Truman (27 page)

It was a devastatingly foolish series of answers, and the President could hardly complain that it was interpreted around the world as meaning that MacArthur had been given discretion as to when to use a nuclear weapon and would probably do so very soon. Within an hour the White House issued a retraction which rather engagingly began by stating that ‘The President wants to make it certain that there is no misinterpretation of his answers to questions at his press conference today …'It then pointed out, accurately but eliptically, that what he had said must be nonsense for, by law, only the President could authorize the use of the atomic bomb, and that no such authority had been given. But the alarm bells around the world could not quickly be stopped ringing.

One of them rang in London at a particularly sensitive time. The House of Commons was holding a major foreign affairs debate when news of the President's press conference came through in the late afternoon. The attendance in and around the chamber was augmented by the tense parliamentary situation of that short Parliament of 1950—1, with a government majority of only six. The news from America, however, united rather than divided the House. It did so in rather an ignoble way, with members crowding and clucking around the main tape machine like animals around a meal trough. A mood of near panic set in. I had certainly never seen anything like it. That was not altogether surprising, as I had then been a member for less than three years. What is more surprising is that I have never seen anything like it in the subsequent 35 years.

Attlee was quickly confronted by a letter of dissociation with America signed by half his back benchers. Churchill and Eden expressed slightly more measured dismay. Attlee calmed the House by proposing an immediate visit to Washington. This was a remarkable event, for he was no great traveller. He mostly left such things to Bevin. But Bevin was too ill to go, and in any event had been confined to travelling by ship for several years past, and the schedules of the Cunard Line were hardly adequate for such an emergency.

Attlee proposed to Truman a fairly broad-based three-pronged agenda, but the impression given to the House of Commons and the world was that he was going to read the riot act to the Americans. He was nonetheless able to command a full-scale Washington heads of government conference at very short notice. A significant part of the special relationship persisted, and the British had a hard-fighting brigade in Korea. Accompanied by a strong military team, Attlee flew to the United States on the night of Sunday, December 3rd, and had four full days of talks with the Americans.

This visit was, and remains, one of the most varyingly interpreted diplomatic events of the post-war decade. The extreme British and pro-Attlee interpretation is that the Prime Minister arrived at the White House like a feared but respected schoolmaster striding into a disorderly class-room and proceeded to tell Truman, with his well-known economy in the use of words, that he had better pull himself together, give up foolish notions of using the A-bomb in or around the Korean theatre, discipline Mac-Arthur, and generally reduce commitment in the Far East in order to get a better balance in Europe. The extreme American and anti-Attlee version suggests that the Prime Minister arrived in Washington as a lugubrious and unwelcome guest at a time when a tense administration needed sustenance not criticism, proceeded to whine a doctrine of total appeasement in the Far East, and was duly chastened by his firmer minded hosts until he departed, none too soon, with his tail between his legs.

It is not easy to determine exactly where, between the two, the truth lies. First, the myth that Attlee's visit stopped Truman starting nuclear warfare in Korea can be quickly disposed of. Truman had no intention of doing any such thing, but he had mainly himself to blame for the fact that such a fear had become widespread. Second, it was probably the case that the news of Attlee's imminent arrival aroused little enthusiasm in the White House. Margaret Truman, who normally reflects the atmosphere well, refers to the trip as being ‘unnecessary' and ‘defeatist'. On the other hand, Acheson, who was in most ways the sharpest critic of the visit, actually recorded that on December 3rd he successfully ‘opposed efforts to obtain a cease-fire until Mr Attlee had arrived and been
consulted'.
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19
And the whole administration, President, State Department and military establishment, put themselves out to a remarkable extent for the exchanges. Apart from the four days of formal talks there was a Potomac cruise and a British Embassy dinner attended by Truman. Perhaps the dismayed administration was glad to have something to do other than listen to the mixture of bad news and bad advice from MacArthur. In any event it was treatment which no allied head of government could now secure in Washington, even at 96 days' notice, let alone 96 hours'.

Truman's own account of the meetings, given respectfully and at considerable length in his
Memoirs
(published in 1956) contains no criticism of Attlee. Unfortunately that amounts to little by way of evidence, for these
Memoirs
were written (certainly not entirely by Truman himself) with all the bland, formal accuracy of British Cabinet minutes. They are a good, flat account of the events of his presidency, purged of any authentic contact with his habits of phrase or thought. In books which better capture his views and personality he is mostly silent upon the visit.

Acheson therefore becomes an important if not wholly conclusive witness. Apart from anything else, he comes near to contradicting himself. He strikes a different note in his own memoirs (published in 1969) and the interview which he gave to Mr Kenneth Harris for his
Attlee
between then and his own death in 1971.
Present at the Creation
is, to say the least, waspish about the Attlee visit. ‘December opened by bringing us a Job's comforter in Clement Attlee …' he warmly began. ‘He was a far abler man than Winston Churchill's description of him as “a sheep in sheep's clothing” would imply, but persistently depressing. He spoke, as John J. Chapman said of President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, with “all the passion of a woodchuck chewing a carrot”. His thought impressed me as a long withdrawing melancholy sigh.'
²⁰
For the rest he described how he had to rebuke Attlee for believing that the United States could be expected to combine a policy of determined commitment in Europe with scuttle in Asia, and for saying that nothing was more important for the West than retaining the good opinion of Asia: ‘I remarked acidly that (there was) the security of the United States.' For the rest he recorded that ‘the chief impression left with me was a deep dislike and distrust of the “summit conference” as a diplomatic instrument'.
²¹

The bridge between this account and that which he gave to Mr Harris was provided by his description of the difficult general battle he had to fight to prevent Attlee skilfully leading Truman into a cumulative acceptance of his argument, and the specific battle over the excision from the communiqué of an undertaking by each of the two countries not to use the atomic weapon without consultation with the other. This, it was alleged, would be as much against United States law as the President delegating such authority to MacArthur. Talking to Mr Harris, Acheson paid high tribute to Attlee, although rather in the way that Churchill described Baldwin as ‘the most formidable politician he ever knew', and several times using rather inappropriate words:

‘Churchill never asked or got so much as Attlee did,' Acheson was recorded as saying. ‘He was a very remarkable man … Attlee was adroit, extremely adroit, his grasp of the situation was masterly. His method was seduction:
¹³
he led the President, step by step, to where he wanted to get him. He would make a statement of what the British wanted as though it were a statement of what the Americans wanted, and pause and say, very quickly, “I take it we are already agreed about that,” and Mr Truman, who was no slouch himself as a negotiator, would answer “Yes, we are.” I was horrified. I began stepping on the President's foot … I found that Attlee had been very much underrated. He was a damn good lawyer.
¹⁴
All through the talks he was out to get everything he could out of Truman's hands, and into his. The idea that he came over just to expostulate about MacArthur and the Bomb is most misleading; if we hadn't watched him like a hawk,
he would have gone back to London leaving American policy hamstrung.'
²²

There remains the question of personal relations between Attlee and Truman. Truman was not particularly good at getting on with those from a different background whom he did not much know. Attlee was still worse. In the circumstances they seem to have managed very well. Lord Franks, who was British Ambassador at the time, but whose judgment is much less affected by achievements as a host than is that of many diplomats, has told me that the embassy dinner on the Thursday evening (the third day of the talks) was in his view an occasion of break-through. Truman and Attlee sang World War I songs together. This particular choral manifestation is not mentioned elsewhere, although both Truman and Acheson give the impression that the dinner was a considerable success.

This was the more remarkable as it took place at the end of 24 hours which had been exceptionally wearing for Truman. On top of having to cope with the
débâcle
in the Far East and the Attlee talks, he had just sustained the sudden death of the member of his staff to whom he was closest. Charles Ross, his press officer, with whom he had been at school in Independence, had dropped dead at his desk on the Wednesday evening, within minutes of completing a briefing on the progress of the talks during the day on the presidential yacht. Later that evening, Margaret Truman gave a concert in Washington. The music critic of the
Washington Post
reviewed it in terms which, while not wholly hostile, were fairly critical. Truman read the review at 5.30 the next morning, walked across to his office in the White House, and there poured out to the thirty-four-year-old critic 150 words of bile which was as childish as it was concentrated.
¹⁵
This was pre-eminently a composition which should have joined Truman's large collection of letters he did not send. His staff would quickly have gathered it in had he put it in his out tray. Instead he stuck a three-cent stamp on it and got a White House usher to go and put it in an ordinary mail-box. Hume published it two days later. The informed reaction was one of shocked surprise that the President of the United States should attack such a small target so intemperately. But the incoming mail was largely on his side and he wrote defiantly in his diary about what he had done. It was not the best preparation for an embassy dinner with visitors with whom he had already spent most of the previous 72 hours.

On the other hand I must record that when I went to see Truman in Kansas City nearly three years later and tried to get him to discuss his relationship with Attlee, I could elicit little warmth. It was Churchill, with whom he worked for the last fifteen as for the first three months of his presidency, for whom he reserved his enthusiasm and whom he wished to see again. He liked to stress his own homespun virtues in favourable contrast to the grandeur of F.D.R., but he confused the issue by showing much more appreciation of the grandeur of Churchill than of the more homespun quality of Attlee.

The essential skill of Attlee on this visit, which Truman probably appreciated more than Acheson, for all the latter's high perception, was that he put under the talks the safety net of fairly frequently telling the Americans that the British would in the last resort support them more or less whatever they did. He did this both in public and in private. He told the National Press Club: ‘As long as the Stars and Stripes flies in Korea the British flag will fly beside it.' In this way he kept American impatience at some of his views well under control and gave himself a relatively safe position, up on the tight-rope, from which to tell them that he hoped the courses in which he would support them would not be too foolish. As a result he could return to London feeling that he had got satisfactory moral (although not formal) assurances about consultation before any future use of the bomb, and that he had made the Americans more aware, not merely of MacArthur's bad and rash generalship in the context of Korea (it needed ‘no ghost come from the grave to tell [them] that'), but of the dangers of his strategy distorting the whole balance of their world effort.

In Washington the President and his advisers were left to live
with the consequences of their crushing repulse in North Korea. The alarmist view that it left only the choices of all-out war or evacuation proved ill-founded, but was refuted only at the price of another six months of bitter and fluctuating warfare with heavy casualties. Compared with the great swoops of the previous six months the advances or retreats became slower, but this stickiness of movement brought more and not less carnage. The line, more or less on the old frontier, which General Walker was able to establish in December, could not be held. Walker himself was killed on December 23rd and replaced by Ridgway, who soon afterwards took over command of all the UN forces in Korea, thereby relegating MacArthur to the role of a semi-spectator in Tokyo.

Ridgway successfully set about restoring the morale of the 8th Army, and of X Corps when it again took the field. His first task was, however, the melancholy one of containing the second Communist invasion of South Korea and again evacuating Seoul. He was back forty or so miles south of the capital by mid-January. On January 25th he launched a counter-offensive and, after a period of setback in mid-February, he regained Seoul by March 15th and was at the 38th parallel by the end of the month. He advanced cautiously north for another three weeks. Then the Chinese launched their expected spring offensive. Once more the UN troops were driven back south of the parallel but managed to hold a line just to the north of Seoul. It was in this withdrawal that the British suffered particularly heavily, with the near massacre, following a most gallant stand, of a battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment.