolding victory. The upcoming midterm elections—crucial to the future of Truman’s Fair Deal—were less than a month away. It appears certain that worry about Chinese intervention was not uppermost in the president’s mind.”16
Because Truman had crossed swords with MacArthur both before and after the Wake Island meeting, the president later gave a distorted account of their encounter. In August, after MacArthur had visited Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa and issued a public blast at the Truman administration for failing to forcefully endorse Chiang’s Formosa enclave as a counter to Asian communism, Truman compelled him to withdraw his statement.
Later events would add to the Truman-MacArthur differences, and Truman told Merle Miller in a conversation for his 1972 book that MacArthur was “a dumb son of a bitch.” During their conference at Wake Island, Truman said, MacArthur was arrogant in public, but “kissed my ass at that meeting.” The get-together, however, was anything but abrasive. Truman’s complaints—that MacArthur had been rude to his commander in chief by arriving late in sloppy dress to greet the president as he descended from his plane, for which Truman claimed he reprimanded him—were not true. Nor was Truman skeptical of MacArthur’s assurances of quick success; “the war will be over by Thanksgiving and I’ll have the troops back in Tokyo by Christmas,” Truman quoted MacArthur to Miller, to show how wrong the general was.17
The meeting, in fact, was entirely cordial. In a half-hour private conversation, the general assured the president that victory was in sight in Korea, that the Chinese would not intervene, and that he’d be able to transfer a division of troops to Europe by January 1951. At a larger meeting lasting two hours with military and White House staffs, MacArthur described the chances of a
Chinese intervention as “very little.” As for the Russians, he said they lacked the military wherewithal to help the Chinese if they did intervene, and he predicted that the Chinese would suffer “the greatest slaughter.”
Subsequent communiqués and statements about the meeting were all sweetness and light, describing their complete accord on current success and future plans. Once U.S. forces crossed the 38th parallel, however, MacArthur disregarded orders to keep American troops away from the northern border areas, explaining to the Joint Chiefs that such deployments were essential for success. No reprimand arrived from the Pentagon or the White House. There seemed no reason to argue with MacArthur’s apparent success. Besides, it was difficult to challenge his authority after the victory at Inchon.
By the last week of October, however, reports indicated that Chinese troops had crossed into North Korea from Manchuria, and by the first week of November, U.S. intelligence was estimating that possibly forty thousand Chinese soldiers had entered the fighting. On November 5, MacArthur told the press that the Chinese army had joined the conflict and more troops were massing in Manchuria. Privately, MacArthur asked permission to bomb the bridges over the Yalu River (the boundary separating Manchuria and North Korea) to stem the movement of Chinese forces. Fearful that he was now facing a new, wider war, Truman saw no option but to grant MacArthur’s request. But he did not want any U.S. air attacks on the Chinese in Manchuria lest it provoke the larger conflict Truman still hoped to avoid.
As conditions deteriorated in Korea, other distressing events occurred at home. Two Puerto Rican nationalists traveled to Washington from New York with the intent of assassinating the president. They wished to call the world’s attention to a demand for Puerto Rico’s independence from U.S. control, which had existed since the Spanish-American War in 1898. Unlike Cuba, which had regained its independence, Puerto Rico remained a semiautonomous part of the United States. Ironically, Truman had publicly supported Puerto
Rico’s right to determine its relationship with the United States by a majority vote of its citizens. The assassins represented a small element on the island that wanted an immediate grant of nationhood.
On November 1, the two men attacked the policemen guarding the president at Blair House, where the first family was living while the White House living quarters were being renovated. They managed to kill one guard and wounded two others, but one of the would-be assassins was killed and the other captured before they could break into the house and shoot Truman, who was taking an afternoon nap in an upstairs bedroom. Although the captured assailant would be convicted of murder and sentenced to execution in 1952, Truman would commute his sentence to life imprisonment. (President Jimmy Carter would pardon him in 1981.)
Truman confided to his diary after the terrible incident, “It’s hell to be President,” and he described himself in a letter to a friend as “really a prisoner now.” Morning walks, which had been a pleasant recreation for him, were now less available and more closely guarded; the Secret Service insisted that even the short walk across the street from Blair House to the Oval Office be made in a bulletproof car.
David McCullough concludes his compelling description of this traumatic episode with the observation that Truman “had always imagined he might take care of any would-be assassin, as had Andrew Jackson, who, when shot at by a deranged assailant at the Capitol, went after the man with his cane.”18
On November 7, the country went to the polls to elect a new Congress. Circumstances favored the Republicans. In addition to the usual shift away from the governing party in a midterm election, Truman and the Democrats were burdened by tax increases forced by war costs and fears of shortages and inflation, as the country had experienced in World War II. The apparent involvement of China in the Korean fighting by November 7 amplified worries that the conflict would turn into a third world war. In August, well before any evidence of Chinese participation in the
fighting, 57 percent of Americans thought the United States was already in World War III.
The elections also featured a vicious attack on the president and the Democrats as having encouraged the North Korean aggression by weak responses to the Soviets and Chinese Communists. Joe McCarthy said that “the Korean death trap, we can lay at the doors of the Kremlin and those who sabotaged rearming, including Acheson and the President, if you please.” McCarthy took special aim at Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, who had vigorously opposed his distorted charges against the administration about Communist appeasement. McCarthy encouraged his allies in Maryland to publicize doctored photos of Tydings in conversation with the U.S. Communist Party leader Earl Browder.19
Tydings lost and so did another prominent liberal Democratic senator, Helen Gahagan Douglas of California, who fell victim to Richard Nixon’s attacks on her as a fellow traveler of Communists; his campaign distributed flyers labeling her the “Pink Lady.” It wasn’t simply that the Republicans won 52 percent of the vote to the Democrats’ 42 percent and that Democrats lost five seats in the Senate, cutting their advantage to two votes, and twenty-eight seats in the House, where their lead was reduced to twelve. It was the belief that McCarthy and the anti-Communist drumbeaters were now in political control of the country. As the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. told Averell Harriman, “I do not see how the elections can be honestly interpreted except as a triumph for McCarthyism.”20
The election losses frustrated and angered Truman. It was one thing for voters to turn against him and the administration for economic or foreign policy failures. But to see folks taken in by McCarthy’s anti-Communist antics was infuriating. The evening of the elections he took refuge on the presidential yacht in Chesapeake Bay, where, in a rare display of lost self-control, he drank himself into a stupor. Before the press, however, he refused to acknowledge that he was greatly disturbed by the election results.21 Besides, for
the moment, the war in Korea remained a success that gave him hope of quieting the right-wing outcry.
But by late November the situation in Korea had turned into a disaster. After the initial thrust into North Korea at the beginning of November, the Chinese seemed to retreat back across the Yalu River. As a consequence, MacArthur prepared a “final offensive,” which he launched on November 24 without a full endorsement from the Joint Chiefs in Washington. MacArthur divided his forces in two, sending troops up the east and west sides of the Korean peninsula. The Chiefs believed it a risky strategy and had also warned against proceeding to the Yalu.
MacArthur shunned their caution and four days later found his troops under siege from Chinese forces measuring between 250,000 and 300,000 men. MacArthur cabled the Chiefs that the United States now faced “an entirely new war.” He demanded reinforcements, asked permission to call in Chinese Nationalist forces from Taiwan, bomb Chinese bases in Manchuria, and chase Chinese combat planes across the Yalu. Truman and his top advisers were alarmed and now feared that any further escalation could provoke a wider war with China and possibly the Soviet Union. When the White House rejected his requests, MacArthur told the press that he was operating under “an enormous handicap, without precedent in history.”22
During a November 28 cabinet meeting that included military advisers, Truman and Acheson emphasized their determination to hold the line in Korea at the same time as they tried to avert a larger war. But at a press conference two days later, which Truman held to reassure the public that he was strong in his determination, the president unnerved Americans and European and Asian allies by responding affirmatively to a reporter’s question about considering the use of using atomic bombs. He then added to the anxiety by denying any need for UN authorization and declaring that “the military commander in the field will have charge of the use of the weapons.”
The president’s remarks frightened European allies, who pressed
Truman through British prime minister Clement Attlee to consider negotiating a cease-fire with the Chinese and withdrawing from Korea to ensure against a larger war and not to give the Soviets a justification for aggression in Europe. During White House meetings with Attlee in the first week of December, Truman and Acheson were adamant about not abandoning Korea. They argued that a U.S. withdrawal would lead to the loss of not only Korea but all of Southeast Asia to communism. They described China as nothing more than a Soviet surrogate intent not on national selfpreservation but Communist control everywhere. The president assured Attlee that he alone could authorize use of atomic bombs, and that he had no current intention of doing so. He also promised to consult the British before ever taking such action. Truman and Acheson also emphasized their determination to avoid a wider war, but explained that the current political mood in America left them no choice but to continue fighting in Korea.23
If the stressful developments in Korea weren’t enough to overwhelm Truman, on December 5 his old friend and press secretary Charlie Ross suddenly died of a heart attack. At the age of sixty-five, Ross was a year younger than the president. Truman was so distraught he could not read a statement to the press about his sense of loss. The measure of his distress, however, registered more clearly the following day when he wrote a scathing letter to the Washington Post music critic, who had published a harsh commentary on a concert vocal performance by Truman’s daughter, Margaret. Truman’s letter found its way into the press. In a later graphic description to Merle Miller of what he had written, he said, “If I could get my hands on him I’d bust him in the jaw and kick his nuts out.”24
The Korean developments and Truman’s intemperate letter drove his public standing to an all-time low. The Chicago Tribune wondered whether the president’s “mental competence and emotional stability” were sufficient for him to remain as president. One letter writer told the president that his “concern” with his daughter’s career was “ridiculous” at a time when the country was in such
danger from foreign threats.25 Truman rationalized his letter by saying it was the sort of thing any father would do, but, of course, he wasn’t any father. His outburst was an inexcusable personal and political display of emotionalism that the public never wants to see from a president.
On December 15, Truman felt compelled to announce a national emergency. He declared the country in “great danger.” He forecast controls and rationing reminiscent of World War II. He also announced the creation of an Office of Defense Mobilization. Behind the scenes, the crisis spurred Truman to prepare for a third world war. He asked Congress for supplemental defense appropriations to expand the army, navy, and air force and dramatically increase armaments, including the country’s atomic arsenal. But the consensus every president needs to sacrifice blood and treasure in a war had disappeared.26