The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (50 page)

O
N THE AMERICAN
side, the decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and head north was in a way a decision that made itself. It was a decision that the senior
civilian
officials thought they would control when they finally faced it, but that in the end would control them. When the North Koreans invaded, Truman, Acheson, and Acheson’s people at State had simply not given much thought to what would happen if the tide of war turned and North Korea’s forces unraveled. Their first two months as a de facto war cabinet had been given over to sheer survival. Few minds were concentrated on the then almost abstract problem of what should be done if the way north were suddenly open. Now, post-Inchon, that question had suddenly become paramount. Suddenly the appetite for a larger victory had been whetted. The men who had so carefully controlled the decisions at Blair House back in late June had less control as an ever greater victory seemed possible. The crucial differences between senior civilian and military officials and MacArthur about overall agenda and in attitudes toward China, largely suppressed when the In Min Gun threatened to take over the entire country, now began to surface. Because the Communists had started the war by crossing what the Americans considered a border, because so many Americans had already died in Korea, and because the commander in the field had always wanted to go north, the decision was essentially foreordained. The more successful the United States was in the South, the harder it was to set limits going north.

Anyone who tried to limit an offensive into the North would be labeled an appeaser. In fact, Bill Knowland of California, one of the China Lobby’s most powerful spokesmen in the Senate, was already using the A-word. The cumulative force of several years of intensified Cold War rhetoric, words that summoned up a world divided between white and black in moral terms, contributed to the mandate to go north, even as the issues at stake tended to demand that people think in terms of gray. It was ever harder to be satisfied with a truncated, partial success, with the old, always unsatisfactory status quo. Part of the dynamic was military. It would have been hard to justify
stopping at the thirty-eighth parallel and simply waiting for the other side to rebuild its forces and strike again. The more logical move militarily, and one that the Joint Chiefs eventually fell in behind, was to go a limited distance above the thirty-eighth, build up American airpower significantly, find the right piece of terrain that could be readily defended by artillery, dig in, make any additional assault unacceptable, and then work for a cease-fire. But that would have meant accepting a concept of limited victory in a limited war, and negotiating with people Americans otherwise refused to talk to. Nor was it just MacArthur who wanted to go farther north; if the other senior commanders often had their difficulties with him, then on this issue, they tended for a time at least to be unified—it is virtually a genetic condition among military men that when they have a chance for a breakthrough, they want to push ahead.

The decision to go north prompted a debate that was never really a debate; the forces pushing to cross the thirty-eighth were simply too strong. The most critical domestic change had taken place at the State Department, especially in the slow but systematic erosion of the influence of George Kennan. By the time they faced the decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel, he was not a major player anymore. He had believed that the risk of either the Soviets or the Chinese coming in was far too great if we tried to unite all of Korea. Paul Nitze, much influenced by Kennan on this single issue, agreed. Kennan was sure that we were heading toward a major crisis, that Washington did not have control of MacArthur, and that something terrible was going to happen. It was his personal policy nightmare: he felt the United States was overreaching militarily for something that did not matter and that would not improve our geopolitical position at all—and doing so at a fearful risk. But he was on the outside looking in by now.

Kennan was hardly alone in being sidelined. Acheson had been making his own political accommodations and battening down the hatches in the Far East section almost since he had taken over at State. Most of the China Hands, or people in charge of them, had been moved out—though Acheson did not like to admit it. He was too proud to let anyone know he was backing down on any issue for political reasons. He was exhausted by the political forces working against him on this issue, of trying to make the rather abstract case that Communism in China and Communism in Russia might be different. (About that time he revealed his frustration in a telling conversation with Clement Attlee, the British prime minister. He had been, he told Attlee, “probably more bloodied…than anyone else” in trying to distinguish between Soviet and Chinese intentions, and he thought it was no longer possible to act on the basis of a future split between the two Communist nations.)

As Acheson moved some of the China Hands out, more conservative men
were moving in. The team at State, especially on Asia, was being changed very quickly. Dean Rusk, a quiet, centrist-conservative figure, a man of the bureaucracy itself, had become the administration’s key man on Asia. Rusk was the opposite of Kennan, who brought great knowledge about Russia and China to the table but was quite insensitive to the ever more pressing realities of domestic American politics. Rusk was acutely tuned to the latter and had much less feel for (and interest in) the former. He was exactly what Acheson wanted at a moment when concessions were needed. Rusk had volunteered to take a demotion from deputy undersecretary of state to assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs. “You get the Purple Heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor for this,” Acheson had told him at the time.

Rusk was to prove the most conventional of men in terms of his feelings about China. Later, during the Vietnam era, he became known as a notorious hard-liner on Asian Communism. But even in the summer of 1950, Rusk was already beginning to emerge as a hard-liner in the department, with views that would cause him no contemporary political problems; he believed the rise of Mao represented a historic change, “a shift in the balance of power in favor of Soviet Russia and to the disfavor of the United States.” Rusk, unlike Kennan, saw the Communist world as a monolithic entity. He had been one of the first senior people who argued for bringing John Foster Dulles into the State Department, and when that happened, he and Dulles quickly became allies over the importance of defending Taiwan. On May 18, 1950, Dulles had prepared a draft policy paper suggesting that Taiwan was as good a place as any to draw the line; twelve days later Rusk took the same position. They both painted the island as an attractive redoubt to defend because the United States could wield its long-range air and sea power effectively there, and the Soviets (and Chinese) could not bring their land forces effectively to bear.

Dulles’s reentry into the department was a controversial one, itself reflecting the fact that Truman and Acheson were seriously on the defensive against mounting Republican opposition. Dulles had been the shadow cabinet Republican secretary of state and Dewey’s chief foreign policy adviser, a man viewed as connected to the political forces of Eastern internationalism. Dewey’s 1948 defeat had been a bitter disappointment for him. He had then been appointed to a vacant Senate seat in New York, insisting that he would not run for election; then he decided to run for the seat anyway and, in a special election, lost to Herbert Lehman, the popular former governor, by nearly two hundred thousand votes out of nearly 5 million cast. With that, Dulles, wanting to get back into the world of public policy (and greater public visibility) and knowing there were more presidential elections still to come, started making overtures to the Democrats about some kind of role at State. He would, he told
administration officials, help restrain some of the men on the Republican right like Senators Styles Bridges and Robert Taft, but only “if Truman allowed [him] to plan some early affirmative action against ‘the Communist menace.’” Not everyone wanted Dulles there—he was known for both his grandiosity and righteousness—but Acheson, hardly one of his admirers, gradually decided that tactically it was a smart move. When Acheson first mentioned it to Truman, the president exploded. Dulles had said too many harsh things about his domestic policies during the 1948 campaign. But Acheson, pushed on Dulles’s behalf by Arthur Vandenberg, the leading Republican internationalist, bided his time, then raised the idea with Truman again, and Dulles was finally assigned the Japanese Peace Treaty to work on. John Allison was assigned to work with him. Allison had served in Japan as a young foreign service officer, had briefly been interned in Japan after Pearl Harbor, and had become head of the
Northern
Asia office—a fortunate post, for it meant that he had not been caught in the political crossfire over China.

There was an immediate impact to Dulles’s arrival in high-level meetings. In George Kennan’s view, Dulles should have been present only at meetings directly pertaining to the Japanese Peace Treaty. His presence, a surprisingly dominating one in certain circumstances, Kennan believed, was a reflection of changing domestic politics, and tilted the debate to a harder line, one reflecting the growing pressure from the right, and bringing that pressure right into the room. By early July, Kennan had already begun to feel that events were slipping out of this administration’s control. On July 10, the Americans had received word from the Indians, who had come up with a peace proposal for Korea, that the Chinese seemed to be interested in it. Under it, the hostilities would stop, both sides would go back to the thirty-eighth parallel, and Communist China would become a member of the United Nations. The Chinese seemed amenable, but the Soviets, not surprisingly, were clearly unhappy. To Kennan, the proposal made eminent sense. He thought Chinese membership in the UN of very little national security importance, since the Soviets were already there and had the veto; more, the proposal had the additional benefit of potentially splitting the Chinese from the Russians. He was, he said, quickly shouted down at the meeting, principally by Dulles—for the proposal would, Dulles and his other critics claimed, reward aggression. Dulles had said that it would “look to our public as if we had been tricked into giving up something for nothing.” To Kennan, the political reasons for spurning the Indian proposal were all too obvious, and on July 17, he had written in his diary, “I hope that some day history will record this as an instance of the damage done to the conduct of our foreign policy by the irresponsible and bigoted influence of the China Lobby and its friends in Congress.”

By July 1950, Rusk, Dulles, and Allison had formed something of a departmental trinity, and all three of them began to argue for crossing the thirty-eighth parallel, at a moment when almost no one else in the bureaucracy was even thinking about the subject. In a memoir of his years in the Foreign Service (
Ambassador from the Prairie: or, Allison in Wonderland
), Allison denied playing any role in influencing the decision to cross the parallel. In that he was all too modest. For during that important period he wrote very tough, indeed quite emotional, position papers, clearly acting as a point man for both Dulles and Rusk. They would then follow up with seconding papers. Their memos often seemed to be aimed at discrediting the more dovish papers coming out of State’s Policy Planning, where even under Paul Nitze most of the senior people were nervous about Russian and Chinese intentions. As early as July 1, on returning from Tokyo, Allison had told Rusk in a paper that American forces should not only eventually cross the thirty-eighth but “continue right up to the Manchurian and Siberian border, and having done so, call for a U.N.-supervised election for all Korea.” This was, of course, at a time when not being driven off the peninsula rather than conquering it seemed the most basic issue. On July 13, Allison wrote another impassioned memo to Rusk, this one occasioned by an American military official who had rather casually told reporters that American forces eventually wanted to get to the thirty-eighth and stop there. That infuriated Allison. “If I were a South Korean soldier and had heard of the announcement by the American Army spokesman I would be strongly tempted to lay down my arms and go back to the farm.” A day later, Foster Dulles followed Allison with an even stronger statement to Nitze. The thirty-eighth parallel “was never intended to be and never ought to be a political line,” he insisted. Honoring it now, he noted, would provide “asylum to the aggressor [and was] bound to perpetuate friction and the ever present danger of a new war.” If it could be obliterated, all the better, “in the interest of ‘peace and security’ in the area,” Dulles wrote.

Rusk was an important figure at this point, both player and litmus test, the first real hard-liner at that level in Asian affairs under a Democratic administration, and an important figure in tilting the way State, and thus Acheson, saw events now unfolding. The old China Hands might have been more nervous about anything that could tempt the Chinese to come in, but they were gone, and Rusk had few doubts about driving north. Later, after the Chinese struck American forces in the far north of Korea, Rusk told his senior colleagues that the attack “should not be on our conscience, since these events are merely the result of well laid plans and were not provoked by our actions.” That was, noted the historian Rosemary Foot, “a fantastic piece of rationalization, designed presumably to bring some comfort to the administration in a time of despair.”

That all of this was somehow organized, and that the more hawkish people like Rusk wanted to dominate the play at Policy Planning, seemed clear in retrospect. But Kennan and the people in Policy Planning close to him thought that going north was a tragic mistake. Fighting in Korea at all, he believed, was in pure, rational terms a mistake, because of the varying logistical difficulties, and thus unsound; but given other pressures, among them stabilizing Japan, finally worth doing—a necessary mistake, if you will. But as UN forces went farther north, in his words, the dangers of adversaries lurking there, Chinese or Russian, would grow, and “the more unsound it would become from a military standpoint” because of the way the country spread out like a mushroom and because of the increased logistical problems for our forces and the other side’s ability to mass its forces. The idea of advancing above the neck in the North appalled him. But the play was going the other way. On July 15, in a memo to Rusk, Allison entered his “most emphatic disagreement” to a paper by Herbert Feis, a Kennan ally at Policy Planning, who had suggested there was a clear danger of Soviet or Chinese entry into the war if the United States went north of the parallel. The thirty-eighth parallel had always been an arbitrary line, Allison wrote. Only the obvious intransigence of the Soviets had sustained it; the United States, Allison argued, should adapt “a determination that the aggressors should not go unpunished and vigorous, courageous United States leadership to that end should have a salutary effect upon other areas of tension in the world. Notice would be served on the aggressor elsewhere, who is the same as the covert aggressor in Korea, that he cannot embark on acts of aggression with the assurance that he takes only a limited risk—that of being driven back only to the line from which the attacked commenced.” Those were very strong words. A week later, the draft of a Policy Planning paper written by George Butler, yet another Kennan ally, again pointed out the risk of the Russians or the Chinese entering the war. The Communists, Butler noted, were unlikely to permit a pro-Western proxy state to exist so near the Russian and Chinese border. That paper provoked the most emotional and militant Allison memo yet, this one on July 24, to Nitze. First, Allison spoke of the shame that would follow if the United States stopped at the thirty-eighth parallel, the loss of American stature in the eyes of the Korean people if we accepted the prewar status as a postwar division. If that happened, “the people of Korea would lose all faith in the courage, intelligence, and morality of the United States. And I for one would not blame them.”