American Experiment (329 page)

It was not in Germany or China, however, or in some atomic confrontation, but in the little-known land of the Koreans that statecraft failed and the balance of power began a wild oscillation.

Although this remote land, protruding into the Sea of Japan out of the great haunch of Manchuria, had for centuries been a jousting ground for rival powers, it had been viewed during the postwar years of tension as one of the less likely theaters of hot war. Divided along an “administrative dividing line”—the 38
^th
parallel—after World War II, Korea fell into the hands of militant communists in the north headed by Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang and militant anticommunists in the south headed by Syngman Rhee in Seoul. The two regimes, each hoping to take over the whole country, glared covetously at each other’s lands across the parallel.

In January 1950, Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor as Secretary of State, described to Washington journalists an American defense perimeter that ran from the Aleutians to the Ryukyus to the Philippines but excluded
Korea, though the secretary added that if such other areas were invaded the people attacked must resist with the help if necessary “of the entire civilized world under the charter of the United Nations.” American occupation troops pulled out of South Korea, leaving light weapons and ammunition but no aircraft, tanks, or heavy naval craft. Washington’s idea was that Rhee would be able to defend but not attack. Moscow, Peking, and Pyongyang looked on with interest.

The war that erupted after North Korean troops drove through the parallel on June 25, 1950, was in part an old-fashioned campaign of movement and maneuver. Within two days President Truman, without waiting for Congress to act, ordered United States air and naval forces to Korea and authorized the dispatch of a regimental combat team within a week. The North Koreans quickly captured Seoul and drove south down the peninsula, seizing Pohang on the southeastern coast by early September and cornering their foe at the foot of the peninsula. On September 15, American forces under General MacArthur struck back with a brilliantly conceived and executed landing at Inchon, on the coast west of Seoul. Within eleven days the counterattackers had captured Seoul, and by late October they had taken Pyongyang, a hundred miles to the north. Intoxicated by his success at Inchon, by hopes of a glorious triumph over communism, and by visions of his return home to a hero’s welcome, MacArthur drove his troops still further north, toward the Manchurian border.

The world looked on aghast—World War II was not yet five years over in the Pacific and Americans were once again fighting Asians. How could this “most unnecessary of wars” have started?

The misperceptions that dominated the Korean War rivaled the blunders that had led to hostilities in earlier centuries when both intelligence and communication among nations were still primitive. Its origins were parochial. Kim feared that Rhee would wipe out communists in the south and then turn north; Rhee feared that Pyongyang would seek to “unify” the country by mobilizing those same southern communists. According to Khrushchev’s later account, Kim, during a trip to Moscow, sought Stalin’s permission to strike south and topple Rhee. Somewhat reluctantly Stalin assented, doubtless calculating on a large gain at small risk. Even so, Stalin ordered all Soviet advisers out of North Korea so that Moscow would not be compromised in the venture. He also had Kim clear the decision with Mao, or perhaps did so himself when Mao visited Moscow. Both the Russian and the Chinese dictator expected that the Americans would not intervene, at least not in time to stop Kim’s conquest of the south. But Truman, under attack himself for “losing China,” was not going to “lose”
more real estate. The fall of South Korea would gravely menace Japan.

The Americans and South Koreans counterattacked far more quickly and effectively than the communist leaders had expected. But now it was the Americans’ turn for miscalculation.

Truman, assuming wrongly that Moscow had instigated the invasion and that Korea was the first step in the communist march to world conquest, had hopes of rolling back communist power and unifying Korea. Now, with the North Korean forces reeling backwards, he could win a relatively cheap victory. But it would not be cheap. After MacArthur’s forces neared the Yalu River and launched a general assault to win the war, the Chinese counterattacked in heavy force. Soon it was MacArthur’s army, divided and immobilized in the mountain passes, suffering bitterly in the winter snow and ice, bleeding heavily from close Chinese pursuit, that stumbled back to positions on the other side of the 38
^th
parallel. There the two sides sparred with each other for years, suffering further heavy casualties, until an armistice was signed in July 1953, a few months after the death of Stalin.

Both sides had failed to assess correctly the other’s strategic capability. Both sides were militarily unprepared for the battle they would undertake. Each had underestimated the other’s willingness to fight and then had exaggerated the other’s fighting as part of a long-planned strategy of global conquest. Each assumed that the “other” Korea was the enemy’s puppet. Originally Korea had not been part of either side’s master plan, but the outbreak of the Korean War, resulting from miscalculations and misperceptions, made Korea part of a crisis plan.

Then, too, the Korean War had a dire and unexpected impact on the relationship of Moscow and Peking. It was, Adam Ulam concluded, one of the biggest blunders of postwar Soviet foreign policy. “On the surface it appeared as a master stroke to make Peking the lightning rod for America’s wrath and frustration while the Soviet Union remained a sympathetic bystander. In fact, those two years when the Chinese had to assume the burden of the fighting marked their psychological emancipation and speeded up the process of equalization between the two states” that had begun with negotiations between Mao and Stalin in Moscow. The increasing tension between Peking and Moscow heartened Western leaders, but it was a further destabilizing factor in the quivering balance of power around the globe.

Perhaps the Korean War’s major effect in the United States was on the mass public’s fears and hostility. Anticommunists now cried out that their warnings had been justified, that the North Korean attack proved Russia to be bent on world conquest, that the Chinese attack across the Yalu
confirmed that Peking was bent on Asian conquest. It was in this context that anticommunist feeling was reaching a new pitch among Americans.

After his election “in his own right,” President Truman carried on his anticommunist campaign, holding that his “responsible” efforts might moderate or head off the “irresponsible” red hunters. In July 1948 his Justice Department won the indictment of twelve Communist party leaders, including Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall, for violating the 1940 Smith Act, which made it a crime “to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence.” The trial dragged on through most of 1949. The prosecution based its case largely on the testimony of ex-communists and on readings from “Marxist-Leninist” classics, with former
Daily Worker
managing editor Louis Budenz explaining that however innocent the language of the classics might appear, it had an altogether different and sinister meaning to trained communists. The twelve sought but failed to put “the Government… on trial.” The judge’s charge to the jury that there was “sufficient danger of a substantial evil” eliminated the “clear and present” test of the First Amendment from the jury’s deliberations. Conviction duly followed.

Administration actions of this sort, however, appeared not to quench popular fears of the reds at home and abroad but to stoke them. Those fears flamed higher after the Chinese intervention across the Yalu and Harry Truman’s sacking of MacArthur for publicly advocating, against Administration policy, that the war be carried to communist China. Korea was now closely linked with “Red China.” A militant “China Lobby,” embracing such notables as Clare Boothe Luce, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and James Farley, and such publications as the Hearst newspapers and the Luce magazines, kept up a drumfire: Who lost China? Senator Taft charged that “the proper kind of sincere aid to the Nationalist Government a few years ago could have stopped communism in China,” but a “pro-Communist group in the State Department” had promoted “at every opportunity the Communist cause in China.”

At the center of the China Lobby’s target stood Dean Acheson. This sternest of cold warriors was described in the Senate as having “whined” and “whimpered” as he “slobbered over the shoes of his Muscovite masters.” Acheson was vulnerable. Though lacking a political base of his own, he made no attempt to modify his bristling Groton-Yale-Eastern Establishment demeanor. Acheson showed his class manners and his moral code
when he told reporters that he would never “turn my back” on Alger Hiss, but this only goaded his foes to a new fury.

“I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism,” cried Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska, “and I want to shout, Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United Stales for years.”

During the late forties the war on “reds in America” had lacked a single dominant leader—or perhaps it had suffered from too many leaders vying for headlines and photographs. Then there emerged a figure that only a movement of the fearful and the paranoid could have brought to the fore. Decades later it was difficult for historians to fathom just why an obscure junior senator from Wisconsin named Joseph R. McCarthy suddenly became the notorious spokesman and symbol of American anticommunism at home. “Tail-gunner Joe,” as he was somewhat derisively called, had won some note in 1946 by shooting down a famous senator and heir to a great Wisconsin dynasty, Robert M. La Follette, Jr. In Washington he soon won a small reputation for abusing Senate procedures, harassing witnesses, and using “the multiple untruth,” as Richard Rovere later termed it. He employed these tactics indiscriminately against advocates of public housing, communists, fellow senators.

McCarthy had been casting about for some exploitable cause when the GOP sent him out on a routine barnstorming trip in February 1950. At Wheeling, West Virginia, he offered to an audience of Republican women the usual grab bag of parings from newspaper columns, Senate testimony, and anticommunist talks—this time a two-week-old Nixon speech, which he plagiarized. After the tired old cracks at traitors and fellow travelers and striped-pants diplomats in the State Department, McCarthy tried his version of the Big Lie. “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” he said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

This was pretty stale talk, and the Wheeling speech itself received little press attention. But as McCarthy continued his tour and spewed out charges and numbers, he gathered more and more headlines. It was still not clear why. His Wheeling “list” had come from a 1946 letter—which he did not “hold in his hand”—to Congress from Secretary Byrnes. The letter reported on a preliminary screening, made no mention of Communist party membership, contained no names; and McCarthy had no idea how many of them were still in State. But something about this man
increasingly riveted press attention—his sullen, jowly, dark-shaven features, his menacing voice, the recklessness with which he offered specific figures instead of hazy accusations.

Indeed, he had the audacity to renew his charges on the Senate floor. Fishing papers out of his briefcase, he embarked on an eight-hour, case-by-case analysis of what were now “81 loyalty risks.” His speech was a masterpiece of distortion of a two-year-old House of Representatives report drawn from unsifted State Department files that were in turn based, in many cases, on rumor and hearsay. McCarthy promoted a suspect in the House report from an “active fellow traveler” to an “active Communist,” converted a man “inclined towards Communism” into simply a “Communist,” transformed a “friend of someone believed to be a Communist” into a “close pal of a known Communist.” Even Senator Taft called it a “perfectly reckless performance.”

Questioned by a Senate investigating committee under the chairmanship of Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings, McCarthy twisted and parried and obfuscated. Pressed for names, he threw out those of culprits with abandon and sometimes, it seemed, at random. After a four-month investigation the committee concluded that McCarthy had perpetrated a “fraud and a hoax” on the Senate.

But for many Republicans the Wisconsin senator was now changing from an embarrassment to an artillery piece in a wider war. Any Republican could use this freewheeling red hunter against the Democrats without taking responsibility for him. And conservative, isolationist Republicans could use him against moderate, internationalist ones. Soon Taft, despite private doubts, was encouraging McCarthy to “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another one.” Moderate Republicans were prepared neither to embrace McCarthy nor to join his Democratic foes. Rather they sought a middle ground that proved to be unstable. After seven moderates, headed by Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, issued a “Declaration of Conscience” that scored both Truman and the exploiters of fear, five of the seven backed away as they felt the political heat.

That heat was rising as the elections of 1950 and 1952 neared. McCarthy received hundreds of invitations to speak for his party’s candidates, more than all other senators combined. He appeared in fifteen states, most notably in Illinois, where he backed Everett Dirksen, and in Maryland, where he opposed Tydings. In the 1950 elections Democrats kept control of both houses, but the result was seen as a stunning triumph for McCarthy, who brandished the scalps of at least five anti-McCarthy senators, including Tydings. Later election analysis deflated McCarthy’s role, but it was the perception that counted. To oppose the Wisconsin senator,
it appeared, was to commit political suicide. A reporter noted in 1951: “The ghost of Senator Tydings hangs over the Senate.”