Harry Truman Read online

  On Thursday, the news from Korea was almost all bad. At 7:00 a.m., our time, another teleconference was held between MacArthur’s headquarters and the Pentagon. South Korean forces had suffered 50 percent casualties and had very little hope of forming a line at the Han River south of Seoul, their capital. Then came a telegram from our ambassador in Moscow, Alan G. Kirk. On June 27, my father had ordered the ambassador to ask the government of the USSR to “use its influence with the North Korean authorities to withdraw their invading forces immediately.”

  Foreign Secretary Andrei Gromyko now read the Russian reply to this request. The atmosphere was “calm and without constraint,” Ambassador Kirk said, but the words were chilling:

  1. In accordance with facts verified by the Soviet Government, the events taking place in Korea were provoked by an attack of forces of the South Korean authorities on border regions of North Korea. Therefore the responsibility for these events rests upon the South Korean authorities and upon those who stand behind their back.

  2. As is known, the Soviet Government withdrew its troops from Korea earlier than the Government of the United States and thereby confirmed its traditional principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other states. And now as well the Soviet Government adheres to the principle of the impermissibility of interference by foreign powers in the internal affairs of Korea.

  John Foster Dulles, back from Tokyo, gave my father a very alarming report on the conduct of General MacArthur. When the North Korean attack began, Dulles rushed to MacArthur’s headquarters. MacArthur was not there, and no one was aware of what was happening or had the slightest conception of what to do. Incredulously, Dulles asked if they weren’t going to notify their commander. But not one of the General’s aides had the nerve to call him when he was in seclusion. Dulles finally telephoned him personally and got him into action.

  Dulles urged Dad to recall MacArthur immediately, and send a younger, more vigorous man to Japan to replace him. But my father pointed out this was almost certain to cause a tremendous blowup among MacArthur’s supporters in Congress - something he did not want to risk at this delicate moment, when he had Congress so totally on his side they had just passed a one-year extension of the draft unanimously. Dulles was forced to agree.

  At 4:00 p.m. that day, my father held a press conference. Naturally, the reporters were full of questions about Korea.

  “Mr. President, everybody is asking in this country, are we or are we not at war.”

  “We are not at war,” my father said.

  “Mr. President, another question that is being asked is, are we going to use ground troops in Korea?”

  “No comment on that.”

  “Mr. President, in that connection it has been asked whether there might be any possibility of having to use the atomic bomb?”

  “No comment.”

  Another reporter asked him to elaborate on his view of the war.

  “The members of the United Nations are going to the relief of the Korean Republic to suppress a bandit raid on the Republic of Korea.”

  “Mr. President, would it be correct against your explanation, to call this a police action under the United Nations?”

  “Yes, that is exactly what it amounts to.”

  Note that this term, police action, was not my father’s creation. He accepted it, as a very rough estimate of what was being done in Korea, with no idea of how it would be misused by his critics in the months to come.

  At 5:00 p.m., Dad summoned another meeting of his Blair House team. He decided, after more intense discussion, to authorize the bombing of airfields and other military targets in North Korea and to order American ground troops to seize and protect the port of Pusan, at the southernmost end of Korea - at that moment far from the combat zone.

  At the very end of the day came one bit of news that seemed to brighten the gloom a bit, as far as Dad was concerned. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had offered to send 33,000 troops to Korea if we would arm them with modern weapons and supply them. It raised Dad’s hope of avoiding a massive commitment of American ground troops. Secretary of State Acheson feared it might give the Chinese Communists a chance to intervene. Dad decided to discuss it more fully with all his advisers the following day.

  This same day, Thursday, June 29, General MacArthur landed in Korea to make a personal inspection of the situation. What he saw was not encouraging. The South Korean army had blown up the bridges across the Han River in a moment of panic, trapping three of their best divisions in Seoul. The roads were clogged with fleeing refugees and shattered remnants of South Korean army units. The North Korean army was massing on the other side of the Han, and there seemed to be nothing between them and the tip of the Korean peninsula to stop them. General MacArthur climbed back into his plane and returned to Tokyo. At 3:00 a.m., Washington time, the General’s recommendations were received in the Pentagon: “The only assurance for holding the present line and the ability to regain later the lost ground is through the introduction of United States combat forces into the Korean battle area.”

  General MacArthur told his fellow generals it would be a waste of time, money, and equipment to try to stop the North Korean invasion with the American air force and navy. He asked for permission to commit a regimental combat team immediately and urged a rapid buildup of our troops in Japan “for an early counteroffensive.” Even an all-out effort by the “army-navy-air team,” the General warned, “might be doomed to failure.”

  General Collins discussed the situation in detail with General MacArthur. The North Korean army had burst across the Han River by now and was rolling south. General Collins told MacArthur it was his impression that “the President would wish carefully to consider with his top advisers before authorizing introduction of American combat forces into battle area.”

  MacArthur replied: “Time is of the essence and a clear-cut decision without delay is imperative.”

  At 4:30 a.m. Friday, June 30, General Collins called Frank Pace, the Secretary of the Army, and reported his conversation with General MacArthur. At 4:57 a.m., Pace called my father. He listened to the grim news and made the most difficult decision of the week without a moment’s hesitation. He had known it was coming and had been bracing himself for it.

  Aware of its enormous importance, Dad sat down later that morning and made the following notes:

  Frank Pace called at 5 a.m. e.d.t. I was already up and shaved. Said MacArthur wanted two divisions of ground troops. Authorized a regiment to be used in addition to the authorizations of yesterday, to be used at Mac’s discretion.

  Was briefed . . . at seven o’clock. Called Pace and Louis Johnson and told them to consider giving MacArthur the two divisions he asked for and also to consider the advisability of accepting the two divisions offered by the Chinese Nationalist Government. That Gov’t is still recognized as the 5th permanent member of the Security Council U.N. Since Britain, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands have come in with ships and planes we probably should use the Chinese ground forces.

  What will that do to Mao Tse-tung we don’t know. Must be careful not to cause a general Asiatic war. Russia is figuring on an attack in the Black Sea and toward the Persian Gulf. . .

  At 8:30 Friday morning, my father convened another meeting of his Blair House team. When he brought up the subject of Chiang’s troops, he found very little enthusiasm. Secretary of State Acheson renewed his fears of Chinese Communist intervention. The Joint Chiefs of Staff pointed to the time that would be lost transporting Chiang’s men into Korea and reequipping them. They might even have to be retrained to use modern weapons. Instead, they recommended the commitment of the two U.S. divisions which General MacArthur had under his command in Japan. Reluctantly, my father decided to refuse Chiang’s offer and approved the commitment of our two American divisions.

  Step by step, in six fateful days, searching for alternatives before he made each move, my father found himself fighting his third war. At 11:00 a.m. on Friday, he convened
a meeting of the Cabinet, to which he invited eighteen leading members of Congress from both sides of the aisle. He told them he was sending troops to Korea, but he did not make it clear they were going into action immediately. Republican Kenneth Wherry arose and addressed Dad as though he were on the Senate floor. He wanted to know if the Congress would be advised before “our boys” began actual combat.

  My father replied that ground troops had already been ordered into combat. Tensely, Senator Wherry said he thought Congress ought to be consulted before the President made moves like this. My father told him that it had been an emergency. It was no time for lots of talk. “I just had to act as commander in chief, and I did. I told MacArthur to go to the relief of the Koreans and to carry out the instructions of the United Nations Security Council.”

  Senator Wherry ignored him. Echoing Senator Taft’s party line, he leaped to his feet again and reiterated that the President should consult Congress before taking drastic steps.

  “If there is any necessity for congressional action,” Dad said, “I will come to you. But I hope we can get those bandits in Korea suppressed without that.”

  Dewey Short, the Republican congressman from Missouri, cut Wherry down by asking for the floor and stepping up to the Cabinet table to say he thought he was expressing the opinion of practically everyone in the Congress in saying they owed the President thanks for the quality of his leadership. Short said he personally was very grateful to the President for his frankness in telling them what had been going on and having General Bradley give them a résumé of the military situation. Nothing more was heard from Senator Wherry for the rest of the meeting.

  Several other senators declaimed at length upon the importance of getting soldiers from other countries into the fighting. Patiently, General Omar Bradley explained this was not as easy as it sounded. They were equipped with different weapons, used different food from American troops. They had different military procedures. It would take six or eight months to train them to the point where they could be used in combat.

  Vice President Barkley complained about the statement Dad was releasing, saying that “General MacArthur had been authorized to use certain supporting ground units.” Barkley felt the President was in control of the troops and was issuing orders to them. Dad had to explain that from a legal point of view, MacArthur was working for the United Nations. “This is all very delicate. I don’t want it stated any place that I am telling MacArthur what to do. He is not an American general now, he is acting for the United Nations. It would spoil everything if we said he was just doing what we tell him to do.”

  My father was feeling his way in a totally new situation - the first war against aggression fought under the auspices of a world organization of nations. It had to be fought successfully on both the military and the diplomatic fronts, and time was very short.

  At the end of this terrible week, Dad did something that was utterly typical of him. He thought of what other men around him had accomplished and somehow found the time to give them credit. He sent Dean Acheson the following handwritten note:

  Memo to Dean Acheson

  Regarding June 24 and 25

  Your initiative in immediately calling the Security Council of the U.N. on Saturday night and notifying me was the key to what followed afterwards. If you had not acted promptly in that direction we would have had to go into Korea alone.

  The meeting Sunday night at Blair House was the result of your actions Saturday night and the results afterward show that you are a great Secretary of State and a diplomat.

  Your handling of the situation since has been superb. I’m sending you this for your record.

  Harry S. Truman

  ONE LETTER OF support which my father received around this time especially pleased him. It was from Henry Wallace. He enclosed a statement he had issued defending the decision to resist aggression in South Korea. “When my country is at war and the U.N. sanctions that war, I am on the side of my country and the U.N.,” he wrote. “. . . I cannot agree with those who want to start a propaganda drive to pull United Nations troops out of Korea.”

  Dad replied:

  Dear Henry:

  I certainly appreciated yours of the eighteenth, and the enclosed personal statement. We are faced with a very serious situation. I hope it will work out on a peaceful basis.

  Among the most serious aspects of the situation was the President’s relationship to Congress. In the course of the June 30 meeting, not only Senator Wherry, but Senator H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, a moderate Republican, brought up the question of obtaining approval from Congress before Dad committed American ground troops on a large scale. My father, who had already achieved so much by working closely with Congress to create a genuinely bipartisan foreign policy, assured them he would seek congressional support for any decisions he made. But he never said he would seek congressional approval because he believed the powers of the presidency were at stake in this issue, and these powers were in turn related to the very survival of the United States of America. A President without the power to make the swift decision he had made in Korea could not protect the United States in a world of jet aircraft and surprise attacks.

  On July 3, at the President’s request, the State Department prepared a memorandum, which listed eighty-seven instances in the previous century when the President as commander in chief had taken similar action. At this time, moreover, there was little need for my father to seek congressional support. He already had it, in overwhelming amounts. Letters and statements poured into the White House from all but a small group of die-hard right-wing Republicans. Around the country and the world, the same air of euphoria prevailed.

  But our hopes of swiftly repelling the North Korean “bandit raid” were not realized. The American troops flung into battle from Japan were not much better equipped than the South Koreans. Few of them had combat experience, and they were cruelly mauled by the tank-led North Koreans. Americans gasped with shock as reports poured in from the battlefronts about the superiority of North Korea’s weapons and the combat readiness of their well-trained troops. American soldiers finally established a perimeter around the port of Pusan at the heel of the Korean peninsula, and for the rest of the summer maintained a tenuous grip on this beachhead, beating off ferocious North Korean attacks.

  The desperate fighting, the heartbreaking casualties were only part of my father’s woes during this summer of 1950. He had to get congressional permission to shift the economy from a peace to a war basis. Six hundred thousand men had to be added to the armed forces in the shortest possible time. Four National Guard divisions were activated, the draft was expanded, and a massive recruiting program launched. By raising taxes and restricting consumer credit, my father tried to avoid the painful imposition of price controls, which had been the most unpopular government measure of World War II.

  The lengthening struggle in Korea inevitably complicated my father’s relationship with Congress. The reactionaries began ranting sarcastically about Truman’s “police action.” Rumors about Communists in the government ballooned, upsetting moderate congressmen in both parties. The emotional situation led to one of the most distressing political defeats my father ever suffered in his warfare with the reactionaries. If there was one of these negative thinkers whom he disliked both personally and politically, it was Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, which controlled 40 percent of the Senate’s business. My father first tangled with him over the displaced persons bill, which he had hoped to see passed early in his second term. Dad wanted to admit 339,000 refugees, who were still languishing in camps in Europe, five years after the war had ended. Senator McCarran refused to have anything to do with the administration’s bill. Instead, he introduced his own which was worse than the one that had been passed by the Eightieth Congress. Only after a tremendous thirteen-hour debate did the Senate finally reject McCarran’s ideas and vote for the Truman bill, sponsored by Harley Kilgore of West Virgin
ia.

  This victory, on April 5, 1950, left Senator McCarran thirsting for revenge, and he got it when the Korean War aroused the nation to anti-Communist frenzy. My father was trying to prevent the government’s loyalty program from turning into a witch-hunt. For over a year, Senator McCarran had introduced into appropriations bills numerous riders giving government department heads the power to fire any employee on security grounds without the right of appeal. My father asked for legislation to give every accused person a fair hearing. In response, Senator McCarran introduced an internal security bill which set up a government within the government, the Subversive Activities Control Board, with sweeping powers to hunt down suspected Communists everywhere. My father promptly vetoed the bill, because, he said, it gave the government “thought control” powers the framers of the Constitution never intended it to have. “There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have,” Dad wrote.

  Within twenty-four hours, in spite of heroic efforts by a forlorn little band of senators led by Hubert Humphrey, Congress overrode the veto by crushing majorities. Even Scott Lucas, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, voted to override, because he was worried about his reelection in November.

  Congress was by no means the only legislative body with which Dad had to cope during this agonizing summer of 1950. The United Nations was also restive and frightened by the large-scale fighting. The British and the Indian governments suggested peace plans which involved large concessions, such as the immediate seating of Communist China and the trading of Formosa for a withdrawal from Korea. They were politely informed this was unacceptable to the United States. My father also had to fend off critics such as Bernard Baruch, who demanded immediate and all-out national mobilization, which would include price, wage, and rent controls, as well as rationing. Lengthy reports were made to Congress and the American people in mid-July, explaining why such drastic measures were unnecessary. Although the term was not yet in use, my father was already formulating the concept of a limited war. Any lunge toward the posture of an all-out war might inspire a Russian attack and launch World War III.