Worldmaking (52 page)

But this was no formality. Truman sympathized with Louis Johnson in his desire to limit American defense spending and balance the books. The president placed NSC-68 in a holding pattern, concerned that Nitze's grand strategic vision might derail his domestic agenda and his party's political prospects. Chances for presidential approval appeared slim until a conflict intervened that vested the report with decisive momentum. When North Korea invaded South Korea, Nitze's supposedly alarmist portrayal suddenly appeared accurate and measured.

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At the close of the Second World War, Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel, with a Soviet occupation zone to the north and an American one to the south. The fiercely doctrinaire communist Kim Il-Sung ruled northern Korea in the manner of Josef Stalin. In the south, the corrupt, conservative Syngman Rhee wielded power. Rhee had studied for his doctorate at Princeton with Woodrow Wilson, was strongly pro-Western in political and economic preferences, Christian in spiritual matters, and as determined as Kim to reunify the nation on his own terms. The United States was unwilling to sanction or support Rhee's desire to launch a preemptive strike north of the 38th parallel. But Kim was more fortunate—if that is the word—in his superpower patron. Having been pestered for months with requests for support, Stalin reluctantly agreed to support Kim's invasion plans in April 1950, warning his zealous young comrade that “if you get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger.”
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Stalin's qualified consent was more than enough encouragement for Kim. On June 25, a hundred thousand North Korean troops poured across the 38th parallel, forcing the enemy into full-scale retreat.
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The shock felt in Washington was palpable. Nitze's NSC-68 began to look as farsighted in 1950 as Kennan's Long Telegram had appeared in 1946.

The speed and purpose of America's reaction startled Stalin, whose support for Kim presupposed that the Western response would be limited to nonmilitary channels. Instead, Truman came out fighting to a degree that surprised even Nitze, who described his president as “a very feisty fellow [who] was prepared to fight anybody and everybody as long as he was convinced he was right.” And so it was with the Korean War. The president took advantage of the Soviet Union's absence from the United Nations Security Council to secure UN approval for military action to repulse the northern offensive. Within days, the United States had committed itself to liberate South Korea. And as NSC-68 had recommended, America's range of strategic interests widened considerably. The Seventh Fleet was deployed to the Taiwan Strait. The Truman administration increased its financial support for the French effort to put down a communist insurgency in Indochina. Hard realities compelled Truman to conclude that his fiscal caution had been misplaced, that NSC-68 was correct in identifying Marxism-Leninism as expansionary and insatiable. Nitze recalled that “when the attack took place, [Truman] felt that really did settle the matter in his mind. He came to the conclusion that what NSC-68 basically said … was true.”
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Containment had truly shed its European focus.

Nitze's and Kennan's responses to the war were in fact identical. Both shared a common belief that the United States should respond forcefully to this gross violation of the postwar status quo; this was a clear example of what NSC-68 identified as “piecemeal aggression.” Kennan was immediately summoned to Washington from rural Pennsylvania in an advisory capacity—the summoning process hindered by Kennan's refusal to have a telephone installed at the farm. At a meeting in Dean Acheson's office on June 26, Kennan “stated it as my deep conviction that the U.S. had no choice but to accept this challenge and to make it its purpose to see to it that South Korea was restored to the rule of the Republic of Korea. The question of what we should commit to this purpose was simply a question of what was required for the completion of the task.”
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Nitze was of a similar mind, though Kennan confided to his diary that he was worried about working with his successor, as “my whole framework of thought … was strange to Nitze, and … he would be apt to act on concepts of his own which would differ from those I had put forward.”
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Kennan need not have worried. NSC-68's bluster and unwillingness to countenance opportunity costs was not to Kennan's taste, but confronting a clear-cut case of communist aggression—an internationally recognized boundary was breached, after all—was a different matter.

In September 1950, United Nations troops, composed primarily of U.S. Marines, executed an audacious amphibious landing at Inchon on the northwestern part of the Korean Peninsula. General Douglas MacArthur devised the plan and led the assault, which ultimately enabled the UN forces to divide and scatter its enemy. After Inchon, first Seoul and then the remainder of South Korea were liberated in a matter of weeks. This major battlefield victory led MacArthur to pose the question of what to do next. The primary goal of restoring Korea's 1945 boundary at the 38th parallel had been achieved. But building on this momentum to liberate North Korea from Kim Il-Sung was an enticing prospect for a man of MacArthur's outsized ambitions, which included a likely run at the presidency in 1952. Truman was fully aware of MacArthur's megalomania, describing him privately as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur.”
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Yet the president understood that MacArthur had momentum, and that liberating North Korea might quiet Republican attacks that he had “lost China” in 1949—when forces loyal to the communist Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army, so ending the Chinese Civil War. MacArthur and Truman both discerned political advantage in removing a communist regime from the face of the earth.

During a debate in the State Department on the merits or otherwise of attempting to liberate North Korea, Nitze and Kennan collaborated on a paper that argued strongly against it. The gist of their opposition was that moving north might provoke Chinese intervention, which in turn would lead to a much larger and more dangerous conflict. John M. Allison, director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs at State, presented a strong case to the contrary, criticizing Nitze and Kennan for recommending “appeasement”—that dread word which summoned worst-case scenarios to conceal argumentative deficiencies—and the abdication of “moral principles.” Instead, Allison advised that MacArthur be permitted to lead his troops “right on up to the Manchurian and Siberian border,” a crushing hypothetical victory that would facilitate a “UN-supervised election for all of Korea.”
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Caught up in the fervor, Acheson, George Marshall—who had been recalled to replace Louis Johnson as secretary of defense—and Truman all decided to support the “sorcerer of Inchon,” as Acheson nicknamed MacArthur upon more sober reflection. On September 29, Marshall sent MacArthur a cable that read: “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.”
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Kennan and Nitze called it correctly. As MacArthur edged northward, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed their border to assume well-concealed defensive positions, hiding themselves in mine shafts and tunnels, not lighting fires that might alert their enemy, and preparing themselves to strike if MacArthur's UN force came too far north. After testing the water with a series of minor skirmishes, on November 25, 1950, the People's Volunteer Army launched a massive surprise attack that forced the advancing UN army into a swift and embarrassing retreat. By January 4, 1951, Chinese and North Korean troops had recaptured Seoul. China's shock entry to the Korean War had forced the U.S. military into its longest retreat in history.

The UN force eventually recovered its poise and Seoul was recaptured. But General MacArthur again wanted to expand the war's parameters, placing him on a collision course with Washington. In March 1951, Truman received word from the National Security Agency that MacArthur had been musing openly on launching a wider war against Red China to restore Chiang Kai-shek to power. Late that month, MacArthur supplied the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Joseph William Martin Jr., with a speech criticizing Truman's leadership, which Martin read out on the floor of the House. The concluding paragraph brought to mind NSC-68's stridency:

It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield; that here we fight Europe's war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words; that if we lose the war to communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you have pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.
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Nitze had authored, or at least superintended the drafting of, similar sentiments. Yet he was appalled by this rank insubordination. On April 10, he helped draft President Truman's announcement that MacArthur was to be relieved of his command. MacArthur returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was given yet more material for his campaign to purify the nation. Privately, McCarthy said of President Truman that the “son of a bitch ought to be impeached.” Publicly, McCarthy predicted during a speech in Milwaukee that MacArthur's dismissal would produce a situation where “red waters may lap at all of our shores.” He further opined that “unless the public demands a halt in Operation Acheson, Asia, the Pacific, and Europe may be lost to communism.”
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After observing an enthusiastic audience applaud McCarthy's histrionics in Milwaukee, his hometown, Kennan committed a long, mournful entry to his diary:

For the first time in my life I have become conscious of the existence of powerful forces in the country to which, if they are successful, no democratic adjustment can be made: people in other words, to whom there is no reasonable approach, to whom the traditions of tolerance and civil liberty are of no real importance, people who have to be regarded as totalitarian enemies … I am now in the truest sense of the word an expatriate. As an individual, my game is up in this part of the world.
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Two days later, Kennan observed that “McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy. The result is that there is no place in public life for an honest and moderate man.”
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The Korean War was effectively stalemated near the 38th parallel from the summer of 1951 to the summer of 1953. It had been waged for sound reasons—to repulse clear-cut aggression—but had expanded into a much wider conflict, with the potential to expand even farther, and had caused painful ruptures in the American polity. The way MacArthur and McCarthy excoriated Truman's handling of the conflict—his refusal to invade China and/or use nuclear weapons for fear of provoking the Soviet Union—testified to the dangers of open-ended fidelity to strategic blueprints. Nitze himself advocated an unerringly cautious approach to the Korean War. But rationalizing the Cold War in NSC-68 as a struggle between “slave states” and the forces of “freedom” raised the stakes to a dangerous level, contributing to the creation of a febrile environment conducive to demagoguery. As Kennan wrote on August 4, 1951, “There is no escaping the vulgarizers, the detractors, the dismantlers, the strident over-simplifiers of our generation.”
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Diplomacy was no place to pander to the lowest common denominator. The Korean War was a truly terrible conflict in which upwards of two million soldiers died, including nearly forty thousand Americans. The reckless way the conflict was waged on the battlefield, and debated on the American home front, was a foretaste of worse to come.

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Fearsome as it was, the Korean conflict coincided with Paul Nitze's optimum moment of professional satisfaction: “The happiest and most productive years of my life were those from 1947 to January 1953, when I was among those working closely with Dean creating the modern world.”
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Acheson was similarly inclined—he titled his subsequent memoir
Present at the Creation—
viewing Nitze as the exemplary strategist: hard-nosed, steadfast, but aware that full-frontal war with the Soviet Union offered no answers. Nitze and Acheson formed a very close friendship. George Kennan, meanwhile, continued to view both men, and the vast geostrategic commitments promised by NSC-68, with alarm. He wrote a long letter to Acheson on September 1, 1951 detailing his continued desire to avoid government service. Kennan noted that his high regard for the State Department, and his personal friendships with those who labored there, “have served to obscure the full measure of divergence between my own views and those that have been, and are, current in the shaping of policy and in the administration of the process of external relations. I say that quite without bitterness, and in the full realization that in many of these differences it is entirely possible that I may be the one farthest from wisdom.”
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Nitze and Acheson had no doubt of the truth conveyed in Kennan's final sentence.

But Nitze's service to the Truman administration had to come to an end. In February 1951, the ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment—which limited American presidents to two terms, or to one term and more than two years of a previous president's term—made it likely that this would occur after the general election of 1952. In a study in contrasts, the election pitted the Democrat Adlai Stevenson against the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower—the intellectual versus the war hero. Weighing each candidate's merits, Walter Lippmann decided to endorse Eisenhower. Considering the national interest first and foremost, Lippmann believed that the Democratic Party's stranglehold on the executive branch had created a harmful imbalance in the political system: “Eisenhower appeared as a possibility, and a national hero—and that had other advantages. It not only virtually insured [
sic
] that the Republicans would come back to power, as you might say, respectably … but also because Eisenhower, due to his position as a national hero, was, in my view, bound to attract McCarthy and destroy him. And that is, as a matter of fact, what happened.”
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