From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (105 page)

happily relieved "Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur" of his command.
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The general returned home to a hero's welcome, including a ticker-tape parade viewed by 7.5 million people in New York City and an emotional farewell speech to a joint session of Congress. Republicans sought to exploit the popular anger to discredit Truman. Flags flew at half mast, the president was burned in effigy, and there were calls for impeachment. In time, however, Americans grudgingly agreed with Gen. Omar Bradley that Korea was the "wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." In the meantime, MacArthur's replacement, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, stabilized the lines around the 38th parallel. Mao—his ambitions as rudely dashed as MacArthur's, his forces hopelessly overextended and suffering heavy casualties—also settled for limited war.
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The stalemate persisted beyond the end of the Truman administration. The Chinese periodically mobilized fresh manpower for new offensives, but they gained little ground. Ridgway developed "meat grinder" tactics to lure Chinese troops into the open and chew them up with artillery and aircraft. The fighting ground on mercilessly, increasingly reminiscent of World War I, the names given to major battle sites—Heartbreak Ridge, No-Name Ridge—suggestive of the cost and frustrations. Negotiations began in the summer of 1951, but they produced no more movement than military operations. The mere fact of negotiations among equals was sui generis for the United States, a nation accustomed to imposing peace terms on defeated enemies. The administration erred in assigning the task to military officers, a job they were ill suited for by temperament and experience. The U.S. negotiators found it especially difficult to deal with Chinese and Koreans, peoples they considered inferior, and Communists, whom they viewed as savages and criminals, in circumstances where they could not use without restriction the military power available to them. The talks quickly stalled over difficult substantive questions such as terms for a cease-fire and an armistice.
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The most vexing issue proved to be repatriation of prisoners of war. China and North Korea adhered to the conventional position, endorsed by the 1949 Geneva Convention, of compulsory repatriation. For humanitarian reasons and to score Cold War debating points, Truman doggedly—and perhaps foolishly—insisted that POWs who did not wish to be repatriated need not be compelled to
do so. It would take 575 of the most tortuous meetings of the Cold War and a new Republican administration to end the Korean "police action" in July 1953.

The war left a bitter taste for Americans. The harsh climate, rugged terrain, and seemingly inscrutable people made Korea, for many U.S. soldiers, a "land that God forgot." The inconclusive nature of the combat, along with its deadliness, made the war especially difficult to fight. Accustomed to the verities of total war, many Americans bristled at the limits imposed by the nuclear age: a "stalemate—a frustration of desires—a compromise with principle—an acceptance of that which is unacceptable," one army officer complained. Positioned between World War II and Vietnam, two conflicts that touched the American psyche in very different ways, Korea became a forgotten war that Americans happily expunged from their memory.
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Yet this war that Americans preferred to forget had enormous consequences. For the Koreans, whose leaders' suicidal ambitions had sparked it, the results were catastrophic, an estimated three million dead, roughly 10 percent of the population, their country laid waste. The nation remained divided after the "peace" treaty, the South still occupied by foreign troops. For the major Communist nations, the war had mixed results. By holding its own against the United States, Mao's China achieved instant great-power status. China's dependence on the Soviet Union solidified their alliance for the short term, but that very dependence and sharp differences over the conduct of the war opened fissures in the Communist bloc that would widen in the coming decade. For Stalin, who had gambled on Kim's ability to win a quick victory, the Korean War was a major setback. The pressures he imposed on his East European allies to produce war materials created strains that would provoke uprisings that in turn threatened Soviet control over its vital buffer zone. Korea also produced Stalin's worst nightmare, a massive buildup of Western European defenses—including the first steps toward German rearmament—and U.S. mobilization for all-out war.
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As waged by the Truman administration, the Korean War became, in historian Walter LaFeber's apt phrase, "the war for both Asia and Europe."
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In June 1950, Western Europe's defense structure was underfunded and shaky. With the impetus from the Korean War, NATO expanded to include
Greece and Turkey. Tito's renegade Communist government in Yugoslavia became a virtual associate member. Without seeking congressional assent, Truman in December 1950 sent four U.S. Army divisions to Europe, a move previously unthinkable, bringing the total of U.S. troops there to 180,000 and provoking a "great debate" at home over the commitment to Europe and the president's authority to send troops abroad. By the end of 1952, NATO had fifteen well-armed divisions. European defense spending swelled from 5 to 12 percent of the gross national product. A NATO command structure and headquarters had been created, and the U.S. commitment was strengthened by the enormously symbolic appointment of World War II hero Gen. Dwight Eisenhower as its first supreme commander. Rejecting Stalin's belated appeals for negotiations, the United States plunged ahead with integrating West Germany into its economic and political sphere and with plans for a European Defense Community to entice an extremely nervous France to accept German rearmament.
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Although it could not have been seen at the time, in one of history's grand ironies, an immensely unpopular war in Northeast Asia had much to do with winning the Cold War in Europe.

Korea had profound consequences for U.S. policies in Asia. Chinese intervention and the humiliating defeat inflicted on American forces provoked added mutual hostility, destroying any chance for accommodation. It would be nearly thirty years before the nations would establish diplomatic relations. On the other hand, the exigencies of war pushed a previously wary United States into Taiwan's eager embrace, bringing forth in the summer of 1950 a U.S. military mission and $125 million in military aid. For the conservatives who ran Japan's government, the Korean War was a "gift of the gods."
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United States military procurement pumped $2.3 billion into a lagging Japanese economy. Exports soared to 50 percent above prewar levels; the GNP increased by 10 percent. Over loud Soviet and Chinese protests, the United States incorporated its former enemy into its East Asian security orbit. The administration shrewdly named Republican John Foster Dulles to negotiate a peace treaty. The bumptious future secretary of state ran roughshod over Cold War enemies and allies alike, negotiating separate agreements that restored Japan's sovereignty over the home islands and provided for U.S. bases. The United States recognized Japan's "residual sovereignty" over Okinawa but ruled that island, with its vital nuclear bases, in what can only be called a neo-colonial fashion. Threats to block the treaty by California Republican William
Knowland, widely known as "the senator from Formosa" for his passionate support of Chiang, led to additional provisions requiring Japan to agree to a treaty with Taiwan and accept restrictions on trade with China. Partly out of concern for Japan's export markets and despite sharp differences in goals and approach with France, the United States by 1952 was bearing much of the cost of France's war against Communist-led Viet-minh rebels in Indochina.
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In the summer of 1950, to Acheson's delight, the administration took NSC-68 off the shelf. Following its guidelines, U.S. officials undertook full-scale mobilization for war in Korea—and for the long-term global struggle with the Soviet Union. Warning Congress that modern weaponry made the United States vulnerable to potential enemies as never before, Acheson likened it to the person who, on "the death of a parent, hears in a new way the roaring of the cataract."
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The legislators heard the sound, and for the next three years military spending soared. Truman's defense budget of $53 billion for FY 1953 quadrupled that for 1949. It represented 60 percent of government expenditures and 12 percent of the GNP, compared to less than 33 and 5 percent respectively for FY 1950. The U.S. Army expanded by 50 percent to 3.5 million soldiers; U.S. Air Force air groups doubled to ninety-five. The military establishment's growing size enhanced its position in the new national security state.
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Between 1950 and 1952, the administration developed new weapons to wage the Cold War. Responding to the failure of U.S. intelligence to forecast the North Korean invasion of South Korea and Chinese intervention in the war, it created in October 1952 a new highly secret National Security Agency (NSA, or "No Such Agency," according to wags) to listen in on enemy communications and crack codes.
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It institutionalized and expanded previously ad hoc foreign aid programs. Even before NSC-68, Congress approved the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, an important instrument in implementing the containment policy.
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Designed mainly to boost European morale in the early days of NATO, the initial program authorized $1.3 billion to help equip nations involved in U.S. defense agreements. With the outbreak of war in Korea, the administration secured an additional
$5 billion for a significantly expanded military aid program. In his 1949 inaugural address, Truman advanced a proposal, bold in conception if modest in scope, to provide economic and technical assistance to less developed nations to help stave off the poverty he and his advisers believed provided a fertile breeding ground for Communism. By the end of 1950, this so-called Point Four program had been extended to thirty-four nations; visitors from more than twenty countries were in the United States for training.
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Propaganda also became an essential part of Cold War strategy. As early as 1947, the administration had revived the wartime Voice of America to beam broadcasts into the Soviet Union. Persuaded that Europe was a "vast battleground of ideas," Congress through the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act created under the State Department the first peacetime information program. Director Edward Barrett, a protégé of OSS boss William Donovan, set out to "penetrate the iron curtain with our ideas." By 1950, broadcasts from thirty-six transmitters in twenty-five languages were estimated to reach three hundred million people.
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Desperate Soviet efforts to jam the airwaves seemed to confirm the program's success. As in other areas, NSC-68 gave the propaganda war a boost. Truman had previously stressed the urgency of combating Communist propaganda with a "great campaign for truth." Former advertising executive and Connecticut senator William Benton called the Campaign for Truth a "Marshall Plan in the field of ideas." Although hampered by poor funding, bureaucratic warfare, and harassment from Senator McCarthy and his followers, the program flooded the world with films extolling the American way of life, provided material to newspapers, established student exchanges, and created information centers in sixty nations and 190 cities. Increasingly, it focused on Eastern Europe and the USSR with the avowed aim of rolling back Soviet power. Harvard and MIT scientists, working with the government through Project Troy (named for the Greek campaign that subverted the city-state of Troy), developed transmitters powerful enough to overcome Soviet jamming and leaflet-dropping balloons that penetrated the Iron Curtain by soaring above it.
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The administration also used front organizations. The government helped create and fund the ostensibly independent Committee for a Free Europe that used émigré broadcasters to beam through Radio Free Europe bare-knuckled propaganda denouncing the evils of Soviet imperialism, mocking Communism through satirical skits, and using American popular culture, especially jazz, to subvert East European youth.
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In 1950, an increasingly influential and active CIA established in Paris the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), another ostensibly independent group that waged a cultural Cold War by helping to organize and fund such events as art exhibits, literary symposia, and tours by the Yale Glee Club. The CCF distributed funds through such respectable front organizations as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Time, Inc. (sometimes with their knowledge, sometimes without). It recruited former leftist intellectuals such as Sidney Hook and writers such as George Plimpton to write anti-Communist essays and publish literary journals. The agency came to be known as "the Good Ship Lollipop" by those few artists and intellectuals who knew of its support.
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T
HE NEW PROPAGANDA MACHINE
scored some points abroad and helped mobilize domestic support for waging the Cold War, but it could not salvage the fortunes of its creators. In its last years, the Truman administration was shaken by domestic scandals, some touching very close to the White House. The Korean conflict took a huge toll in public war-weariness. The president's approval ratings plummeted. Having waved the banner of anti-Communism to gain support for their bold initiatives, U.S. officials could not contain the monster they had loosed. As the public mood soured in 1951 and 1952, McCarthy and his cohorts viciously and relentlessly attacked the president, Acheson, and even the once invulnerable Marshall, now secretary of defense, for being soft on Communism, sheltering Communists within the government, and not waging the Cold War with sufficient resolve. Truman did not seek reelection in 1952. Democratic nominee Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois stood little chance against General Eisenhower, a moderate Republican and internationalist whose stature, charismatic smile, and vague promises to go to Korea (presumably to end the war) secured him an easy victory, ending twenty years of Democratic rule.