The Cold War (11 page)

Everyone miscalculated. Korea would not be the first time, or the last, when faulty intelligence and just plain bad guesses sucked nations into a quagmire. The U.S. had withdrawn its troops from South Korea in 1949, at the same time indicating that it would not protect Chiang's remaining forces in Taiwan: The Truman administration did not hide its reluctance to become involved in armed confrontations on the Asian continent. Stalin, too, at first waffled on whether to back an invasion of South Korea. But Kim Il Sung, the leader of the North Korean puppet regime, badgered the man who was by then exalted as the veritable pontiff of the world Communist revolution: The time was ripe, he maintained, to “liberate” South Korea. In the spring of 1950, the Soviet dictator gave in. He agreed to provide Kim arms and lent him Soviet generals to orchestrate the plan of attack. They came up with a scheme straight out of the World War II Eastern Front, artillery saturation followed by a quick mechanized
advance that would require no longer than a month to swallow the South. The war would be over before the U.S. even had a chance to react. Still, Stalin stressed the need to conceal the Soviet role: He did not want to give the Americans justification for intervening.

Meanwhile, Mao was preoccupied with plans to invade Taiwan that summer. Kim, the single-minded middleman, exaggerated Stalin's enthusiasm to Mao and Mao's to Stalin. Mao at last acquiesced to Kim's invasion plans, afraid that if he didn't, Stalin would deny him aid for the Taiwan invasion—and indeed, in the spring of 1950, American intelligence picked up indications that Soviet air force planes were deploying on the Chinese coast. But both the Pentagon and General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo discounted evidence of a North Korean build-up along the 38th Parallel.

When the invasion did come, however, the Americans pulled themselves together with a dispatch that caught the two Communist titans by surprise. The U.S. has never taken kindly to blindside attacks. How Washington reacted so quickly, and how it took advantage of the Soviet absence at the U.N., is the story that James Chace and Caleb Carr tell here. (In the process, Truman would order the U.S. Seventh Fleet to patrol the Taiwan Strait, thus preventing a Communist landing on Taiwan —or a Nationalist attempt to return to the Chinese mainland—as long as the Korean War lasted.) Though the Truman administration was certain that Stalin was behind the North Korean attack, it deliberately muted blame. Regional wars were one thing; global ones were quite another, to be avoided at all costs. As Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, mused to Charles Collingwood of CBS in September 1950, “The whole idea that war was inevitable seems to me to be completely wrong and very vicious. I remember looking back over the history of the United States not long ago and reading the terrible things that were said in the 1850s about the irrepressible conflict, talk about war being inevitable, which tends to make it so. War isn't inevitable.”

These are words that a later generation might have done well to remember.

The late JAMES CHACE may be remembered best for his biography,
Dean Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World
. Prominent among his
other eight books is
America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars,
which he wrote with CALEB CARR. Carr is the author of two other historical studies,
The Devil Soldier
and
Lessons of Terror,
as well as four novels,
The Alienist, Killing Time, The Angel of Darkness,
and
The Italian Secretary
. His military and political writings have appeared in numerous magazines and periodicals. Carr teaches at Bard College and lives in upstate New York.

F
OR THE UNITED NATIONS
, the end of maintaining global peace can, under the enforcement provisions of the U.N. Charter, involve the means of making regional war. This was true of the recent large-scale multinational response to a local crisis, the Persian Gulf War; it was also true of the U.N.'s first and most famous military trial, the Korean War. Like the campaign in Kuwait and Iraq, the Korean effort was initiated as a collective response to criminally aggressive behavior; but, again, like the war against Saddam Hussein, the military action against North Korea was orchestrated by the United States. America—obsessed in 1950 with the free world's slow response to total itarianism during the 1930s, just as in 1991 it would be haunted by its 1970s defeat in Vietnam—used the United Nations to safeguard interests it considered vital, cajoling or browbeating its allies into joining the effort. The Gulf War was an intervention that took weeks to organize, but Washington in 1950 was able to marshal a multilateral commitment and mount a forceful response to aggression in the space of just days.

In late May and early June of that year, intelligence reports stating that “somewhere across the broad globe the armed forces of some Communist power were expecting soon to go into action” reached the desk of George F. Kennan, the U.S. State Department's leading Soviet expert. Kennan had spent his life studying the Soviet Union in particular and Communist behavior gen-erally—any report that indicated a significant move on the part of the U.S.S.R. or one of its client states was entirely too tantalizing for him to ignore. Kennan and his fellow Russian experts immediately undertook an “intensive scrutiny” of the disposition of the Soviet Union itself, and this study “satisfied us,” in Ken-nan's words, “that it was not Soviet forces to which these indications related. This left us with the forces of the various satellite regimes, but which?”

Possibilities were discussed and discarded, and eventually, the subject of Korea came up. In 1945 that peninsula—the focus of Russian, Chinese, and Japanese ambitions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—had been divided at the 38th Parallel between the forces of the United States and the Soviet Union after the surrender of Japan. The division had supposedly been for military purposes alone, each of the victorious allies assigned the task of disarming Japanese troops within its zone. But in the years since, the arrangement had taken on a political dimension: Both the Americans and the Soviets had set up client regimes under repressive strongmen.

Considering the possibility of an attack by North Korea against the southern republic, Kennan and his colleagues were informed by the Pentagon and by General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo that the idea was out of the question. Kennan was not comforted, for “nowhere else … could we see any possibility of an attack, and we came away from the exercise quite frustrated.” In this state of mind, Kennan left Washington for his farm in Pennsylvania on the morning of Saturday, June 24.

That evening, W. Bradley Connors, in charge of public affairs for State's Far Eastern desk, found himself stuck in Washington. At just past eight P
.
M., Connors received a phone call at his apartment from the Washington bureau chief of United Press International, who said UPI's correspondent in South Korea was reporting a North Korean attack across the 38th Parallel. Would Connors care to confirm? Connors instead broke off the discussion and tried to call the American embassy in Seoul, but the switchboard was closed.

By 9:26, Connors was at his post at the State Department to receive a cable from John J. Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul: ACCORDING
KOREAN
ARMY
REPORTS
WHICH
PARTLY
CONFIRMED
BY [American] KMAG [Korean Military Assistance Group] FIELD
ADVISOR
REPORTS
NORTH
KOREAN
FORCES
INVADED
ROK [Republic of Korea] TERRITORY
AT
SEVERAL
POINTS
THIS
MORNING
….
IT
WOULDAPPEAR
FROM
NATURE
OF
ATTACK
AND
MANNER
IN
WHICH
IT
WAS
LAUNCHED
THAT
IT
CONSTITUTES
ALL
OUT
OFFENSIVE
AGAINST
ROK. Connors immediately got on the phone and contacted his superior, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Later to gain fame as secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Rusk served as an intelligence officer in China under “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell during World War II. He was consistently on his guard to prevent any repetition of the errors of the 1930s. Rusk sped to the State Department after receiving Connors's call, to find that the assistant secretary for United Nations affairs, John Hickerson, and Ambassador at Large Philip C. Jessup had also
been called in. The three immediately telephoned Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was at his farm in Maryland. A forceful and independent thinker with a taste for action, Acheson shared his subordinates' alarm and ordered them to call the secretary-general of the United Nations, Trygve Lie, to inform him of the attack and schedule an emergency meeting of the Security Council for the following day.

Upon hearing Hickerson's report of the North Korean attack, Secretary-General Lie responded, “My God, Jack, this is war against the United Nations.” From that moment on, American officials would do all in their power to promulgate Lie's assessment.

Rusk, Hickerson, and Jessup next got in touch with the Pentagon and began to work out possible American military responses to the North Korean attack. Meanwhile, Acheson put through a call to Independence, Missouri. President Harry S. Truman had gone home for the weekend, and when Acheson's call came, he had just finished dinner and was in his library. When Acheson told him what had happened, Truman wanted to return to the capital right away, but Acheson convinced him to wait until more was known. The secretary said he had requested an emergency Security Council session, where he hoped to obtain condemnation of the North Korean attack.

The next day in his office, Acheson was briefed on further developments. The military situation had only gotten worse, but diplomatically, the United States had already scored a victory: In an emergency session, the U.N. Security Council had passed an American-sponsored resolution calling for an “immediate cessation of hostilities” and a withdrawal of North Korean forces to the 38th Parallel—although some members had asked that the American characterization of the North Korean move be scaled down from “active aggression” to “breach of peace.” The United Nations would remain in this obliging state of mind throughout the early period of the Korean War.

Passage of the resolution had been made possible by the absence of the Soviet delegate, who, Acheson assumed, was continuing a boycott of council sessions begun as a result of the U.N.'s refusal in February to admit the People's Republic of China. In reality, the Chinese issue was only part of the reason for the unusual Soviet inaction on Korea; Stalin had already decided the North Korean gambit was unlikely to pay off, and for the moment—as cables that the Russians recently declassified reveal—he wanted as little to do with it as possible. The practical effect of this Soviet inaction was historic: For the first time,
the United Nations seemed ready to vote for concrete action to counter aggression.

On the night of June 25, Truman, just returned from Independence, had dinner with his top advisers at Blair House (the White House was being renovated). He had already decided on a forceful response to the North Korean move, which he, along with everyone else in Washington, believed had been made with the Soviets' consent and encouragement. “If this was allowed to go unchallenged,” Truman later recalled, “it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the Second World War.” Truman found his cabinet and defense advisers in complete agreement. Force, they all believed, was the only answer to such a threat: collective force, if the U.N. could be made to act quickly enough; unilateral force if it could not. Specifically, Dean Acheson recommended that General MacArthur be authorized to give the South Korean army all the matériel it required, that the U.S. Air Force be directed to cover the evacuation from Seoul, and that the Seventh Fleet be sent into the Formosa Strait to ensure that neither Mao Tse-tung nor Chiang Kai-shek would use the Korean hostilities as a cover for operations against his opponent.

The following day, a Monday, Acheson also suggested including direct American air support of South Korean ground actions and additional troops for American garrisons in the Philippines. In addition, he proposed increasing American aid to the French in Indonesia, on the chance that Korea might be just the first of several Communist attacks in Asia. He also recommended that the United States sponsor a Security Council resolution calling for U.N. members to aid South Korea. Acheson, on the advice of Kennan, was betting that the Soviets would continue to boycott the sessions.

The bet paid off. On June 27—three days after the North Korean attack— Acheson got his resolution, and with it international sanction for military action. It was sanction that Acheson and Truman greatly prized but had not waited for: American warplanes were already at work in the skies above Korea, swift testament to American determination that the 1930s failure to prepare for aggression should not be repeated.

The fighting continued to go badly for South Korea. By Thursday, June 29, General MacArthur's personal representative in South Korea was reporting that despite American air support, the pre-invasion status quo—the announced goal of the United Nations—could not be restored without the deployment of American ground forces. In typically reckless fashion, MacArthur himself visited
the front, then returned to Tokyo and confirmed that without American troops, there would be disaster in Korea.

President Truman wondered whether such American intervention would not lead to a similar response on the part of one of the Communist powers; Acheson informed him that “it was State's view that while the Chinese might intervene, the Russians would not.” MacArthur was asking for one brigade immediately, to be built up to two divisions. Acheson strongly urged the president to assent. On Friday morning, June 30, the decision was made: American ground forces would go to the front. As Acheson later recalled, “We were then fully committed in Korea.”

One more piece of business remained. The United States succeeded in securing approval for a unified military command—five nations had pledged to contribute contingents to the Korean action—under a person of its choosing. The next day MacArthur got the job and was presented with the U.N. flag that had been used in peacekeeping operations in the Middle East.